Category: General Drug War

Morning Links

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
  • Google knows all.
  • New Jersey legislature passes medical marijuana bill.
  • Grandma, 78, spends two weeks in jail for driving with a suspended license because authorities forgot about her.
  • Chris Beam has the best take I’ve seen on the Harry Reid imbroglio.
  • This new Tumblr makes me happy.
  • More problems for D.C. Metro: Metro’s new strategy [is] to plug its operating budget’s holes by skimping on preventive maintenance, even as it adds new bureaucrats to its staff.
  • Nobody does the nauseating fluffy celebrity profile like Esquire.
  • That Other War

    Monday, January 11th, 2010

    My crime column this week looks at the deaths of Tarika Wilson, Jonathan Ayers, and Gonzalo Guizan.

    All three are drug war collateral damage.

    Sunday Links

    Sunday, January 10th, 2010
  • Federal grand jury now investigating Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
  • ICE officials cover up inmate deaths at immigrant detention centers.
  • A machine 1,500 years ahead of its time.
  • DOJ study finds 12 percent of juvenile inmates have been sexually assaulted by prison staff or other inmates.
  • Virginia considering awful law that would require parents paying child support to fund their kids’ college education, too.
  • The family of Tarika Wilson has won a $2.5 million settlement from municipal insurer for Lima, Ohio. Wilson, you may remember, was killed in a drug raid after a raiding cop mistook his colleague’s gunfire (the colleague was killing the dogs in the house) for hostile fire and opened up on Wilson, who was unarmed, on her knees, and holding her infant son. The child lost his hand. The officer was acquitted of manslaughter. As part of the settlement, the city admits no wrongdoing with respect to the raid.
  • Has Marc Thiessen Been Living Another Country for the Last 30 Years?

    Saturday, January 9th, 2010

    Someone should send him a copy of Overkill.

    Reminds me of the time Michael Ledeen attempted to illustrate how evil the ruling government in Iran is because, holy crap!, their narco cops wear masks when they conduct drug raids. Imagine!

    Morning Links

    Thursday, January 7th, 2010
  • D.C. Metro train nearly takes out a group of safety inspectors.
  • VH1 bus crashes, spills dangerous slut.
  • Good Dahlia Lithwick piece showing the absurdity of Obama’s decision not to release innocent Gitmo detainees because . . . they’re from Yemen.
  • Minnesota to begin database tracking patient use of “often abused prescription drugs.” Translation: If you’re a chronic pain patient in Minnesota, your life is about to get more hellish.
  • Trials of “vaccine” to prevent cocaine high didn’t turn out so well.
  • http://runningfromcamera.blogspot.com/
  • Ryan Frederick Denied

    Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

    Ryan Frederick’s appeal has been denied.

    That’s sad for Frederick. It also seems likely now that we’ll never get that investigation into whether Chesapeake police were sending drug informants to break into private homes to get probable cause for search warrants.

    Morning Links

    Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
  • Jackson, Mississippi dropped a giant catfish this New Year’s Eve. Clever variation on the apple, but they should have had it flop around on the ground until the fifth or sixth of January.
  • “Nah, it’s just ice cream.”
  • Tennessee judge selects random people in his courtroom, orders them to undergo drug testing. Tennessee State Supreme Court “censures” him, but lets him remain on the bench, where he’ll presumably continue to rule on Fourth Amendment matters.
  • Laws against texting while driving largely symbolic, not enforceable. I told you so.
  • This is a great post on urban economies and urban planning.
  • Morning Links

    Monday, January 4th, 2010
  • Cops nab suspected drug dealer by tracking him through World of Warcraft.
  • The Haley Barbour juggernaut rolls on! God help the GOP if this is the best they can do.
  • Anne Applebaum predicts trouble for totalitarianism in the next decade. Save for China.
  • Britt Hume says Tiger will be okay as long as he finds Jesus. Because Christians have never been known to cheat on their spouses.
  • Arizona immigrant rights group using text messaging to warn about impending (and illegal) brown people sweeps by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
  • Good example from the recent TSA leak imbroglio of why you should never cooperate with the police.
  • Morning Links

    Monday, December 28th, 2009
  • David Boaz points to two surprisingly strong editorials in the Washington Post with libertarian themes, one on problems with the criminal justice system, and one on the Obama administration’s troublingly expansive view of human rights (and its rather casual treatment of actual human rights).
  • Bruce Schneier: “Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.”
  • The top ten Top 10 lists of 2009.
  • This is a positive development.
  • Gay rights, leftist groups in D.C. fight other gay rights, leftist groups in D.C. over right of anti-gay rights groups to take out ads on the city’s Metro trains. Good on the pro-speech folks.
  • Zero tolerance strikes again.
  • Federal judge won’t toss the obscenity charges against John Stagliano. I think his attorney is right. This is a good chance to bring Miller v. California into the Internet age. “Community standards” means something quite a bit different now than it did then.
  • This smug op-ed by the guy wrongly arrested in the Snowball Fight Heard ‘Round the World is almost enough to make me support the gun-waving cop.
  • I can’t believe people still make these kinds of arguments. What a vapid waste of electrons.
  • Saturday Links

