• Puppycide. 
• And another one, this time a ferocious Jack Russell Terrier.
• Why Ken White matters. Be sure to read White’s excellent dissection of the culture of prosecutorial misconduct in the criminal justice issue of Reason.
• How many things wrong with this picture can you find?
• Police union fights to reinstate cop who was driving 143 mph with a .089 BAC.
• I always thought this was a joke. It apparently really exists. (It’s also available in a can, but only on your birthday.)
• How to make a Thing in a Jar.
• Headline of the day. (Bonus points: Santorum retweeted it.)
• 2012 will bring the end of Happy Hour in Utah.
• Indiana lawmaker wants to hand out fines for poor renditions of the national anthem.

• The state of Florida wants to allow cops to bring drug-sniffing dogs to your door without a warrant.
• Cool map showing the geographical distribution of support for/opposition to SOPA.
• Gary Johnson announces his candidacy for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination.
• Headline of the day.
• This story seems dubious.
• Tyler Cowen’s Ted Talk on why he’s suspicious of stories.
• How Jamie Oliver, Eric Schlosser, and other “industrial food” critics may be making meat less safe to eat.
• Candidate Newt proving lucrative for Newt, Inc.

• Virginia drivers ticketed for breaking a law that doesn’t exist.
• Another tribute to Siobhan Reynolds from Eapen Thampy.
• Professional Courtesy: NYPD officer suspected of drunk driving after car crash wasn’t given a blood alcohol test until eight hours later.
• DOJ changes its position on the Wire Act, possibly clearing a path for legal online poker.
• Annapolis police arrest the wrong “Hot Dog.”
• The New York Times looks at the expanding bourbon market. I’m excited for the new Woodford Reserve Double Oaked.
• People Are Awesome, the 2011 edition.

• Another example of how when police know a suspect is actually armed and dangerous, they find other ways to apprehend them than to send in the SWAT team while the suspect is sleeping.
• America’s is losing its faith in government. If this brings some skepticism about giving government ever-more power (though it likely won’t), it’s a good thing. But it also means government is failing at its most basic and fundamental obligations.
• Mark Hemingway on how the fact-checking trend in journalism has evolved into a way for journalists to simply validate their own opinions.
• The Supreme Court may be on its way to authorizing medical patents. Tim Lee explains why this is something to worry about.
• Alabama: Where it’s illegal to brew your own beer, but it’s perfectly fine to drink while you’re serving on the jury in a death penalty case.
• The latest in the Michael Mermel saga: An Illinois court has reversed the conviction of Juan Rivera, the subject of the New York Times piece that led to prosecutor Mermel’s resignation.

• 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.

• Your morning worry.
• Headline of the day.
• Smart kids do drugs.
• Georgia cop admits to falsifying breath test results in DUI cases.
• New York’s highest court ordered the state’s family courts opened to the public in 1997. They’ve mostly stayed closed, anyway. 
• Yale law professors propose paying students to quit law school.

• Your Penn State reading: An interesting post from Joe Paterno’s biographer. And the New Yorker lays out four important and unanswered questions.
• Economic advice from Gene Simmons.
• Interesting (and troubling) emails from Tennessee state police monitoring the Occupy Nashville protests.
• Blogger Aunt B. gives the vodka-soaked tampon story the Mythbusters treatment.
• Congressman wants to enlist national intelligence agencies to fight marijuana.
• Overcriminalization watch: The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  Also, the Wall Street Journal interviews Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz.
• Some analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s upcoming case on sentencing juveniles to life without parole.
• Ted Allen cooks up some pretentious foodie bullshit.

It’s the scariest thing since iDosing.

Yes, I’m calling bullshit on this story. Beware of any hyped-up local news report that involves teenagers, alcohol, and sex. Throw in the Internet, and this one would have been a sensational local news home run.

