The restaurant chain executes a brilliant little maneuver to get around San Francisco’s ridiculous attempt to ban the toys in Happy Meals.

Nose-thumbing at absurd regulations makes me smile.

Emily Bazelon has the terrible story of another shaken baby case in which the woman convicted—the grandmother—is likely innocent. The Supreme Court says it doesn’t matter, thanks to the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which put restrictions on habeas appeals.

The majority’s brief and unsigned opinion concedes that “doubts about whether Smith is in fact guilty are understandable.” But according to six justices, it’s not the 9th Circuit’s job to do anything about that.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, with Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Ginsburg gives all the reasons to doubt the medical testimony against Smith. She does a great service by laying out the growing skepticism among a minority of doctors about the validity of diagnosing shaken-baby syndrome without any evidence at all of external injury. “What is now known about the SBS hypotheses seems to me worthy of considerable weight in the discretionary decision whether to take up this tragic case,” Ginsburg writes.

The piece includes a decision by Judge Richard Posner about another shaken baby case involving a coerced and false confession.

• Disgraced former “Sheriff of the Year” arrested, now jailed in the building that’s named after him.
• The cognitive benefits of gum chewing.
• The reproductive perils of Wifi.
• Tennessee officials want to protect Tennesseeans from “synthetic drugs” by putting them in jail for trying them.
• Wonderful old color photographs from Russia.
• Federal prosecutor argues in a court brief that advocating jury nullification is a crime, “no matter where it occur[s].”

The road between Split and Dubrovnik in Croatia. I bought some grappa from one of these roadside stands. Still have it. It tastes delicious. But the sugar. Dear God, the sugar. Smelling the stuff will give you a hangover.

• Cop shoots at unarmed man, arrests unarmed man. Unarmed man somehow still charged with “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.”
• Deaf man held in jail for 25 days because police department didn’t bother to get a translator.
• National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers: It’s time to reform the grand jury system.
• Finally . . . 5-year-old arrested, zip-tied at the hands and feet, and charged with battery on a police officer.

The sad thing is, it will probably help him.

Here you have a power-mad, office-abusing sheriff who has misspent millions in taxpayer funds, and who once let a celebrity drive a damned tank into a man’s home (on suspicion of cockfighting, no less).

And the leading candidates vying for the nomination of the alleged party of “limited government” have been falling all over themselves to win his blessing.

• Innocence no defense against Virginia’s sex offender list. Once you’re on these things, it’s damn near impossible to get removed.
• FDA considering mandatory salt reductions. Remember when everyone said not to worry, all this talk about reducing salt in food would be voluntary? Good times.
• California police captain voids police lieutenant’s ticket for causing an accident, says doing so was “in the interest of justice.”
• Headline of the day.
• Nutty, Tea-Party-backed senator proposes crazy-ass amendment to limit the federal government’s power.

The road between Split and Dubrovnik in Croatia.

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but it looks like something to keep an eye on.

Crooks & Liars suggests the raid was intimidation. But we are talking about the Prince George’s County, Maryland Police Department, here. I wouldn’t be too quick to rule out good old fashioned incompetence.

By the way, a reader points out that new Prince George’s County Police Chief Mark Magaw was formerly in charge of the narcotics division during the colossally botched raid on the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo. Magaw is also the one who leaked that the department had obtained a no-knock raid for Calvo’s home. They hadn’t. And still, he was promoted to police chief.

We know what can happen if your dog so much as growls at a cop. But what happens when a police dog attacks a kid? Well, we get to hear about the dog’s exemplary service record.

Police say the Friday attack of the department’s police dog, Storm, on an 8-year-old boy was an unfortunate accident, but Storm has done much more good than bad during his time with the department.

The boy, Patrick Assion, was visiting his grandmother’s house in Campbell and playing hide-and-seek with his cousin in the backyard when Storm took hold of Patrick’s arm and dragged him to the ground.

The incident left the boy three physical reminders of the attack: a red mark on his arm, a T-shirt full of holes and a torn-up sweat shirt.

An off-duty Campbell police officer was walking Storm and allowed the dog to go to the bathroom in a fenced-in area. But the dog saw the boy and ran after him, apparently mistaking a running boy for a suspect . . .

“He has caught three armed robbers. He has located numerous amounts of drugs. He has tracked down suspects. He’s been a vital, vital part of our police department,” Rusnak said of the dog’s history.

And if someone had come to the kid’s defense and shot the dog, as on- and off-duty cops routinely do, that person would be in custody right now. Of course, the problem isn’t the dog, it’s the handler. And when cops kill the family pet, the problem also usually isn’t with the dog.

