We allow comments!

More specifically, we have an active community of readers who deign to give us their thoughts.  Often we enjoy lively discussions with these readers, and they with one another.  Sometimes these readers, even the ones who were described by a proud internet curmudgeon, making the point that blogging under a pseudonym or incomplete identity is wrong, as needing to:

finish your high school or undergraduate degrees; and/or secure non-peasant jobs. But you must use your real names.

or by the same person, commenting under a sockpuppet pseudonym, as:

embarrassingly but proudly out-to-lunch. These folks, I would wager, are quite young (really thin-skinned) and pseudo-something. Is it Libertarian? I hope not. Includes some of the least-educated “thinkers” I’ve seen. No wonder they shy away from real names.

add more to our posts than we do.  Comments are the key to this blog.

As for the noted internet curmudgeon and his sock puppet, I'll quote a truly great blogger. "Read the whole thing!"

Personally I'm convinced.  I'll never write again under the pseudonym "Patrick."  I'm using my real name from now on.  Let the chips fall where they may.

And for our valued comment community, a game and a challenge.  Devise a pseudonym which sounds like an obvious pseudonym, yet could still conceivably be a real person's name.  The bar set by "Holden Oliver" (or should we name him "Caulfield Twist"?) is high.

My choices, appropriately, appear in the comments to this post.

It's interesting, occasionally, to look at the quantum of traffic that shows up here. On July 15th, 2010:

–There were 1,937 visitors.

–There were 2,548 visits. (Some of you came back!)

–There were 4,197 pageviews. (Some of you read more than one page!)

–You visited from 58 counties. 1524 of you are in the U.S., 107 from Canada. Other countries ranged from the U.K. and Australia to Malta, Brunei Darussalam, Tunisia, and Latvia.

–You had your browsers set to 17 languages.

–You visited from big companies and small ones, big schools and small ones, and various governmental entities. (Hello, U.S. Department of Justice!)

–About 400 of you came here via search engines, 880 from links from elsewhere, and a handful from social networks, feed readers, social bookmarks, and forums. 583 came directly.

–The most popular pages were the home page, the page about tasing third grade teachers, and John Fitzgerald Page.

–The most popular search terms were Anthony Graber, "popehat" (for those who forgot our url, I guess), and "dora the explorer." (Don't ask.)

–Some of you still use internet explorer. One of you uses a super-secret advanced copy of a future release of Firefox. It's like glimpsing a space-plane at Roswell.

Of course, that's an incomplete picture. It only shows who actually visited Popehat to read, which is increasingly like walking to school uphill both ways through the snow. Some of you out there are reading exclusively via RSS. How many? We have no idea. [According to one metric generated by WordPress,] More than 10,700 signed up for the RSS feed in the last year, 1119 in the last month, and 328 in the last 24 hours. But how many of those actually read our feed? How many have already deleted it in disgust? It's unknowable. Our readership is indeterminable by an order of magnitude. That's odd.

[Edit: in the comments, Chris casts those feed numbers into doubt. I have little faith in them, and would not be surprised if they were substantially inflated.]

Meet Tyler Tirado, True Crime Report's Moron of the Day.

Why did Tyler get that honor? Well, according to police, he joined a group confronting Defense Language Institute students on a beach and calling them "baby killers", then threw a bottle at one of them and hit her in the head when the students attempted to leave to avoid a confrontation.

As the victim’s group left, police said, Tirado threw a beer bottle and struck the woman. She was taken to the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula where she required staples to close the wound.

"Baby killers" is old-school Vietnam War stuff. One gets the sense that if these allegations are true, Tyler Tirado pines for bygone days when he could have been part of a real peace movement that really stuck it to the man, man. But all he's got is a douchey haircut and (I betcha) a tribal tattoo and an aimless life in an affluent beach town. It's rough to miss your calling. That's why he confronts anyone whose uniform makes them look like a hardened killing machine: doormen in uniforms, girls in the mall in those Hot Dog On A Stick uniforms if their big hat is off, or students from the Defense Language Institute. Anyone with a putative connection with the military or militarism — the antithesis of his chosen lifestyle of wandering around the beach being a choad without invading any countries — is fair game. So if the DLA students are the best he can find, "baby killers" they are. He doesn't know, or care, that DLA students are not trained to kill babies. They are trained painstakingly, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to speak Arabic, in hopes that we might develop better human intelligence to make progress in the Great War on Terrorism, and then they are fired because someone thinks they might be a little too fond of musical theatre, and the military reverts to its previous strategy of gathering intelligence from Arabic speakers by raising their voice and speaking more slowly.