    Saturday, December 26th, 2009
  • I’m guessing this movie will include lots of fighting and stuff blowing up. Although given the cast, it would be pretty great if it turned out to be a sappy love story.
  • Wonderful little pop mash made entirely of audio from the movie Up. A beautiful movie by the way. See it if you haven’t yet.
  • Every Christmas Eve at 3pm, half of Sweden sits down to watch Donald Duck cartoons.
  • This apparently happened in my hometown on Thursday. Coincidentally, the poster quotes from one of my old Fox columns.
  • Top Mexican drug official on prohibition: “This war is not winnable.”
  • “In brief, Brennan wanted to understand why some ducks have such extravagant penises.” The article only gets better from there. Includes tales of exploding artificial duck vaginas.
  • (NOTE: Link fixed.)

  • Incredible photo of asteroid impact.
  • Gizmodo’s worst gadgets of the decade. Includes: a sex doll for dogs (!), a Taser gun/MP3 player combo (in a just world, it would electrocute any user that tried to play Nickelback), and a $200 device whose sole purpose is . . .  tweeting.
  • Morning Links

    Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
  • Thank goodness the Washington Post didn’t perpetuate irresponsible Internet rumors on that snowball fight story. Instead, they went straight to MPDC for the official version of events, unskeptically published the resulting lies from the department’s spokesman, after which WaPo columnist Marc Fisherput up a smug blog post gloating about how responsibly the paper treated the story, as opposed to those hysterical blogs and Internet sites. Never mind that the blogs and videos had proof the WaPo got the damned story wrong. Facts aren’t as important as who followed journalistic protocol.
  • Interesting piece by Adam Liptak on the politicization of Supreme Court clerks.
  • Saddest Christmas story you’ll hear about today.
  • Speaking of the snowball fight heard ’round the world, Julian Sanchez has good thoughts on class, video, and police accountability.
  • Cow art. Some of these are quite moo-tiful.
  • The latest from Maricopa County.
  • Minnesota Supreme Court nixes innocent owner defense in forfeiture cases, says spouse has no claim if other spouse loses car after DWI stop.
  • Morning Links

    Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
  • Seattle Mayor-Elect Mike McGinn says he supports legalizing marijuana.
  • Obama administration looks at steep fines for long tarmac delays. I’ve written before that I support some sort of regulation in this area, particularly in cases where airlines unreasonably keep passengers hostage for hours on end. I don’t know that fines would work as well as a more uniform policy that if you’re stuck on a grounded plane for more than, say two hours, the airlines have to give you the option of de-planing. Unfortunately, part of the problem lies with how the airlines are regulated, and that part of course isn’t likely to get as much scrutiny.
  • Magnum photos of dogs in snow. I like mine better.
  • Chase Bank sets up a contest to fund non-profit groups, then changes the rules at the last minute to avoid funding two drug reform organization and a pro-life organization. It’s Chase’s money, of course. They can do what they want with it. But they got free advertising from these groups who promoted the contest. And I’m also free to call Chase a bunch of cowards for not backing their promotion because some of the winners were too controversial.
  • Oregon man freed after triple homicide conviction thanks to junk science and the state destroying the evidence in his case. As Gideon writes, it’s far from clear the guy is innocent. Which makes the state’s actions troubling for a whole other set of reasons. What’s unfathomable is that the FBI has admitted it’s comparative bullet lead tracing methods aren’t reliable, but refuses to release the list of cases where the methods helped put people in prison.
  • Morning Links

    Monday, December 21st, 2009
  • Congratulations, Democrats. You’ve proven you can pass a major piece of legislation by buying off votes with last minute pork projects and special favors, then shoving it through the Senate in the middle of the night just as well as the Republicans. You’re an all-growed-up corrupt ruling party, now. (CORRECTION: As noted in the comments, the bill didn’t pass, the Dems were just able to force cloture.)
  • Awkward moments in webvertising.
  • The D.C. cop who drew his gun at a snowball fight this weekend is now international news. This will make it somewhat more difficult for MPDC to continue lying about the story.
  • If Mullholland Drive was the sixth best movie of the decade, I just lived through a different decade.
  • Prosecutors are still whining about the Supreme Court’s Melendez-Diaz decision from last term, arguing in a brief for a similar case next term that the decision “is already proving unworkable.” Oh. Well in that case, sure. Let’s go ahead and scrap the constitutional right to confront one’s accusers because, you know, it’s really, really inconvenient to the government to respect it. I always forget about that footnote to the Bill of Rights that says, “*Unless respecting these rights makes the jobs of government employees more difficult.”
  • A grand jury has ruled that the police shooting and killing of Georgia pastor Jonathan Ayers was justified. I’ll have more on this terrible story in coming weeks.
  • Morning Links

