Budapest.

 . . . this would be a good way to do it.

Santa Clara County’s housing authority could have spent $16 million of federal funds to help more struggling families put a roof over their heads. Instead, it chose to more than double the value of its employees’ retirement benefits.

That may sound unusual, but federal housing officials say it was an allowable expense. Still, the switch from a 401(k)-style retirement plan to a pension allowing workers to retire early — with guaranteed lifetime payments — is raising eyebrows at a time when generous public employee pensions are under fire. . .

Bill Anderson, chairman of the Housing Authority of the County of Santa Clara’s board of commissioners, conceded that the money spent on employee pensions could have been used in other ways, including housing aid for low-income families.

Indeed, the waiting list for federal housing assistance is so long that applicants must now wait four to nine years.

Anderson also acknowledged that with the area’s high unemployment, the housing authority could fill jobs without a more generous retirement plan. But he said he considered the agency’s employees, whose average salary according to CalPERS is $60,730, underpaid compared with other government workers, most of whom have pensions.

“I was very much aware that this was money available for whatever else we do,” said Anderson, a retired assistant county counsel. “I thought it was the right thing to do for the employees.”

Housing authority workers who under the old plan had to wait until they were almost 60 to draw from retirement accounts — which could be shrunk by market losses — can now receive a guaranteed monthly pension check as early as age 50. And they’ll have a guarantee of 2 percent annual increases after they retire . . .

The change in retirement benefits was made possible after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2008 made the housing authority one of 32 Moving to Work demonstration sites. The program allows more spending flexibility to encourage “innovative” approaches that “use federal dollars more efficiently.”

Via Hit & Run.

• Anonymous takes over Syrian Ministry of Defense website.
• ” . . . he ‘angled his Malcolm Gladwell.’”
• Another death after a jolt from a non-lethal Taser.
• More home invasions by criminals posing as police.
• Your kid needs one of these.
• ACLU of Maryland may sue Baltimore PD over detention, camera seizure of citizen attempting to record police.
• Fred Imus, RIP.

Rovinj, Croatia.

It’s been awhile . . .

My segment on drunk driving laws aired Thursday night. You can watch it here.

Here’s the column where I lay out my argument.

• Agitator guest blogger alum Alyona Minkovsky does a Q&A with Brian Lamb tonight on C-SPAN.
• LAPD officers allege ticket quotas.
• More laws named after dead people.
• Next in line for a bailout: the U.S. Postal Service.
• Ken at Popehat has been on a rampage lately—a delightfully entertaining rampage of truth, light, and goodness.
• DOJ files secret brief in wiretapping case that plaintiff’s attorneys aren’t permitted to see.
• Anonymous claims to have hacked 70 law enforcement websites, says big information dump is coming.
•  Up next: the higher education bubble.

Caught a nasty bug, so this is all the blogging for today.

• Jerusalem Post apologizes for tone of editorials in response to the Oslo shooting.
• New Mexico mayor says he was drunk when he signed million-dollar contracts.
• Photo of an Escher painting refracted in a water droplet.
• Florida teen dies in a jail cell after arrest for pot possession.
• New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tells the “dhimmitude” crowd to get lost.
• New book looks at long-suppressed color video from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

This is insane.

The Renton City Prosecutor wants to send a cartoonist to jail for mocking the police department in a series of animated Internet videos.The “South-Park”-style animations parody everything from officers having sex on duty to certain personnel getting promoted without necessary qualifications . . .

Only KIRO Team 7 Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne holds a key document that really lays bare the city’s intent. The document was quietly filed in King County Superior Court last week. It’s a search warrant accusing an anonymous cartoon creator, going by the name of Mr. Fiddlesticks, of cyberstalking (RCW 9.61.260). The Renton Police Department and the local prosecutor got a judge to sign off as a way to uncover the name of whoever is behind the parodies. Halsne talked with three nationally respected legal experts who believe the use of the cyberstalking statute is likely stomping on the constitution . . .

A criminal court document, uncovered by Team 7 Investigators, not only shows how badly the city of Renton wants to “out” the cartoonist (who goes by the name MrFiddlesticks), but states some of the fake character’s lines discuss real life incidents.For example, the search warrant says one cartoon statement “discussed a past incident that has already been investigated…..regarding a dating relationship (a female detective) had with a suspect.”