It's possible we can change Tyler Tirado's mind about baby-killing. Maybe if we told him that some of the babies might grow up to be soldiers.

Dan Hull at the entertaining and informative What About Clients? (currently headed "What About Paris?" for reasons unclear to me) has re-run a post I missed the first time around — a stirring call to action against blog anonymity, at least among people who comment on blogs. I don't agree with all of it, nor (obviously) with the ultimate conclusion, but it's well worth a read, and is a very strong exposition of the anti-anonymity point of view, made more interesting by Dan's vision of how openness can improve legal blogging.

My position hasn't changed, as I said when Mark Bennett talked about this issue and instituted a no-anonymous-comments policy on his blog. (And by the way, I see that Dan commented on that thread back then.) I'm still at peace with my reasons for blogging semi-anonymously. You'd have to ask Patrick yourself, but I suspect he agrees. Our experiences since I wrote about this have only confirmed my position — notably based on our experience with a convicted rapist and registered sex offender (not to mention subject of outstanding harassment warrants) who engaged in nutty stalking behavior against a group of law bloggers that included us after that group criticized his content scraping. That dude is within driving distance of me, and I'd prefer not to deal with the paperwork and front-porch power-washing involved if I have to put a couple of bullets through him because he shows up at my door.

But I enjoy dialogue on the subject, and recommend Dan's post to you. Also, let's be realistic: I've been outed before by talented people, and will be again.

More specifically, this is Sparta Townson, aka Internet Guru Girl. Just as the Spartans abandoned their weak babies, exposing them to die in the wild, Sparta would you like to abandon your reputation and ethics to her (she would say "outsource"), exposing you to widespread ridicule and contempt.

That is to say, Sparta is a "professional legal marketer."

Sparta offers services including search engine optimization and link building. Unsophisticated attorneys buy into the sizzle that "professional marketers" are selling — they believe that marketers will use sophisticated, legitimate, and benign methods to improve their search engine rankings. Little do they know that marketers frequently employ bots, or low-paid net jockeys on the Subcontinent, to flood legal (and non-legal blogs) with spam comments in a highly offensive, and usually fruitless, attempt to build their clients' web presence.

And so, credulous and careless attorneys who have outsourced their marketing — and hence their reputation — suddenly find that their names are associated not so much with legal excellence, but with the same marketing technique favored by cut-rate porn sites and the multitude of pills that make your dick hard. Just ask Bradley Johnson. Ask him twice. Or this guy. Or this one. Or this one (who was shrewd enough to hire a registered sex offender to handle her reputation for her). No blogger likes spam. No reader likes spam. So the attorney whose marketer has resorted to spam has generated hostility and contempt for dubious (if any) gain.

Sparta's clients (or at least some of them) are apparently in the same boat. See, she spammed Austin criminal defense attorney Jamie Spencer with inane spam comments on behalf of clients. Spencer took the high road, called a couple of the lawyers to warn then, and then called Sparta herself. Sparta showed the insufferable sense of entitlement and utter lack of actual marketing savvy that spammers are famous for:

Sparta had already heard from at least one unhappy client by the time I spoke with her, but was not at all sympathetic to my plight. She asked if my blog was open or closed, and told me that since it was open, my comment section was fair game. What I got from the conversation was that she would damn well put whatever idiotic comments she wanted on my blog, and happily associate her client’s names to them, as often as she pleased, and that there was nothing I could do about it. Open blog, therefore the fault was mine.

Sparta is foolish. Very foolish. Spencer blogged it. Then Mark Bennett, who routinely savages scummy marketers, picked it up. Many more lawbloggers will follow. Her ranting and largely incoherent responses will not help her. [Edit: She deleted it after Bennett and I linked it. You can see it cached here. Plus I have a screenshot, dear Sparta. The post headed "baffled Austin criminal." Sparta was snooping around here shortly after I published this.]

