This bit of embarassment to my whole gender has already been shredded here and here and here, so let me just offer a constructive suggestion:

Dear Anne,

Congratulations on your wedding day. I wish you and Robert all the best.

Kind regards,

Andrew

Would that have been so fucking hard?

Economists generally believe that extremism is probably a mistake. That's because every choice involves a trade off. You'll start with the easiest trades first, but as you push to greater extremes, you'll have to trade off more and more things of value. For example, if you set out to own the fastest production car in the world, it will probably turn out to be uncomfortable, loud, hot, and astonishingly expensive.

You may be that rare person for whom those trades offs are worth the trouble to get the fastest car, but most people would be happier with something a little slower that offers more in turms of comfort and amenities.

One common form of extremism is fear of failure. If no woman has ever turned you down when you asked her out on a date, you've probably been too careful in choosing who to ask out. If you had been a little less careful, you probably would have been turned down a few times, but you would have asked out a lot more women and gone out on a lot more dates.

Similarly, if you've never missed an airplane, you've probably spent too much time waiting around in airports, and a heart surgeon who's never lost a patient has probably turned down patients he could have saved.

Lately, Mark Bennett and Norm Pattis have both been questioning Gerry Spence's claim to have never lost a criminal case. I don't know if that's true or how he defines winning or how many cases he's taken, but I'm pretty sure of one thing: If Gerry Spence has been turning down every case he thought he might lose, then some of the cases he passed up were cases he would have won.

The defense has rested in the corruption trial of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich without letting the jury hear his testimony. Other people are discussing what it's fair to assume about Blagojevich's guilt based on his not testifying [be sure to read Scott Greenfield's scathing response in the comments below], but I'm wondering how we're hearing about so many details about the inner workings of the defense team.

Last week, criminal defense lawyer Stuart Goldberg was quoted in People discussing his meeting with actress Lindsay Lohan to discuss the possibility of representing her:

"My impression of Lindsay is that she's a fragile lost child - a sleeping beauty with her head in the sand. I found her not fully forewarned of the consequence of her actions," Stuart V. Goldberg, who was contacted by Lohan after her attorney resigned, tells PEOPLE.

"I'm concerned that she's not disciplined or tethered enough to the reality of adult consequences," he says. "She doesn't seem to have the awareness of what's going to befall her."

New York personal injury lawyer Eric Turkewitz called him out about client confidentiality:

Why the hell is this Stuart Goldberg, apparently a Chicago criminal defense lawyer, talking about what he heard or saw in the confidence of his practice? And why would any future client ever trust him to keep a secret?

I had all that in mind as I read a report in the Chicago Sun-Times about the decision that Blagojevich should not testify:

But sources told the Sun-Times that despite the public show of discord, all the members of Blagojevich's legal team -- and the former governor himself -- actually agree that Blagojevich should not testify.

The decision, which appeared to stun prosecutors, one of whom stared toward the former governor as he learned of the defense's intent, is said to have come late Monday after a night of wrangling.

During preparations with his own lawyers and others, Blagojevich showed signs that he would have trouble answering questions clearly and succinctly and might not be able to withstand what is expected to be a withering cross examination, sources said. The defense also took into account the possibility that the government, which put on a quick case after only six weeks, had rebuttal witnesses ready, potentially including convicted businessman Tony Rezko.

How are Sun-Times reporters are getting information about legal decisions from inside the Blagojevich camp? Lohan's lawyer appears to be a publicity-hungry fool who's trying to attract attention to himself by talking about his celebrity almost-client. But Blagojevich is being defended by Sam Adams, who already has a big reputation for not being particularly foolish.

The Chicago Tribune is also reporting a similar story, so unless there's some way in which this leak is part of the defense strategy, it sounds like somebody on the defense side is leaking privileged information to the press.

If I had to guess who's talking too much, the obvious culprit is Rod Blagojevich.

If you've ever spent time editing digital audio recordings, you know that they can become hard to understand when you compress them just a little too much...

(The story follows a short commercial.)

Scott Greenfield wrote today about a case involving a police officer who caught one of those lucky breaks in court that cops seem to get so often:

It seemed as if things couldn't get any worse for Police Officer Patrick Pogan, when his arrest of Christopher Long, a cyclist in the Critical Mass rally, for attacking him was covertly videotaped.  Only 10 days on the job and he was shown to be a violent attacker and liar.  He had a great future ahead of him on the NYPD.  Except for that video.

Finally prosecuted.  Finally convicted, though not of the vicious assault on Long, because cops have to be allowed some latitude in vicious harming people, but convicted of filing a false instrument.  And yesterday, Patrick Pogan was sentenced to life.  No, not life in prison.  Not life on probation, Not life in community service.  He was given a conditional discharge by Justice Maxwell Wiley, which is a non-sentence sentence that says, go back to your life and have a nice day.  You've suffered enough.

So a jury convicted him, but the judge gave him no punishment whatsoever. Scott concludes his post this way:

Yet there must be a consequence when a police officer is caught, irrefutably, lying.  There must be a message that lying cops will not be tolerated.  Give him 30 days.  Give him probation.  Give him something.  The message must be that a cop cannot lie without consequences.

Instead, Patrick Pogan got life.  His own life, to live whatever way he chooses, as he's now free to move on without consequence.  The message has been sent.

It's another in a long line of good points from Scott Greenfield. But with all due respect, Scott made a mistake when he titled this post "The Big Shove Cop Gets Life." When I read that title, I assumed he was talking about another case which he blogged about last year, linking to the original report by Sara Jean Green of the Seattle Times:

Witnesses have provided conflicting accounts of when two King County sheriff's deputies identified themselves to an Edmonds man who ran from the deputies. He suffered life-threatening skull fractures when his head struck a concrete wall as one attempted to arrest him early Sunday in Belltown.

Seattle lawyer Sim Osborn, who has been retained by Christopher Harris' family, said both deputies wore black uniforms and yelled to Harris from a half-block away in a darkened alley. He said one witness reported the two deputies didn't identify themselves as law-enforcement officers until after Harris began running down the alley sometime after 1 a.m. Sunday. Osborn said Harris stopped running a few blocks away, apparently after realizing the two men chasing him were deputies.

There's video of the incident. It happens in the first few seconds, and it's unpleasant to watch:

(Scott and I recently had a discussion in his comments section about the distinction between a mere accident and a conscious disregard for human life. This incident seems like a clear case of the latter.)

At the time, the police were still investigating, and everything was up in the air. I wondered what happened to Christopher Harris and the deputy who shoved him.

It turns out that Sara Jean Green followed up on this story a year later in an article that came out last May. The cop who shoved Harris -- now identified as King Country Deputy Matthew Paul -- seems to have gotten away with it:

After reviewing the chase and apprehension of Harris, prosecutors found no basis to charge Paul with a crime. After an internal investigation cleared the deputy of wrongdoing, the King County Sheriff's Office called the incident "a tragic accident."

In other words, to use Scott's terminology, Deputy Matthew Paul got life. His own life. He gets to go on as if nothing happened.

As for Christopher Harris, he wasn't so lucky:

Sarah Harris goes through the motions of her day trying hard not to think about what life was like a year ago -- or what it would be like now if not for "the incident."

She feels guilty leaving the house, even if only for a couple of hours to visit her mom or sister, to run errands, or go grocery shopping. She still cries every night.

Her husband, the first boy she kissed and the only man she's ever loved, suffered a catastrophic brain injury when his head slammed into a concrete wall after a brief footchase with two King County sheriff's deputies on Mother's Day 2009. He's now confined to bed, unable to talk, walk or do anything for himself.

Christopher Sean Harris spent six weeks at Harborview Medical Center, where his family was encouraged to remove him from life support because doctors didn't think he'd ever come out of a coma. But he did, and was transferred to an Edmonds nursing home in June.

