How far have we gone toward dismantling the Constitution in our quest to ensure that people accused of drunk driving are punished?

We've eviscerated the Fourth Amendment (right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures)…

We've eviscerated the Fifth Amendment ("right to remain silent")…

We've eviscerated science itself, in a fashion that would make a creationist blush.

And that's just what we'd done five years ago, when Lawrence Taylor* wrote The DUI Exception To The Constitution.

Now they're coming for the Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses. Don't believe me?  Consider that John Paul Stevens and David Souter, who joined a cast of liberals and conservatives to uphold the right to confront the people behind a breathalyzer test in a 5-4 decision, are already gone.   Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor may not be so friendly to the rights of the accused.  Especially when the accused are the target group of one of the most powerful lobbies in the United States.  And in the lower courts, they're already whittling the Sixth Amendment away.

Use a designated driver tonight.  It's the smart thing to do anyway, and you won't be giving them another excuse.

Via the Legal Satyricon and Simple Justice.

*(the attorney, not the football player)

Sometimes people write me and ask why the hell I'm not writing about story X, because it's "right up your alley." Usually this means that story X is about free speech, or nanny statism, or police abuse, or (not infrequently) some species of mordantly self-involved douchebaggery that readers associate with me.

Sometimes the answer is that I'm too busy. Often the answer is that I can't think of an angle on the story that will allow me to say something about it that hasn't been said better already by smarter people, and I am not in the mood for a mere heh indeed-style link.

And sometimes the answer is that the story inspires a white-hot impotent fury that would leave me unable to write anything but a string of epithets.

The story of Siobhan Reynolds and the Pain Relief Network, and how they've been menaced, censored, and eventually shut down by Assistant United States Attorney Tanya Treadway, falls into the last two categories.

See, Jacob Sullum and Radley Balko have been reporting the living shit out of this story. I'm not going to improve on either of them. And the story makes me very, very angry. Not to mention very sad — sad that the judiciary has been an indifferent observer of (at best) or co-conspirator in (at worst) Tanya Treadway's censorious abuse of the justice system, not a check on it. This is a story that makes me sympathetic to the sentiment that what ails the justice system should be cured not with briefs or ballots but with short ropes and long drops.

Read Sullum and Balko yourself, and follow their links all the way back to their earliest writings on the subject.

You'll learn that Siobhan Reynolds is a vigorous critic of the government's failed, life-destroying, state-power-accreting, ruinously expensive War on Drugs. Specifically, she's a critic of the federal prosecution of doctor Stephen Schneider and his wife (and nurse), Linda, in Haysville, Kansas. The government said the Schneiders were illegally dealing pain pills to their patients, encouraging addiction and abuse. The Schneiders, and pain-relief advocates who support them, say the government is full of shit, and is preventing adequate treatment of chronic pain by applying blundering War-on-Drugs mentality. I'm not a doctor, or a drug addiction expert. I don't know who is right. But I used to be a prosecutor, and now I'm a defense lawyer, and I've worked one side or the other of the War on Drugs for sixteen years, and I am inclined to agree with others that the government is full of shit.

But it shouldn't matter whether critics of a prosecution are on the mark or off of it. Their right to criticize the government for such prosecutions should be above question. But, in reality, apparently it isn't. Assistant United States Attorney Tanya Treadway was enraged by the criticism of Siobhan Reynolds and her Pain Relief Network. Treadway took the astounding step of demanding that a court gag Reynolds and her organization, asserting that Reynolds had "a sycophantic or parasitic relationship" with the defendants Treadway was prosecuting, and that she was using the case "to further her own personal interests." To Treadway, speech ought not be free if the speaker is advancing a personal interest. That's an odd interpretation of the First Amendment, and not one that the judge was willing to accept.

Treadway was not deterred by the federal judiciary's minimal resistance to her efforts at censorship. Having failed to use one tool — a gag order — she resorted to the federal prosecutor's favorite tool: the grand jury.