Lawyers who hire comment spammers ought to know better. There are plenty of hints that the profession of "legal marketing" is shot through with bumblers and scam artists and uber-spammers. Take, for example, the fact that these people often spam to find clients. So it's a mystery to me why people don't expect their outside marketers to spam unless specifically told not to. It's a mystery why customers of "legal marketing experts" don't educate themselves and realize that comment spam doesn't work — which is why only crooks and morons use it.

Unfortunately, as the links above demonstrate, too few lawyers are sensible. To few lawyers obey the truism coined by Eric Turkewitz: when you outsource your marketing, you outsource your reputation and your ethics. If you must outsource, supervise closely, and monitor your trackbacks and other indications of what your marketer has done for you. Or you may find yourself regarded as the kind of lawyer who has to spam lawblogs to get business.

Today Adam Kissel at the FIRE supplements and expands upon a column by Dan Reimold over at the Huffington Post. Despite the fact that it is at the Huffington Post, Reimold's column does not involve using crystals blessed by Jenny McCarthy to prevent antibiotics from giving your children autism, and is quite worthwhile. It details the regrettable academic abuses of free speech principles in the past year, including both overt censorship of campus media by college officials and speech-suppressing thuggery (usually in the form of stealing newspapers with disfavored content) by student groups. Adam's piece is link-rich and will send you to all the details, plus additional FIRE cases.

The censorious behavior of both college officials and college students is breathtaking. Don't read it unless you are in the mood to be outraged.

Iranian scientist and former would-be defector Shahram Amiri has returned to Iran, and spun a story about being subjected to the "harshest mental and physical torture" in the United States, aided (of course, since this statement was for consumption in Iran and the Middle East) by Israeli agents and the threat of deportation to some grim fate in Israel.

The entire story sounds patently bogus, in that (1) we let him go relatively quickly and voluntarily, and (2) he's clearly someone we wanted information from, and (3) we're being pretty open about it. I don't believe him — the facts and circumstances suggest that it's a publicity stunt by Iran, with his willing participation.

But it got me thinking. Wouldn't it be nice if we could respond to his statement by saying, "Unlike Iran, the United States of America does not torture. And we don't ship people off to cooperative foreign countries to be tortured, nor do we threaten to do so."

But I guess we can still make a case-by-case defense.

In a past life, Lee Bollinger was a lawyer and law professor specializing in First Amendment issues.  He was the author of scholarly works advocating and celebrating freedom of the press.  Today, Lee Bollinger is the president of Columbia University, which collects millions of dollars from students looking for jobs as journalists.

One suspects that past life Lee Bollinger must be spinning in his grave at what present day Lee Bollinger is writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are undertaking studies of ways to ensure the steep economic decline faced by newspapers and broadcast news does not deprive Americans of the essential information they need as citizens. One idea under consideration is enhanced public funding for journalism.

In other words, Bollinger wants a bailout for journalism.  Someone's got to hire all of those J-school grads, and the newspapers sure aren't doing it now.

But perhaps bailout's not the best term.  A "bailout" is hopefully a singular event, like a bridge loan to help a friend get back on his feet.  One time only, unless you're Chrysler.  What Bollinger actually proposes is more like the farm subsidy, an ongoing, perpetual wealth transfer from taxpayers to a favored class.

Bollinger confesses unease.

The idea of public funding for the press stirs deep unease in American culture. To many it seems inconsistent with our strong commitment, embodied in the First Amendment, to having a free press capable of speaking truth to power and to all of us. This press is a kind of public trust, a fourth branch of government. Can it be trusted when the state helps pay for it?

I submit that a better question would be, "Can the public trust the government not to dominate and control the press when Congress is writing the checks?"  Why not ask a scientist!

Of course Bollinger's question makes me uneasy as well, as does his inability to answer it.  He poses it, just to show kids back in the free speech hood that he hasn't sold out to The Man, then proceeds to, well, sell out to The Man.

American journalism is not just the product of the free market, but of a hybrid system of private enterprise and public support. By the middle of the last century, daily newspapers were becoming natural monopolies in cities and communities across the country.

They did it by selling the public what it wanted, and selling it better than the competition.  Not with a handout coerced from people who didn't want to buy their product.

