Love, love, love Fark’s year-end headline-of-the-year competition. (See here and here.) Some of my favorites:

• For 75 years, woman plays piano weekly for her church. Credits her longevity to watching her keys and pews
• New Jersey woman steals valuable church crucifix. Police nab her after brief cross examination
• Vehicle crashes into Subway restaurant. Let us take a moment to honor our fallen heroes
• There is a group home for alcoholic hipsters in Brooklyn. At least, there was until everybody heard about it
• Car carrying $1M coin collection rolls over and crashes, dumping entire load across highway — resulting in unexpected lane change
• Ring ring ring goes the trolley. Argh argh argh goes the worker trapped under it
• Nearly 70 dead bats found in Arizona. Isn’t it a little early for spring training news about the Cubs?
• B.C. man hit by stray bullet in Mexico. DAMN YOU, TIME-TRAVELING BULLET

And finally . . .

• Sperm stem cells altered into insulin-producing cells to treat diabetes. Researchers say a cure for diabetes is about to come any moment now

• House members want DHS to protect illegal immigrants from rape in detention centers. Can’t wait to see GOP primary candidate will be the first to condemn this, call for more raping of illegal immigrants.
• Headline of the day.
• School principal gets firsthand lesson in zero tolerance.
• Boise St., San Diego St., Houston added to the Big East conference. Geography surrenders.
• U.S. is arming the Egyptian military crackdown.
• Check out the last sentence in this article. 
• ” . . . the wrong sort of people . . . “
• People and the Fish They Look Like
• CBS News: Documents show ATF pressured reluctant gun merchants to sell into Fast and Furious, then used the sales to call for more gun control.

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

My intern Jessica Greene just wrote her first published article, and it’s the top story at Huffington Post this morning. Not a bad way to kick off a journalism career.

Snippet:

In June 2010 the Nashville Metropolitan City Council passed legislation raising the city’s minimum fee for limo and sedan rentals, bumping it from $25 to $45. Drivers were prohibited by law from charging less. Other new regulations forbid limo companies from using leased vehicles, require cars to be dispatched only from the place of business, compel companies to wait 15 minutes before picking up a client, and ban parking in front of hotels and bars to wait for customers. More laws that take effect in January 2012 would also require companies to replace all sedans and SUVs over seven-years-old, and all limos 10-years-old and older. Vehicles older than five years cannot enter into service.

Passed under the guise of consumer protection, the net effect is to give large, existing car companies (also known as livery services) a huge advantage over smaller companies, and to effectively prevent any new companies from entering the market. Prior to the new laws, Tennesseans could purchase transportation from downtown Nashville to the airport in a limo or sedan for the same price as an average taxi ride. Nashville residents and visitors will now pay almost double for the same service . . .

A transportation battle currently playing out across the country pits large, established car service companies against their smaller and independent competitors. State or local governments in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and Oregon, have all passed minimum fare regulations. The fight over new laws in Nashville, where a group of smaller car service owners have filed suit in federal court, belies the black-and-white approach the both Democrats and Republicans take to regulation.

Wesley Hottot, an attorney for the Texas Chapter of Institute for Justice, a non-profit libertarian law firm, says the Tennessee Livery Association (TLA), a coalition of expensive limousine companies, pushed the bill through with a number of provisions that benefit only its members. “There is no point in this regulation. It has nothing to do with public safety. It has everything to do with economic protectionism,” Hottot says. Hottot and his team have litigated similar cases involving economic liberty and property rights in federal and state courts across the country.

• Another conservative against the drug war.
• Putin pulls 99.48 percent of the vote . . . in Chechnya. The other .52 percent slipped on a patch of ice this morning.
• After $56 billion and 10 years . . . TSA is junk.
• “There’s absolutely no evidence that anyone has ever been harmed in any way by an unlicensed interior designer.”
• Virginia Court of Appeals exonerates Thomas Haynesworth. He had served 27 years for two rapes in the 1980s.

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Latest scary Internet fad is . . . laying down on things.

Via the comments, here’s an account of how police dismantled the Occupy encampment in St. Louis. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but if true, praise, credit, and commendation to St. Louis law enforcement officials.

The first thing they did was the one that baffled me the most, at first: they gave the protesters nearly 36 hours notice, as opposed to the 20 to 60 minutes’ notice other cities gave. It has taken me almost a week, and the mistakes of several other cities, to see why that was a good idea, because here’s how they did it. Early afternoon on Thursday, they gave the protesters 24 hours’ notice: as of 3pm on Friday, the no structures in the plaza rule was going to be enforced, and as of 10pm, the curfew was going to be enforced. So, unsurprisingly, Occupy St. Louis put out a huge call for as many people as possible to come to the plaza by noon, to be trained in peaceful civil disobedience; local civil liberties lawyers showed up to brief them. Needless to say, the cops did not oblige them by showing up at 3pm. Heck, I knew they weren’t going to show up at 3pm; no way were they going to snarl downtown traffic during rush hour; I told my friend not to expect them any earlier than 7pm at the very earliest.

