• Headline of the day.
• Purity Bear might be creepier than PedoBear.
• Want to open a moving company in Missouri? You’ll first need to get permission from other moving companies.
• Free the waves! (Man.)
• But they did confiscate your cupcake.
• More runaway federal prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
• Scenes from the social democracy utopia of Scandinavia.

• Indiana legislator wants to ban novelty lighters.
• Lost city emerges in East St. Louis.
• This is kind of badass.
• Paypal orders man to destroy expensive WWII violin.
• Exploiting tragedy to push an agenda: Apparently, when killers going on murder sprees, they stop to be sure they’re abiding with federal gun laws.
• Maia Szalavitz eulogizes Siobhan Reynolds over at Time.
• The guy who thinks “the pursuit of happiness” ruined the Declaration of Independence nearly won the Iowa Caucuses last night.

• 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.

• My Huffington Post colleague Ryan Grim on how Ron Paul has been one of few politicians to talk about the racist origins of the drug war.
• Popehat is asking you to vote for the “Censorious Asshat of the Year.” So many nominees, so devoted to their cause.
• Sen. Chuck Schumer assails new caffeine product before it comes to market.
• L.A. County Sheriff’s Department has jailed hundreds of innocent people due to misidentification.
• “When Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation’s clandestine drone war was confined to a single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over five years had left about 400 people dead . . . The number of strikes has since soared to nearly 240, and the number of those killed, according to conservative estimates, has more than quadrupled.” These are estimates, because the government won’t say how many innocent people its drones have killed.
• Federal worker pay saw lowest increase in 10 years last year, but even with the Obama “freeze,”  it was still more than the increase in the private sector. According to USA Today, one in five federal employees now makes over $100,000 per year. The recession isn’t exactly crippling members of Congress, either.
• Comedienne-turned-conservative-activist Victoria Jackson serves up a hot plate of crazyburgers.
• Headline of the day.
• New York Times attempts to paint conceal carry permit owners as crazy gun nuts with an itchy trigger finger, accidentally publishes data suggesting they’re  far less likely to commit crimes than the general population, but runs with the narrative anyway.

• Not The Onion: Californians will vote on whether porn stars should be required to wear condoms.
• It’s all just going to get dumber and dumber until November.
• Gene Healy: the five worst op-eds of 2011. His delightfully Friedmanesque closer: “And so, my friends, we roll up our sleeves and limp forward, hunkered down to face what 2012 holds, our boats borne back ceaselessly into the past, yet always, always, twirling toward freedom.”
• Alternet publishes article calling for government monitoring of doctors and their pain patients, a crackdown on prescription painkillers, and generally expanding the drug war, all because . . . corporations are evil. And Florida’s governor loves the Tea Party. Or something.
• A list of all the new reasons for which governments will send you to jail, starting on Sunday.
• Woman says she was arrested, had her phone confiscated after trying to record a police beating in North Carolina.

• Headline of the day.
• L.A. has a tough time getting kids to eat their brussels sprouts.
• D.C. tries to avoid a debate over why it plans to screw over small, mostly immigrant cab drivers by backdooring a taxi medallion bill. 
• Speaking out for gay rights in Uganda, at the risk of death.
• Your new favorite Tumblr: Kim Jong-Il drops the bass.
• TSA: cupcake haters.
• For your holiday reading: quirky long-form story about shrunken heads in Chicago.
• Mother of three waiting on a kidney transplant will be evicted from her public housing unit because police found drug paraphernalia in her mother’s purse.

• Your WTF of the day.
• Occupy Wall Street protesters crash the set of a Law & Order taping. City revokes the show’s permit in response.
• New study debunks much-hyped study claiming a “viral” component to obesity. New study will get 1/100th of the coverage the original study received.
• This sounds great. Provide it works as advertised. Disposable razors are such a ripoff.
• The latest nasty bit of censorship masquerading as “campaign finance reform.” Expect newspaper editorials to demand an an amendment to protect their right to editorialize before an election—and then endorse the restrictions for everyone else.
• Puppycide.
• The “freakiest ads of 2011.”
• U.S. citizen gets 2 1/2 years for insulting Thailand’s king on the Internet. The State Department is outraged, and rightly so. But as I’ve pointed out before, it’s no different than our arrest and imprisonment of online gambling executives.

• 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.

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.