Let me pause and offer you a dark confession. I miss the grand jury. When I want documents or evidence now as a criminal defense attorney, I have to ask the government for it, wait for them to laugh and refuse, and then run to court and try to convince a judge to order the government to abide by its obligations. As a civil litigant, I have to write long, complicated demands for documents and information, wait a month for a response, get a response refusing most of what I asked for, engage in a letter-writing campaign, and eventually go to court seeking an order making the other side give me the documents, often months later. Oh, to use the grand jury again! As a federal prosecutor, I could just issue grand jury subpoenas. I could refuse extensions at my whim. I could ask for whatever the hell I wanted based on the most remote suspicion that it might be relevant to a federal investigation. I could demand compliance with confidence, knowing that it is extraordinarily rare for a federal court to grant a target's motion to quash or limit a subpoena. And I could do all of this under the ridiculous fiction that I was acting on behalf of a grand jury so long as, occasionally, I stepped into the grand jury room and had a federal agent testify briefly that "Hey, we've got an investigation going into [vague subject], we issued subpoenas in your name, we got these documents, the investigation continues." 99% of the time, the grand jurors wouldn't look up from their newspapers, hoping they'd get let out early that day. Were the grand jurors a check on government abuse of the subpoena power? Don't make me laugh until I throw up.

Tanya Treadway knows all of that. So, thwarted in her demand for a gag order to silence the critics of her little battle in the Great War on Drugs, she turned to the more reliable weapon of the grand jury.

After Treadway failed to obtain a gag order silencing Reynolds, she instigated a grand jury investigation of her for obstruction of justice, obtaining subpoenas that demanded material related to PRN's activism, including its finances, media strategy, and organizational techniques. Among other things, the subpoenas covered communications with the Schneiders, their lawyers, and their patients; a PRN video about the conflict between drug control and pain control; and records regarding a PRN-sponsored billboard in Wichita that proclaimed "Dr. Schneider never killed anyone."

This time, the judiciary offered no resistance at all to Treadway's censorious ambitions. Reynolds' attempts to quash the subpoenas as overbroad, harassing, or in violation of her First Amendment rights failed in the trial court and the circuit. It would be nice to know more about all of the arguments employed to justify a ruinous and expensive grand jury investigation of an American citizen for criticizing the government, wouldn't it? It would be nice, but it won't be easy, because the trial and appellate courts ordered most of the briefs and decisions sealed. They did so because grand jury proceedings are supposed to be secret — to protect the privacy of the witnesses and the suspects being investigated. In other words, an effort to vindicate Siobhan Reynold's free speech rights must be kept secret by the courts for her own good, and the good of her accusers. The courts even ordered the friend of the court briefs by free speech advocates to be sealed, apparently in part on the grounds that those groups are trying to publicize their arguments. As if that's a bad thing, a wrong thing.

In short, after the denial of Treadway's initial attempt at censorship, the federal judicial has actively assisted her campaign to silence Siobhan Reynolds and the Pain Relief Network by censoring open debate about the methods used to investigate her. The judiciary has demonstrated very little recognition of the First Amendment issues involved, and in fact has demonstrated open hostility to her advocacy. Here's what United States District Judge Monti Belot said when he sentenced the Schneiders to long sentences:

There is one aspect of deterrence I hope this case achieves and that is to curtail or stop the activities of the Bozo the Clown outfit
known as the Pain Control Network, a ship of fools if there ever was one. A ship of fools is an allegory in Western literature which depicts a ship with deranged passengers without a pilot who are seemingly ignorant of their own direction. When persons leading or involved in an organization such as the Pain Control Network are so stupid that they support what occurred in this case, they demean the efforts of legitimate medical providers to help persons suffering from chronic pain.

Siobhan Reynolds and the Pain Control Network may be passengers on a ship of fools. They may be advocating foolish and reckless distribution of dangerous drugs instead of sensible pain management. But I don't give a shit, and neither should any decent free citizen who cares about limited government and freedom of expression over government thuggery and the state enforcement of the sentiments behind the War on Drugs. Judge Belot's statement — that one reason to sentence doctors to long prison terms is not just to deter drug distribution, but to deter critics of the government's methods in the War on Drugs, however deluded — is sickening and nothing short of evil. The government has no legitimate interest in using force to deter unpopular viewpoints, particularly criticisms of the government itself.

This is not a happy story. This is not a story in which American values, American strengths, American love of justice prevails. This is a story where the bad guys win. This is a story where censorship and thuggery — where those who think the government should be able to control criticism — triumph.

From Reynolds' Facebook entry:

[V]ery sad to be announcing the closure of Pain Relief Network. The government and the federal judiciary have succeeded in silencing the lone organized effort on behalf of tens of millions of American, vets, children, cancer patients, people born with congenital painful conditions who cannot get their pain controlled. Power wins. Suffering humanity, decency itself, and the rule of law lose.

