Rovinj, Croatia.

The Onion publishes a story, promotional Tweets about Congressmen taking children hostage, Sen. Chuck Schumer pistol-whipping a school chaperone.

U.S. Capitol Police announce that they are “currently investigating the reporting.”.

I’ve written a couple times before on the surreal, looming disaster that is Shaquille O’Neal’s secondary career as a police officer.

The Phoenix New Times has now published a long piece about Shaq’s time with the Tempe, Arizona, police department.

And Jesus, is it weird.

An awing time-lapse video from the International Space Station.

• Jonathan Turley: Obama “prove the most disastrous president in our history in terms of civil liberties.”
• Couple refuses entry to DEA agents who got the wrong house.
• University of Wisconsin-Stout targets faculty member with “threats” for Firefly posters on his door.
• Michigan police chief, five cops charged with using asset forfeiture money to purchase drugs, prostitutes.
• This seems like a bad idea.
• Incredible story of a false confession and wrongful conviction.
• TSA/airport police in Indianapolis seize a breast cancer patient’s medical marijuana. I feel safer.
• Other things that make me feel safer: That we’re about to deport a star student because she was brought to America illegally when she was 20 months old.
• An interview with the great Idris Elba.

So a couple weeks ago I noted that seven police officers in Houston had been lightly disciplined for covering up for a fellow officer when he crashed into a school bus with a DWI over twice the legal limit, including covering up the empties on the off-duty cop’s floorboard. The cop himself was fired. But the cops who covered up for him got off with some light discipline. They remain on the force.

And then there’s this:

Assistant Chief Daniel Perales was the highest ranking in the group.

HPD Chief McClelland told Perales, “You failed to ensure that a comprehensive and timely investigation was conducted into the allegations that alcohol may have been a factor in Sgt. Trejo’s accident.”

Just two weeks after being disciplined for not properly investigating that DWI accident, we’ve learned Chief Perales is getting a new job. He’ll now be in charge of traffic enforcement for HPD and the DWI task force.

Rovinj, Croatia.

It’s interesting that the local DA dropped the charges in this case. But only after the guy spent a night in jail.

“I’m just an ordinary citizen. I was on my way to the movies, and all of a sudden I’m facing a felony and 15 years in prison,” Frobe told ABC7.

Frobe calls it the worst experience of his life. He was on his way to a late evening movie on an August night last year when he was stopped for speeding in far north suburban Lindenhurst. He didn’t believe he was in a 35-mile-an-hour zone, and he figured if he was going to get ticket he wanted to be able to document his challenge with video evidence, so he got out his flip camera, which he was not very adept at using.

At one point he held it out the window trying to record where he was. When the officer, being recorded on his squad dash cam, walked back to Frobe’s car, the officer saw Frobe’s camera.

Officer: “That recording? Frobe : “Yes, Yes, I’ve been… Officer: “Was it recording all of our conversation? Frobe: “Yes. Officer: “Guess what? You were eavesdropping on our conversation. I did not give you permission to do so. Step out of the vehicle.”

Louis Frobe was then cuffed and arrested for felony eavesdropping.

“I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified. I was begging him, I said I didn’t know about this law. Would you please take the camera – this is no big deal – and smash it. You know I didn’t know about the law,” Frobe told ABC7.

Frobe spent a night in the Lake County jail and was released on bond the next day. Later the charges against him were dropped, but so angry was Louis Frobe that he decided to file a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s eavesdropping law.

“And they had audio and they had video on me, but I’m not allowed to do it to them. I’m in a private car on a public street and it’s a public official. Why shouldn’t I be able to record what’s going on to prove my innocence?” he said.

That’s the topic of my latest piece for Huffington Post.

Rovinj, Croatia.

