The DOJ has issued a clear and unequivocal statement that makes clear the fact that citizens videotaping or photographing police are protected by the First Amendment under all but the most extenuating circumstances, and that steps taken by police to bully or harass those photographers are completely unconstitutional.

Nice job.

More at TechDirt and Ars.

Oil surveyors have found a previously lost WWII British fighter plane in the Sahara, untouched and presumably unseen by human eyes in 70 years.

This is widely linked, but still worth reviewing: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.

It’s a common story: successful small company is swallowed and destroyed by a larger, more established firm in a futile effort to extract the value. Stories like this are almost certainly a big reason why Mark Zuckerberg has maintained complete control over Facebook, and will continue to control a simple majority of the voting shares even after the IPO.

Flickr is dying. This kills me, because I’ve got years of photos and annotations there that, I suspect, will eventually need to be migrated elsewhere. That sucks. It sucks even more because it didn’t have to be this way; this is only the endgame because Yahoo has been traditionally run by chuckleheads.

Something really, really, really has to be done about forfeiture laws that allow cops to “impound” cash without charging or convicting the money’s owner with a crime. George Renby was pulled over for simple speeding in Tennessee. The cop asked if he had a large amount of cash on him, and Renby — confident that it was his right as an American to do so — said yes.

He didn’t see his $20,000 again for four months.

Again, I feel strongly that a key piece of the solution is a drastic rollback of the immunity cops now enjoy. This cop needs to fat lawsuit, as does the jurisdiction.

The Log Cabin Republicans have issued the following statement regarding President Obama’s comments on gay marriage:

That the president has chosen today, when LGBT Americans are mourning the passage of Amendment One, to finally speak up for marriage equality is offensive and callous,” said R. Clarke Cooper, Log Cabin Republicans Executive Director. “Log Cabin Republicans appreciate that President Obama has finally come in line with leaders like Vice President Dick Cheney on this issue, but LGBT Americans are right to be angry that this calculated announcement comes too late to be of any use to the people of North Carolina, or any of the other states that have addressed this issue on his watch. This administration has manipulated LGBT families for political gain as much as anybody, and after his campaign’s ridiculous contortions to deny support for marriage equality this week he does not deserve praise for an announcement that comes a day late and a dollar short.

Right.

An enormous sinkhole has swallowed a Florida home’s backyard and is threatening the house itself.

I somehow missed his epic takedown of PETA on the Daily Show back in February. Language occasionally NSFW.

The NYTimes is finally covering the fact that the FBI’s terror busts are mostly bullshit, since they’re generally disrupting plots they made up themselves as a means to entrap people with no actual terrorist ties.

The United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years – or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.

But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.

These are publicity stunts for the FBI, and do not make us safer.

DEA agents lock San Diego man in a cell for 5 days without food or water.

The entirely-too-long secondary reign of the Empire State Building as the tallest skyscraper in New York will end today as the steel skeleton for One World Trade Center exceeds 1,250 feet.

Every time you do something like this I damn near fall on my knees to give thanks for the Sunshine State, because between you and Arizona people might actually forget what a misbegotten place Mississippi is.

Chuck Colson, a Watergate felon who spent his later years spreading all manner of hate under the banner of “Christianity,” is dead.

More on Colson’s legacy of hate and intolerance at MeFi and at two posts at Slacktivist.

Fred sums it up:

What’s remarkable about Colson’s legacy is not just how angry he managed to make the enemies that he bore false witness about and harmed for so long. Their anger is understandable and wholly appropriate. What’s really remarkable about Colson’s career is how very many such enemies he chose to make and how much damage he was able to do.

and further:

As “one of the leading spokespersons of evangelical Christianity in America today,” Colson helped to identify Christianity with a vicious, mean-spirited, and thoroughly dishonest culture war against women and LGBT people. He worked, passionately, to make that the core and the bedrock of American Christianity.