So, when no cops showed up anywhere near 3pm, the protesters had their biggest rally to date (as I suspect the cops were thinking, “getting it out of their system”), and then started to drift away. Rally organizers advised people to be back before 10pm, to block the enforcement of curfew. Sure enough, by 10pm, they had 350 people down there. And scant minutes later, people were jazzed up and ready to go, because outlying scouts reported that the police were gathering, en masse, with multiple cars, multiple buses, an ambulance, and a firetruck, only a couple of blocks away!

And sometime around an hour, hour and a half later, the cops just disappeared, dispersed, without ever having gotten within two blocks of the plaza. So the confused protesters declared victory, let most of the troops go home, and fewer than a hundred of them bedded down for the night in their tents. An hour later, somewhere around 150 cops showed up. I’m sure people in those tents tweeted and text messaged and phoned for reinforcements. But between the late hour, and the fact that people were exhausted after having been out there all day, and that it was the third call-up of the day? Nobody showed.

Ah, but the cops did more than just show up after two head-fakes and with sufficient numbers … they did right exactly what the Obama administration told everybody else to do wrong. They didn’t show up in riot gear and helmets, they showed up in shirt sleeves with their faces showing. They not only didn’t show up with SWAT gear, they showed up with no unusual weapons at all, and what weapons they had all securely holstered. They politely woke everybody up. They politely helped everybody who was willing to remove their property from the park to do so. They then asked, out of the 75 to 100 people down there, how many people were volunteering for being-arrested duty? Given 33 hours to think about it, and 10 hours to sweat it over, only 27 volunteered. As the police already knew, those people’s legal advisers had advised them not to even passively resist, so those 27 people lined up to be peacefully arrested, and were escorted away by a handful of cops. The rest were advised to please continue to protest, over there on the sidewalk … and what happened next was the most absolutely brilliant piece of crowd control policing I have heard of in my entire lifetime.

All of the cops who weren’t busy transporting and processing the voluntary arrestees lined up, blocking the stairs down into the plaza. They stood shoulder to shoulder. They kept calm and silent. They positioned the weapons on their belts out of sight. They crossed their hands low in front of them, in exactly the least provocative posture known to man. And they peacefully, silently, respectfully occupied the plaza, using exactly the same non-violent resistance techniques that the protesters themselves had been trained in.

Instead of brute force, cunning and creativity. Lo and behold, it worked. The Occupy encampment is gone. No one was sprayed or beaten. No horrifying photos or cell phone videos. No public funds spent defending lawsuits. No public relations nightmare. If it has to be done, this is how you do it.

Now that I no longer work there, I can encourage you to donate to Reason without feeling like I’m encouraging you to donate to me. Although I guess I’ve done that in the past, too. In any case, Reason is having its annual fundraising drive. You should donate. (Preemptive rebuttal: No, donor-supported organizations are not incompatible or even inconsistent with free markets or with libertarianism.) With new hires Mike Riggs and Lucy Steigerwald (in addition to Jacob Sullum, Tim Cavanugh, and the Reason.tv crew), they’ve more than kept the criminal justice beat alive since I left. In fact, those issues are probably getting more attention over there than ever.

Also, if I may shamelessly self-promote, I somehow missed these kind words Jonathan Rauch had for Reason’s criminal justice issue, which Jacob Sullum and I co-edited:

Hats off to Reason for its July special issue on criminal (in)justice. Strong journalism examining, among other things, the unaccountable “culture of misconduct” among gung-ho prosecutors (names are named); and the prevalence of wrongful convictions; an immigration detention system “that treats treats suspected illegal aliens like criminals, but with fewer rights.” Special kudos to Jacob Sullum for a compelling and, in today’s climate, brave takedown of politically sacred sex-offender laws.

I read the whole magazine with mounting admiration. Every article is solid and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, on a subject about which Americans are too complacent. This kind of enterprise is why God invented magazines.

Coming from Rauch, a journalist’s journalist, that’s damned flattering.

The Current Events Inquiry blog points out that the Pentagon’s 1033 program—the program by which the Defense Department transfers surplus military equipment to domestic police departments—hit an all-time high last year.