An embarrassing revelation; yes, but criminal?We asked attorney Venkat Balasubramani to review several parody videos and the court documents. He’s an expert in cyber-law and constitutional issues.

“The cyberstalking angle doesn’t pass the laugh test,” Balasubramani told KIRO-TV. “It’s a serious stretch and I’d be surprised if somebody looked at it and realistically thought these acts actually fit the statute and we could make somebody criminally liable.”

When we asked about the more likely scenario, Balasubramani said, “I think they were trying to get at the speaker and they looked around for a statute that shoehorned their conduct into and sent that to Google and said ‘turn over the information.”Historically, Google and You-Tube are far more likely to cough up an anonymous animator’s real name when there’s a criminal case, as opposed to just an internal affairs investigation into some personnel issues.

In a just world, this stunt would get the prosecutor disbarred and the police chief fired.

MORE: Ken at Popehat names the names.

I was thinking a bit more about that Lawrence O’Donnell rant from Tuesday night. And the more I think about it, the more wrong he gets. For example, over the last few years, those crazy, right-wing, teacher-hating Fox News personalities John Stossel and Andrew Napalitano have had me on their shows at least a dozens times to talk about police abuse issues. Want to guess how many times MSNBC has invited me on? It’s less than one.

Of course, I’m not the only one who writes about this stuff. Maybe O’Donnell has had other people on. So I did a search of O’Donnell’s archives to see how many times he has addressed police abuses. I found one instance, and even that one had a partisan angle. O’Donnell actually acknowledged on Twitter yesterday that he could only think of a single story about police abuse he has addressed since he started hosting the show. (Though he did write a book several years ago about a police abuse case his father handled as an attorney.) Reason has run dozens of articles, videos, and blog posts over that period.

So what sorts of important issues does O’Donnell think are more deserving than police abuse? Sarah Palin, apparently. He has discussed her more than 50 times. She even gets her own topic tag.

And O’Donnell isn’t just wrong about Reason. The conservative-learning libertarian Glenn Reynolds have been outspoken and critical of police on issues like no-knock raids, citizens’ right to record police officers, and even ending qualified immunity for cops, a pretty radical (though in my opinion correct) position that I doubt you could find ten members of Congress to support. Sites like Lew Rockwell also run pieces by adamant police critics like William Grigg.

So not only did O’Donnell deliver an ad hominem attack, it was an attack that was also embarrassingly wrong on the facts, which he’d have discovered had he done 20 seconds of research. And it doesn’t look like he’ll be issuing a correction. His only response yesterday was the Tweet linked above and to re-Tweet others’ weak defenses of him.

If O’Donnell really gave damn about police abuse, he’d be looking to forge alliances across partisan and ideological lines to build support for reform. Meaning he’d be reaching out to places like Reason. Instead, in just the second time he has mentioned police abuse in his eight months of hosting a national TV show, it was to use the issue as an ideological cudgel to smack around people with whom he disagrees . . . on a completely unrelated issue.

• Puppycide in Birmingham, Michigan.
• Immigrant family says ICE agents raided the wrong house.
• There oughtta be a law.
• Looking at the effects of the Adam Walsh Act, five years later.
• The family of William Cooper, the Hampton, Virginia, man killed in a drug raid in June, plans to sue.
• It’s great that this officer was finally suspended, but there ought to also be some discipline for her colleagues who pulled over, suspected she had be drinking, but granted her “professional courtesy.”
• The return of violent rhetoric!
• Headline of the day.
• These drugs have soul.
• “It takes balls to execute an innocent man.”

Prague.

My last piece on Cory Maye’s release just went live at Huffington Post.

It’s a report from last week’s homecoming party.

UPDATE: Link fixed. Sorry about that.

Someone has (somewhat randomly) designated August 20 as National Lemonade Freedom Day.

Idea is to get your kids to set up a lemonade stand without a permit to teach them about bad laws, mindless bureaucracy, and civil disobedience. There’s also a handy Google Maps ap that plots lemonade stand crackdowns around the country.

I support this.

Responding to that Matt Damon video, O’Donnell first calls Reason “right-wing” and “Republican,” then asks why Reason criticizes teachers, but never bothers to criticize cops.

Nick Gillespie responds.

MORE: Mediaite picks up O’Donnell’s rant. But not Gillespie’s response, of course. Nor did author Frances Martel bother to check the veracity of O’Donnell’s claims in the video before reiterating them. It really wouldn’t have taken long to check. Type “police” into the Reason search engine. That’s about it.