• Colorado offers $500 million in corporate welfare for Nashville-based to build a hotel.
• Things I’m apparently good at: Predicting that Nancy Grace’s nipple will appear on television. I haven’t yet figured out how to use this talent. But I promise it will be for good, not evil.
• Cops eat man’s pot brownies, boast about it.
• Fascinating photo set from North Korea.
• Threatening blog comment traced to North Miami Beach police computer.
• Cracked takes aim at the criminal justice system.
• Here’s a petition that might be of interest to Agitator readers.
• Good catch by Dave Weigel: How Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is trying to force a reality where Rick Santorum matters.
• Ah, the glories of central planning. It’s an odd worldview that could hail a man who forcibly sterilized poor women as “a hero with women’s reproductive rights.”

I missed this last week:

The judge who dismissed Michael Allison’s case last week won’t have the final word.

An appeal by prosecutors is likely in the works, Crawford County State’s Attorney Tom Wiseman said Wednesday.

On Sept. 15, Second Illinois Judicial Circuit Judge David K. Frankland accepted Allison’s motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that eavesdropping law he is charged under is unconstitutional.

Allison’s defense filed the motion on April 29, citing three ways in which the law violates constitutional protections. Frankland granted two of the motions, rejecting the third.

Wiseman said the prosecutors – the Illinois Attorney General’s Office was brought in earlier this summer to assist with the case – have 30 days to appeal. They’ll take their time in making the next move in a case that has brought national attention to the county.

“We’re still considering all of our options at this time,” Wiseman said. “We’ve got a little time here.”

As you probably know if you read this site with any regularity, Allison faces up to 75 years in prison. If the state does appeal, that’s probably bad for Michael Allison. But it’s good for getting this awful law overturned once and for all. Allison has told me in prior conversations that he won’t accept a plea, even if he’s offered a misdemeanor. His aim is to get the law overturned.

If you’re wondering how state officials could possibly defend this law, here’s how Wiseman defended it to me last year:

Asked if he thinks Allison should spend the rest of his life in prison for recording his interactions with public officials, Wiseman says, “My job isn’t to write the laws. My job is just to enforce them.” Of course, Wiseman does have discretion over whom he charges and what charges he files. But he says Allison committed a felony, and it wouldn’t be proper for a prosecutor to overlook such a thing….

“They may have problems with some bad police officers in some of your urban areas,” Wiseman adds. “But we don’t have those problems around here. All of our cops around here are good cops.”

There’s good stuff in this Gene Healy column.

Two years ago this month, the federal government broke ground on what was supposed to be a massive new headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security. Situated on the St. Elizabeths Hospital campus in Southeast Washington, the $3.4 billion project was designed to bring together some 15,000 employees of our newest Cabinet department, which in less than a decade has become notorious for waste, mismanagement and inflicting pointless humiliation on airline travelers.

Depending on your sense of humor, you may get a mordant chuckle out of the fact that, before the government adopted the St. Elizabeths moniker in 1916, the property was known as the Government Hospital for the Insane….

….in a new study, my Cato Institute colleague David Rittgers makes a provocative and compelling argument for going much further. He argues that, 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, it’s time to abolish the Department of Homeland Security.

Rittgers sees particular danger in DHS’ grant programs, under which the department has ladled out some $34 billion to states and localities since its inception.

The talismanic properties of the phrase “homeland security” enable politicians “to wrap pork in red, white and blue in a way not possible with defense spending,” Rittgers argues. “Not every town can host a military installation or build warships, but every town has a police force that can use counterterrorism funds.” As a result of the “gold-rush pathology” encouraged by the grants — to offer just one example — the midsize town of Grand Forks, N.D., now “has more biochemical suits and gas masks than police officers to wear them.”….

All this has done very little to enhance public safety — not that you’d learn that from the agency itself, which is especially resistant to using cost-benefit analysis. In 2006, a senior economist at DHS admitted, “We really don’t know a whole lot about the overall costs and benefits of homeland security.”

In a new book, “Terror, Security, and Money,” professors John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart closely examine that question and, using a set of assumptions weighted in favor of the government, conclude that, to justify the increased post-Sept. 11 spending, we “would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful [attempted Times Square car bomb-type] attacks per year, or more than four per day.”