• The Bernie Fine story keeps getting stranger. His wife apparently had an affair with one of his accusers. Another accuser’s father says he’s lying, and the accuser is himself facing sexual assault charges. Two of the accusers are also step-brothers. None of which means Fine is innocent. It just means we should probably wait a bit longer before assuming he’s guilty.
• Fed gave biggest banks billions in secret, low-interest loans.
• With the exception of the last one, I’m fairly sure every category of ads in this article has been run against a prominent male politician.
• Tennessee constables get kickbacks from the state for writing citations.
• Heard an ad for the site on Sirius the other day. Your thoughts? Disgusting, or just a more transparent way of dating? Both?
• Emma Sullivan, hero of the week.
• Washington State law to take effect next month is likely to make it yet more difficult for pain patients to find doctors who will treat them.

The road between Split and Dubrovnik in Croatia.

The road between Split and Dubrovnik in Croatia.

• Cool little gizmo tutorial that simulates the controls on an SLR camera.
• The latest bit of nastiness your Congress has cooked up in secret.
• Four of the last five Vancouver mayors say it’s time to legalize marijuana.
• Google Street View + stop-motion animation.
• View from the top of the Burj Khalifa Spire, the tallest man-made structure in the world.
• Headline of the day.
• One of your odder Christmas traditions.
• Smothered, scattered, covered, held up at gunpoint.

Thoughts and condolences to James Joyner and his family.

Email responses to my article from Friday have been mostly positive. But here’s a fun one:

I’m from outside Chicago.  Wicker park has historically been a rough neighborhood.  In fact, i had to chase down a purse snatcher there a couple years ago.  The new hipsters moving in are naive.

Shaver seems to me like she doesn’t understand the city.  Her and her dipshit friend picked a fight with two hot headed gangsters and got a light beat down.

Then they blamed the cops.  You learn not to screw with Chicago cops, and you learn to mind your own business.

Someone yelling profanities is a verbal argument.  She’d have an excuse to get involved if the girl was getting beaten.

There’s no California bullshit in my city.

I feel bad for her like i feel bad for the dead wrong pedestrian lying in the crosswalk (Oh yeah, that rule doesn’t mean shit in Chicago either).

Two sides to every story,

Brock

In response to my HuffPost piece:

I just read your article on the young lady who was battered in Chicago and had her case ignored, only to later have her house raided during a drug bust.  I am a high ranking police officer who has worked in the Chicago area for the past 15 years. I have worked with the DEA at the federal level and at the state level, and I also teach criminal justice at Loyola University.  Let me just say that you have barely scratched the surface with how wasteful and destructive the American drug policy has been to our society.  While I do not agree that police conspire to ignore violent crimes, the sad fact is that violent crime detectives do not have nearly the resources that are available to narcotics agents.  It is insanity and law enforcement and society are too brainwashed to see the truth.  I also blame the “community activists” who shamelessly put themselves ahead of their supposed constituent’s needs.  Whatever gets them headlines, and what better way than to stand next to a shooting scene and scream about how police ignore their neighborhoods.  The media is as much to blame because they do not seek truth, but rather inflated drama.  All this leads to our useless politicians enacting irrational and meaningless laws that have the exact opposite consequences they were seeking.

Just a few of my thoughts.  Stay on this topic, it’s worth exposing.

• “The American people want an adult, and no one has a stronger record of adultery than I do.”
• Arthur Brooks on fairness and the Occupy movement.
• Video shows UC-Davis students were clearly warned about use of force before pepper spray. I don’t think this justifies it. It’s hard to see what harm the students were causing by sitting on a sidewalk at a quad. But it does mitigate the casualness with which the cop appears to spray them.
• The Occupy crackdowns have at least forced more people to start paying attention to police militarization.
• FDA: U.S. facing severe Adderall shortage that is causing real harm to people who use the drug. DEA: Shut up.

Split, Croatia.

All are included in my new piece for Huffington Post.

The broader theme is how drug war incentives encourage police departments to go all out while investigating consensual drug crimes and to brush off crimes with actual victims.

I think it’s clear now that the only real threat posed by “digital drugs” is that your local news team may insult your intelligence with inane scare stories about them. This nonsense flares up a couple times per year, and has been for a few years now.

Just to mess with local news reporters everywhere, someone needs to put up a website offering free audio downloads that claim to mimic the effects of inserting a vodka-soaked tampon. Maybe try to work Satanism and comic books in there, too.

On a positive note, I’m pleasantly surprised that we haven’t yet seen legislation to outlaw the binaural “high.”

One of my favorite covers. Beck and Emmylou Harris sing Gram Parsons’ “Sin City.”

• Mr. T plays Santa with Nancy Reagan.
• OWS takes aim at Black Friday.
• Speaking of which, here’s the dumbest thing you’ll read about Black Friday.
• Federal judge tosses lawsuit brought by targets of that violent drug raid in Columbia, Missouri.
• William Anderson on prosecutorial misconduct.

Split, Croatia.