Sarah Harris, who worked as a manager for Nordstrom and dreamed of becoming a buyer for the department store, gave up her job to care for her husband.

...

Doctors can't put their finger on Chris Harris' condition, Lamb said. Based on brain scans, they say he shouldn't be able to move or make sounds. Yet, he can respond to simple commands and appears to have symptoms of "locked in" syndrome since he's aware of what's going on around him.

He even recognizes loved ones -- his mother, his uncle, old friends from high school -- who visit.

"He'll stare at someone for a really long time, and then you'll see the change in his eye," Sarah Harris said. "It clicks, and all of a sudden he knows who he is looking at."

I guess, in a different way, Christopher and Sarah Harris got life too.

Hey Kids! Want to know how to smuggle large amounts of dope without getting caught? Police Lieutenant Andrew G. Hawkes will show you how. Of course, he's selling his training materials to police officers only, so you'll have to get past his security questions without breaking any laws, which may be tricky.

Even so, there are a few handy tips on his web site:

Tip #3: "If you really want to be successful at highway drug interdiction then turn OFF your radar.  DRUG HAULERS DON'T SPEED!"

In other words, most highway cops are looking for speeders, so don't speed.

Indicator #18:  "Passengers that DON'T know each others' names is a strong indicator of drug trafficking."

So, you should exchange names and check everybody's memory before hitting the highway.

Tip #36-  "Be sure to turn on the A/C unit to see if the vents blow air, if they do not then that may mean there is a load of dope inside of it."

So, don't put so much dope in your ventilation system that it blocks the air flow.

Personally, I'm fascinated by this sort of thing. If anybody out there has a legally-acquired copy of the book and the bonus videos that they don't want anymore, I'd love to buy them off of you.

(Hat tip, Scott Greenfield)

My wife and I were in Louisville, Kentucky this weekend, and while we were stopping at a gas station mini-mart next to our hotel, I spotted this anti-drug poster in the window:

Larger ImageAnti-drug poster in the window of a gas station in Louisville, Kentucky.

The image is a little blurry because I took it with my phone, but the text reads, in part, "Trapped. Controlled. Alone. Also known as meth addiction."

On the inside, as we were paying for our Diet Coke and snacks, I spotted this display of pot smoking paraphernalia under the cash register:

Larger ImageDrug paraphernalia on sale in the same gas station

My first thought was that they were sending a mixed message, but perhaps the real message they are trying to send is "Don't use crystal meth, because there are much safer drugs you can use, like marijuana."

There's been round-the-blawgosphere turmoil about Lee v. Lampert, in which the 9th Circuit basically said that the AEDPA's time limits for filing a habeas petition still apply even though pretty much everyone agrees that the defendant is actually innocent. That is, Lee is innocent, but he just didn't submit the paperwork on time. There's plenty of coverage by Gideon, C&F, Gamso, and Greenfield.

I think that unless the U.S. Supreme court overturns this ruling or the Governor steps in and moots the case with a pardon, this case is probably headed for some crazy legal shenanigans, as the defense tries to find a judge who will go along with some sort of pretextual constitutional issue that will allow the facts to be reconsidered so that justice can be done.

This tends to support my observation that the machinery of justice is missing an important part:

This is an ridiculous situation. Our court system apparently has no simple, honest method of dealing with the possibility that a criminal court followed all the correct procedures and -- perhaps due to facts unavailable at the time -- still reached an erroneous conclusion.

The closest we come to such a method is probably a habeas petition, which is going to be a problem...

I haven't been writing as much as I'd like to lately, but fortunately, there's plenty of other good stuff to read. Mirriam Seddiq has a terrific article about what she's learned practicing criminal law in several different jurisdictions. Her description of Baltimore (and the Baltimore police) is priceless.

Following up on my earlier post about the Supreme Court ruling against Chicago's handgun ban in McDonald v. Chicago, the case has been sent back to the lower court to figure out the details, so it's not quite time to arm ourselves yet.

An attorney involved in the case advised against Chicagoans running out and purchasing handguns until a lower court rules on the matter later this summer.

"Obviously I'm elated by the court's decision, said attorney David Sigale. "(But) I think it would be prudent to wait."

Sigale said he expects the U.S. District Court to take up the case again in the coming weeks and issue the city directives on the handgun ban and a number of specific ordinances regarding re-registration and pre-registration.

Naturally, Mayor Daley is planning to fight this:

Daley has scheduled a news conference for 1 p.m. today to discuss the ruling.  The City Council could consider new gun control measures as soon as Wednesday, Daley said last week.

City Hall has been drawing up plans after the justices heard arguments in the case in early March and appeared to indicate they would rule against the city.

In an interview with the Tribune, the mayor said his primary goal would be to protect police officers, paramedics and emergency workers from being shot when responding to an incident at a home.

It's nonsense to think that the loss of Chicago's handgun is going to endanger cops or any other first responders. Illinois will almost certainly keep its background check requirement, which means that only people with no significant criminal record will be able to possess a handgun legally. The aren't likely to suddenly commence a life of crime.

Let me put it another way: Last weekend in Chicago, 54 people were wounded by gunfire, 10 of them fatally. Since ordinary Chicago residents can't own handguns legally, most of those shots must have been fired by people who had guns in violation of Chicago's tough handgun ban. It's hard to imagine that more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens would have made things any worse.

"If the ban is overturned, we will see a lot of common-sense approaches in the city aimed at protecting first responders," Daley said. "We have to have some type of registry. If a first responder goes to an apartment, they need to know if that individual has a gun."

It sounds like the usual obstructive behavior. If the mayor can't make it illegal to own guns, he'll figure out a way to harass people who own guns legally. There will probably be lots of paperwork. As Scott Greenfield points out, this could drag on for decades, because the Supreme Court's ruling was remarkably lazy:

McDonald did one thing only, holding that the right enunciated in Heller applies to the states.  As with the mystery paragraph of Heller, the Court reiterated that the decision doesn't preclude regulation and limitation.  This leaves open the next hundred years of piecemeal litigation over each and every inch of imaginative legislation to see where the line is drawn.  We're so far away right now that we can't even see the line, no less know what the line precludes.

Heck, as Eugene Volokh points out, the Court hasn't even cleared up whether the right is truly fundamental, and whether limitations are subject to strict or intermediate scrutiny.  While these legal issues aren't particularly interesting to non-lawyers, they play a huge role in framing laws to restrict the applicability of Heller and its progeny.  More decisions needed to flesh out the right mean more years before anybody really understands what can and can't be done.

...

And if anybody doubts that McDonald is merely another baby step in a very, very long journey, consider that it took 214 pages to conclude that the right is incorporated.  Just wait until the Supremes have to struggle with some of the tougher questions, like whether children under the age of 6 months living in a home for which an application to possess a firearm has been made will have to pass a physical examination to demonstrate competency in firearms handling.  Yes, the possibilities are endless.

Meanwhile, getting back to Mayor Daley's rantings, this sentence gives pause for thought:

He said he also wants to save taxpayers from the financial cost of lawsuits if police shoot someone in the house because the officer felt threatened.

This is absurd. The courts know how to handle lawsuits over police shootings, and police officers have always been allowed to shoot when they reasonably feel their life is in danger. If the handgun ban is struck down, threatening a police officer with a gun will still be a crime, even if the gun is legally owned, and the police rules for use of force won't change, just has they haven't changed anywhere else in the country where people can own handguns.

What Mayor Daley is really worried about is that the City of Chicago has been paying out millions of dollars in damages for the illegal or dangerous conduct of its police officers, and Mayor Daley sees the impending fall of the handgun ban as an excuse to drum up some sort tort protection. It's incredibly cynical.

The Supreme Court has spoken:

Court rules for gun rights, strikes Chicago handgun ban.