Note that the reporter doesn’t talk to a single student, either one who has tried it (which would give the station the opportunity to cover them in shadow and give them that creepy disguised electro-voice), or even one who knows other students who have. The only source for this story is a school cop who claims to have overheard kids talking about it all in the hallway. From this, he concludes that the vodka-soaked tampon trend has infested every school, city, and state in America—it’s “everywhere.” So they put him on TV.

They do at least interview one doctor, but the doctor never says he’s actually seen a student who has done it. He only talks about the possible physiological effects if a student were to try it. A Google News search turns up about a dozen stories . . . and all of them lead back to this one news report out of Arizona.

The “rectal beer funneling” seems particularly silly. High school boys tend to be pretty homophobic. I find it hard to believe there’s an epidemic of them dropping trow at parties, then helping one another pour beer into their rectums. (Logistically, I would think this is more than a one-man job.) Especially when they can just, you know, drink the stuff through their mouths.

According to Snopes, an email circulated about vodka-soaked tampons a couple years ago, and it included a number suspiciously similar details to the news story in the video, including the reasons why students claimed to be doing it.  (To pass breath tests, to drink more without vomiting, etc.) Snopes also finds a couple print reports out of Finland in the late 1990s. Booze-soaked tampons were also featured in a 2008 episode of CSI, and the alcohol-delivery method is apparently also part of a rumor about the Scottish band Mogwai.

• Study suggests low income obesity and fast food are unrelated.
• Ethan Nadelmann on Obama’s medical marijuana crackdown.
• Lessons in capitalism from Occupy Wall Street.
• Washington State breaks up state liquor monopoly. Includes a beautiful quote from public service union rep.
• Alaska hit by a “snowicane.”
• Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper on ending the drug war.

• In defense of jury nullification.
• Income inequality in perspective. More from Will Wilkinson.
• Florida man arrested for recording conversation with cops; newspaper misstates the law in Florida.
• The sweet, sweet demise of Righthaven.
• At least it wasn’t the Virgin Mary.
• Headline of the day.
• The National Motorists Association takes down a hysterical Boston Globe report that judges are going easy on drunk drivers.
• More insanity from NYPD: Woman arrested, jailed for two nights for being in a public park after it had closed, then not having ID.

• Non-existent DOJ study repeatedly cited to justify police benefits.
• Stuff Siri says.
• Pat Buchanan: Black people were more American back when they were second-class citizens.
• Remember the high school principal arrested for DWI despite blowing 0.0 on the breath test? There were no drug or alcohol in his system. Still, the cop swears he smelled alcohol. And the DA says he believes the arrest was made in good faith.
• If only this could actually happen.
• Trucking gets a little freer today. The usual suspects predict mass calamity.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened.

Thousands of people in Florida convicted of DUI may not have been drunk at all. They very well may have been under the allowable blood alcohol limit. The problem may have been law enforcement not calibrating the breathalyzer called the Intoxilyzer 8000.

Now, the 10 News Investigators have uncovered documents and emails that prove the state knew there were problems and didn’t do anything to correct it for more than two and half years . . .

The 10 News Investigators obtained letters where a Sarasota deputy noticed there was a problem recording breath samples and breath flow levels as far back as 2007. He wrote in his notes that he even alerted an inspector who agreed there was a problem.

Those notes prompted an email from the head of the breath testing program, Laura Barfield, telling inspectors not to write down flow sensor problems in their field notes. . .

“As we found, almost half of every Intoxilyzer 8000 used in the state of Florida is not properly calibrated. There are enormous implications. I would tell anybody convicted of DUI using the breath test over the past few years they may want to talk to their lawyer because this information the state wouldn’t tell anybody about,” says Harrison.

While several people, including Bob Marois, who were arrested for DUI using faulty machines have had their convictions thrown out, they ended up losing their licenses for up to a year, having their mug shot forever online, and spending thousands defending themselves.

Not to mention that a DUI can get you fired from your job, ruin your reputation, and have all sorts of other extra-legal implications. It’s really astonishing (in a moral way, not a surprising way) that these idiots could allow people’s lives be seriously disrupted, sometimes ruined—and for more people to continue to be falsely implicated—rather than admit to a fixable mistake.

