As a blogger, I get to write about whatever interests me.

One of the things that did not interest me, however, was the upcoming Democratic primary race for Cook County State's Attorney. Until a few weeks ago, I didn't even know that office was up for a vote (although I probably could have figured it out...). The current state's attorney, Dick Devine, is retiring, which leaves the race wide open.

One of the candidates for that office is 38th Ward Alderman Tom Allen. Since that's right near where I live, the Great and Mighty Geoff at Chi-Town Daily News assigned me to interview Allen for the race.

Preparing for the interview, I read a bunch of background material about the State's Attorney's office, the issues in this race, and what the candidates are saying, so now I know something about it all. I'd love to blog about it too, but that might give the appearance of a conflict of interest, as far as the Daily News is concerned.

So now I'm interested, but I can't blog about it.

I'm going to have to think more carefully about that next time I get an assignment.

Here's my interview with Alderman Tom Allen.

Update: I might as well post the full list of Chi-Town Daily News interviews with the Democratic candidates for Cook County State's Attorney:

• Tom Allen (38th Ward Alderman) by Mark Draughn
• Anita Alvarez  (Chief Deputy to the Cook County State's Attorney) by Beatrice Figueroa
• Tommy Brewer (Defense attorney) by Natasha Eziquiel-Shriro
• Howard Brookins Jr. (21st Ward Alderman) by Marcie Hill
• Robert Milan (First Assistant to the Cook County State's Attorney) by Marcie Hill
• Larry Suffredin (Cook County Commissioner) by Tasha Clopton-Stubbs

We didn't bother to interview the Republican candidates---no doubt because of liberal media bias---but here's the complete list:

• Tony Peraica (Cook County Commissioner)

Vote smart, everybody.

I was going to write something about the disgraceful article by Cato's Roger Pilon in The Wall Street Journal extolling the virtues of warrentless wiretapping of U.S. citizens, but Julian Sanchez has got that covered.

Over at Drug WarRant, Pete writes about yet another way politicians and their minions use the fear card to get more money for government programs.

As part of his article, he includes a mock "FEAR" credit card. I liked the idea a lot, but I wanted to try making one that was even more obviously a credit card:

You might think the monster is so cheesy looking because I have no artistic talent, but really I did it that way as an ironic commentary on the banal fakery inherent to all fear-mongering. I swear.

Long before I got fascinated by legal blogs, I was fascinated by legal novels. Neither is a substitute for receiving actual instruction in the law, but both are cheaper. I've learned a few things.

Reading Scott Greenfield's rant about informants reminded me of A Cinderella Affidavit by Michael Fredrickson. I'm not going to go into the details of the plot---they're not that important and I can't really remember them anyway---but the concept of a Cinderella Affidavit has stuck with me.

I don't know if "Cinderella Affidavit" is common legal jargon or just a catch phrase Fredrickson made up for his book. In any case, here's how it works: Say you're a cop working narcotics, and you want to arrest a guy you're sure is dealing drugs out of a house, but you don't have any proof. In order to get the probable cause you need for a warrant, you're going to have to investigate the case, gather evidence, find informants, and try to make a controlled buy. But that's a lot of hard work, and you might not succeed.

If you aren't too concerned about lying to a judge (also known as perjury), there's an easier way: You make it all up. Just start writing out your affidavit and say a confidential informant told you there were drugs. (This also works if you got some information in a way you're not supposed to, like the Herc and Carver on The Wire attributing all the information from their illegal audio bug to a phantom informant named "Fuzzy" Dunlop). The judge grants the warrant, and you bust into the drug dealer's place of business and find what you were looking for: The drug dealer and his drugs.

Case closed, pretty much. No one will ever expect to meet the phantom informant. For one thing, most cases never make it to trial, and if there's no need for a trial, there's no need for his testimony. If the case does go to trial, the cops can argue that revealing his identity will ruin his value as an informant. If worst comes to worst and somebody insists, the cops can just say they can't find their informant (which has the advantage of being true). The prosecutor doesn't really need the informant anyway because he's got a big pile of drugs he can show off.