    Friday, December 18th, 2009
  • The Washington Times editorial board and NRO contributor Hans A. von Spakovsky decry the “persecution” of Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. No, really.
  • Copenhagen climate summit leaves largest carbon footprint of any summit to date, producing in 11 days the “same amount [of carbon] produced each year by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians.”
  • A pictorial history of U.S. currency.
  • In his continuing guest sting over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Harvey Silverglate damns the press for its complacency and lack of skepticism in federal criminal cases.
  • Jack Shafer’s “stupid drug story of the week” comes courtesy of the Washington Post.
  • Illinois’ Department of Agriculture takes aim at unlicensed charcuterie. (WARNING: Story contains disturbing details about senseless waste of 80 pounds of premium bacon. May be uncomfortable for some bacon-loving readers.)
  • Today’s Civics Lesson from The Wire

    Thursday, December 17th, 2009

    Been re-watching the entire series the last few weeks. Just caught the episode with Bunny Colvin’s brilliant paper bag speech below. This is my third time watching the entire series. If I were running a university, I’d institute a class that did nothing but watch, study, and discuss the show. And passing it would be required to get a degree.

    Well, at least the first four seasons.

    Morning Links

    Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
  • Former legislator convicted of rape makes preposterous copyright claim on his own name, threatens news organizations who publish it without his permission, causes the entire story to go national, ensuring hundreds more articles mentioning his name and the rape conviction.
  • Seems plausible.
  • Second-grader suspended, given psychological counseling over drawing of Christ’s crucifixion.(UPDATE: Per the comments, it’s looking more and more like this story is bogus.)
  • A call for Obama to allow for a more honest, science-based study of marijuana’s possible medicinal benefits.
  • Spanish jazz fan calls cops during concert because musicians weren’t jazzy enough.
  • Cop tases girlfriend three times, twice in the face; will get probation.
  • Saturday Morning Links

    Saturday, December 12th, 2009
  • Seattle/Tacoma airport wants to seize a nearby mom n’ pop parking garage to replace it with . . . a parking garage run by the airport. Government officials have generously offered $2 million less than what the family paid for the land two years ago.
  • Lots of you have sent me this one: Canadian sci/fi writer Peter Watts says he was detained and beaten by U.S. border officials in Michigan.
  • Amish man arrested for horse & buggy DUI.
  • Poignant Joseph Galloway column on the war in Afghanistan.
  • Top Google search on December 2, the day Tiger Woods released his first statement about his scandal: “transgressions.” #4 Google search: “transgression definition.”
  • Good post from Scott Greenfield on a really sad case.
  • Another wrong door drug raid in New York City.
  • Federal Judge Says NYPD Plagued by “Widespread Falsification by Arresting Officers”

    Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

    In refusing to dismiss a lawsuit against New York City brought by two brothers arrested on trumped-up drug charges, Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein had some harsh words for the city’s police department. From the NY Daily News:

    “Informal inquiry by [myself] and among the judges of this court, as well as knowledge of cases in other federal and state courts … has revealed anecdotal evidence of repeated, widespread falsification by arresting officers of the New York City Police Department,” Weinstein wrote.

    He said that while the vast majority of cops don’t engage in crooked practices, it was common enough to be an institutional problem.

    The judge said that despite better training for recruits and tough disciplinary action for bad cops, “there is some evidence of an attitude among officers that is sufficiently widespread to constitute a custom or policy by the city approving illegal conduct.”

    Maximo and Jose Colon were arrested and jailed last January for participating in a drug deal with undercover officers at a Brooklyn bar. They were released—and the officers who arrested them were later indicted—when surveillance video showed the arresting officers fabricated the entire drug deal. From an A.P. story on the case last June:

    Jose quickly got the tape to defense attorney Rochelle Berliner, a former narcotics prosecutor. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

    “I almost threw up,” she said. “Because I must’ve prosecuted 1,500, 2,000 drug cases … and all felonies. And I think back, Oh my God, I believed everything everyone told me. Maybe a handful of times did something not sound right to me. I don’t mean to sound overly dramatic but I was like, sick.”

    What the tape doesn’t show is striking: At no point did the brothers interact with the undercover officers, nor did the brothers appear to be involved in a drug deal with anyone else. Adding insult to injury, an outside camera taped the undercover officers literally dancing down the street.

    If it weren’t the tape, the Colons would probably still be in prison.

    The Colons’ lawsuit argues the incident is one of many, brought about in part by arrest quotas imposed on officers by the NYPD.

    And No One Was Ever Murdered Over a Michelob Deal Gone Bad

    Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

    The Washington Post reports that support for legalizing marijuana is gaining momentum. The article includes this fun quote from Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project:

    “…there is a reason you don’t have Mexican beer cartels planting fields of hops in the California forests.”

    Thanks to Bob Ewing for the tip.

    Morning Links

    Monday, November 23rd, 2009
  • New York court rules on defamatory merits of the word douche.
  • Meanwhile, St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer Ken Greenbaum makes a bid for putting his picture next to the definition of the word.
  • Good article on asset forfeiture cases in Alabama. Nice to see the issue getting covering coverage in smaller newspapers.
  • High-energy, low-intelligence dog? Wear her out with this trick.
  • Fascinating article in The Atlantic looking at the “prosperity gospel” and the housing bubble.