In a just world, the people who covered all of this up would suffer the same sort of repercussions those falsely convicted of DUI did. That isn’t going to happen.

• Police raid suspected meth lab . . . that turns out to be a guy making his own beer.
• Colorado man makes last-ditch effort to overturn his 145-year sentence for a sex crime his alleged victim says never took place.
• The Milky Way, taken near the North Sea.
• Wisconsin judge says you have no right to drink the milk from your own cow.
• The FTC goes after Four Loko again, this time for packaging the drink in cans that are apparently too large.
• CBS reporter says White House “screamed” at her over Fast & Furious story.
• Speaking of which, the Obama administration apparently thinks it’s fine to sell guns to murderous Mexican drug cartels, but they draw the line at pot-smoking cancer patients.

More stories you couldn’t make up:

The Internet is full of license plate covers that claim to be able to help drivers avoid getting a red light or speed camera ticket.

According to New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas, one of his high-ranking officers, Capt. Michael Glasser, had this type of distortion device on his police cruiser. Serpas took away his car, and the matter is now under review by the NOPD’s Public Integrity Bureau.

“No police officer has the right to violate the rules and the law and police supervisors are especially responsible for insuring that the officers follow the rules,” said Serpas.

According to Louisiana law, license plates “shall be maintained free from foreign materials and in a condition to be clearly legible.”
Glasser’s attorney Frank Desalvo said license plate covers are not illegal.

“I think the state law says if your license plate has to be visible from 50 feet away,” said Desalvo. “I think these things affect the visibility from a certain angle.”

Glasser’s case is particularly thorny because of the unit he commands.

He is the integrity control officer for the Special Operations Division, which also includes highway enforcement, the department that reviews red-light tickets.

“This inquiry is going to get to the bottom of it and it would be terribly troubling to us if a captain who was also responsible for insuring integrity had in fact broken our rules,” said Serpas.

I have no idea if the product Glasser uses it technically illegal under Louisiana law, but it would be interesting to see how many motorists Glasser’s unit has fined for using similar techniques to obscure their license plates from red light cameras. Bonus points: Glasser is president of the New Orleans police union. More bonus points to his lawyer for putting up the “everybody else is doing it” defense.

[Serpasj]  claims there are other police cars out there with illegal tint and improper license plates.

Think about that for a second. Glasser’s attorney is arguing that his client, a high-ranking cop, shouldn’t be disciplined for possibly violating the law because lots of other New Orleans cops also violate similar laws—laws that regular, non badge-wearing residents of New Orleans are expected to follow.

In related news, a Pennsylvania state liquor control officer was arrested over the weekend for DUI.

• Attempted puppycide.
• “Forty Texas Cops Rob a Strip Club.”
• Cops ticket man for directing traffic at a broken stoplight, then leave without replacing him.
• Rick Perry seeks blessing from Joe Arpaio.
• Barack Obama, drug warrior.
• Police board plane, arrest, cuff brown people, release with no charges.
• Man arrested, charged with DUI despite blowing 0.0 on breath test. Note all the boilerplate language in the arrest report about smelling booze, driver being flush and glassy-eyed, etc.

• Mother Jones suggested that Charles Koch compared Barack Obama to Saddam Hussein. It’s pretty likely that he didn’t.
• Interesting photo from space of the India-Pakistin border.
• Federal court rules that a traffic stop does not justify forced entry into a home. You’d kind of hope we wouldn’t need court decisions to tell us that.
• “November Rain,” the comic book.
• I doubt these numbers will come as much of a shock to regular readers of this site. But they’re worth passing on.
• Mother of 22-year-old who drowned after getting drunk on Everclear wants a law to . . . I’m sure you can guess what comes next.
• “The Secret History of Guns”
• Travel guru Rick Steves talks to Reason.tv about legalizing pot. I used Steves’ guides pretty regularly for my vacation in May. Thought I detected a bit of a libertarian streak in them.