O’Donnell’s fact-free rant is also picking up steam on Twitter. Really aggravating. I would wager that Reason has dedicated more coverage to police and prosecutorial abuse over the last five years than any left-of-center magazine or website, save for the ACLU. And it’s not just the work I did when I was there. Tim Cavanaugh, Jacob Sullum, and now Mike Riggs all regularly write about police abuse. Reason.tv has thoroughly explored various police abuse of power issues.

O’Donnell thoroughly embarrassed himself here, and he owes Reason a correction and an apology.

Cavtat, Croatia.

• Man jailed for shingling his own roof.
• Woman threatened with fines, jail because her daughter saved an endangered woodpecker from being eaten by a cat.
• Allegedly extremist budget deal doesn’t actually cut government spending.
• Caylee Anthony’s useful idiots.
• Another successful government operation.
• “Child protection official” for the Catholic church caught with child porn.

Creating new little libertarians.

Police in Coralville shut down at least three lemonade stands run by children over RAGBRAI weekend. According to Dustin Krutsinger, police shut down his four-year-old daughters stand after just 30 minutes. Krutsinger said the officer told his wife, “this isn’t the first time I’ve had to do this.”

Krutsinger said his daughter was selling lemonade for 25 cents a glass, and had made less than $5. According to the city of Coralville, 4-year-old Abigail Krutsinger was in violation of a two day ordinance, which required all vendors to have permits when RAGBRAI rolled into town.

Josh Schamberger, President of the Iowa City/Coralville Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the ordinance was passed to protect riders from possible health risks . . .

“If the line is drawn to the point where a four-year-old eight blocks away can’t sell a couple glasses of lemonade for 25 cents, than I think the line has been drawn at the wrong spot,” Krutsinger said.

A mother of six also said her kids had their lemonade stand on 18th Avenue shut down after just 20 minutes.

Bobbie Nelson said she laughed when a police officer told her that a permit to sell lemonade would cost $400.

“The kids were devastated,” Nelson said. “They just cried and didn’t understand why.”

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Bowing to pressure from public health groups and politicians, Campbell’s recently tried reducing the sodium content in most of its soups. No one bought them. They still plan to actually expand their low-sodium line, but they’re now also planning to put the tastier, sodium-er soups back on the shelves as well. The public health crowd isn’t happy. Here’s one reaction:

Why do so many foods pack in the salt? because it is a cheap alternative to other ways of making food tasty.

Take soup for example. Why is it that when you prepare a soup at home it tastes so much better than from a can? Even if you are not a famous chef, it tastes an order of magnitude better than a prepared soup. The reason: you used fresh, good quality ingredients. Not so with low cost processed foods.

In order for the companies to be profitable they need to procure the cheapest possible ingredients. They need to skimp on anything that increases the price. We bet that if some companies could sell you water and salt as a soup…they probably would.

Of course, cheap, tasty, ready-to-eat foods also make the lives of low-income people (and lots of other people) immeasurably more convenient. Not everyone has time to make homemade soup from scratch. (I also doubt most homemade soup recipes are all that healthy.) Here’s the predictable reaction from CSPI:

Unfortunately for millions of hypertensive Americans who have the occasional can of Campbell soup, it’s going to be a lot harder for the company to talk about the health benefits of soup. And how patronizing for Morrison, now the new chief executive, to claim that adding more salt to Campbell’s soups gives consumers more choice. Consumers are always free to add salt, but it’s impossible for them to get rid of the new salt Campbell has added. Why not trust consumers to add as much or as little as they want?

See what they did there? Campbell’s is actually offering more low-sodium options than before, but because they’re offering some soups with the previous sodium content, consumers apparently now have “less choice.”

Groups like CSPI once criticized the food industry for not offering enough of what they considered to be healthy choices. Now that it’s clear that consumers really don’t like those choices, the food scolds have switched strategies. It’s now a sin to offer the less healthy options at all.

By the way, it’s far from clear that sodium is the health threat these groups claim it to be.

• Matt Damon is an idiot. He also doesn’t appear to know what “paternalistic” means.
• Injustice Everywhere crunches some data related to yesterday’s discussion.
• British professor takes on Prince Charles and his fondness for homeopathy.
• Texas pride.
• Congress wants to spy on your computer. For the children, of course.
• Increasing evidence that the government’s dietary guidelines have been making people fat.

Prague.