On the other hand, if the cops didn't find any drugs during the raid then the informant isn't needed because there's no criminal case. Either way, like Cinderella at the ball, the informant just vanishes from the scene.

Unless something goes wrong.

In A Cinderella Affidavit, a cop gets killed during the drug raid. This brings down a whole lot of attention on just why the cops raided the location and what the informant saw when he was there. It takes a novel for it all to play out.

Knowing what a Cinderella affidavit is turns out to be helpful in understanding a number of real-life stories. For example, when Atlanta cops killed a 92-year old grandmother during a drug raid, a lot of people wanted to know why the cops thought there would be drugs in her house. The resulting federal investigation alleged that although the informant was real, he made his statement after the cops framed him with planted drugs. The cops also allegedly lied about there being security cameras at the house to justify a no-knock warrant. If all had gone according to plan, the problems with the affidavit would probably never have come to light.

Then there's the drug raid in Cheseapeake, Virginia on the 17th of this month, in which officer Jarrod Shivers was shot and killed, allegedly by the occupant of the house, Ryan Frederick. On their warrant application, police said they had a confidential informant who had seen a marijuana grow operation in the garage. Almost a week after the raid, police finally announced they had found some marijuana in the home, but they wouldn't say how much. Meanwhile, Frederick says that no one was in his home around the time specified in the affidavit, but there were signs of a break-in. Did the cops raid this guy's house on the word of a burglar? Did they mention that in the affidavit? Or was that something else that would vanish when the party was over?

I've been reading about botched drug raids for a while, and it seems that a non-trivial percentage of them turn out to have problems with the facts asserted by the officers applying for the warrant. Do you think that's a characteristic of botched drug raids? Or do you think we'd find the same kinds of problems in all the successful drug raids if we ever bothered to look?

Check out this clause in the User Agreement for Business Week magazine online:

In addition, User may not:

...

2. use or attempt to use any "deep-link," "scraper," "robot," "bot," "spider," "data mining," "computer code" or any other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, process or methodology or manual process having similar processes or functionality, to access, acquire, copy, or monitor any portion of BW.com...

It's 2008 and they don't allow deep linking?

Aside from their lousy web etiquette (and questionable business model), I've always felt that legal attempts to prohibit deep linking are crazy talk.

It would be one thing if people were hacking into the site to steal data, or if people were publishing secret passwords. But Business Week isn't using any of the web security protocols to protect their articles. Everything is wide open. How can it be wrong to publish deep links to their site when their server is programmed to honor deep links?

They claim their User Agreement is a contract that is binding on everyone who visits the site. For all I know, that may even be actual law, but it makes no sense for them to claim one thing in their User Agreement and then implement another thing in their web server. It's like posting a "No Trespassing" sign outside your door while the people inside are yelling "Come on in!" to everyone passing by. Who are visitors supposed to believe?

(Hat tip: Don MacAskill)

Chicago just got hit with some more snow, and I realized I need new wiper blades on my car. The ones I have now are not winter blades, so ice builds up in the wiper frame and prevents it from applying even pressure, allowing ice and sleet to remain on the window.

My Camry bit the dust with serious engine problems about a month ago (my mechanic says it's a "spun bearing," but that sounds like something he made up), so I'm driving an old T-bird that a friend is loaning me. According to the books, it takes 22-inch wiper blades on both sides.

I haven't been able to find the blades. I stopped at three different auto parts stores, and all of them were out of 22-inch winter wiper blades. They had other blades, but not the ones I needed.

How can that happen?

I mean, obviously, winter blades are in demand because it's winter, and I'm guessing that 22-inches is one of the most common blade sizes, so people have been buying a lot of them, and the stores have run out.