• This looks like a case we’ll be hearing more about. From the article, it isn’t clear why a 20-man SWAT team (allegedly) would have been necessary.
• Woman punches bear in the face, saves dog.
• I’ll be giving a “webinar” for the Students for Liberty on Wednesday, September 14th.
• Will Saletan wants to know how anyone could possibly oppose Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I don’t even know where to begin.
• Good piece on Jon Huntsman, who I’m starting to think would be someone worth rooting for should the GOP nominate him to run against Obama. Which of course is a good sign that the GOP will never nominate him.
• Feds tell trucking company they aren’t allowed to fire an alcoholic driver. But they’re still liable if he drives drunk and kills someone.

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

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

Shocking, isn’t it?

But good on the Washington Times for exposing the money grab behind the “public safety” campaign to mandate the devices for first-time DUI offenders.

A bill that would withhold up to 5 percent of each state’s highway funding unless that state requires such as device in the cars of all convicted drunken drivers was introduced in the Senate in February by Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, New Jersey Democrat, and last month in the House by Rep. Eliot L. Engel, New York Democrat.

For the past 18 months, lobbyists for “ignition interlocks,” as they are called, have jockeyed to inject a provision into the crevices of the transportation reauthorization bill, a tentative outline of which was released Friday by Rep. John L. Mica, Florida Republican.

The hospitality industry says a mandate could pave the way for a different type of sensor, other than a Breathalyzer, to be made standard in all cars within five years, in line with a separate House proposal introduced last month that would allocate $60 million over that period to develop the technology. Those devices would be set to detect blood alcohol content near the legal limit, likely through skin contact with the steering wheel.

The Coalition of Ignition Interlock Manufacturers hired lobbyist David Kelly, a former chief of staff and acting administrator at the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration. Mr. Lautenberg’s former chief of staff, Tim Yehl, now lobbies for Ignition Interlock Systems of Iowa . . .

The manufacturers are taking a page from a well-worn playbook: lobbying campaigns in which private companies advocate for government requirements that would make them rich by aligning with activist forces who provide moral pronouncements that are appealing to politicians and – once on the table – the public . . .

“The overwhelming majority of entities that want to regulate in some way are composed of Baptists and bootleggers,” said Peter Van Doren, editor of the quarterly journal Regulation, referring to the two groups that pressed for Prohibition 90 years ago: religious zealots who viewed alcohol as immoral and the gangsters who profited from its illegal status.

Manufacturers are “probably sincere and also making an alliance with Mothers Against Drunk Driving – the mothers would be the Baptists,” he said. “They’re going to them and saying if you mandate this thing, your version of the world will come along, and it just so happens we’ll get rich – but of course they don’t say that part.”

I’m fine with mandating these devices for repeat offenders. But first-time offenders is too much, especially for someone barely above the too-low legal limit. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to worry about the possibility that this campaign will expand to demand the devices in all new cars.

I’d also add here that there may indeed be good public safety arguments for this policy. I just don’t think the anti-alcohol fanatics can be trusted when they try to make them. A few years ago, for example, I wrote about a MADD report that “evaluated” DWI fatality data in all 50 states. Somehow, MADD’s objective analysis determined that every state was in urgent need of an ignition interlock law, regardless of whether the state’s DWI stats were trending up, trending down, or unchanged.

• Good Dahlia Lithwick piece on the role of empathy in Supreme Court decisions.
• Why is this woman facing criminal charges? (MORE: Looks like they’ve decided not to press charges, and the story is more complicated than the prior linked article conveys.)
• Noted without comment.
• Former spy says Bush administration tried to dig up personal dirt on critic Juan Cole.
• “Ghost Ships of the Mothball Fleet”
• Interesting discussion of libertarianism and parental rights.
• It isn’t officially summer until the first petty bureaucrat shuts down a kids’ lemonade stand.
• Jimmy Carter: Call off the global drug war. Hey, this is the man we can thank for good beer.