In another dramatic victory for firearm owners, the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional Chicago, Illinois' 28-year-old strict ban on handgun ownership, a potentially far-reaching case over the ability of state and local governments to enforce limits on weapons.

So, anyone know how soon I'll be able to buy that pair of Desert Eagle 50s I've been wanting? They're so pretty.

I had a frustrating science discussion with a friend the other day. Somehow, our conversation had turned to the subject of cooking -- about which I know nearly nothing -- and my friend mentioned that someday he'd like to have an induction cooktop. He told me that when you place a pan on an induction cooker and turn it on, the food will begin to sizzle almost immediately.

To me that sounded like trouble. My intuition was that a fast-heating cooker would result in cooking temperatures that were way too high. I tried to explain why, but my grasp of physics and engineering is sketchy at best, and I wasn't able to get my point across.

Now that I've had time to think about it, and done some research, I think I know how to explain it. So I figured I'd post it here and maybe someone who understands the principles better will stumble on it and straighten me out.

The idea behind an induction cooktop is that the cooking pan is positioned right over an inductive electrical coil that's just under the surface of the cooktop. An oscillating current is passed through the coil, reversing direction a few thousand times a second. The current creates a magnetic field that oscillates at the same frequency. This field is just large enough to pass through the metal base of the pan, allowing the rising and collapsing magnetic fields to induce eddy currents. The metal of the pan has a natural electrical resistance, so the induced eddy currents cause the pan to heat up.

The advantage is that the cooking pan itself is the source of all the heat used to cook the food. There's no open flame or red-hot heating coil, and neither the cooktop nor the induction coil heats up. (The cooktop does come in contact with the heated pan, so it will warm up from conduction, but it's usually made of something that absorbs heat slowly.)

Imagine a pan sitting on a stove that hasn't been turned on. If the pan has been there a while, it should be at room temperature. This is not as simple a situation as it seems, because the pan isn't just at the same temperature as the room, it's also in thermal equilibrium with the room. That is, there is no net heat flow between the pan and the room, so the pan stays at a constant temperature.

This is not to say that the pan is thermally isolated from the room. The warm surface of the pan radiates heat out into the room, and the warm parts of the room radiate heat into the pan. Similarly, if any part of the pan is warmer than the air around it, heat will be conducted into the air, and vice versa. The point is that the pan and the room still exchange heat by the usual means -- radiation, conduction, convection -- it's just that the heat flowing into the pan is exactly matched by the heat flowing out of the pan.

This is a necessary condition for any object that is staying at a fixed temperature. If the heat flows in and out didn't match, the object would experience heating or cooling.

Now fire up the burner under the pan. The flame is a new source of heat that is transfered into the pan. However, simply turning on the burner does nothing to change the rate at which heat flows out of the pan. Since more heat is flowing in than out, the pan must heat up.

When the temperature of the pan rises, that affects the heat transfer between the pan and the surrounding room because a hotter pan will transfer more heat into the relatively cool room. Since the room stays at about the same temperature, the rate of heat transfer back into the pan stays about the same. (When you cook something, the kitchen probably does heat up a bit, but only by a few degrees, which is negligible compared to the cooking pan, which heats up hundreds of degrees.)

Eventually, the rate at which heat is shed to the surrounding room will be high enough to exactly offset the new heat flowing into the pan from the burners. At this point the pan will once again be in thermal equilibrium with its environment -- which now includes the burner -- and the temperature of the pan will stop changing.

The process is pretty much the same for an induction heated pan, except that instead of heat flowing in from the burner, the heat is generated within the material of the pan by induction. The pan's temperature still starts increasing, and stops only when the temperature of the pan increases to the point where heat transfer to the room is high enough to exactly offset the rate at which heat is being generated in the pan.

(I'm pretty much hand-waving away the effects of the food in the pan by assuming that there's just enough food to give us that sizzle we were talking about. Maybe it's just a few slices of bacon.)

Over a broad range of conditions, the amount by which an object changes temperature is proportional to the amount of heat energy transferred. So, for example, raising the temperature of an object by 5 degrees will require a transfer of 5 times as much heat energy as raising its temperature one degree.

Similarly, the rate at which the temperature changes is usually proportional to the rate at which energy is transfered. Any change in energy over time is called power, which is usually measured in watts. The higher the power, the more energy is transferred per second. So the less time it takes to heat an object to a given temperature, the greater the power of the heating mechanism.

For our purposes, let's assume that a typical gas stove can heat a pan to the sizzle temperature in one minute. Let's also say that when my friend says an induction cooker makes the food sizzle almost instantly, he means within 5 seconds. Since that's 1/12 the time it takes the gas burner, that means that the induction coil must produce heat in the pan at 12 times the rate at which the burner transfers heat.

Actually, since the shorter time span allows less time for the heat to flow out of the pan into the room, quicker heating is also a more efficient way to reach the same temperature. The magnitude of this effect is very dependent on the system under consideration. In the interest of keeping the math simple, I'll assume that the induction system has 10 times the power of the burner.

Now let's pull another number out of thin air and assume the burner is transfering heat at 1000 watts. Then the induction coil must transfer heat at the rate of 10,000 watts to achieve the desired heating speed.

That gets the pan to the sizzle point, but the heating process doesn't necessarily stop, since the heating only stops when the pan is in thermal equilibrium with its environment, which now includes a 10000 watt burner.

As near as I can tell from a little Googling, on a typical gas stove, a dry pan can heat to about 500°F. In other words, if the burner is transfering heat to the pan at 1000 watts, then when the pan reaches 500°F, it's transfering 1000 watts to it's environment. So how hot does the pan have to get to shed 10 times as much energy?

It's hard to say, because it depends on details of the heat transfer mechanism, which I'm not very sure of. However, since a gas burner heats a pan hot enough to cook food, I think the induction stove with 10 times the power is going to get way too hot for normal cooking.

I've since looked up a little bit of thermodynamics and learned that in the worst case, getting rid of 10 times the heat could require a full 10-fold increase in temperature difference between the pan and the room, meaning the pan wouldn't stop heating until it hit about 3000°F. That's more than enough to turn the pan into a pool of white-hot molten metal, melting its way down through the stove.

On the other hand, I think the best case would be if the process is dominated by radiative cooling, in which case the radiated energy increases as the fourth power of the the temperature, which my rough calculations show would require a temperature of only 860°F. That's still way above normal cooking temperature. If you turned the lights out, you'd see a faint red glow like a branding iron.

When I was trying to explain my concerns to my friend, I didn't present it nearly as clearly as I have here (and I realize this is still not a model of clarity). He didn't see the problem, and he kept pointing out the induction process heated the pan much more efficiently than an open flame, so not as much energy was needed.

But that misses the point. The amount of waste heat is irrelevant to the problem. In order to heat the pan 10 times faster, the induction cooker simply must pump energy into it 10 times as fast. This means that when the pan stabilizes at its equilibrium temperature, it's going to have to emit 10 times as much energy into the surrounding room. This far higher energy emission rate can only occur if the equilibrium temperature is also far higher.

My point was that something was missing from our mental model of how induction cooking worked, because our mental model predicted a top-end cooking temperature far too high for normal cooking. No engineer would design an induction cooktop to overheat food so much. There's no point to it.

We did manage to come up with a couple of theories. My friend pointed out that induction cookers only heat the bottom of the pan. This means the burners need less than 10 times the power to get to the sizzle point 10 times as fast, because they are bringing less of the pan to that temperature.

My theory was that the induced eddy currents would occur on the surface of the pan, the inside and the outside, without directly heating the interior thickness of the metal. Since the food sizzles when the surface touching it reaches the sizzle point, this again reduces the amount of mass required to be heated, thus reducing the required energy and requiring less power to reach the sizzle point quickly.

A bit of research on the web seems to indicate that both of these theories are true. Induction cookers don't heat the pan sides directly, and eddy currents do indeed hug the surface. However, it turns out that neither of those is the real solution to the overheating problem.