It’ll never happen, of course. Suggest we add a new cabinet-level federal agency and you’re hailed as a visionary. Suggest that we eliminate one that we did fine without just 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, and you’re dismissed as a nut.

Rovinj, Croatia.

• NYPD chief claims his department has the ability to take down an airplane.
• Actually, the First Amendment does protect anonymity.
• For the look on Michelle Bachmann’s face alone, I would donate to help establish the gay, nudist Tea party of San Francisco.
• Chomp.
• Bridal party sinks into lake.
• Terrifying headline of the day.
• “Senator Santorum is certainly an advocate for states’ rights, but he believes as Abraham Lincoln – that states do not have the right to legalize moral wrongs.” Moral wrongs such as letting people with cancer smoke marijuana so they can keep down their medication. Federalism! How does it work?
• You know, this is a very good point.
• CNN to Gary Johnson: You can’t be in our debate unless you’re supported by at least 2% of the people in this poll we conducted in which we didn’t give people the option to support you.
• Good news.
• Obama reps bar reporters from covering Silicon Valley fundraisers.

• Seattle PD loses 45,000+ dash cam videos.
• More terrifying stories from Mexico.
• Lightning storm at the Grand Canyon.
• The Economist looks at false confessions.
• Photos Tweeted from space.
• Over five years, the federal government paid at least $600 million in entitlements to dead people.

Rovinj, Croatia.

I keep seeing death penalty supporters make arguments similar to this one:

The death penalty is irreversible, and in the case of a miscarriage of justice there can be no reparation to the condemned . . .

There are rejoinders: someone who is wrongly executed cannot ever be compensated, but can someone who was wrongly imprisoned for 10 years ever truly be compensated in any meaningful way? Punishment of the innocent is terrible to contemplate whatever the punishment, and yet society must punish and will always be imperfect.

Everyone who makes this argument should spend 20 minutes with a few people who were convicted of a capital crime, then exonerated and released after a decade or more in prison. I obviously can’t speak for every exoneree, but I’ve spoken to many. And I’d wager a good deal of my next paycheck that every one of them will tell you that (a) they’re pretty darned happy they weren’t executed, and (b) there’s a huge difference between incarcerating an innocent person and executing one.

• Massachusetts high court okays a $70 administrative fee to fight a $100 traffic ticket.
• Steven Pinker: “Why Violence Is Vanishing.”
• After a half million wrongful arrests, NYPD commissioner tells cops to stop tricking pot smokers into breaking the law.
• How state lawmakers pump up their own pensions.
• Girl cuts herself. School makes her sign a pledge she isn’t cutting herself.
• Man with Down Syndrome beaten by cops, who apparently were concerned about a bulge in his waistband. It was a colostomy bag.

A friend just pointed me to this incredible September 11th story yesterday. I had never heard about it before.

Looks a good response to the meet-up post.

So let’s plan to meet up at Fountainhead tonight at 7:30pm.

I didn’t see last night’s debate, but I undestand Gary Johnson did very well, and getting quite a bit of press. Another good writeup here by Dave Weigel. Note Johnson’s position on capital punishment, and why he switched. I’m fairly certain that he’s the only candidate in the 2012 from either major party who is against the death penalty.

He’s also profiled in next month’s issue of GQ. And it’s a pretty flattering profile. And here he is on Fox News this morning.

Meanwhile, Bill Kristol accidentally compares Chris Christie to the antichrist.

MORE: Commenter points out that Ron Paul is also against the death penalty, and changed his mind for the same reasons.

Rovinj, Croatia.

• Interesting study on power and corruption.
• Libertarianism happens to people: foodie edition.
• Why pro-death penalty and anti-government are incompatible.
• Ugandans beaten, forcibly removed from land to make way for carbon credit forests.
• “Professional courtesy” in Houston. Nice to see the meting out of some discipline, though.
• And here’s another example of a police chief showing some courage.
• Interview with a man who did 18 years for a crime he didn’t commit.