From the Pain Relief Network:

The Members of the Board of Trustees and I have decided to shut down PRN as an activist organization because pressure from the US Department of Justice has made it impossible for us to function. I have fought back against the attack on me and PRN but have received no redress in the federal courts; so, the board and I have concluded that we simply cannot continue.

The Tanya Treadways and Monti Belots of the nation will continue to triumph because not enough of us give a shit, and because not enough of us do something about it. What can you do? Write about it. Spread the word. Donate to organizations that defend free speech. Vote for candidates who are wiling to question statism — whether it comes in the form of the nanny state or the War on Drugs. When you get called for jury duty, speak out and tell them during voir dire why you don't trust the prosecution or the judiciary. Call out, revile, decry the Treadways. Push back, or someday you might get a grand jury subpoena for vigorous criticism of the government. Push back, because government behavior like this makes it harder and harder to advocate for change through the rule of law and the political process — because such abuses make it harder and harder to answer the eliminationist question "why shouldn't this end with Tanya Treadway and Monti Belot and their ilk enjoying a brief, blindfolded appearance in front of a pock-marked wall?"

Here's a devastating cutdown for Andrew Sullivan's poll on the "the smuggest, most pretentious pop song in history."  Smugness and pretension being traits Sullivan embodies all too well.

Sullivan is simply pandering to his new audience of leftists who claim Sullivan as "my favorite conservative blogger," precisely because he hasn't written a conservative word since 2004.  He understands quite well that Merle Haggard was having fun when he sang "Okie from Muskogee," and on his more lucid days (Sullivan, who divides his time between the District of Columbia and the gay beach resort of Provincetown Massachusetts, has never understood middle America too well) might even perceive that Haggard's audience in the 1960s was in on the joke.

Of course, he didn't take on Haggard's far better, funnier (and smugger, more pretentious) song, "The Fightin' Side of Me," because Sullivan, who advocated the most bloodthirsty tortures, praised Guantanamo, and boosted the Iraq war up until the very day George W. Bush came out in favor of a constitutional amendment to prohibit same sex marriage, would have difficulty dealing with complaints about "switchin' sides" and "some squirrelly guy who claims that he just don't believe in fightin'".

The Fightin' Side of Me:

You don't have to be a lawyer to grok how UMASS won The FIRE's Speech Code of the Year award. Bear in mind that's a booby prize, not a positive distinction.

In short:

UMASS, a state school, is bound by the First Amendment.

UMASS has a policy governing "rallies" on campus.

UMASS has a separate policy for "controversial" rallies. "Controversial" is not defined. "Controversial" will apparently mean whatever the people taking in the rally registration requests decide that day it means. Neither college administrators nor college students are known for good judgment or consistency in deciding what is "controversial."

"Controversial" rallies can only be held at one small place at UMASS, a rather large university. "Controversial" rallies may only be held during the lunch hour.

At a "controversial" rally, the sponsoring student organization must offer up six of its own members to act as security.

At a "controversial" rally, the sponsoring student organization is liable for any damage to the sound system, no matter who causes it.

"Controversial" rallies must be announced five business days in advance, as opposed to 24 hours for non-"controversial" rallies.

Let's be clear — this is a piss-poor effort at complying with First Amendment principles that have been well-defined for about a half-century.

My parents spent quite a lot to send me to college. I was very lucky because of that, and because I'd conned my way into a university far better than I deserved. So generally I took my work seriously. However, on occasion, when dealing with a class that I did not respect or take terribly seriously, I dashed out a crappy effort at a paper or assignment in the early morning hours — often after a bender — on my good old Apple IIe. This did not represent my best work or anyone's best work. This represented putting a sufficient number of words onto paper that could be said, broadly, to address the topic at hand in some manner.

Sometimes I wonder — do the people who draft college speech codes go on benders? Do they startle themselves awake at 3 a.m., suddenly sober and terrified and nauseous, realizing they have an important university policy due the next morning at 8:30 and haven't started to write or even researched the relevant issues yet? Do they calculate that nobody will ever actually read the policy before it's published, and that nobody will likely care if they do? Do they dash out some half-assed nonsense on their iMac, some arrangement of words and numbers that an extraordinarily generous person would call a policy?

Are college administrators people, too?