When heated by an induction cooker, each type of pan reacts differently, depending on its shape, size, and construction materials. To achieve optimum cooking and energy transfer, an induction cooktop has to be able to adapt its performance to each pan. Fortunately, the effectiveness of a particular frequency can be detected by measuring the rate of energy consumption of the induction coil, and the induction wave can be modulated until the energy transfer is at the desired level.

The point is that, contrary to what I had been imagining, an induction cooktop is not just a coil that blasts out a magnetic wave. The inductor's resonance circuit includes a switched power supply that is controlled by a microcontroller -- a small computer -- that continually monitors the coil current and adjusts the induction wave form from moment to moment according to a programmed formula.

Once you have a computer on board, lots of things become possible, like changing the wave if the pan is moved to a new position, or shutting off the power when the pan is removed.

Or detecting when pan overheats. In a modern induction cooktop, each induction coil has a temperature sensor that detects when the cooktop, and therefore the pan, gets too hot, at which point it cuts off the power until the pan cools.

Hey, does everybody remember those viral dance videos from OK Go? They did them for songs like "A Million Ways" (the one in the back yard) and "Here It Goes Again" (the one with the treadmills). If not, you might want to follow those links to take a look (they won't let me embed them).

Those are great fun, and I have a lot of respect for the amount of work OK Go puts into entertaining their fans...

But now take a look at the Nicholas Brothers in this scene from Stormy Weather:

Fred Astaire once called this "the greatest dance number ever filmed."

I think if you wanted to do something like this today, you'd probably have to use CGI...

A little while ago, my wife and I noticed that our ragdoll cat, Dozer, had taken to sleeping on the floor right in front of our china cabinet. We wanted to make him more comfortable, so we put down a cat pillow for him, right in the spot where he liked to sleep.

Anyone who owns a cat could've predicted how that would turn out:

Larger ImageDozer Meets the Cat Pillow

People complain about reporters asking asking crazy questions, but those are sometimes the ones that get the most interesting results.

For example, in the video below, the reporter goes through the trouble of setting up an ambush interview on a Congressman, and then asks him a really dumb generic question: "Do you fully support the Obama agenda?"

I mean, seriously, couldn't he have phoned that one in? Ambush interviews are supposed to be for hitting people with questions they really don't want to hear, like "We have a witness who says you sold your BP stock because you received inside information from the CEO. How do you respond, Senator?" or "Is it true you just spent a week in Argentina with your mistress?"

A good ambush interview is wasted on a pointless question like "Do you fully support the Obama agenda?" which any seasoned politician can answer with a platitude like "My voting record speaks for itself." There's no way you can get a good story out of that.

Unless, that is, you get a response like this guy got from Democratic representative Bob Etheridge:

Of course, this is all over the internet. Yet, as Ethical Alarmist Jack Marshall points out, the news media is missing the story:

Today, the day after a video surfaced showing North Carolina Congressman Bob Etheridge grabbing, restraining, and wrapping his hand around the neck of a young man who dared to ask him a question on a Washington D.C. sidewalk, "The Daily Beast's" #4 story was the revelation that former Ebay CEO and current G.O.P. candidate for governor of California once shoved an Ebay subordinate in a moment of anger and paid six figures in damages. The story about a sitting U.S. Congressman assaulting a U.S. citizen without provocation on a public street doesn't appear anywhere in the liberal-leaning news aggregation site's news summary.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post relegated coverage of the Etheridge attack to its blogs, most of which made the focus of their coverage the "mystery" of the assaulted student's identity and that of his companion. This theme was picked up elsewhere too: Who were these guys? Were they Republican operatives? Right Wing hit men disguised as students? Was this a plot?

Here is the complete list of people who could have been the victims of Etheridge 's assault whose identity and motives would change his culpability: nobody. It doesn't matter if the student Etheridge assaulted was really Karl Rove on his knees, or Ann Coulter in a mask, or Lindsay Lohan in a desperate cry for help. It doesn't make one bit of difference. A U.S. Congressman assaulted a citizen in public.

Really, shouldn't that be the big story?

Some people have suggested that this is a Republican dirty trick of some kind, buttressing their arguments with the fact that the face of the on-camera interviewer is blurred out, and he has not been identified. As some Democratic party hack puts it:

"Motives matter, and I think you can see who was behind this," said DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse just now. "This was a Republican party tracking operation. If it wasn't a party tracker or intern, why is the face blurred and why is the source hidden? You know if it had been a right wing blog, they'd identify themselves and they'd be booking this person on TV all day. Republicans know if they admit their involvement in this game of gotcha it will undermine their credibility. One minute this guy is interviewing a member of Congress on camera and the next a video is released with his face blurred out? If that doesn't tell you this is a Republican Party hatchet job nothing will."

I was inclined to buy this scenario at first. I know if I had been the interviewer and gotten a video this great, I sure wouldn't have taken my name off of it. It does seem a little suspicious.

(Note that I was just buying the scenario, not the argument -- assaulting people on the public street doesn't become okay just because they're members of the opposition party.)

But then, I got to thinking...If this was a setup, what exactly was the plan here? How could these supposed Republican party operatives have known the Congressman would go off like that?

And here's another one:

"It was pure Gotcha, try to trap a congressman, because they refused to tell them who they were, what school they were from," [Democratic Consultant Brad] Crone said. "And if you're working on a project, tell the truth."

Crone's got a point. It's not required by law or anything, but most real reporters give their names and the name of the organization they work for. I know I try to do it when I interview someone, but I sometimes forget. Maybe the kid forgot too.

Or maybe he intentionally withheld his identity.

But so what? If this was a "Gotcha," what was the plan? How was asking a simple, vapid question a "trap"? Most public figures would have politely asked for a name and then walked off if they got no response. Again, for this to be some sort of Republican plot, these two guys would have had to somehow predict that Etheridge would go nuts like this.

I'm not buying it. Etheridge assaulted some guy on the street. That's the story.

Update: Jamison Koehler discusses the legal definition of assault in D.C.

Nick Gillespie notes that Peter McWilliams died ten years ago today. McWilliams was a resister of the War On Drugs. He was also one of its casualties.

McWilliams was very sick with AIDS and cancer, and the medicines he used made him nauseated, which he was able to ameliorate by smoking marijuana. The DEA charged McWilliams with various crimes in connection with a medical marijuana operation. Forbidden by the judge from mentioning his medical condition in court, he was forced to plead guilty and hope for leniency. While out on $250,000 bond for sentencing, and refraining from using marijuana as a condition of the bond secured by his mother's house, he apparently vomited and choked to death.

I only know of McWilliams through his amazing book, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Country. It's a passionate cry for freedom, the simple human freedom to do what we want as long as no one else gets hurt. Go ahead and click the link. That's not an Amazon page, that's the entire book, posted online for free the way McWilliams wanted it.

This book has been a huge influence on my personal moral philosophy. I had already come to an intellectual conclusion that things like the War on Drugs were wrong, but I hadn't really internalized the idea. Then I read a section in Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do where McWilliams describes getting a ticket for a traffic violation and later getting busted for smoking marijuana. He points out that the traffic violation presented a genuine danger to his fellow human beings, but using drugs harmed no one other than perhaps the user, so despite what the cops and the legislature and almost everyone thought, the traffic violation was the greater crime. In fact, using drugs was no crime at all. I realized that this crazy idea was something I could believe. And it changed everything.

The other thing I remember about McWillaims is his astonishment at the types of people who fought on the dark side:

I write these things and feel myself in mortal combat with a gnarly monster; then I remember the human faces of the kind people who tried to make me comfortable with small talk as they went through my belongings as neatly as they could. Then I remember, painfully, that the War on Drugs is a war fought by decent Americans against other decent Americans, and these people rifling through my belongings really were America's best -- bright young people willing to die for their country in covert action. It takes a special kind of person for that, and every Republic must have a generous number of them in order to survive.