Publishers and editors drew on the revenue to develop highly specialized expertise that enhanced coverage of economics, law, architecture, medicine, science and technology, foreign affairs and many other fields.

Again, they earned that revenue by selling customers a quality product at an affordable price, just as GM once did. The same way that Studebaker once dominated the horse buggy industry.

Ironically, we already depend to some extent on publicly funded foreign news media for much of our international news—especially through broadcasts of the BBC and BBC World Service on PBS and NPR. Such news comes to us courtesy of British citizens who pay a TV license fee to support the BBC and taxes to support the World Service. The reliable public funding structure, as well as a set of professional norms that protect editorial freedom, has yielded a highly respected and globally powerful journalistic institution.

But that's the United Kingdom!  The British government is too honorable to interfere with the BBC.  What about a country where the people elect Texas oilmen, or Chicago machine politicians, to high office?

There are examples of other institutions in the U.S. where state support does not translate into official control.  The most compelling are our public universities and our federal programs for dispensing billions of dollars annually for research.

Is that a fact, Mr. Bollinger?

To take a very current example, we trust our great newspapers to collect millions of dollars in advertising from BP while reporting without fear or favor on the company's environmental record only because of a professional culture that insulates revenue from news judgment.

I have a counter-theory.

My counter-theory is that for years, perhaps decades, BP ran a slipshod, dangerous operation in the gulf (you do remember that the American arm of British Petroleum is a merger, that there was once a company known as "Gulf Oil"?), and that for years, perhaps decades, our great newspapers did not report one single, solitary fucking word about BP/Gulf's environmental record.  Partially because our great newspapers accepted millions of dollars in advertising revenue from BP/Gulf, and partially because reporting on oil rig safety hazards isn't sexy, unless there's an oil rig disaster.  Combine the two, and you have a snooze story ("There hasn't been a spill.  Can't you find a dead bird?") that alienates a major advertiser.

Now imagine the government as the dominant partner with big journalism:  "Problems with the Minerals and Mine Agency?  There hasn't been a spill.  Can't you find a dead coal miner?"

As for why the papers are reporting on BP/Gulf's environmental and safety records now, well, DUH.  The people demand it, and if BP complains, the New York Times and Washington Post will write a story about editorial threats from a despised foreign corporation, earning a Pulitzer, and the plaudits of people like Lee Bollinger and Barack Obama in the process.

Speaking of the gulf, I commend CNN, which has been nearly alone among big media types in seriously complaining about government restrictions in reporting on the disaster.  Would CNN have the guts to do so if it was expecting a big check from a very political administration at the end of the quarter?  Probably, but I wonder…

Or consider another area where we have well established mechanisms of government support for even the most oppositional views: defense counsel in our courts, where government-paid lawyers (including those in uniform military courts) will do their utmost to undermine cases brought by the government itself. Playing the role of calling our government to account is an accepted ethic of the legal profession despite the political hostility it can sometimes generate.

You flatter me Mr. Bollinger.  You know I'm a lawyer too.

But riddle me this, Batman:  Government pays for indigent defense because it's constitutionally required to do so.   The logic of Gideon, which I accept, is that when the government pursues the poor criminal with the sword of its own attorneys, due process and the right to counsel require that the poor criminal be provided a shield with which to defend himself.

But the poor don't have, constitutionally, a right to newspapers.  The Constitution only guarantees freedom of the press, not a free press. Or does it?  Should the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, highbrow papers, be required to hand out free editions to poor people in the Bronx and Compton?  That's a helluva subsidy, don't you think?

And if there is such a requirement, shouldn't the Timeses be required to report on matters of interest to the poor? You know, trash media, things the poor care about, things like Lindsay Lohan's jail sentence and Britney Spears' fat ass and John Edwards' marital infidelity.

Well, scratch that last one.  The Times on both coasts had plenty of opportunities to report on Edwards but refused, even though the work had been done for them.  Maybe that kind of business judgment is why the Enquirer has cash to pay for stories, while the Times, New York and Los Angeles, need a taxpayer handout.  Still, if the people are writing the checks, don't they have the right to demand bread and circuses, through funded mandates and regulation, from those who accept the money?  I rather think they do.