I don’t think that counts as living without scandal. I think that counts as being at the center of one of the worst scandals of this generation of the church.

It turns out that a whole lot of forensics is more or less bullshit, and that the Justice Department has known this for a long time and not told anyone but prosecutors, even when flawed evidence had put people in prison.

As Radley notes, this is dangerously close to “pitchforks in the streets” stuff:

I mean, think about that. Taxpayer-paid employees of the Justice Department had direct and exclusive knowledge that there may be hundreds of innocent people in prison, they knew that flawed forensics in these cases needed to be reviewed, and their justification for not doing more as these people continued to rot in prison was, Hey, we did the bare minimum required of us by law.

…it appears that Newark’s Cory Booker may be a superhero:

Newark Mayor Cory Booker was taken to a hospital Thursday night for treatment of smoke inhalation he suffered trying to rescue his next-door neighbors from their burning house.

The Magnolia State will really have to step up its game if they want to stay ahead of Arizona, which has a bill pending that declares pregnancy to begin two weeks prior to conception.

It’s really ridiculous how often I have to say so, but: No, I am not making this up.

This is what justice looks like in Bellaire, Texas. Radley’s on fire for this, as he should be:

Cop runs license check on a suspicious vehicle. Although they apparently committed no traffic violation, cop insists that his decision to run a check had nothing to do with the fact that the occupants were black, and happened to be driving in an affluent, predominately white neighborhood. The cop’s partner apparently then enters the wrong license number, which returns a car that had been reported stolen. So cop follows car into driveway, which happens to be the home of the driver’s parents, where he lives. Cop approaches driver and occupant with his gun drawn. Driver’s parents come out to see what’s causing the commotion. Cop roughs up driver’s mother. Driver gets up from ground to tell cop to lay off of his mother. Cop shoots driver, a full 32 seconds after pulling into the driveway.

The driver, who was unarmed, will now carry a bullet in his liver for the rest of his life. The cop was charged with first degree aggravated assault. A jury acquitted him. Now this week, U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon dismissed the driver’s lawsuit against both the cop that fired his gun and the cop who entered the wrong license plate number, citing qualified immunity. According to Harmon, the officer acted “reasonably,” and moreover, wrongly accusing an unarmed man of stealing a car, pointing a gun at him, then shooting him in the liver, “did not violate [his] constitutional rights.”

Both cops are back on the force. The guy with the bullet in his liver? Tough luck. He’ll be paying his own medical bills.

Local coverage here. I hope the family appeals. I hope the get the cops’ houses. These jackasses are still on the force, still carrying guns, and are behaving as if they did nothing wrong. That’s fucking lunacy.

There exist commercial enterprises whose sole purpose is to discover and sell software vulnerabilities to governments and corporations precisely so they may be exploited before they are remedied.

You may have heard the tale of a man dressed as Batman pulled over on route 29 outside DC last week.

It turns out there is substantially more to the story.

(Widely linked, good thread at MeFi.)

Courtesy of Mother Jones.

Seriously, check this out.

It should surprise precisely no one that Slacktivist has an excellent post on Martin’s murder.

Trayvon Martin’s murder by a gun-toting neighborhood watch doofus with delusions of grandeur (reports note his “criminal justice degree,” which says “cop wannabe” to me) has gotten the attention of the Justice Department because, apparently, Florida’s stand your ground law means local prosecution is unlikely (though apparently a grand jury will look at it).

We at Heathen are all about citizens being allowed to protect themselves, even including lethal force, but laws that protect people defending themselves should not be so broad as to encourage would-be vigilantes like Zimmerman (who, it should be noted did pretty much everything wrong in his zeal to catch that suspicious youth armed with Skittles and soda).

More at NPR and, via them, The Orlando Sentinel‘s “Breaking New” page, onto which updates about this (and other) stories are frequently posted.

Groups like the MPAA and the RIAA are so openly, brazenly mendacious that they make Republicans look like Girl Scouts. Seriously.