• 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 New York Times looks at the e-cigarette debate:

A team led by Riccardo Polosa of the University of Catania recruited 40 hard-core smokers — ones who had turned down a free spot in a smoking-cessation program — and simply gave them a gadget already available in stores for $50. This electronic cigarette, or e-cigarette, contains a small reservoir of liquid nicotine solution that is vaporized to form an aerosol mist.

The user “vapes,” or puffs on the vapor, to get a hit of the addictive nicotine (and the familiar sensation of bringing a cigarette to one’s mouth) without the noxious substances found in cigarette smoke.

After six months, more than half the subjects in Dr. Polosa’s experiment had cut their regular cigarette consumption by at least 50 percent. Nearly a quarter had stopped altogether. Though this was just a small pilot study, the results fit with other encouraging evidence and bolster hopes that these e-cigarettes could be the most effective tool yet for reducing the global death toll from smoking.

Good news. But wait . . .

But there’s a powerful group working against this innovation — and it’s not Big Tobacco. It’s a coalition of government officials and antismoking groups who have been warning about the dangers of e-cigarettes and trying to ban their sale.

The controversy is part of a long-running philosophical debate about public health policy, but with an odd role reversal. In the past, conservatives have leaned toward “abstinence only” policies for dealing with problems like teenage pregnancy and heroin addiction, while liberals have been open to “harm reduction” strategies like encouraging birth control and dispensing methadone.

When it comes to nicotine, though, the abstinence forces tend to be more liberal, including Democratic officials at the state and national level who have been trying to stop the sale of e-cigarettes and ban their use in smoke-free places. They’ve argued that smokers who want an alternative source of nicotine should use only thoroughly tested products like Nicorette gum and prescription patches — and use them only briefly, as a way to get off nicotine altogether.

The article points out that the FDA has warned that there are traces of harmful and possibly toxic substances in e-cigarette vapor, but . . .

…the agency has never presented evidence that the trace amounts actually cause any harm, and it has neglected to mention that similar traces of these chemicals have been found in other F.D.A.-approved products, including nicotine patches and gum. The agency’s methodology and warnings have been lambasted in scientific journals by Dr. Polosa and other researchers, including Brad Rodu, a professor of medicine at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Writing in Harm Reduction Journal this year, Dr. Rodu concludes that the F.D.A.’s results “are highly unlikely to have any possible significance to users” because it detected chemicals at “about one million times lower concentrations than are conceivably related to human health.” His conclusion is shared by Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.

“It boggles my mind why there is a bias against e-cigarettes among antismoking groups,” Dr. Siegel said. He added that it made no sense to fret about hypothetical risks from minuscule levels of several chemicals in e-cigarettes when the alternative is known to be deadly: cigarettes containing thousands of chemicals, including dozens of carcinogens and hundreds of toxins.

The analogy to abstinence-only sex education is spot-on. And it’s more evidence that the public health fanatics on the left can be just as ideology-driven and anti-science as the moral crusaders on the right. Of course if you’ve been following the medical marijuana debate, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the FDA would let politics and fearmongering trump science. And on that issue, left and right are guilty.

• An online museum of banned toys. I think the Atomic Energy Laboratory will get you sent to Gitmo today.
• Catholic Church’s investigator of pedophilia claims found with thousands of child porn images on his computer.
• Press release of the day. As a metaphor at least, it’s not too far off.
• Strange Internet criticism of the day.
• Good on Justin Bieber.
• Another incredible time-lapse video of Earth from the International Space Station.

• 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.

• William Niskanen, RIP.
• Robbing the cradle.
• What could possibly go wrong?
• Winner of this week’s “Get Over Yourself” award.
• Runner-up.
• Bovine-cide.
• “Because this was a gathering of people invited to our farm for dinner, I had no idea that the Health Department would become involved.”
• Best “We the People” petition yet.
• Dog tucks himself in.

• Pretty sure something in HIPAA prohibits this.
• Those speedy neutrinos, explained.
• Australian government may levy fines for insulting politicians.
• The unlikely early funder of Occupy Wall Street.
• Jacob Sullum slaps around food columnist Mark Bittman.

• Bo Diddley’s son arrested for occupying plaza named after Bo Diddley.
• The New York Times delves into the new Beavis and Butthead.
• California bans foie gras.
• Jaw-dropper of the day: Texas DA opposes post-conviction DNA testing because an exoneration “overrides what a jury decided.”
• Stunning collection of old photos from Paris.
• Five myths about healthy eating.

• 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.