To me a key priority is to strengthen our public broadcasting role in the global arena. In today's rapidly globalizing and interconnected world, other countries are developing a strong media presence. In addition to the BBC, there is China's CCTV and Xinhua news …

Funny you should bring up the Chinese media while claiming that state subsidies won't impair freedom of the press.

Oh well, as others have pointed out, you'll come to your senses around 2012.  Under the Palin-Huckabee administration.

How do you recruit top-notch law enforcement personnel, ready to be at the tip of the spear in the struggle between our vulnerable transportation and the freedom-hating fanatics who want to blow shit up? Put another way, how do you find people who will reliably harass people for carrying cash or wearing Decepticon t-shirts, ogle body scans, and act entitled to the unquestioning compliance of the general populace?

Well, if you are the TSA, you start advertising on pizza boxes.

TSA has rigorous qualifications and requirements, including but not limited to "the munchies." The good news is that if your next security line is going slowly, there's an excellent chance you can skip it by bribing the security agent with a bag of Doritos.

We do more than our share of griping about suppression of unpopular speech here at Popehat. We gripe not only about local First Amendment violations, but about excesses by our fellow beneficiaries of the common-law heritage of freedom, including England, Australia, and America's fecklessly censorious hat Canada.

Vigilance against censorship, even in societies that generally protect free speech, is a good thing. In fact, its an obligation of responsible citizens. But now and then, it's also good to reflect on how lucky and (comparatively) free we are.

The blog Index on Censorship is a fantastic resource for such reflection and thanksgiving — and for reminding us what lies at the bottom of the slippery slope, and what people are willing (and eager) to do if they can get away with it. Follow it. Here's some recent stories to remind us of the freedoms we enjoy:

Tunisian journalist sentenced to four years in prison, a sentence affirmed on appeal, for "spreading news likely to harm public order" by reporting on trade union protests.

Palestinian authorities ban three newspapers (which were also recently banned by Israel) from distribution in Gaza, demanding that papers agree not to criticize Hamas.

Iranian blogger prosecuted for "working with 'hostile' states, propaganda against the Islamic regime, propaganda in favor of anti-revolutionary groups, insulting religious sanctities, and launching and managing 'obscene' websites."

They do good work. Check them out.

With apologies to Shakespeare.

We've said it many times, but it bears repeating: one of the chief frustrations of being libertarian-leaning is the feeling that mainstream politics offers us a choice between one party's socially conservative totalitarianism and the other party's social engineering totalitarianism. Each party constantly rails against the other party's excesses, but indulges in its own, utterly failing to grasp this: giving the government power to do things you like naturally tends to give it power to do things you don't like. So liberals cheerfully advocate heavy regulation of our economic lives, not grasping that it tends to empower the government to control our moral lives, and conservatives eagerly advocate increased morals laws and law enforcement power, not grasping that these tend to empower the government to regulate the living shit out of their businesses. And then there are the intrusions and abuses of power that both parties support, like the moronic and destructive War on Drugs.

This has been going on for a long time, and I've been writing about it for a long time, so I should be well beyond getting agitated about it. But I'm not. The government-as-God-Emperor crowd still has the power to get under my skin.

Take San Francisco.

San Francisco is a beautiful and fascinating city, full of friendly and interesting people, and I've always loved it. But as a political entity, it's completely batshit crazy. In the last month alone, various bureaucratic entities within the city's baroque and querulous power structure have attempted to ban bottled water at all events on city property (to save the planet), ban soda from vending machines on city property in favor of water, juice, milk, and "soy milk, rice milk and other similar dairy or non dairy milk" (to protect us from becoming fatties), and ban stores from selling any pets [pardon me, "animal companions"] other than fish (to save the abandoned hamsters, mostly). City employees are instructed on how small to cut bagel pieces to ensure good nutrition.

San Franciscans are, in many respects, an incredibly tolerant bunch. They'd never tolerate their government trying to protect their good morals by telling them they can't buy, sell, and use sex toys. They'd make awful, awful jurors for the government in cases brought by the Bush (and now Obama) administration's Obscenity Task Force, and would probably hold marches or vigils or organic hemp brownie bake sales against it or something. They are vigilant about police brutality against traditionally disfavored minority groups.

But it seems they have no clue whatsoever about the inexorable connection between those types of tyranny and the sort of "progressive" tyranny they gleefully inflict.