The quaterly newsletter, titled All Points Bulletin, is an official publication of the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), which is currently a part of the Defense Logistics Agency. A tag line used in the newsletter reads: “from warfighter to crimefighter.” In the recent October issue, LESO program manager Craig Barret brags that “[FY 2011] has been a historic year for the program. We reutilized more than $500M, that is million with an M, worth of property in FY 11. This passes the previous mark by several hundred million dollars.”…

Elsewhere in the same publication it is revealed that LESO issued 800 Humvees in FY2011, a 700% increase from FY2010. In the same time period 27 Armored Vehicles were distributed as well. One of the latest vehicles declared up-for-grabs is the South African manufactured REVA 4×4 Armored Personnel Carrier. LESO previously boasted that “its V-shaped hull offers protection against land mines and Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), and has space for at least 10 passengers.”

It’s easy to become inoculated to the outrage, here. So let’s reiterate: The U.S. government is boasting about how it has enabled equipment specifically designed to help U.S. troops kill foreign soldiers during war . . . to be used on American streets, against American citizens. Not only that, but the government is particularly proud of the fact that last year, significantly more military equipment was diverted for that purpose than ever before.

Also, more coverage of the militarization issue this week from The Daily, which also notes the record year for the 1033 program.

Today’s nominee . . . teen werewolves.

Prior nominee, description of contest here.

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

• Great piece by my HuffPost colleague John Rudolf about an Alabama woman trying to find out why and how her son died in police custody.
• Marist poll (PDF): In hypothetical general election matchup with Obama, Ron Paul is tied. All the other GOP candidates would lose.
• Mississippi Supreme Court admonishes DA Forrest Allgood. (PDF)
• DEA has laundered millions of dollars from Mexican drug cartels. Hey, why not! It’s our policy that made them rich in the first place. Not to mention that we’re also arming them.
• Mitt Romney’s staff spent $100,000 in public funds to wipe out all email from his tenure as governor of Massachusetts.
• I did an interview yesterday with Wall Street Journal Radio about police militarization. You can listen here. My interview starts at about the 22 minute mark.
• New threat: drunken gummi bears.
• The Durbin Swipe Fee Amendment: the latest consumer protection measure that isn’t protecting consumers.
• How Rand Paul prevented World War III.

I have a new piece at Huffington Post looking at how and why government and police officials are increasingly willing to use more force, more often.

Or put another way, why we let them get away with it.

We may need a catchier title.

But in light of the recent, positively ridiculous i-dosing and vodka-soaked tampon stories, I thought it might be fun to scrounge up all the lazy, absurd, hysteria-promoting local news stories we can find, then vote ourselves a couple winners for a public shaming. Bonus points for particularly lazy reporting, re-reporting old stories that have already been debunked (see i-Dosing), reporting well-known urban legends as news, and reporting on some new “trend” without actually finding anyone who has engaged in it.

Email me your nominees, or leave links in the comments section. The reports could be from any year, so long as there’s video.

We’ll kick things off with one of my all-time favorites.

There’s no easier way to scare up ratings and circulation than to push a trend that involves teenagers, sex, and technology. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a couple dumb laws passed in response. When a careful study comes out months later showing the whole thing was hooey, most people will have forgotten.

So, about “sexting” . . .

One in 10 children ages 10 to 17 has used a cellphone to send or receive sexually suggestive images, but only 1 in 100 has sent images considered graphic enough to violate child pornography laws, a new study found.

The results of the study, published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, are based on detailed telephone interviews with 1,560 children across the country. It is one of the largest surveys yet to look at the prevalence of sexting among minors, a phenomenon that has drawn concern from schools and law enforcement and that has prompted nationwide legislation trying to curb it.

An earlier, often-cited study had estimated that as many as one in five teenagers engaged in sexting, but it included 18- and 19-year-olds, most likely increasing the overall prevalence.

In recent years, high-profile cases in which teenagers were arrested for forwarding nude pictures of other minors have attracted nationwide attention. Despite sexting’s reputation as a teenage pastime, surveys now suggest that it is actually more common among young adults than children.

“It only takes one or two cases to make people think this is very prevalent behavior,” said Janis Wolak, an author of the new paper and a senior researcher at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. “This has been reported as if it were something that everyone was doing, not just in the teen population, but in the young adult population. It’s really not the case.”

Last year, I vented my wrath at prosecutors who are ringing up minors on child porn charges for “exploiting” themselves.

• If I didn’t know better, I would probably be tempted to sign a NOM pledge, too. It sounds delicious.
• David Friedman on private law. Always find this topic fascinating, but ultimately unconvincing.
• ProPublica looks at presidential pardons.
• Occupy D.C. protesters claim a First Amendment right to build a house in a city park. And then to pee off of it. Or something.
• This is not a bargain.
• Ron Paul vs. Donald Trump. Paul could probably win the primary if he just made his entire campaign about mocking Trump.