• This is a good thing. Not the killing, but that it was captured on camera.
• The New Professionalism, Clayton County, Georgia edition.
• A brief history of branding.
• Michael Bloomberg says government’s highest priority is to stop you from making bad decisions. Like, say, voting for Michael Bloomberg.
• Man convicted by Texas DA and Perry forensics commission appointee John Bradley freed after 25 years in prison.
• How the FDA is killing people.

• 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 study on power and corruption.
• Libertarianism happens to people: foodie edition.
• Why pro-death penalty and anti-government are incompatible.
• Ugandans beaten, forcibly removed from land to make way for carbon credit forests.
• “Professional courtesy” in Houston. Nice to see the meting out of some discipline, though.
• And here’s another example of a police chief showing some courage.
• Interview with a man who did 18 years for a crime he didn’t commit.

• The state of Georgia executed Troy Davis last night. Here’s a rundown of the witnesses who recanted. I honestly didn’t think they’d go through with it. Which only goes to show that however low your expectations of government may be, they probably aren’t low enough.
• California city is demanding couple purchase a permit to host Bible study sessions.
• The cops who beat University of Maryland student John McKenna have been indicted. This would never have happened were it not for social media and cell phone video.
• Telling stats on marijuana arrests.
• The McGurk Effect.
• Cops in the Kelly Thomas case charged with murder, manslaughter.
• RAND study: No connection between medical pot dispensaries, crime.
• Here’s a delightful shredding of Thomas Friedman.
• Government paternalism and overreaction trumped by government in competence.

• The war on e-cigarettes. I’ve written this before, but because e-cigarettes are harmless, and because they can help people quit actual cigarettes, these attempts to prohibit them are an excellent example of paternalistic regulations that actually kill people.
• Connecticut Supreme Court justice apologizes to Suzette Kelo for ruling against her.
• Given the numerous times a story I first reported was re-reported by a bigger news outlet without credit (something that also happens pretty frequently to other bloggers, and especially to alt weeklies), I find it kind of amusing that reporters at larger news outlets are now complaining when it happens to them.
• L.A. Times: Here are two statistics that have nothing to do with one another. But we’re going to juxtapose them anyway.
• David Rittgers: Abolish the Department of Homeland Security.
• Man gets life sentence for shoplifting.
• New Jersey cop attacks woman who was filming him at a DWI checkpoint.

• I think that if I were a death penalty supporter, I’d be fighting like hell to make sure Troy Davis isn’t executed.
• Write your own caption.
• A police department that gets it. Although you should be able to record someone else’s interaction with cops as well, so long as you aren’t physically interfering.
• Study: People with delusions of grandeur tend to become very successful. Other study: But subtler, reality-based optimism may actually hinder success. This totally explains politics.
• A defense of Lochner.
• The cop who killed former NFL player Deacon Turner in that case with the mysterious non-functioning security camera has shot another man.
• Signs that the DA may back down in the Kelly Thomas beating death.
• Feds spend $3.4 billion on anti-terror program for food supply, have little to show for it.
• Rick Perry vs. the lap dance lobby.

• Lawsuit: Man contends he was arrested for contempt for not standing on his leg. Which the arresting officer had just broken.
• Another arrest in Austin for providing free rides home from bars. And from the discussion of that post over at Reddit: “I am personally involved in the lobbying effort to keep these guys off the street and honestly the reason is simply to restrict competition.”
• Nice photo of a runway model.
• Good roundup of great journalism on the death penalty.
• Anonymous releases hacked emails from Texas police department. Disturbingness ensues.
• Dustup of the day: Cato’s Tad DeHaven vs. Lloyd Chapman, head of the American Small Business League.
• How U.S. companies profited from torture flights.

Stuff you should read that I don’t have time to write more about . . . .

• Another ignorant, ill-informed rant against libertarians. Good responses here and here. Lind’s rant is so riddled with errors, it both isn’t really worthy of a thorough response, and would take a book-length response to address them all.
• Bullying prevention as an unfunded mandate.
• Law enforcement and the “Holy Shit!” rule.
• Tim Carney has more on how Warren Buffet has benefited financially from the big government programs he supports. (Note: I don’t doubt that Buffet earnestly supports these programs and is sincere in his political beliefs, anyway. But free market people who get involved in politics and policy certainly don’t get the same benefit of the doubt.)
• Good question for libertarian discussion. At what point do claims like those made by homeopathy become fraud?
• California bill, among other things, would mandate breaks for babysitters.
• Controversial claim!: Americans should be free to sell things without a permit.
• Anti-abortion activist says cops beat him, arrested him, and accused him of terrorism for handing out pamphlets.