But shouldn't the buyers at the auto parts store have realized that 22-inch winter wiper blades would be in big demand in Chicago in January? Shouldn't wiper blade manufacturers know the ups and downs of their business and ship a few extras to stores?

I see similar economic mysteries all the time. Why is it that the ice cream section of the 7-Eleven always has plenty of Butter Pecan but consistently runs out of Dulce de Leche soon after each new delivery? Shouldn't some computer somewhere notice what's going on and start ordering more Dulce del Leche and less Butter Pecan?

The theory of efficient markets doesn't require that businesses never make mistakes, but the free market does tend to doom businesses that consistently fail to take advantages of chances to make money. So what's going on here? Is this some weird kind of market failure? Or does it somehow make good business sense to run out of Dulce de Leche ice cream and 22-inch wiper blades?

My post about the Lima, Ohio SWAT team's shooting of of Tarika Wilson and her infant son drew an angry comment from Kevin P:

Ok, First of all i would say who the fuck are you to tell them how to handle things. When you become part of the SWAT let me see how you react. I bet you have no clue how that even works do you? Do you know how hard they train. Lets keep it this way, I live over in New Jersey, And i am only 15. We go up to camden and also pennsauken, to play at a real SWAT house. This house is used for every Kind of Law Enforcement Agency. Now remember we are just playing paintball, but being traied by an Ex-Navy Seal. But do you know how your heart beats around every corner you go. I don't think you relize what exactly goes on do you. They are pretty much trained to not shoot untill they see movement. Now if were in the swat and you were called out to go to this house, And your the point-man In the stack(If you Even now what that means) And im coming around the corner now all of a sudden someone pops out in front of you. Ohh yea are you just going to let them walk right by??? When your in there it is a whole diffrent world. How do you know that Anothny Terry didn't have a gun. Do you know that bullets can go through walls, well if u did. Did yo ever come to think that the kid was hit by axident. What do you think thier going to be perfect?? Well anyway i just wanted to give you a little example and next time you should think twice bud. Remember Im Only 15 To!

The paintball exercises in the SWAT house sound really cool. I never got to do stuff like that.

Now let me address a few of your points...

First of all, I'm an opinionated blogger, that's who the fuck I am. Welcome to the blogosphere.

I'm sure you know more about SWAT tactics than I do. (Folks, that's not snark: Wargames are a fantastic learning tool, and I think paintball is about as realistic as it gets for close combat.) However, I know a thing or two about firearms safety and the ethics of deadly force.

As a general rule, except for open warfare, you are responsible for what you shoot. Whoever shot Tarika Wilson didn't identify his target properly, or handled his weapon poorly and had an accidental discharge, or (to adopt your scenario) shot through a wall because he wasn't paying attention to his backstop when he pulled the trigger, or...something else bad, because it's an undeniable fact that a member of the SWAT team shot a finger off a baby and killed its mother. That can't be right. It was almost certainly an accident, and it may have even been an excusable accident, but you can't deny that it was a bad outcome.

(I don't know what kind of SWAT scenarios you run through, but don't you lose points or something if you shoot a hostage or an innocent bystander?)

Like all men under arms, a SWAT team exists to serve a political goal: Promoting law and order. However, the shooter was white and the victim was black, which has increased racial tensions in Lima. Hundreds of people have marched through the street and outside the police station. Thankfully, the unrest hasn't turned violent.

I think the SWAT team has been stood down while the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation is investigating the incident. The Ohio Attorney General's office is observing the situation, and a special prosecutor has been appointed. The FBI has also begun an investigation of possible civil rights violations.

The Lima SWAT team may have succeeded in their mission---the capture of Anthony Terry---but in terms of the larger goals of the Lima police department and the city government, this was a disaster.

As for the hypothesis that Anthony Terry had a gun, I think we can dismiss it. Here in Chicago the police shoot people all the time, and they usually announce within hours if the offender had a gun. Two weeks have gone by since the Lima shooting, and nobody in the police department or the city government has said anything about Terry having a gun.

