• 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.

• Puppycide. During a raid. That turned up nothing. And the dog was chained. Bonus points: The pup was shot in front of a three-year-old.
• A partial list of Kim Jong Il’s titles. Also, “State textbooks claim Jong-Il does not produce urine or feces.”
• More to the point: Remembering Kim Jong Il’s victims.
• Ron Smith, the libertarian radio host at WBAL in Baltimore, has died. Ron was always one of my favorite interviews. Never a demagogue. And he always gave his guests time to make a point, with some nuance and context, even.
• Anne Applebaum on Vaclav Havel.
• Headline of the day, unfortunate wording edition.
• In case Minnesota decides to invade.
• More on the NTSB and cell phone bans, from Walter Olson, and from the National Motorists Association.

• Rick Perry “retires” in order to engage in some pension/salary double dipping.
• Dog disguise kits to get around breed-specific prohibitions.
• Police meet man at airport baggage claim, then arrest, book him over expired vehicle tags.
• DOJ report finds that Seattle cops violate the Constitution one out of every five times they use force.
• Grandmother of convicted drug dealer fights to keep her home from the asset forfeiture brigade.
• If you’re a secretly gay mayor who preaches conservative politics, you probably shouldn’t fund trips to the adult bookstore with taxpayer money.
• Feds spend tens of millions of dollars to put Barry Bonds on probation for lying to a roomful of professional liars.

• In his affidavit for warrant to search D.C. head shops, a cop cites copies of Flex Your Rights videos as evidence of criminal activity. Seems like a good time to remind everyone about the Flex Your Rights videos. They’d make a great holiday gift!
• Dog shoots man.
• German city drops charges against the pope for refusing to wear his seat belt while traveling in the popemobile.
• Florida out-stupids Arizona and Alabama in concocting new anti-immigrant laws.
• Return of the singing telegram.
• Jon Stewart often compares Congress to poo-flinging monkeys. He might need to come up with a new analogy. 
• Psst, Attorney General King. They’re making you look like a fool.
• Congress was unaware of $7.7 trillion the Fed handed out to banks before the TARP vote.

• 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.

• Ice finger of death!
• Man falls off bicycle. Cop kills him.
• Red light camera vendor sues Knoxville, Tennessee for not issuing tickets when people turn right at a red light.
• The Pentagon’s $3 billion mercenary war on drugs.
• AFL-CIO, Teamsters, other unions firmly backing SOPA.
• All your fish are belong to government.
• A good reminder as the country goes into panic—and politicians go into “there oughtta be a law” mode—in response to Penn State: False allegations of sex abuse can also ruin lives.

• The product of a decade of democracy-fighting in Afghan.
• Speaking of spreading democracy around the world: “Why is the Pentagon spending tens of millions of U.S. tax dollars to whitewash the image of Central Asian dictatorships?”
• Hello.
• ACLU: Local governments are using license plate scanners to monitor citizens’ movement.
• Ditto.
• How we process evidence.
• Cato’s Ben Friedman: Cutting Pentagon budget will limit U.S. military capability . . . and that’s a good thing.
• When academic papers get honest.

• 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.

• Good question.
• Chicago journalism professor records an arrest in progress. Police threaten him, seize his camera, and delete the video. If he was using sound, it’s still illegal to record anyone in Illinois without their permission, in which case the police destroyed evidence of a crime. If he wasn’t using sound, they illegally confiscated his camera and destroyed his property.
• Cabin porn. (Link is SFW.)
• An interview with the great John Prine.
• Government announces plan to make citizens safer by devoting more resources to harassing and threatening them.
• Mitt Romney demonstrates one of the most important qualifications to be president.
• Finally, something heartwarming. The first paragraph is really all you need.

• More feuding over “professional courtesy” between Miami police and Florida state troopers.
• Massachusetts to keep health care costs down with  . . . price controls.
• Coca-Cola gets a ban on plastic bottles at national parks overturned. And somehow . . . the Koch brothers and libertarianism are to blame.
• I’m not sure I understand the point of handing out annual awards for classic rock.
• A nation asks: Who, if not government, will count our goats?
• I don’t see how this could possibly go wrong.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo correctly diagnoses the problem with bans on texting, cell phone use, and other forms of distracted driving . . .

During the last five years, 34 states have passed laws that ban texting while driving. The laws in each of those states differ widely—some make it illegal to “send” texts, while others prohibit “electronic communication” as well as “reading” texts. Each of these versions would make Siri-based texting verboten, because even if you dictate a message, you’re still, technically, sending some kind of electronic communication (and if you glance at the screen to make sure Siri correctly transcribed your message, you’re reading it).

• 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.