When you encourage the government to regulate what you can drink to keep you (or your kids) from getting fat, you encourage that government's minions to imagine what else you might be doing — or reading, or watching, or saying — that's not good for you, and how they might increase the power of their little fiefdoms by regulating it. When you tell the government it can forbid you from buying pets or drinking bottled water, because you can't be trusted to do those things responsibly on your own, you encourage them to dream of all the other things that it would be better for you, really, if you didn't do. Just ask Amanda Marcotte, cheering the pet sale ban:

This would probably mean that people couldn’t get exotic pets, and that isn’t really the sort of thing that would keep me up at night, either. I understand the urge to have something like a pet ferret, but like with smoking, it’s an understandable urge that probably is best not indulged.

The tyrant asks not "should the government have the power to stop a free man from doing that," but "would it be better, from our point of view, if you didn't indulge your desire to do that." As a society, we lurch drunkenly from one sort of tyranny to the other, from the nanny-state control fetishes of the Amanda Marcottes to the censorious dreams of the book banners. Far, far too few of us recognize that those urges are just different signs of the same ill-minted coin. Often we hold our nose and decide that the particular totalitarianism urged by our party is tolerable and unlikely to impact us. "I don't buy ferrets or fetish porn," we say. "So the nanny staters/moral scolds are not likely to impact my life."

So you say for now, my friend. But sooner or later, the nanny-staters or the morals police will get you. You think you are safe, sitting there reading this on your computer? Not so. You're probably using air conditioning, with the government ought to stop or at least regulate. Your surfing is creating a huge carbon footprint; they'll be talking to you about that. And is that wi-fi you are using? Progressive locales recognize that's hazardous to druids and other living things. And on the other side of the coin, make sure you're not visiting banned sites, or for that matter even mentioning banned sites by name. Or ordering videos the government thinks are bad for society. Or treating your glaucoma. Or writing anything to offend a teacher.

We get, and deserve, the tyranny we tolerate. We get it because we teach officious government officials that regulating our life is their birthright. More frighteningly, we get it because we teach our children that the role of the government is to regulate our life — thus dashing their chances to be free people.

We previously covered the story of Evelyn Towry, a 54 pound eight year old girl who refused to take off her cow hoodie and was denied cake.  Now Ms. Towry and her parents are suing the Lake Pend Oreille Idaho School District and the Bonner County Sheriff's Department.

Not for the denial of cake, but because Evelyn was hauled to jail in handcuffs and charged with criminal battery.

Evelyn was a third-grader at Kootenai Elementary School last year when she was handcuffed and arrested. School staffers say she spit on and inappropriately touched two instructors.

Evelyn and her parents say their rights were violated.

The school and county plan to defend the claim by demonstrating that Evelyn's disruptive behavior made her arrest appropriate.  54 pound Evelyn, pictured below, suffers from Asperger syndrome, a relatively high functioning form of autism.   So it was right and proper to deny Evelyn a slice of cake for refusing to be a good little girl, and remove her cow hoodie.  And it was wrong and evil of Evelyn to throw a tantrum, indeed, to molest and assault her teachers.

So deputies had no choice but to lead the half-pint hooligan to jail.

Cow Hoodie Criminal

Of course the policeman has a hard job, something that selfish autistic children don't seem to appreciate, especially where cake is concerned.  While it must have been difficult for two deputies to arrest this terrorist tot without resort to a Taser or OC spray, Evelyn doesn't seem to appreciate the kindness she was shown.

Indeed, Evil Evelyn should be grateful that her teachers aren't suing her, for her inappropriate touching.  Sadly, it seems the school has failed in its efforts to teach Evelyn that big girls don't cry, or sue.

But when I became a man, I put away childish fears.

It would appear that for some police officers, the trauma of third grade never ends.

Janice Wells called the Richland Police Department when she feared a prowler was outside her clapboard house in the rural west Georgia town.

The third-grade teacher had phoned for help. But within minutes of an officer coming to her backdoor, she was screaming in pain and begging not to be shocked again with a Taser. With each scream and cry, the officer threatened her with more shocks.