But instead of our best and our brightest being trained to hunt down terrorist bombs or child abductors -- to mention but two useful examples -- our misguided government is using all that talent to harass and arrest Blacks, Hispanics, the poor, and the sick -- the casualties in the War on Drugs, the ones that, to quote Leonard Cohen again, "sank beneath your wisdom like a stone." It is the heart of the evil of a prohibition law in a free country. After all, picking on someone with AIDS and cancer is a little redundant, don't you think?

On the way out, one of the DEA agents said, "Have a nice day."

I believe the comment was sincere.

I never know what to make of that. Oh, I understand what McWilliams was saying, and I think it's probably true. It's a mistake to think these people are stupid, and it's probably unhelpful to think of them as evil. But sometimes that just makes it all the more hopeless: How can these "decent Americans" not understand that they are hurting people for no reason?

Peter's gone now, but in his short time on earth he influenced a lot of people, and his ideals live on in so many of us. I wish he was still here to see some of it.

Chances are, you don't enjoy movies as much as you think you will. That's because movie tickets present us consumers with a tricky problem of incomplete knowledge. We want to buy tickets to movies we'll enjoy, but the only sure way to know how much we'll enjoy a movie is to watch it, and we can't do that unless we've already bought a ticket.

So we try to make an educated guess. We watch trailers, read reviews, and talk to friends who've already seen it, hoping to get enough information to make a good estimate of how much we'd enjoy it if we bought a ticket. Then we compare our estimate of our enjoyment to the cost of the movie -- including the price of the ticket, the cost of snacks, and the value of our time -- and decide whether or not to give the movie a chance.

We'll never be able to estimate exactly how much we'll enjoy a movie we haven't seen -- we just don't have enough information -- so there will always be an error factor. That is, our estimate of our enjoyment is conceptually equal to our actual enjoyment plus a random error factor (which can be positive or negative).

If the error factor is random, you'd think that would mean we would find ourselves enjoying movies more than we expected or less than we expected with equal probability. But it turns out that that only happens if we ignore our estimates and just go see every movie we can. We get a different result if we only go see movies for which we estimate a high enjoyment value, because the movies we overestimate will tend to have a higher estimated enjoyment value than the movies we underestimate.

For example, if you estimate your enjoyment of 100 movies and split them into two groups by rank -- the highest 50 and the lowest 50 -- the higher group is likely to have more overestimations, and the lower group is likely to have more underestimations. So if you go and see all the movies in the top half, you will see more movies which you overestimated. In other words, you will see movies which you enjoy less than your estimate predicted you would. As I said at the top of this post, you don't enjoy movies as much as you think you will.

This is a variation on a phenomenon called the winner's curse. The name comes from the observation that in an auction, the person who bids highest is likely to be the person who overestimates the value of the auctioned item the most.

I was reminded of all this a few days ago by a post I first saw at Gideon's a public defender blog about a new American Psychological Association paper which shows that lawyers overestimate their chances at trial which has made the rounds of the legal blogosphere. Here's a bit from the abstract of the paper:

The study investigated the realism in predictions by a sample of attorneys (n=481) across the United States who specified a minimum goal to achieve in a case set for trial. They estimated their chances of meeting this goal by providing a confidence estimate. After the cases were resolved, case outcomes were compared with the predictions. Overall, lawyers were overconfident in their predictions

This makes sense as another example of the winner's curse. Lawyers and their clients are more likely to take a case to trial when their estimate of the outcome is high, but because overestimations result in higher estimates, those are precisely the cases which they are most likely to be overestimating. Whereas the cases they underestimate are more likely to look like losers, so they're more likely to settle before trial.

In other words, the cases lawyers take to trial are those in which they have the most confidence, but those are also likely to be the cases in which they are most overconfident.

Unfortunately for my nice little story, the winner's curse is also something of a paradox. The problem is that lawyers presumably know about the winner's curse -- maybe not by that name, but the concept isn't exactly a dark secret. More importantly, the lawyers will have experienced the winner's curse. They will see the outcomes of the cases the take to trial, and they should be able to use that knowledge to adjust their estimates to eliminate the curse. And yet this recent study shows that doesn't happen.

It's not just lawyers. Economists have studied the winner's curse in artificial simulations and in the real world for years, and there is some evidence that people consistently fail to compensate for it. It's a bit of a mystery. The most obvious non-economic explanation is that people are a bit stupid, but that's unsatisfying because it accomplishes too much: Once you assume that people are stupid, you can use that to explain any behavior you don't understand.

The APA paper doesn't mention the winner's curse, but a section called Metacognitive Realism does discuss several possible causes for overconfidence: It could be a side effect of zealous representation, a result of the need to display confidence to attract clients, distortion due to the perception of control, or simple wishful thinking.

I don't know enough about psychology to begin to guess whether any of those theories are correct, but I know enough about economics to notice something that's missing. Lawyers are supposed to represent the interests of the client, but they wouldn't be human if they didn't also consider their own interests. Depending on the fee arrangements, many lawyers get paid more when a case goes to trial, which gives them an incentive to go to trial when it wouldn't be best for the client.

So if lawyers are following the path of higher earnings, we'd expect the rate of overestimation to be higher for lawyers who make more by going to trial.

The APA study doesn't report fee arrangements directly, but we can try to make a few guesses from the data in the paper's Table 2, which I used to prepare this data:

Success rate	Criminal prosecution	Criminal defense	Civil plaintiff	Civil defense
Estimated	72.8	50.1	65.1	65.1
Actual	67.1	43.7	51.6	62.6
% Overestimated	8	15	26	4

Some criminal defense attorneys have a fee structure that brings in more money when they take a case to trial, but as far as I know all prosecutors work for a fixed salary, so the overestimation rate should be higher for criminal defense attorneys than for prosecutors, and indeed the data seems to confirm this, with defense attorneys overestimating their chances of achieving their goals by 15% to the prosecutors' 8%.

For the civil bar, I'd expect to see a similar result, since plaintiffs' attorneys often work on a contingency basis (which aligns their interests with their clients) but civil defense attorneys usually charge by the hour and therefore make more by going to trial. However, the data goes the other way, with plaintiff's lawyers wildly overestimating their chances at 26%, while civil defense lawyers only miss by 4%.

Whatever's going on, I guess it's more complicated than my simple economic theory. Or maybe I'm misunderstand the data. Or else I'm misunderstanding how lawyers earn money from legal work. In any case, it's getting late and I'm going to bed.

Heck, maybe plaintiff's lawyers and criminal defense lawyers are all just romantic dreamers...

Jeff Gamso has a fascinating post about the probabilities behind a DNA match.

If you do felony criminal law (from either side of the aisle) and I tell you the number is 6.17 quadrillion, you probably assume that I'm talking about DNA.

The number will reflect just how unlikely it is that the DNA in the whatever left at the scene could have come from anyone other than the defendant. There are four things you need to know about that number.

If you want to know what those four things are, read Jeff's post. I want to talk about something else. It's that number, 6.17 quadrillion. There's an important proviso that's missing, although Jeff touches on it at the end of his post:

Next time you're on a bus or a plane or a train or in a restaurant or movie theater or anywhere where there are a bunch of people, look around.

You never know when your not-twin, the one whose DNA profile is the same as yours, might be in the crowd. Despite the odds of 1 in 6.17 quadrillion. Hell, it might be one of the jurors.

If you pick a person at random off the street -- or one of the random readers of this blog -- the odds of someone else having that person's DNA are not 1 in 6.17 quadrillion. They're only about 1 in 500. That's because about 1 person in 500 was born as one of a pair of identical twins.