• Peter Schiff dialogues with Occupy Wall Street. I’d like to see more of this.
• An opera about collard greens.
• Headline of the day.
• This Harris County, Texas grand jury is going rogue. And that’s pretty great. Love this line: “If [DA] Lykos appears, she could be cross-examined by one of her own prosecutors.”
• Wonder if this will cause the Occupy folks to question their support for public service unions.
• Thought: The Tea Party groups, largely portrayed as anti-government, largely sought permits, paid fees, and followed protest regulations. The Occupy movement, largely portrayed as pro-government, has largely thumbed its nose at protest rules and regulations. Not passing judgment on either strategy. Just interesting.

• Classic songs that were intended as jokes.
• You can’t tell by the pixels.
• Very little about the police version of this story makes sense.
• This is almost certainly illegal under Indianapolis v. Edmond.
• Two Illinois teachers union lobbyists teach for one day, get fat pensions for the rest of their lives. Bonus: One of them helped write the law that made them eligible.
• Attempted puppycide . . . by defenestration.
• Kanye’d by the Bell.

So it’s worse than initially reported.

The D.C. police department has released preliminary statistics on the controversial practice of arresting drivers whose vehicles are unregistered or have expired registration. The numbers indicate that the practice is more widespread than previously thought, with several arrests per day on average.

In the one-year period starting Oct. 1, 2009, records indicate that 2,163 persons were arrested in the District for expired tags. In the subsequent year, ending in September, arrests declined dramatically, to 1,334.

Funny thing about numbers. The article notes that of those 3,500 people arrested, only about 250 were actually put in a jail cell. The disparity between the two numbers first evoked in me an, “Oh, well that’s not so bad” reaction. So just consider that latter number on its own: Over two years, 250 people were jailed in D.C. for having expired license plates. Absurd.

• 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.

This is really one of the scarier recent assaults on the Fourth Amendment.

California Gov. Jerry Brown is vetoing legislation requiring police to obtain a court warrant to search the mobile phones of suspects at the time of any arrest.

The Sunday veto means that when police arrest anybody in the Golden State, they may search that person’s mobile phone — which in the digital age likely means the contents of persons’ e-mail, call records, text messages, photos, banking activity, cloud-storage services, and even where the phone has traveled.

Police across the country are given wide latitude to search persons incident to an arrest based on the premise of officer safety. Now the nation’s states are beginning to grapple with the warrantless searches of mobile phones done at the time of an arrest.

Brown’s veto message abdicated responsibility for protecting the rights of Californians and ignored calls from civil liberties groups and this publication to sign the bill — saying only that the issue is too complicated for him to make a decision about. He cites a recent California Supreme Court decision upholding the warrantless searches of people incident to an arrest. In his brief message, he also doesn’t say whether it’s a good idea or not.

Instead, he says the state Supreme Court’s decision is good enough, a decision the U.S. Supreme Court let stand last week.

Last time I posted on this, commenter “Puzzling” made a very good point.

Cell phones are also not simple “containers” to the extent that modern phones show both local data and vastly more data information stored in cloud services, often all integrated together seamlessly to the user. These law enforcement searches are actually retrieving information stored in “containers” elsewhere.

So a traffic infraction can now lead to a search of your email (much of which may be stored on off-site servers, but still downloadable from your cell phone), GPS history, cell phone photos and video, web browsing history, history of phone calls placed and received, text message history, and anything else you do with your cell phone. Troubling, to say the least.

• Scalia is apparently concerned that capital defense attorneys who screw up their clients’ cases don’t face any professional sanction. Maybe he’s right. But it would also be nice to see some concern over the lack of discipline for misbehaving prosecutors, too.
• “When the officers showed up at the city jail to book Hill a short time later and turn in their evidence, the five pounds of marijuana they bragged about an hour earlier somehow had become a pound and a half.”
• Obama administration cracks down on medical marijuana marijuana dispensaries. Again. At this point, his campaign promises on this issue amount to damnable lies.
• Another isolated incident. What the hell is going on Fullerton?
• California appeals court upholds warrantless cell phone searches during a traffic stop.

I’m speaking at Tulane law school at noon today.  The talk is free and open to the public. So come on out.

• Fred Shuttlesworth, RIP. You probably haven’t heard of him. I hadn’t. Go read about him.
• Steve Jobs, RIP. Not sure what to write that others haven’t already written. The man made our lives immeasurably better. And that’s true even if you’ve never owned an Apple product.
• Who was the rhetorical Hitler before Hitler?
• Federal judge lets CIA off the hook for destroying interrogations videos . . . because they’ve promised it won’t happen again.
• This is a thing of beauty.
• D.C. is throwing drivers in jail for expired tags.
• The saddest thing you’ll read today.

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.

• 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.

Interesting post from the National Motorists Association about a highway in Massachusetts where state officials are keeping the speed limit artificially low, despite plenty of evidence that doing so makes the road more dangerous.

• 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.