• Jonathan Adler says it isn’t clear that Gov. Scott Walker is to blame for the language in a Wisconsin law that would require craft brewers to use wholesalers.
• Most offensive political ad ever?
• Senate bill could make it a felony to embed some YouTube videos.
• Samuel L. Jackson narrates the faux children’s book Go the Fuck to Sleep.
• Koalas are kinda’ slutty.
• Most ridiculous Obama criticism this week.
• Surveillance video of Cleveland police beating a man during booking contradicts police reports. The police department also initially said the video didn’t exist. Now it claims its previous denials were due to a “glitch in the system.”

Alex Seitz-Wald:

Tucked into Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) much-discussed budget was a little-noticed provision to overhaul the state’s regulation of the beer industry. In a state long associated with beer, the provision will make it much more difficult for the Wisconsin’s burgeoning craft breweries to operate and expand their business by barring them from selling directly to restaurants and liquor stores, and preventing them from selling their own product onsite.

The new provision treats craft brewers — the 60 of whom make up just 5 percent of the beer market in Wisconsin — like corporate mega-brewers, forcing them to use a wholesale distributor to market their product. Under the provision, it would be illegal, for instance, for a small brewer located near a restaurant to walk next door to deliver a case of beer. They’ll have to hire a middle man to do it instead.

But more noteworthy than the provision itself is how it was enacted. The provision was quietly slipped in the massive budget legislation without any consultation from independent craft brewers, who are justifiably outraged by it.

These wholesaler requirements ought to be eliminated entirely, not expanded. I’ve explained in the past how they’re phony Prohibition-era artifacts that create state-sanctioned artificial middlemen who then get enormously wealthy (I’m looking at you Cindy McCain) by limiting consumer choice and inflating the price of alcohol.

I’d love to hear Walker try to explain how crushing microbreweries is consistent with his alleged free market principles.

• With FourLoko out of the way, State AGs are now shamelessly grandstanding about the next “irresponsible” alcohol product.
• Cops once again mistake tomato plants for marijuana. This business of getting probable cause for a search warrant based on purchases of perfectly legal products (like hydroponic equipment) has been going on for years. But it’s still creepy.
• I’m probably going to write my own review of this James Stewart book about white collar lying, but Scott Greenfield knocks it around pretty good here.
• Write your own caption.
• I have more on that Andrew Cohen blog post about online poker over at Hit & Run.
• Another death after a non-lethal Tasering.
• Here is an awesome video illusion.

• Interesting article on social networking sites and their role in police work.
• Nine-year-old kid gets pepper sprayed by cops.
• SCOTUS further restricts habeas claims in federal court. More here.
• DWI registry? Sure! Why not? I think the best strategy at this point may be to support as many registries as possible. Eventually, we’ll all be on one, thus rendering registries useless.
• I’ve written a bit before on the battle between the Cook County, Illinois DA’s office and the Northwestern University journalism class taught by David Protess, which has uncovered a number of wrongful prosecutions. It now looks as if things have taken an unfortunate turn. I only know what’s in the article, but it doesn’t make Protess look good. Which is too bad, because he has done some great work.

• Headline of the day.
• “Guatemala is a good place to commit a murder, because you will almost certainly get away with it.”
• City of Dover digs up, hauls off basketball hoops on private property that were in violation of a new “clear zone” ordinance.
• USA Today report suggests D.C. school officials cheated on standardized tests.
• Disturbing how common these sorts of images have become. Remember, these are domestic law enforcement agents you’re seeing, not military.
• The Tennessee legislature is again considering a bill that would allow grocery stores to sell wine. (Note to local media: Make sure your headline puns are properly aligned with the beverage being regulated. “Wine legislation on tap” = No! “Legislature serves up wine bills” = better.) Rather hilariously, Tennessee’s liquor stores, which have a monopoly on wine retailing, are again warning that this could unleash a wave of binge drinking and DWI carnage on the roadways.
• So I guess atheists and Muslims are the reason Newt Gingrich cheated on his wives.
• Disturbing list of writers and intellectuals who have recently gone missing in China.