Photos for the next week or two are from Dubrovnik, Croatia, probably my favorite stop on my vacation last May. I’ll write more on this charming, liberty-loving town over the weekend.

The New York Times takes up the case of Megan Winfrey, convicted of murder at age 16 due primarily to a scent lineup conducted by the miracle dogs of Fort Bend County, Texas Dep. Keith Pikett.

Pikett has been used in thousands of cases all over the country. The problem? There’s no scientific evidence that his lineups are any better than guesswork. Winfrey was accused of committing the murder along with her father and brother. There was no physical evidence linking any of them to the crime. Her father was convicted, then had his conviction overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which found that “scent-discrimination lineups, when used alone or as primary evidence, are legally insufficient to support a conviction.” Her brother’s attorneys put on a credible attack on scent lineups, and was acquitted after 13 minutes of jury deliberations. The prosecutor, of course, is trying to keep Winfrey in prison.

Pikett is currently facing a class-action suit from several people wrongly identified by his dogs. As late as 2009, prosecutors were attempting to retry exonerated convict Anthony Graves based on Pikett’s dogs. In that case, Pikett claimed his dogs had picked up Graves’ sent on 17-year-old evidence recovered from a burned-down crime scene. Graves, who served time on death row, was released last year.

I explained in a Reason column earlier this year why the dogs aren’t the problem in these cases—their handlers are.

• Never mind the affair, isn’t it sort of odd that a defense attorney would decide to run against an incumbent DA because the DA’s conviction rate is too low?
• The sad and cruel side of Kurt Vonnegut.
• The New York Times on police militarization.
• Dutch copyright management company facing corruption investigation for violating artist’s copyright in . . . wait for it . . . anti-piracy ads.
• Striking images from 2011.
• Woman claims psychiatrist used hypnotherapy to instill false memories of satanic worship, sexual abuse, and cannibalism. It wouldn’t be the first time.
• Another judge reams federal prosecutors for misconduct. The question is when prosecutors will start facing significant professional sanctions for this stuff.

This is great. Explanation/key and more videos here.

• Photos of abandoned water parks.
• Boston bans e-cigarettes in public spaces. 
• Kudos to Pinellas County, Florida, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who is teaching his deputies that there are other ways to deal with aggressive animals than filling them with bullets.
• NeverWet!
• Photos of elderly animals.
• Man receives summons for refusing to tell a law enforcement officer his country of origin. The prosecutor wants jail time.

Great story in the New York Times about LEAP, and the risk active-duty law enforcement officers take if they express support for the organization.

Stationed in Deming, N.M., Mr. Gonzalez was in his green-and-white Border Patrol vehicle just a few feet from the international boundary when he pulled up next to a fellow agent to chat about the frustrations of the job. If marijuana were legalized, Mr. Gonzalez acknowledges saying, the drug-related violence across the border in Mexico would cease. He then brought up an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition that favors ending the war on drugs.

Those remarks, along with others expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico, were passed along to the Border Patrol headquarters in Washington. After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”

After his dismissal, Mr. Gonzalez joined a group even more exclusive than the Border Patrol: law enforcement officials who have lost their jobs for questioning the war on drugs and are fighting back in the courts . . .

Mr. Gonzalez . . .  had not joined LEAP but had expressed sympathy with the group’s cause. “It didn’t make sense to me why marijuana is illegal,” he said. “To see that thousands of people are dying, some of whom I know, makes you want to look for a change.”…

Of course, you can count on the Obama administration to be on the wrong side of this.

The Justice Department, which is defending the Border Patrol, has sought to have the case thrown out. Mr. Gonzalez lost a discrimination complaint filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which sided with his supervisors’ view that they had lost trust that he would uphold the law…

The bridge into Dubrovnik, Croatia.

I missed this when it came out a few weeks ago. The state of Illinois will appeal its case against Michael Allison.

I first wrote about Allison in the January issue of Reason. He’s facing up to 75 years in prison for recording police and other public officials with a digital recorder. In September, a Crawford County judge ruled that the state’s eavesdropping law violates the First Amendment. It’s now up to the Illinois Supreme Court. And, after that, I’d imagine the loser will at least try to get the case before a federal court.*

This is bad for Allison, but good for getting the law overturned once and for all. Allison has told me that is his aim. He has said he won’t take a plea bargain.

*A commenter reminds me that a challenge to the law is already before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.