To put this in perspective, have a look at this video, which explains the brand-new field of “copyright math” — wherein the absurd figures for economic loss due to piracy are compared to actual facts.

It’s short. Watch it.

These things are fucking ridiculous — people call them “tree lobsters,” for Christ’s sake — but the good news is that they only live on one tiny island off the coast of Australia.

Or, rather, that USED to be the case. Some do-gooder environmentalists have bred the damn things with the intention of releasing them into a wider habitat, clearly without checking with the human residents of wherever that might be.

An Iowa man has been arrested for “criminal mischief with cheese.”

I just want to point out how awesome the supporting photograph is.

Via MeFi, “I’d Like To File A Complaint.” Police departments routinely use intimidation and threatening tactics to avoid providing legally required information, such as how to file a complaint.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again, because it remains true: the only way to reign in this kind of jackassery is additional civilian oversight — with actual teeth — and the real possibility of criminal and civil liability for individual police officers found to be using their powers in inappropriate ways. The fact that they’re almost completely insulated from any repercussions creates an untenable situation where abuse is the rule.

(What amazes me is that the video linked is from American Family Radio. I guess a stopped clock really is right once and a while.)

If you’re as morbidly fascinated by corporate collapses as we are, you may enjoy this long article on the rise and fall of Research in Motion.

Dateline: Alabama: Nude driver hits 7 cars before stopping for police.

The Feds, in cases like JotForm’s and others where the use “destroy site first, justify (or not) later” tactics with no judicial oversight, appear almost eager to drive online businesses away from the US.

Trying to fix it later doesn’t solve the problem if you’ve bollocksed up an entire business after the fact. Frankly, the only thing I can think of that would curtail such LEO antics is personal liability at some level. Cops don’t care if departments get sued, because it rarely hurts them personally.

This is short. Just go read it.

There’s a move afoot to make Sudafed prescription again, in an effort to keep would-be Walter Whites out of business. This sucks for lots of reasons, but at least this writer is thinking clearly about the implications costwise:

What really bothers me is the way that Humphreys [the author of a post to which she is responding] — and others who show up in the comments–regard the rather extraordinary cost of making PSE prescription-only as too trivial to mention.

Let’s return to those 15 million cold sufferers. Assume that on average, they want one box a year. That’s going to require a visit to the doctor. At an average copay of $20, their costs alone would be $300 million a year, but of course, the health care system is also paying a substantial amount for the doctor’s visit. The average reimbursement from private insurance is $130; for Medicare, it’s about $60. Medicaid pays less, but that’s why people on Medicaid have such a hard time finding a doctor. So average those two together, and add the copays, and you’ve got at least $1.5 billion in direct costs to obtain a simple decongestant. But that doesn’t include the hassle and possibly lost wages for the doctor’s visits. Nor the possible secondary effects of putting more demands on an already none-too-plentiful supply of primary care physicians.

Of course, those wouldn’t be the real costs, because lots of people wouldn’t be able to take the time for a doctor’s visit. So they’d just be more miserable while their colds last. What’s the cost of that–in suffering, in lost productivity?

Perhaps it would be simpler to just raise the price of a box of Sudafed to $100. Surely that would make meth labs unprofitable–and save us the annoyance of a doctor’s visit.

They can still buy cold medicine, protest the advocates for a prescription-only policy. But as far as I can tell, there’s really no evidence that the current substitute, phenylephrine, does a damn thing to ease congestion; apparently, a lot of it gets chewed up in your liver pretty quickly, and because the FDA only allows a low dose to start with, the resulting pills don’t seem to be any better than placebo. For people who are prone to sinus or ear infections, that’s no joke; one of the main ways you prevent them is by taking a decongestant as soon as you feel the first ticklings of a cold–not four days later, when your GP can finally see you.

I added the emphasis, since that’s also my own experience with the non-sudafed sudafed.