Identical twins occur when a single zygote in the mother's womb splits into two separate zygotes which develop into two separate individuals. Since all the cells in the zygotes trace back to a single zygote and therefore a single fertilized egg, they have essentially the same DNA.

All of this makes me wonder why this problem doesn't come up more often in news stories about trials. If a criminal defendant has an identical twin, claiming he committed the crime would explain the DNA evidence. As a bonus, it would also explain things like photo arrays, line-ups, and lots of other eyewitness testimony. I guess a defendant might be reluctant to accuse his closest brother of a crime, but I would think that a pair of identical twins creates enough reasonable doubt to protect them both.

I've heard that claiming someone else commited the crime is sometimes called the SODDI defense, which stands for Some Other Dude Did It. I'd think we'd occasionally hear about the METDI defense: My Evil Twin Did It.

Some of the lawyers on my blogroll have been poking fun at a guy named Jack Marshall. He calls himself an "ethicist," runs a consulting firm called ProEthics, and has a blog called Ethics Alarms. I don't really know anything about him, but I thought his blog might make a good source of stuff for me to write about.

For the most part, his blog turns out to be about ethical situations I don't find interesting -- baseball, politics, frivolous lawsuits -- but then I found one from a few days ago that I can work with:

Ethics Pop Quiz: "What's Unethical About Auctioning Intern Positions?"

Are you ready to exercise those ethics brain cells?

The News Alert blog is reporting that the Huffington Post auctioned off an intern position for $9000, and another internship--three weeks of it with Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways, and three weeks with hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons -- was auctioned off for $85,000, to benefit Simmons's charity, Rush Philanthropic.

Question: Is there anything unethical about this, and if so, what?

My answer will not surprise my regular readers: No, there is nothing unethical about this. Neither the organizations providing the internships nor the people bidding for them are being coerced. The transaction would not have gone through unless all parties found it acceptable. Since everyone involved likes the outcome, there's no ethical objection.

Marshall, however, sees a problem:

Answer: It is unethical to have interns do substantive work without paying them, and it is more unethical to make them pay for the privilege of being exploited.

How did HuffPo or Virgin make people pay? It's hard to imagine a more voluntary market activity than casting bids in an auction.

When a for-profit organization allows an intern to work without compensation, it is 1) taking advantage of workers desperate for experience, 2) skirting the minimum wage laws, and frequently 3) using unpaid interns to take a job that an unemployed worker could fill.

Wow. That single sentence has an amazing amount of muddled thinking. Start with the qualifier "for-profit." None of the issues he mentions in the rest of the sentence depend on the for-profit or non-profit status of the organization. Marshall is saying these interns are being exploited, but by singling out for-profit organizations, he's implying that it's okay for non-profit organizations to exploit people. I suspect he thinks there's nothing wrong with non-profit organizations accepting volunteers, and he's trying to hand-wave the distinction.

The first issues he raises, "taking advantage of workers desperate for experience," is probably the strongest one, in the sense that not paying people for productive work seems exploitive to a lot of people. However, the fact that people have volunteered for these positions, and even paid for them, implies that they must believe they are getting something valuable in return. I think "taking advantage of workers desperate for experience" is probably better read as "providing experience to people desperate to acquire it."

The second issue, "skirting the minimum wage laws," is a mind-boggling muddle all by itself. First of all, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're skirting the laws, aren't you obeying them? Second, the minimum wage laws have the same logical form as the ethical issue itself, so appealing to them is a form of begging the question. Third, it implicitly assumes that anything illegal is also unethical, which seems to make it impossible to ever change the law.

The third issue, "using unpaid interns to take a job that an unemployed worker could fill," is the silliest of them all. What possible change could we make to the intern's terms of employment that would not take a job that an unemployed worker could fill? Even if the company paid their interns 10 million dollars per hour, the other guy would still be out of a job. And if we give the intern's job to the other guy, doesn't that leave the intern unemployed?

If the internship has no real educational value and consists of medial tasks, it's unfair to the intern for that reason too.

If the internship has no real educational value and consists of menial tasks, don't you think the intern would quit? I'm sure people wanted these internships because they expected to get something out of them.

The fact that someone agrees to be mistreated doesn't relieve a person or an organization from the ethical obligation not to mistreat them. Just because you know you can get someone to work for unfair compensation doesn't make the compensation fair.

I'm not sure why you need a concept of "fair" beyond the fact that people are willing to work for it. To put it another way, if the people who accept the compensation think it's fair enough for them, who are we to question their judgement?

Auctioning off the exploitive internship to the highest bidder just compounds the unfairness. The interns are now being chosen according to financial means rather than merit. Whether or not the money goes to charity, this is ethically indistinguishable from a bribe or a kickback.  "Okay: we have ten good candidates for this internship. Who's willing to pay the most for it? Cash only!" This method of choosing interns would be unethical for paid internships.

What makes bribes unethical is that the person receiving the bribe is dishonoring a duty. A facilities manager who picks a roofing contractor because he got a kickback is betraying the interests of his employer in finding a good roofer, and a building inspector who overlooks faulty wiring because of a bribe is betraying the city that pays him to keep buildings safe. In the case of the auctioned internships, no one is being betrayed. A professional ethicist should be able to spot a distinction like this.

I imagine that spending time at a major media organization or hanging out with captains of industry is a pretty educational experience. I'm sure plenty of people are willing to pay for those experiences. If there's an ethics issue here, it's not that people paid for internships, it's whether or not they got good value for their money...which is the same question we have about any purchase.

Some of you may have noticed that Windypundit was unavailable for parts of Saturday.

It turns out that my hosting provider migrated Windypundit to a new server sometime in the last week or so. Normally, they'd also change the entries in the nameserver, which is the server that provides the link between the "windypundit.com" domain name and the IP address of the server that hosts my content. However, for reasons too boring to go into, I use a third-party company for nameservice, so my hosting provider has no way to make the change.

They are aware of this issue, and sometime last week they sent me an email explaining exactly what changes I had to make...which I kept meaning to do.

Anyway, for much of the past week, when you or I pointed our browsers at windypundit.com, we were using the old server, not the new one. That lasted until sometime on Saturday, when they finally shutdown the old server, and Windypundit went off the air.

I've changed the nameserver entries to point to the new server, and that's where you're reading this. There was still a problem, however. You see, the copy of Windypundit on the new server was made several days ago, so it didn't have anything recent, including my post about the Tweet-up meeting at the Fairmont hotel, the comments to that post, and drafts of several other posts I had started.

By poking around in the Google and Bing page caches, I managed to put the tweet-up meeting post back together, along with everyone's comments (although the dates are off). But since they were never published where Google can find them, I can't think of any way to get back the drafts of my new blog posts.

Bummer.

Update: I probably also lost emails from the past week too, so if you were trying to send me something, please send it again.

I stopped by the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Chicago after the InsideCounsel Superconference today and finally met the man, Scott Greenfield, who's a lot friendlier in person than you might think.

Larger ImageAmy Derby and Scott Greenfield

The young lady with him is Chicago Twitter sensation Amy Derby. That's probably not how she'd like to be introduced, but I don't know much about her other than that she has almost 5000 Twitter followers and everybody seems to know her. If you follow Amy's tweets, I should say that in real life she's exactly how you think she'd be.

Oh, and all these other people were there too:

Larger ImageTwitter meet-up at InsideCounsel's 10th Annual SuperConference

From left to right, they're Dave Gulbransen (maybe), some guy (I'm bad at remembering names), Ashley Scheck (I can see her badge in the original image), some woman, a guy, another woman, another guy (somebody please help me), Kashmir Hill from AboveTheLaw.com (badge), another guy, Kevin Thompson from Cyberlaw (maybe), Ed from Blawg Review (or just some guy who's using Ed's identity to get chicks), Molly McDonough from ABA Journal (she gave me her card), and Adrian Dayton, best known for being Adrian Dayton.