At long last, Joel Rosenberg (covered here, here, here, and here) has a means for online donation to his legal defense fund.

Simply visit this page. Click the orange "Donate" button.  Paypal will take it from there. Note that this is not tax-deductible. The government does not encourage its subjects to stand up for the blameless.

And yes, Julius was guilty as sin, but Ethel Rosenberg was guilty at most of minor misdemeanors.  Her execution is a stain on America's honor over fifty years later.

Joel is only coincidentally named Rosenberg.

As Heraclitus suggests, is our destiny driven by our character? Or is it hard-coded in our DNA, inherited from our parents? Or does our destiny change based on our life experiences? Or is it all just blind luck?

Surely one of these possibilities explains how I got a bleeding head wound from a Zuzu Pet.

It is in my character to be a lazy slob who throws clothes and work papers and misplaced kid toys and trash into the passenger-side footwell of my car.

It is in my heritage to do so. My mother, God rest her, kept her "office", a hoarder-style array of new and ancient documents, in great heaps in the trunk of her car of the moment; she ceremoniously transferred from one car to the next, possibly with a shovel.

It is my experience that I can generally get away with doing this until I am about to transport my wife someplace in my own car, at which point I duck out and shove everything into the back of the car or under a pile of boxes in the garage.

It was my blind bad luck that one of my daughters' Zuzu pets — a sort of animatronic hamster that utters perky and unintelligible gibberish when you jostle it, accompanied by tinny music — was hidden in the drift of trash in the passenger wheel-well of my car today. When I arrived at our branch office for a diplomatically delicate meeting, it was my further bad luck to require a document in that drift, and was leaning into the car on the passenger side looking for it. When I jostled the hidden ZuZu Pet, it was my further bad luck that it sprang into demonically cheerful life, squeaking something like UH-OH inches from my face, causing me to jump and attempt to leap into a standing position, an effort rendered futile by the doorjamb of the car in question, which was inconsiderately positioned in the way of my skull.

Some words were said, by me and the Zuzu Pet. One of us may have regretted them. There was a roaring and a humming and spots and stars and a whole trippy array of colors and eventually I regained an immediate command of my faculties. I considered throwing the Zuzu Pet across the parking lot — the kids would never miss one — but I thought it was undignified, and unbecoming to a senior partner of a firm come to help manage the attorneys and staff of his branch office, even if the partner in question had just shrieked like a girl and then uttered several inappropriate gerunds and was bleeding from the top of his bald pate.

So I collected myself, re-centered myself, found my quiet place, put on my game face, and dropped the Zuzu Pet back in the footwell. Where it can rot as far as I am concerned.

The attorneys and staff of the branch office looked concerned. I might not have wiped away all of the blood. One uses the tools one has in management.

From roughly 2000 until last May (when I switched browsers to Chrome), I was one of the many whose opening webpage was set to Arts and Letters Daily, a spartan site which delivers three links a day: "Articles of Note"; "New Books"; and "Essays and Opinion".  Except for a spell in a place where web access was non-existent, I read ALDaily every day.  On an average day, two of the three links were to pages I wanted to read, even if they infuriated me.

Apart from Popehat, Arts and Letters Daily has been the most important website in my ongoing development as a person.  And that's (meaning ALDaily, not Popehat) true of many, many people who depended on it in the morning almost as much as coffee.

Yet I'd never heard of its founder, Denis Dutton, until I read of his death today.

To demonstrate the power of ALDaily, assume that these capsule descriptions, all taken from today's version of the page, lead to links as interesting as they sound. Because they do:

Fat Kat had a knack for guns, drugs, and gangs; also, it turned out, for being a prison librarian. He helped fellow inmates connect to the world…

When Sergei Diaghilev emerged in fin-de-siècle St. Petersburg, ballet was passionless, mechanical, and dead. It was time for a new kind of dance…

The geocentric universe. Stress causes ulcers. A flat earth. Heavier falls faster. Many ideas we once thought were true turned out to be hard to unlearn…

Roaring colors, bright lights, strange and perverse sights up every alley – welcome to Istanbul, a vital city at the epicenter of a political catastrophe…

The Golden Age of comics. Superman flew across the skies, Batman lurked in the streets, and Wonder Woman unleashed her truth lasso…

Simply place the word “radical” in front of any Muslim name and the actual person magically disappears in a cloud of suspicion…

Ruben is six foot three, 225 pounds,neck like a waist. You can hire him: $1,000 for every bone he breaks in his victim’s face…

Will English find itself in the service of the world community forever? Given how easily languages can be dethroned, this seems an unlikely prospect…

I've never heard of Arts and Letters Daily described as "New York Review Of Books Personal Ads, Written By Raymond Chandler".  Because no one has ever described it as such.  So I'll describe it as such.  If it isn't your homepage, it should be.