I was pretty angry when I wrote that original post, so I should make it clear that my anger isn't directed at the individual member of the Lima SWAT team who pulled the trigger. Something definitely went wrong that day in Wilson's house, but I have no idea what, and it may not have been his fault. Unless he's a psychopath, I'm sure he feels terrible about the shooting. His life will never be the same again.

My objection is not about SWAT tactics, it's about the SWAT mission. The original purpose of SWAT teams was to handle violent situations that were beyond the capabilities of a few cops in patrol cars, especially barricade and hostage situations. That was a great idea, and SWAT teams have worked out well handling tough problems like that.

But police departments have increasingly begun to use SWAT-like tactics for a far less vital purpose: Gathering evidence in the war on drugs. The armed dynamic entry into a home is not intended to keep police officers safe, it's intended to prevent the occupants from destroying evidence.

In New York, drug cops don't like to use the main SWAT team for arrests because they move too slowly and carefully to preserve all the evidence, so they have their own dynamic entry teams that work faster.

If all police wanted to do was arrest someone, there are much safer ways. A friend of mine was arrested (falsely) a little while ago. Despite a witness saying he had a gun, when the police came for him, they didn't throw stun grenades and crash through his door. A handful of ordinary cops just grabbed him when he came out of the house. That's because you can't flush a gun down a toilet.

The FBI Hostage Rescue Team is probably the finest SWAT team in the world. But when the FBI went to arrest the Unabomber---the most wanted man in America---a couple of federal law enforcement officers just walked up to his cabin, lured him outside with a ruse, and put the cuffs on. Because he had no way to get rid of the evidence.

But when police needed to collect drug evidence from a home filled with children, we're supposed to believe they went in hard and fast because it's safer that way? I call bullshit.

As for how much training SWAT teams do and the heart-pounding stress of being on a mission, that just makes my point. SWAT work is difficult and demanding and filled with risk. All the more reason to avoid SWAT raids for any purpose other than saving lives.

SWAT teams were originally formed for the purpose of bringing violent confrontations to a close, but increasingly they are used to start violent confrontations for the purpose of stopping victimles drug crimes, and the results are often tragic.

In 1982, Andrew Wilson confessed to his lawyers, Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz, that he had robbed a McDonald's on Chicago's south side and killed security guard Lloyd Wycliffe with a shotgun. Bound by the confidentiality of attorney-client communications, the lawyers were unable to tell anyone about Wilson's confession.

They remained silent even as another man, 54-year old Alton Logan, was arrested for the murder. He was tried, convicted, and sent to jail for life.

Although attorney-client privilege prevented the lawyers from revealing their client's confession, they did manage to get Wilson's permission to reveal the truth after his death.

He finally died this last November, and on January 11, Kunz and Coventry got a judges's ruling that they could go public with his confession. After 25 years in jail, Alton Logan may be getting a new trial.

(The full story is told in a terrific piece of news writing by Tribune reporter Maurice Possley. It's a more complicated and more interesting story than my short summary.)

I first heard about this in a post by Chicago's own Second City Cop entitled "Kill All the Lawyers." He has this to say:

What is truly amazing to us is it seems these two scumbag lawyers look like they want to be praised for keeping an innocent man behind bars for 26 years because they wrote a notarized affidavit in 1982 and kept it in a locked box since then.

We'll say this - Doctor/Client privilege can be pierced in extreme circumstances. Under certain conditions, the doctor is obliged by law to report certain things. Husband/Wife privilege can be broken, most times voluntarily by one party or the other. You can't tell us that Lawyer/Client privilege is the only thing impregnable in all circumstances? The law needs to be reformed if so.

He's certainly got it right that this was an awful situation, but it's hard to see a way around this without gutting attorney-client privilege. Every accused person needs counsel. As one of SCC's commenters points out, "I can tell you have never had a case put on you by [Internal Affairs Division]."