Update: Kevin Thompson helped fill the blank spots in my memory. Here's the list: Dave Gulbransen, Chris Schneider, Ashley Scheck, Jane Simon, Jeremy Kissel, Gwynne Monahan, R. David Donoghue, Kashmir Hill, Chris McGeehan, Kevin Thompson, Ed from Blawg Review, Molly McDonough, and Adrian Dayton.

Update: In a comment, Mirriam says "I still mentally draw in Greenfield's mustache." I say, why do it mentally when there's Photoshop? Hope this helps:

Larger ImageScott Greenfield Touched Up To Match Our Expectations

I seem to have developed a talent for offending people at Reason magazine. I think I might have annoyed Radley Balko with this post from last year, and now I think I can add Nick Gillespie to the list.

In my previous post, I was a little peeved at Reason for not producing a better article for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. After writing that post, I emailed both the authors of the offending piece, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, to encourage them to explain why the piece turned out the way it did.

Much to my surprise, Nick Gillespie answered:

Mark,
 
Now that my parents have been dead for over a decade, it is always a relief to know that I am still capable of seriously disappointing somebody!
 
Based on traffic volume and a desire to weed out gratuitously abusive comments (almost all of which revolved around Mohammed either fucking or getting fucked), we closed the comments to Matt's and my blog posts introducing the contest--we continued that with this as well. Additionally, in what was probably an incorrect anticipation of server-crushing traffic (alas!), we decided to host our winners page on our backbone server, which is less prone to server squirrels shutting down.
 
Yrs,
 
Nick Gillespie
Editor in Chief
Reason.tv and Reason.com

Ah, Geez. That sounds right doesn't it? And now that I think about it, I'll bet that a lot of the drawings weren't much better than the comments. I guess that makes sense.

What the hell?

As you probably know, today is Everybody Draw Mohammed day. In case you're wondering, I'm not participating. Mostly because I couldn't think of anything clever to draw. And you probably wouldn't have recognized it if I tried. In case you haven't noticed, Windypundit doesn't have a cartoon section. There's a reason for that.

On the other hand, I was looking forward to Reason magazine's post on the subject. They've been asking people to send them drawings of Mohammed for about a month, and I wanted to check them out. So I waited, and waited, and waited...until finally, late in the afternoon, they posted this.

What the hell? They say they received over 190 images, but they just picked three winners and wrote a long article. Where are the other 187 images? I thought I'd get to see them all.

As for the winners, I think the first one is kind of dumb, the second one is pretty funny, and the third is absolutely brilliant. But there's a problem with all of them: They're not really pictures of Mohammed. Granted, none of the Mohammed drawings are pictures of Mohammed because nobody knows what he looked like: You only know it's Mohammed becasue of the context (which is kind of the point of these three winning images).

Still, if people are going to celebrate free speech by drawing Mohammed, I would have expected the images to be a little more in-your-face offensive, like the original images here. Or this.

The post is a little strange for a couple of other reasons as well. First, it's hosted on Amazon's storage server at this URL: http://reason-contest.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html. What, did they think it would get so many hits that their server would crash? Maybe if they had all the images, but not with this weak collection.

Second, like most Reason articles, this one was announced in Reason's Hit & Run blog when it went up. But unlike every other post I've seen there, this one doesn't allow comments.

What the hell is going on at Reason? Are they owned by Comedy Central now?

Update: Got an answer from the boss.

Heh. Looks like Mary Beth Buchanan lost her primary bid in Pennsylvania's 4th Congressional District. It was a 67 to 33 percent blow-out in favor of her opponent, Keith Rothfus. I don't know anything about Rothfus, but Buchanan is a reprehensible human being:

Buchanan promoted her eight years as Western Pennsylvania's top federal prosecutor even though opponents ridiculed her for a failed corruption case against former Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht and her conviction of famed marijuana advocate Tommy Chong for selling bongs online.

She's also done a lot of other useless crap, like the first obscenity prosecutions in 20 years and railroading Dr. Barnard Rottschaefer for supposedly prescribing too much Oxycontin. She's a winner of Radley Balko's Worst Prosecutor of the Year award.

I'd like to think this is the last we'll hear of her, but I suspect she'll be around to haunt us for a while. At best, she'll switch sides and end up running the white collar defense department for some big New York or D.C. lawfirm, where "white collar defense" is defined as "dealing the client to the federal prosecutor faster than anyone else."

More likely, she'll hang around the fringes of the Republican party until someone gives her a job again, perhaps Drug Czar for the next Republican president. And I wouldn't be too surprised if we start seeing a lot of her on Court TV and Fox News. 

I thought this was a joke, but it looks like they're serious. This just might be the dumbest idea on the internet.

Stephen Baldwin of the famous "Baldwin Brothers" Hollywood clan is a veteran actor who has starred in over 60 films and TV shows. He is no stranger to the Hollywood life of glitz, glamour and the public eye.

In 2002, he had an experience that changed his life forever. He became a Born Again Christian, giving his life to Jesus Christ. Over the next few years, he became very vocal about his faith, using his spotlight to boldly preach the gospel. However, because of his convictions it has caused him the loss of many jobs and the most recently, a highly publicized bankruptcy.

He has been publicly ridiculed and insulted by people who think that he has been abandoned by God. A simple search through the internet will reveal that people not only mock Stephen, but mock God.

In response to this (with the permission of Stephen's ministry President Daniel Southern) we have established RestoreStephenBaldwin.org. A privately funded and managed website. Our vision is to see Stephen Baldwin publicly restored in front of millions. Stephen's platform will increase allowing him to reach even more people with the Gospel and God will get all of the glory. Publicly.

...

Everyone knows that God restored Job, but do they understand the mechanism of his restoration? Job was restored by the people. By "All Who Knew Him". This website was created to see a rebirth of that mechanism. If the people of God come together and each give a small "Token Gift" we can see a massive restoration of a Christian public figure and all the glory will go to God. Its simple, will you take part in the second ever All Who Know Him event?

Uh. No.

If you feel inspired to give money for a good purpose, but propping up a B-list celebrity has-been isn't your idea of charity, the Pacific Garden Mission could probably put your money to better use.

Update: Oh wow. As of May 9th, they took the site down. Possibly because of this video. Pussies. 

In my previous post about illegal immigration, I asserted that,

What illegal immigration amounts to is taking your turn when you're not supposed to. It's the moral equivalent of fishing without a permit, or running a red light when there's no other traffic.

That brought the following response from commenter "mahtso":

"Arizona is the busiest entry point for illegal immigrants. State and federal investigators estimate that their fees generate between $1.7 billion and $2.5 billion for smuggling rings." The Arizona Republic (azcentral.com) July 2, 2008.

To me, this is a far cry from running a red light.

The difference is that I was talking about the illegal immigrants themselves, whereas mahtso and the Arizona Republic are talking about the criminal enterprises that spring up to smuggle them into the United States. Since the illegal immigrants are a source of funds for the criminal enterprise, they are obviously somewhat responsible for it. But they're not the only ones responsible, because illegal immigration follows a sad pattern that we've all seen before.

Consider that if I feel like buying some beer, my money goes to the fine folks at my local Foremost Liquors. Or my local Jewel grocery store. Or Walgreens or CVS or White Hen or 7-Eleven. But if this was 90 years ago, back when booze was illegal under Prohibition, my beer money would have gone to a bunch of Chicago mobsters.

That's the problem with our current immigration policy. We've taken away the legal avenues of immigration from many potential immigrants, so they are turning to criminals for help. It's bad for everybody except the criminals. But none of this would be a problem if we made legal immigration easier. Who needs to hire a coyote to sneak them across the border when Greyhound does it faster, cheaper, and safer?

This is not exactly a radical proposal. Keep in mind that for most of this country's history, immigrants simply got off the boat, went through a brief interview and maybe a medical checkup for dangerous contagions, and that was it. Welcome to the new world.