Ms. Wells was tased for refusing to tell Officer Tim Murphy, of the Richland Police Department, the name of a man Murphy erroneously suspected of assaulting her.  Ryan Smith, of the nearby Lumpkin Police Department, did the tasing after Wells had already received a workover and a thorough dosing of pepper spray from Murphy.

“'You don’t need to know that,'” Murphy wrote in his report was Wells' response. “I told her that she would need to give me the information that I needed or she would be arrested for obstruction. I explained that state law mandates that we investigate to determine if there has been any family violence.”

Now I'm not a Georgia lawyer, but neither is Murphy.  And I suspect this is a case in which a police officer is just making shit up as he goes along. It's hard to imagine Georgia law would support a charge of obstruction of justice against the victim of a suspected crime, for refusing to divulge the suspect's name.  A suspicion that, by the way, was completely off base.  Wells had called to report a possible burglary, and the man whose name Murphy sought was a family friend who agreed to wait with Wells for police to arrive, then was told by Murphy to get lost.

Meanwhile, Murphy had a 57 year old third-grade teacher to work over.

She retrieved her purse and began walking around the side of her house until Murphy said he was taking her to jail.

“Janice then backed up from me in a fight or flight stance and I grabbed her arm and placed a handcuff on it,” Murphy wrote. “She pulled away and she took off. I sprayed her with pepper spray. I chased her around the house and tripped and fell, injuring my knee just as I caught up with her. As I was once again walking her to the car, she broke loose again and ran. She tripped and fell and I grabbed her again. As we got to the car, I attempted to get the other handcuff on her and get her in the car.”

Now this is the point where our police apologist readers will point that if Ms. Wells had only obeyed the officer's lawful command, everything would have worked out fine.  All she needed to do was to tell the officer the name of the man who'd beaten her (except he hadn't), or to stop what she was doing (on her own property), and go along peacefully with her arrest (which was illegal).

But then it gets weird. Murphy, unable to subdue an elderly schoolteacher, called for backup.

Smith answered Murphy's call for backup.

In his report, Smith wrote he was concerned for Murphy’s welfare because his voice was weak. “[He] sound[ed] as if he could barely talk,” Smith wrote.

The camera recorded images of Smith's short drive down a two-lane road, but once he got within sight of the Wells' clapboard house, the dash cam also began recording sound.

Yes, poor Murphy had injured his little knee so badly that his fellow officer was concerned, afraid, frightened for Murphy's welfare.  After all, 57 year old schoolteachers are known to carry dangerous weapons, like sarcasm and even rulers.

So they tased the shit out of the old woman.  Watch for yourself.  Or rather, listen.  The screams are heartbreaking.

Though both officers have resigned or been fired, this doesn't seem to be that big a deal to Georgia law enforcement.  Smith, who says that he wouldn't do anything differently, that "I did what I had to do to take control of the situation," was a hot property.  He's now employed by the Chattahoochee County Sheriff's Department, free to zap old ladies at will in another jurisdiction.

As for Richland, at least one cop is willing to tell it like it is:

Stewart County Sheriff Larry Jones, who came to the house seconds after the last electric shock was administered, suspects the outcome would have been different if the woman had been white and the officers black.

“I don’t think they would have done a white female like that,” said Jones, who is black. “If they had, it wouldn’t have been any doubt about whether they need to be terminated.”

I'm sorry to say that I can't disagree.

I've often mentioned that I enjoy Cracked Magazine, the superior online version of what was once an also-ran to Mad. Cracked frequently manages to say things in the guise of satire that people are reluctant to say outright, which is supposed to be the function of satire in the first place.

This week, in a riff on one of our frequently discussed themes, Cracked tackles Six Completely Legal Ways Cops Can Screw You. Their #1 way is well-chosen. Read about how Ohio cops stole the identity of innocent citizen Haley Dawson, who is not a stripper, and gave it to criminal justice student and cop-wannabee Michelle Szuhay, who used it to go undercover as a stripper at a club suspected of promoting drugs and prostitution. Szuhay used Dawson's social security number and a copy of her driver's license to work as a stripper in the suspect club, but things when south when she began to get chummy with the owners.

The police did not get Haley Dawson's permission to use her identity it what sounds like the plot to a Cinemax movie. I doubt the police will clear up any legal or credit or tax consequences for her. The police say they are allowed to do it. For the good of the citizens.