SCC goes on to ask,

So who does Alton Logan sue now? Kunz and Coventry? Wilson's "estate"? Illinois?

It wasn't Kunz and Coventry who put Alton Logan in jail for two and a half decades. It was the Chicago Police who caught the wrong man and the Cook County State's Attorney who prosecuted him.

Wilson's lawyers did what the ethics of their profession requires of them. The assigned role of criminal defense lawyers is to represent their client's liberty interest at all costs. As ugly as the situation was, they were doing their job.

In yet another odd twist to this story, Andrew Wilson and his brother were arrested for murdering two police officers, and they later accused Police Commander Jon Burge of torturing them during questioning. Burge was investigated for this and other allegations of torture, and he was eventually fired.

However, too much time had passed since the alleged incidents of torture for Burge to be charged. The scandal remains controversial to this day and has arisen as an issue in the current race for Cook County State's Attorney.

Wilson had received some accolades for his role in bringing the Burge scandal to light, but now we know that through it all he was keeping a secret that was ruining Alton Logan's life one day at a time.

Update: I just noticed that Capital Defense Weekly has linked to this article. I guess that would be the worst case scenario. A life sentence is only second-worst case.

[No spoilers that you wouldn't get from watching the trailers.]

When your body moves, your brain coordinates the images from your eyes with balance information from your inner ear to give you a consistent picture of the world. This works fine in the natural world, but our modern world presents your brain with situations it's not ready for. On an airplane, your eyes see a perfectly still cabin, but your inner ear can feel the plane pitching and rolling in turbulent air. You experience these conflicting inputs as dizzyness.

If the inputs are severe enough and persistent enough, some low-level function in your brain reaches an unfortunate conclusion. In the natural world, the most likely cause of dizziness is poison, probably from something you ate. The obvious solution is to empty your stomach as quickly as possible. This is why you get airsick.

The same thing can happen in reverse. If you're sitting still on a firm object---say, a seat in a movie theater---but the picture on the screen is moving and jerking around a lot, your brain might conclude that you need to vomit.

Which brings me to the New York monster movie Cloverfield. Like The Blair Witch Project, the whole movie is shot with a handheld camera. However, the characters shooting Blair Witch were supposed to have filmmaking skills. This movie appears to be shot on home video by an amateur named Hud who is documenting his friend Rob's going-away party.

I knew that going in, but I expected that after a few shaky minutes to establish the premise, the film would start to cheat and steady the camera a bit. That never happened. After an hour and a half of what Roger Ebert is calling "Queasy-Cam," I felt a little ill. Would it have ruined the story if Hud had been Rob's professional videographer friend?

Obviously, I had a lot of trouble getting past the camera work. I think the filmmakers wanted to put us in the action and make it real. Instead, the shaky camera work kept breaking me out of the story. It left me detached from the characters.

As others have pointed out, the movie's visual style intentionally evokes a lot of news footage of disasters, especially the events of 9/11. I don't really think it's exploitive. It's just that we've all learned what a major disaster looks like, so that's what our disaster movies have to look like.

In many ways, this movie reminded me of the problem I had with Spielberg's remake of War of the Worlds. Both movies follow the personal struggle of a small group of characters faced with a threat far beyond their ability to handle. So we spend the whole movie watching them run away, while in the background the U.S. Army tries to do something about the problem.

I suppose this is realistic. People caught up in disasters have no sense of the big picture. For most people in the World Trade Center on 9/11, their whole day was about a loud crash followed by an hour of walking down the stairs and away from the building. Terrifying for them, but you wouldn't want to see a movie about it.

That's the biggest problem with Cloverfield. The main conflict is this incredible battle between the monster and military. Someone somewhere is commanding the increasingly desperate attacks against the creature while simultaneously coordinating the evacuation of the city.

Meanwhile, we're stuck watching a very long subplot.