To fix the problems with our current immigration system, we wouldn't have to go quite that far, and we could certainly keep our current practices of screening for people who pose threats to public health or national security. All I'd like is for us to get rid of the arbitrary annual quotas that force otherwise acceptable immigrants to wait so long for their turn to enter.It's these long waits -- often five to seven years, but effectively forever for low-skilled workers without family members already in the U.S. -- that encourage many potential immigrants to seek illegal methods of entry.

Eliminating the quotas would simplify and speed up the immigration process because immigrants would not have to prove -- and immigration authorities would not have to verify -- the various family and employment connections that are used to determine which waiting list the immigrants belong in. If we could get the immigration approval process down to 30-90 days, I'd think most immigrants would take the legal route into our country.

This might even improve national security. As mahtso pointed out, smuggling people into the United States is big business. This means that any terrorists who want to sneak across the border have a vast criminal enterprise to help them out. But if we make legal immigration easy, the border smuggling operations will dry up, and terrorists will find it that much harder to sneak in.

Changing the immigration process would lead to a surge in immigration as the next several years worth of immigrants enter all at once (although we could phase it in slowly if necessary), but keep in mind that illegal immigrants who are already here might be more interested in returning home if they knew they could come back whenever they wanted.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about an immigration analogy I read on another site. I don't want to repeat the whole thing, but here's the key part I didn't like:

Let me see if I correctly understand the thinking behind these protests. Let's say I break into your house. Let's say that when you discover me in your house, you insist that I leave.

But I say, "I've made all the beds and washed the dishes and did the laundry and swept the floors. I've done all the things you don't like to do. I'm hard-working and honest (except for when I broke into your house).

...

It's only fair, after all, because you have a nicer house than I do, and I'm just trying to better myself. I'm a hard-working and honest, person, except for well, you know, I did break into your house.

I thought this analogy was pretty flawed, and I offered one of my own:

Let's say I own a house, and I've hired you to tend my lawn. It's a great deal for both of us. You get money and I get a great lawn.

However, my neighbor doesn't like you, so he forces you off my property at gunpoint, and just to teach me a lesson, he steals some of my stuff.

The point, in case it's not clear, is that the United States of America is not your house. It's our house. Actually, it's more like a neighborhood of houses, and you're complaining about who your neighbors have as guests. Which is none of your business.

A couple of days ago, somebody named Phil left a comment that illustrates a fairly typical response:

The first analogy makes some sense, but the follow up analogy is absurd, since it ignores the fact that the person is in the country ILLEGALLY. Why is that such a hard concept for some people? Unless of course you feel that laws are only meant as guidelines, and you get to pick the laws that you will follow.

Well, I am a libertarian, so just because what they're doing is illegal doesn't mean I hold it against them. I may not get to pick the laws that I will follow, but I sure as hell get to pick the laws that I respect. And I think immigration laws are too stupid to respect.

Like many other people who complain about illegal immigration, my commenter here would probably insist that he has nothing against immigrants. Advocates of strict immigration enforcement usually insist they're only opposed to illegal immigrants.

Frankly, I doubt their sincerity, because you never hear them arguing for more relaxed immigration rules that would make it easier for people to immigrate legally. To get an idea what's required of legal immigrants these days, check out this diagram published in Reason magazine.

As near as I can figure it, every year about 800,000 people immigrate legally. Most of those 800,000 got green cards under some sort of special rules for skilled workers sponsored by employers or people with family members already resident in the United States. But unless they were some kind of superstar or the spouse, parent, or minor child of a U.S. citizen, they probably had to wait five years or more to get a green card.

If you're an unskilled laborer, or a skilled laborer who can't find someone to sponsor an H-1B visa, you have almost no hope at all of entering the country legally. Only about 10,000 non-skilled, non-family immigrants are allowed to enter legally each year. By comparison, each year about 500,000 people enter the country illegally, down from 800,000 a few years ago. I think we can safely assume that most of those people are unskilled workers. That means that unskilled workers want to enter the country at a rate 50 to 80 times higher than is legally allowed.

Or to put it another way, we can eliminate the problem of illegal immigration with an 80-fold increase in green cards for unskilled laborers. This would roughly double the legal immigration rate. I wonder how many people of the "but they're illegal" crowd would support such a measure. My guess is not many, because when you suggest reforming immigration law, they usually respond with some variation of "let's deal with the illegals first."

What's so bad about illegal immigration anyway? Yes, I know it's illegal, but lots of things are illegal. Just because something is a law, doesn't mean it's a good law. I'm pretty sure all of us can think of a few laws that are unimportant or just plain wrong. Between federal, state, and local laws, I'll bet there are a million defined crimes in this country, and we all probably commit a couple of felonies and a handful of misdemeanors every day (and several traffic violations per hour while driving). Again, the real question is not whether illegal immigration is illegal, but how and why it's a bad thing.

The problem can't just be that illegal immigrants are living and working here in the United States, because hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens are doing the exact same thing. All illegal immigrants want is what people like me already have, and if it's not wrong for me to have it, why would it be wrong for them?

I suppose the answer is that they're born in other countries. I'm not entirely sure why that makes them less worthy to live here, but lets accept it for the sake of argument. That still can't be the complete answer, becase we do in fact let in hundreds of thousands of people from other countries every year. There must be some additional difference between people from other countries that we let in, and people from other countries that come here illegally because we don't let them in.

As far as I can tell, with the exception of people who are explicitly prohibited from entering -- serious criminals, terrorists, people with dangerous contagious diseases -- most of the people who come here illegally would be allowed to come here legally except for one thing: Immigration quotas.

Understand that these quotas are arbitrary by definition. They're not based on the qualities or behavior of the people they apply to. The only difference between the immigrants we let in and the ones we don't is where they were in line.

What illegal immigration amounts to is taking your turn when you're not supposed to. It's the moral equivalent of fishing without a permit, or running a red light when there's no other traffic. I just can't get worked up over it.

This is an ad for a book, but it's also pretty much my take on the human condition.

Despite all the complaining on this blog, I really am something of an optimist.

Our laws against child pornography were created many years ago, when the production of child pornography was a much more difficult process. A would-be child pornographer had to use film cameras to take the pictures. And since a commercial lab would report him to the police, he had to have the equipment and skill to develop the film as well. Pretty much the only people willing to go through that much trouble were dedicated scumbags.

That's not the case anymore. I haven't seen any statistics, but I'm pretty sure that today the single largest group of child pornography producers -- by sheer number of images and videos -- are children. We can blame it on modern cell phones with built-in cameras, which give every child all the tools they need to create and distribute child pornography. And who has better access to naked children than a child?

Thus, we have the great "sexting" epidemic. And naturally we have the moral panic which goes with it. So we have teen couples who make videos of themselves having sex and get busted for child pornography, and we have 15-year-old girls busted for sending pictures of themselves to other kids.

All of which brings me to a rather surprising new law that's just been passed by the Illinois legislature:

Teens who forward or post online racy pictures of their underage classmates would get juvenile court supervision that could result in mandatory counseling or community service under legislation sent to Gov. Pat Quinn today.

...

The first measure aims to educate teens about the dangers of "sexting" while modernizing state statutes for the Internet age. Under current Illinois law, teens caught with nude photos of other juveniles can be charged as sex offenders, lawmakers said.

...

The Illinois bill, which passed 52-0, doesn't penalize youths who send or receive the risque photos but choose not to distribute them widely. It applies to kids under 18 who use computers or cell phones to distribute the pictures, and the court supervision amounts to a scolding.

That seems...sensible. The bill addresses the issue of sexting with a sense of proportion and avoids branding children as sex offenders. Our legislators appear to have successfully resisted the urge to moral panic and moral grandstanding.

I didn't see that coming.