Nick Gillespie has more in a thoughtful obituary for Dutton, and an appreciation of the site.

sleighin' it old school….

Remember Syracuse law professor Gregory Germain, whom Syracuse appointed as special prosecutor to investigate, and perhaps charge, Syracuse law student Len Audaer for the grave offense of satire?

He gets worse.

Apparently he's been having an email dialogue with Rochester Institute of Technology professor David Ross, a mathematician. A source shared one of these emails with me. If you think that was uncouth, rest assured that Professor Germain sent the email in question not just to Professor Ross, but also to — to — Jesus Christ, how many people is that? Has he never heard of the CAN SPAM Act? I'm too lazy to count those email addresses. It looks like about 20 lines of them, maybe 60 to 80 people. And he addresses them as "Dear Friends and Detractors." So I think I'm not in Wikileaks territory here, is what I'm saying. [Edit: even if, as I am now told, Prof. Germain was merely offering a reply-all to someone else's widely distributed email, his choice to voice what comes below to such a wide audience is meaningful, as you'll see.]

Anyway, Professor Germain's email further illuminates the values and attitudes that would lead an academic to embark on an investigation of a law student for writing a blog containing broad, obvious satire. He begins:

Dear Friends and Detractors:

I have spent a great deal of time responding to Professor Ross’s email questions and providing him with additional information.

Note the light touch Professor Germain uses in implying weary martyrdom resulting from his work replying to his detractors. It's a level of subtlety that distinguishes the Professor from a 13-year-old girl heaving a loud sigh at being asked about her homework again by her totally unfair parents.

He has been polite to me, and has recognized that the blog at issue in my case was less than aspirational (I will not quote his comments without his permission – maybe he will share his views with you).

Let's give Professor Germain the benefit of the doubt and decide that "less than aspirational" is gentle self-deprecating humor. The alternative is too grim. What kind of law professor, tasked to determine whether speech ought to be punished, focuses on whether the speech is aspirational — that is, directed to high-minded aims of which the professor approves? (Answer: a born censor.)

But we just don’t see the law the same way. I have been a practicing lawyer for 25 years, and a law professor for the past 8 years. Mr. Ross is a mathematician. You will have to decide which of us has a better understanding of the law.

At this point Professor Germain careens from inappropriate affect directly into cringe-inducing hubris. It's one thing to throw down with argumentum ad verecundium if you're arguing about pirating Weezer on an internet forum under the handle LAWD00D69. It's quite another for a tenured law professor to resort to argument by authority in the second paragraph of an email to a large crowd of professors. It's as good as a confession that you can't back your argument with cases or statutes or actual legal analysis.

And it's an unusually silly instance of argument by authority. The legal principles at issue here are neither complex nor obscure. Either Syracuse, a private entity, is going to punish people based on whatever speech restrictions it cares to devise, or its going to live up to its promises and stated principles and act as if its bound by the First Amendment. If it does that, the real-world analysis of Audaer's satire is straightforward.

Moreover, it's an unusually foolhardy argument by authority. Professor Germain "teaches and conducts research in the areas [sic] taxation, commercial law and bankruptcy and corporate law." He's arguing freedom of expression with the lawyers, founders, directors, and advisors of FIRE. For him to invoke argument by authority is roughly like me proposing to settle an argument with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie with a swimsuit competition.

Professor Germain's sneer at Professor Ross is pride talking. Professor Germain should have consulted a better authority about pride.

1. There are limitations on the ability to bring legal claims. They are called statutes of limitations. In the real world, investigations can go on for years before charges are brought. Many claims (like murder) have no statutes of limitations. In my world, claims against a student must be brought while the person is a student. After all, we can only impose academic sanctions. As long as they wish to attend our institution, we can bring charges under our rules. You can determine whether having potential charges “hanging over your head” for two months is too long. Suffice it to say that at this point the student has asked me to delay filing any charges, and I am doing so at his request for the time being.