If you're not a regular surfer in the libertarian blogosphere, you probably haven't been following the big Ron Paul story, which is that around a decade ago he published a newsletter and a few issues had some stuff that seems pretty racist.

The libertarian blogs have been posting a lot about this story, and every time they do, a bunch of Paul's supporters chime in with rather a lot of criticism, even to pieces that are mostly constructive advice. Having waded through a lot of their comments, I've seen a few that make me understand why Wonkette (a political blogger I've heard of but rarely read) calls these people Paultards.

I'd like to address a few of their arguments, starting with some of the sensible ones.

This is old news.

Paul's supporters in libertarian circles have been hauling this out ever since Paul himself first used it in response to a few questions by Reason's David Weigel:

reason: Do you have any response to The New Republic's article about your newsletters?

Ron Paul: All it is--it's old stuff. It's all been rehashed. It's all political stuff.

reason: Why don't you release all the old letters?

Paul: I don't even have copies of them, because it's ancient history.

reason: Do you stand by what appears in the letters? Did you write these...?

Paul: No. I've discussed all of that in the past. It's just old news.

This may be old news to Paul's supporters, but it's not old news to a lot of other people.

The big story about Ron Paul in libertarian circles is that he's attracted a much larger following to the movemenent than any other libertarian figure. His supporters bring this up all the time.

Guess what?  All those new followers weren't paying attention the first time this was news, back when Paul was running for Congress in Texas.

Virginia Postrel posts an excerpt from a message she received:

My wife and I were big Ron Paul supporters (until yesterday, in fact). We're also 29 and 30 years old, which means we weren't paying attention to Ron Paul in the 90's. We donated money to the campaign, and I suppose we failed to do the due diligence on Paul, as we didn't dig through archives of his old newsletters. We feel terrifically betrayed, not only by Ron Paul, but by older libertarians like yourself for not publicly warning us about him.

This was not old news to those people.

Paul didn't even write those articles.

Yeah, we got that. As nearly every libertarian writer on the subject has acknowledged, nobody has ever heard Paul say anything like what's in those letters. Everyone involved says that a lot of those articles were written by other people. We're all willing to believe that someone else wrote a lot of that stuff.

We're even somewhat willing to believe that Paul didn't read the newsletters before they went out. It was a fundraising operation, and he probably had other things to do besides read the newsletter. But you've got to admit it was pretty careless to allow stuff line that to be sent out in his name.

Paul has already taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under his name.

Yes, he has. But some of us don't just want him to take responsibility, we want an explanation of how this happened.

Paul says he didn't know what was in the newsletters. Maybe the people writing the newsletters were using them to advance their own agenda, but surely at some point one of Paul's friends or staffers came up to him and said, "Ron, you need to see what's in the newsletter. I think we have a problem..."

However, if that happened, Paul seemingly never did anything about it. He claims he doesn't even know who the writers were.

"It’s obvious that you’re out to get Ron Paul. Why don’t you do equal reporting on the TRUCKLOADS of skeletons and evil things that the other candidates and media don’t discuss?" (source)

If a woman is dating a man who never takes her anyplace nice, why does she complain only about him to her girlfriends when there are billions of other men who aren’t taking her anyplace at all?

Paul's the one who's asking us to dance.

You're going after Paul about the newsletters just like you did about the Don Black donation.

That wasn't a libertarian issue at all. Paul didn't take Don Black's money. Don Black sent some money to the Paul campaign, at which point it stopped being Don Black's money and became Paul's money. Paul could do whatever he wanted with his money. Most libertarians got that.

"Kirchick is a Yalie bonesman -- that should explain all to discredit the story!" (source)

I suppose whatever that means could be a reaon for Kirchick to lie. But since the Ron Paul campaign has acknowledged the newsletters were sent out, what exactly would he be lying about?

Kirchick saved all this until right before the New Hampshire primary. Kirchick is just out to get Ron Paul.