Here’s the real point:

But no policy question is ever as simple as “How can we stop X”, unless “X” is an imminent Nazi invasion. We also have to ask “at what cost?” and “by what right?”

Exactly. There is no doubt that meth is a scourge. But the societal costs of drastically increasing the effective price of Sudafed are bad, too. Are we sure that’s a good idea? And let’s also be clear about something: some anti-meth crusaders are actively talking about prohibition. Seriously. Fuck that.

(Via Schneier.)

When the Feds announced a while back that using Tor, a tool to ensure online security and anonymity, could be construed as evidence you might be a terrorist, I wrote it off as them being absurdly out of touch and possessed of the same authoritarian taint as most cops — “if you haven’t got anything to hide, why care?” is sort of a mantra for some LEO folks.

However, now the Feds are suggesting that paying cash for coffee might be suspicious, which is just getting ridiculous.

Do you feel safer yet? Does the FBI have anybody who LOOKS at these pronouncements before they go out? Good lord.

Via BB.

But, just so we’re clear this doesn’t change who they are, or who’s running the organization. As noted before, contribute accordingly.

What happens when you use prisoner labor to design and execute logos for the state police? I SMELL BACON! Oink Oink Oink.

Bonus: Apparently, the prank’s been in place for FOUR YEARS.

I recommend you check out this brief rundown of Things That Can and Cannot Screen for Breast Cancer.

Contribute accordingly.

Edit: Link fixed. h/t GL.

The well-heeled pink-ribbon brigade has bowed to pro-life ninnyhammers and will no longer contribute to Planned Parenthood.

This will of course coincide with heathen HQ discontinuing any support for Komen. We encourage you to go and do likewise. Planned Parenthood provide a cornucopia of well-women services, including family planning; cutting its funding impacts underserved populations far more than the middle class. Given that the Komen dollars were earmarked for breast cancer screening, it seems particularly obnoxious that they’d discontinue the donation.

Let’s also make something completely clear: Komen is a marketing organization. They don’t actually DO anything but raise money and give it away. Planned Parenthood is about providing medical services.

So, as Nonsequiteuse puts it, “If you want to look pretty in pink, give to Komen. If you want to create opportunities for women to access life-saving care, give to Planned Parenthood.”

I think that about sums it up.

In the lily-white Dallas suburb of Plano, a local childrens’ theater is staging Hairspray without any black cast members, and with a skinny Tracy Turnblad.

Wow. Just . . . wow.

The Supremes have ruled that a warrant is required for GPS tracking. Yay!

Over at MeFi there’s this link, which is funny and amusing. Why, the author wonders, does his binge drinking behavior (per the CDC) not result in violence or unprotected sex? After all, he might have 4 or 6 glasses of wine at any given dinner party!

The real money shot here, though, is in the comments to the MeFi post, which pointed out the CDC’s actual, by the numbers definition of “binge drinking,” which they actually take from the NIH:

Binge drinking is a common pattern of excessive alcohol use in the United States. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines binge drinking as a pattern of drinking that brings a person’s blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to 0.08 grams percent or above.

It’s even on the definitions page at NIH.

Unless I’m reading this wrong, the CDC thinks you’re binging if you reach 0.08 percent BAL, or a level that is actually below the driving limit in many states — i.e., well before most people would consider you “drunk” in any sense other than “maybe shouldn’t drive.”

Seriously, really? So perhaps any wine tasting is a binge. Perhaps any afternoon of tailgating is a binge. Certainly any trip to a modern cocktail bar is a binge.

I have no doubt that alcohol can be a problem, and that the problem is magnified by extravagant drinking habits — but when I think of “extravagant drinking habits,” my mental picture is a bit beyond the guy who’s considering whether or not he should, legally, drive. The CDC and NIH do nobody any favors — except, perhaps, prohibitionist types like MADD, but that may be entirely the point.