Suffice it to say that Professor Germain is misleading his audience. He began his investigation in October. Len Audaer informs me that he and his counsel reached out to Professor Germain in December when they still hadn't heard anything, and it was only then that Audaer's counsel asked Germain not to make a charging decision until he had a choice to negotiate. The implication that Audaer has caused delay is false. Moreover, if Syracuse is living up to its rather dreadful architecture-based First Amendment promises and evaluating Audaer's speech based on recognized free speech principles, it shouldn't take two days, let alone two months, to evaluate whether the satirical blogs merit any sort of punishment. Read the handful of blog posts here and here, or at Audaer's site. This ain't mathematics. It's too obvious to be a good hour-long law school exam.

Of course, if Professor Germain and Syracuse are not following basic First Amendment principles — if they are part of the movement to undermine free speech principles under the guise of harassment and anti-discrimination concepts — then it might take time. But what are the chances of that?

2. I don’t want to comment on whether a particular student is innocent or not. That will be determined by a hearing panel on the basis of evidence that Mr. Ross has not seen if I file a complaint. Of course before bringing a complaint, I have to decide on the basis of the evidence I’ve learned from my investigation whether I think the student is innocent or guilty. The presumption of innocence applies to the court in the proceeding, not to the prosecutor. Otherwise, a prosecutor would never be able to bring charges.

True enough. But once again, how long should it take to decide based on those blog posts of whether Len Audaer is "guilty" of anything — if Syracuse is actually serious about respecting free speech principles?

3. Mr. Ross seems to believe that all terms like “harassment” need to be defined with mathematical precision to be valid. That’s just not a correct statement of how the law works. Harassment is an English word with a well understood standard usage and meaning. While it may be defined in specific ways in some codes, a rule can also use a term for its standard English meaning. That is how the law school has chosen to use the term. It may not satisfy a mathematician’s desire for absolute clarity, but it doesn’t have to do so. Of course, any student charged with a violation of our student code is free to advance the views of Mr. Ross in his defense, and it will be up to the hearing panel to determine whether the word “harassment” is so vague as to give no indication of what conduct might constitute a violation.

Anyone can be snide about communications or sociology or drama; it takes a law professor to be snide over a sustained period of time about math.

Here's the thing — if Professor Germain and Syracuse are not serious about their commitment to free expression, then "harassment" justifying official sanctions may, indeed, be based on the dictionary or on "standard English meaning" or on the aspirational beliefs of a university committee or on Professor Germain's personal feelings. But if Germain and Syracuse are looking to First Amendment principles, then there are a wealth of cases explaining the line between free speech and actionable harassment. If they are serious, Germain and Syracuse could look at a case like, say, Rodriguez v. Maricopa Cty. Community College District:

Plaintiffs no doubt feel demeaned by Kehowski's speech, as his very thesis can be understood to be that they are less than equal. But that highlights the problem with plaintiffs' suit. Their objection to Kehowski's speech is based entirely on his point of view, and it is axiomatic that the government may not silence speech because the ideas it promotes are thought to be offensive. See Brandenburg v. Ohio,395 U.S. 444, 448-49, 89 S.Ct. 1827, 23 L.Ed.2d 430 (1969); Saxe v. State Coll. Area Sch. Dist.,240 F.3d 200, 204 (3d Cir.2001); DeAngelis v. El Paso Mun. Police Officers Ass'n,51 F.3d 591, 596-97 (5th Cir.1995). "There is no categorical `harassment exception' to the First Amendment's free speech clause." Saxe, 240 F.3d at 204; see also United States v. Stevens, ___ U.S. ___, 130 S.Ct. 1577, ___ L.Ed.2d ___ (2010) ("The First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits.").

Similarly, if Syracuse and Professor Germain are serious about freedom of expression, then they could take vagueness analysis seriously rather than sneering at it. If they believe the law is whatever they say it is, they probably won't.

4. I have shown Mr. Ross that the statements made by FIRE are misleading and inaccurate. Although he held me to an extremely high standard when I correctly quoted his statement without the preamble, he has strained himself to interpret FIRE’s statement to be based on some truth, and that’s apparently good enough to leave his bold assertion of FIRE’s perfect
accuracy intact.