Of course he is. We'd never hear anything bad about politicians if it weren't for their enemies. Do you think the Clinton whitehouse would ever have said anything about Monica Lewinsky if someone else hadn't brought it up first?

"The Lavander Mafia along with the Israel firsters are trying to destroy Ron Paul." (source) "The 'libertarians' at tReason have shown their true colors. Anything to service your neocon masters, eh?" (source) "Here is an anatomy of the spread of the smear campaign against Ron Paul just prior to and on the crucial “king-making” New Hampshire primary day..." (source)

So it's all a conspiracy? The gays, the Jews, the neocons, the Beltway libertarians...all out to get Ron Paul?

I have several responses here:

1. That's exactly the sort of crazy talk that got us here in the first place.
2. Even if there were a conspiracy against Paul, that doesn't actually make him a better candidate.
3. It still doesn't explain the newsletters.
4. The writers at Reason are hardly out to get Ron Paul. They've been glossing over his anti-libertarian positions on some issues for months, and now that the newsletters are big news, they're not exactly beating on Ron Paul so much as begging him to explain.

"We will remember your actions in this campaign, and we will never support Reason or CATO again if you continue down this path." (source) 

I guess when you can't make arguments, you give ultimatums.

You're just beating a dead horse.

Oh, but that comment never gets old...

Paul has said he didn't write the newsletters and that he takes moral responsibility. What more do you want?

An actual explanation of what happened.

Saying it's old news, shooting the messenger, and crying "Conspiracy!" are not explanations. They're attempts to avoid an explanation.

Explaining that someone else wrote the newsletters is only part of the explanation. Here are a few questions for Dr. Paul that might fill in some details:

• When did you first find out what was in the news letters? Who pointed it out to you? What was your first reaction?
• Who wrote the letters? If you don't know, why not? Didn't you think it was important at the time to find out who the author was? If not, why not?
• If you don't know who the author was, then who had final editorial control of the newsletters? Not you, but the person who actually made the decision to let this stuff run?
• Did you confront the author/editor about this? What did they say?
• Why did you let this go on so long? Did you not notice? Did you not think it was important?
• Was it a matter of free speech? Were you reluctant to censor the writers? Was that a mistake?
• Was the appeal to racists a big-tent strategy? Were you pandering to the racists just to get their money? Weren't you concerned how that would make you look?

One more thing:

Ron Paul is a fearless advocate of libertarianism. He wants to end the war on drugs, bring the troops back home, shut down the Federal Reserve bank, abolish income taxes, and eliminate half the cabinet. He says more crazy things in a 10-minute interview than most candidates say all year.

Ron Paul is not afraid to say what he believes, and he clearly believes that the American people will agree with him once they understand what he's saying.

So why doesn't he trust us with the explanation for the newsletters?

[Note: I think this story has played itself out, at least for the moment, and now that I've got this out of my system, I'm tired of writing about it.]

Some former DEA agents are annoyed by the movie American Gangster:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Three former Drug Enforcement Administration agents filed a $55 million defamation lawsuit against the movie studio that made "American Gangster" on Wednesday, claiming it tarnished hundreds of reputations.

...

The movie hurt the agents' reputations by falsely claiming in text at the end that a collaboration between Lucas and Roberts "led to the convictions of three-quarters of New York City's Drug Enforcement Agency" agents between 1973 and 1985, according to the suit, which seeks class action status.

...

The lawsuit said the public believed the film's text referred to federal DEA agents, not police officers, and regardless, no New York police officers were convicted as a result of Lucas' cooperation.

The DEA agents' demands are about what you'd expect from drug warriors who confiscate people's cars when they find drug residue in the ash tray:

The suit seeks to stop the film's distribution or change the text at the end of the film and turn over all of its profits to a fund for federal DEA agents.

Once a legal gangster, always a legal gangster.