Balko: DOJ Urges Federal Court To Protect the RIght to Record Police

Basically, the Federal government is siding against local police and with a citizen over the issue of recording cops making an arrest.

This is who we are now.

Forbes discusses their inevitable collapse, and it is delicious.

Both JWZ and BoingBoing point us to this post about a Freedom of Information request filed surrounding the assassination, by us, of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki.

The source blog’s title is worth noting: “For Christmas, Your Government Will Explain Why It’s Legal to Kill You” — except, of course, that it won’t do that, either.

Here’s their summary, quoted in full:

Summary:

• The government dropped a bomb on a U.S. citizen,
• who, though a total dick and probably a criminal, may have been engaged only in propaganda,
• which, though despicable, is generally protected by the First Amendment;
• it did so without a trial or even an indictment (that we know of),
• based at least in part on evidence it says it has but won’t show anyone,
• and on a legal argument it has apparently made but won’t show anyone,
• and the very existence of which it will not confirm or deny;
• although don’t worry, because the C.I.A. would never kill an American without having somebody do a memo first;
• and this is the “most transparent administration ever”;
• currently run by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

I’d really love for someone to explain to me why I shouldn’t be utterly terrified by this.

Just so we’re clear, it turns out that it’s totally legal for the cops to roll up on you, search you without any cause, and beat you silly, and you have utterly no right to resist. In fact, they may charge you with a crime, just for fun.

I’m not kidding.

This is, of course, especially true if you happen to be black.

End immunity. Now. No agent of the state should enjoy such protections not afforded to our citizens.

Go read this right now.

The current Defense Authorization bill includes some provisions that would make mincemeat of our most basic freedoms:

One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past. Some claim that this provision would merely codify existing practice. Current law empowers the military to detain people caught on the battlefield, but this provision would expand the battlefield to include the United States — and hand Osama bin Laden an unearned victory long after his well-earned demise.

Why yes, yes I am.

In the early days of the so-called War on Terror, Heathen was by no means the only place crying foul at the power grabs committed by our government supposedly in the name of keeping us safe. In particular, the idea that it was okay to kidnap people without trial or recourse troubled lots of folks, and still does. Equally troubling was something we all said then, too, which was once governments acquire power, they are loathe to give it up. The damage Bush and a complicit Congress did in this regard is very long lasting, and we see more of that today.

Congress is presently debating a bill that would expand the power of the military to kidnap civilians — even Americans, and even on US soil — in the name of preventing terrorism. The government is hooked on war, and will keep this up unless we make it clear we won’t stand for it. Under no circumstances is it acceptable for an American citizen to be held without trial, without counsel, and without due process of law. It wasn’t okay on September 10, 2001, and it didn’t magically become okay the next day. With OBL dead and Al Qaeda essentially decapitated, there’s certainly no argument to be made that suspension of such basic protections is in any way warranted.

(Did you notice that we assassinated an American citizen abroad a few months ago? Did you notice how the media called him “US-born” So-and-So and not “American citizen So-and-So”? Make no mistake about it; that guy was as American as I am, and could’ve voted absentee. If that doesn’t scare the shit out of you, it should. Consider not how a relatively benign conservative or liberal administration will act with such power. Consider instead how your least favorite candidate, your worst electoral nightmare, might use it.)

Go read more from Glenn Greenwald, who has some very astute analysis. Even the White House’s threatened veto isn’t all that reassuring, since their reasoning is that these choices are exclusively Executive in nature, and none of Congress’ business.

Our ideals are only our ideals if we fight for them. Our government is getting away with abrogating rights by crying “terrorist” every ten minutes. This should bother you. It sure bothers me.

Alabama is reportedly reconsidering its anti-immigrant law after it resulted in a white German manager for Mercedes getting the third degree instead of, you know, brown people.

Ah, Alabama.

They are threatening their business partners in order to convince them to sign on as supporters of the wildly controversial and completely ridiculous Internet censorship bills currently in Congress.