5. I received many emails from people on the list who have dealt with FIRE and Mr. Ross before, and advised me that there was no point in trying to reason with either of them. While I don’t think Mr. Ross intends to mislead in the same way that FIRE has, I believe he has so committed himself to supporting FIRE that he is unable to see the flaws in their methods – even though their methods are the very antithesis of his beliefs in honest and respectful debate. Frankly, I think it’s sad. Nevertheless, I wish him and all of you well, and hope you all enjoy the holidays.

In criticizing university investigations of students for their speech, FIRE doesn't pull punches. Read Audaer's blog posts, and read FIRE's coverage, and read Professor Germain's irritated justifications, and then tell me if you think more civility and less outrage is called for. Read his evasions above, and tell me if you think FIRE is the one being misleading.

Some people are outraged by injustice. Some people are outraged by bigotry. Some people are outraged by suffering. And some people are outraged — some people simmer and seethe — when some damn interloper questions their authority. That's the outrage that moves the TSA. That's the outrage that leads to people getting arrested for contempt of cop. That's the outrage of petty authority. And Professor Germain's words show that that's what is moving him. How dare they?

But hey, what do you expect? As I've said before, the two leading influences on academic thinking about free expression on campus are head injury and tenure.

Via Althouse, Pat Robertson endorses legalization.

DeLynn Woodside, 7th grade math teacher at Oklahoma City's Roosevelt Middle School, may know all about her addition and subtraction, but she needs a remedial education in law.

A 13-year-old was arrested Friday in Oklahoma City, accused of violating a little-known city ordinance that prohibits possession of a permanent marker in some circumstances.

Delynn Woodside noted the marker had bled through a piece of paper onto the desk and reported to a police officer that she also had seen the teen writing on the desk with the marker, the report said.

Woodside, a seventh-grade math teacher, made a citizen's arrest on the teen, and the police officer transferred the student to a Community Intervention Center that houses juveniles who have been arrested. The name of the minor was not released.

Leaving aside the officiousness of conducting a citizen's arrest!

then having a thirteen year old hauled to jail for writing on his desk with a pen (if that actually happened), Ms. Woodside has completely misread the statute.

Oklahoma City Municipal Code Section 35-202, the statute under which DeLynn Woodside arrested this young man, has this to say about possession of sharpie pens:

No person may possess an aerosol spray paint container or broad-tipped indelible marker on any private property unless the owner, agent, manager, or other person having control of the property consented to the presence of the aerosol spray paint container or broad-tipped indelible marker.

But Roosevelt Middle School is a public school.  It even says so on the Oklahoma City schools website. It is therefore public property.  This boy has as much right to be there as Ms. Woodside.  More right in fact.  He has to be there, whereas Ms. Woodside can quit her job at any time.  While it's true that Roosevelt Middle School may not be dedicated to public use, as with a town square, it is clearly not "private property".

And Ms. Woodside may well need to quit her job soon, assuming that the boy's parents consult an attorney.  She'll need to dedicate herself, full-time, to defending against a suit for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution.  Assuming the school board doesn't fire her first.

Which it should.

Mark Bennett of Defending People has discovered a secret memo from the TSA to the FBI. Was Wikileaks involved?

Go. Read.

Can you believe that CNN would write this?

Jewish groups and many scholars argue that starting in 1939, Germans committed genocide, when more than a million Polish Jews were massacred in the waning days of the Third Reich.

Modern-day National Socialists officially deny that a genocide took place, arguing instead that hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews and Christian Germans died in intercommunal violence around the bloody battlefields of World War II.

I can't believe it either.

. . . .I remind myself it's full of awesome people, too.

This series of tubes is a tool — and, as we've said before, it can be a mighty one. Why not use it, occasionally, to do something good?

The Augusta Chronicle rationalizes a cop's wanton shooting of a family pet, in the family's own yard, thus:

Your dog may be the sweetest, cuddliest creature on the planet. He may never have harmed a flea. He might even be the kind that would lead a burglar to the family's fine silverware.

But until dogs learn to bark in the king's English, how can any of us know what your dog is capable of doing?

A policeman may be the most conscientious, honest man in the city.  He may never have fired a shot off the practice range.  He might even be the kind that helps cats down from trees, and returns lost children to their parents.

But until we begin firing cops who wantonly slay friendly dogs because they lack the common sense to distinguish threatening behavior from ordinary canine enthusiasm, how can any of us know whether that cop is a brutal thug?

The answer, of course, is that we can't. So when an unleashed dog is running at a stranger on the street, even if the little fellow is bounding happily toward a new friend, that stranger has to assume the worst: that the dog will bite. Some dogs will flat-out maul — and, like it or not, some breeds are infamous for it.

The answer to this assertion is that we're discussing a seven year old golden retriever named "Boomer".

A golden retriever is not a vicious or threatening breed.  The policeman, we're led to believe, is hired and selected for his good moral character and sound judgment.  His good moral character and sound judgment are supplemented by the best training our local, state, and federal governments can provide.

One would hope that training would include a measure of instruction in the art of forbearance.  Deliberation before shooting.  Because only a moron, or a hothead, or a sadist, would shoot a golden retriever in its own yard.  Morons, hotheads, and sadists have no business carrying guns for the state.  They should be employed in jobs where they can do little harm, such as writing editorials for third-tier city newspapers like the Augusta Chronicle.

In addition, sometimes a dog will do things its owner might never have seen or dreamed that it might — especially if another animal is involved. Regardless, a stranger doesn't know what is or isn't characteristic of a particular animal.

In addition, sometimes a cop will do things that citizens might never have dreamed that he might — especially one who's shown such poor judgment as the officer we're actually discussing.  He might shoot a taxpayer for carrying a water hose nozzle.  Regardless, it's safest to put down an officer so vicious as to shoot a golden retriever in its own yard, when it's the officer who's trespassing.

Or at least to take away his gun and badge.

So, occasionally the worst does happen. This past weekend, Boomer, a golden retriever owned by a Clayton County family, sprung off a porch and galloped, in full throat, toward a police officer who was responding to a call on foot. Tragically, the officer felt the need to shoot the animal, which died.

We simply don't know if the officer was justified or trigger-happy. The dog was still on the family lot, which reportedly had an electric fence. The fence, however, was not advertised, and the officer might not have had time to notice even if it had been.

Actually we do know.  We know that the officer was trigger-happy.  We know this because we know that officers are trained to shoot dogs first, and to ask questions later.

An ordinary citizen, in Georgia, has the right to carry a firearm.  An ordinary citizen who went around shooting his neighbors' dogs on the neighbors' property would be locked away as menace and a maniac.  He would be denounced in the pages of the Augusta Chronicle.  But give that ordinary citizen a badge, and the Augusta Chronicle will bend over backwards to give him the benefit of every doubt, and to defend him.  Because ordinary citizens must never know that, sadly, we fill the ranks of our police with the mediocre, the stupid, and the mean.

You also wonder if a non-fatal response, such as pepper spray or Mace, might have done the trick.

Actually, I wonder why the Augusta Chronicle waited seven paragraphs to ask this question.

What is clear is that the officer felt threatened — and no matter what the family says about Boomer's gentility, the officer had no way of being familiar with it.

What isn't clear is whether the officer was justified in feeling threatened, and whether he overreacted to the perceived threat.  And no matter what the Augusta Chronicle says about the officer's internal thought process, I've read too many stories about unjustified shootings of dogs by the police to take the Augusta Chronicle's word for it.

The lesson is clear: Dog owners have an absolute, air-tight and no-questions-asked responsibility to control their pets at all times.

Yet, so many don't do it.

Walkers, joggers and bicyclists, as well as delivery men and other workers, are wholly unimpressed with your dog's résumé. All they want is to be left alone, unencumbered by even the implied threat of a fang in an extremity.

Walkers, joggers and bicyclists, unlike the police, typically make accommodations for strange dogs.  They cross the street, or they keep walking.  They don't pull out a pistol and start firing.  Especially, as in this case, in the direction of a house that contains children. As this officer did.

And, oh by the way, they have a rock-solid legal right to that expectation: Augusta law says, for instance: "It shall be unlawful for any animal to be out of control and/or unattended off the premises of its owner, and/or upon the premises of another person without the permission of such other person."

Boomer was on his property when he was killed. And maybe the officer jumped the gun. But who's to say whether the dog wouldn't have jumped the fence?

Emphasis added.

And who's to say whether the officer won't start firing randomly at strangers in the mall?  According to Boomer's owners, he'd never bitten anyone.  We know that this officer will begin shooting at the slightest provocation.

Keeping your dog restrained on public property is the law.

Doing it on private property isn't a bad idea either.

Firing hotheaded, trigger-happy policemen is a good idea too.  Sadly, it isn't the law.