Random shots around the web:

• Here's one argument against evolution:
  
  

  One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

  
  Uh, we call that energy source the Sun.
• I've always gone for jury duty when called, but if some judge ever grabs me off the street for a jury panel, I'm going to acquit. There's no way this sort of thing happens without some prosecutor who's all hot for a trial, and I'm not going to give him what he wants. (Found this with Google? If you're the prosecutor, I guess now you have cause to strike me. If you're defense counsel...lucky you, huh?)
• I'm a casual dresser, one might even say a bit sloppy. Never been fashionable, never will be. And if the fashionable people are dressing like this, my wife should be very grateful for my lack of fashionability. (Dear God, what were they thinking?)

(Hat tip: Classical Values, Agitator.)

Bill Beckman at Illinois Review is concerned about human embryos destroyed during in-vitro fertilization:

A January 2nd LifeSiteNews article covers findings following a UK Parliamentary question on IVF.  Data from a government organization showed that over one million human embryonic children were killed in the UK in the past 14 years as 'waste' embryos from IVF processes.

The acquired data showed that 2,137,924 embryonic humans were created using IVF between 1991 and 2005, but about 1.2m were never used.  Scientists killed the embryos who were not deemed strong enough for implantation, and froze those not considered 'waste' embryos.  Those that survived the freezing process will die in ten years if not implanted.

'Surplus' embryos were created because women responded differently to fertility drugs, doctors told the Times Online. As many as 40 IVF-fertilized eggs can be used in some treatments. The embryos are then assessed for viability, with only about 20% usually considered strong enough to implant successfully in a woman.

Wait a minute!  These numbers do not compute.  If only 20% are deemed viable, then 80% are killed before ever reaching the point where the phrase “excess embryo” might get used.  Does this mean in reality that the death toll was over 8 million non-viable embryos, killed to create over 2 million viable ones, of which 1.2 million were not used because deemed excess?

I'm having a little trouble researching the details, but I think human embryos produced by IVF are assessed for viability when they've divided into a total of 8 undifferentiated cells, and they are implanted by the time they reach 100 cells. You probably scrape off several times that many cells each time you scratch your nose.

This seems to have crossed the line from pro-life into some weird form of cell worship.

Random shots around the web:

• Amazing news about Alzheimer's disease.
• Here's a trick that's just a product cycle or two from revolutionizing video games.
• And Microsoft would have done well to include this related trick in its Vista operating system. It seems like a bit of a gimmick, but I'll bet there's at least one killer application someone could do with it.
• It's like the "If You Like Pina Coladas..." song, but in Poland, and with hookers, and not a happy ending.
• If you're at an underage drinking party, don't post pictures of the party on the web.
• Beware of Wayne.

(Hat tips: Balko, Mike,

Ron Paul was on CNN, talking to Wolf Blitzer about the racist material in his newsletters. He repudiates the content of the offending pieces, but he still says he has no idea who wrote them. I have a lot of trouble with that statement.

Paul must have known there was racist material in the newsletter, but he appears not to have done anything about it. In fact, he claims not to even know which of his staff wrote those parts.

Does that seem reasonable to you? If you were a politician---or anybody with a newsletter, really---and someone showed you that the newsletter had racist statements going out in your name, wouldn't you have wanted to find out who was doing it?

Either Paul does know who wrote those articles and he's lying when he says he doesn't, or else Paul read those newsletters and didn't see anything that alarmed him. Neither of those is a very reassuring answer.

You can watch the whole Paul interview here. Be warned, it's about 8 minutes long, and parts of it are painful to watch. Paul is not a slick public speaker. Blitzer actually takes pity on him and tries to coach him through the interview. It's a little like going to dinner with your great uncle Herb who calls all black males "colored boys," and you know he probably doesn't mean anything by it, but you really hope nobody you know is sitting in the next booth.

Except that Paul isn't family, so I can kick him to the curb any time I want, and maybe it's time I do. That's too bad, because it's been nice seeing libertarian ideas getting airtime, so I've kind of been rooting for Paul even though I disagree with him on a number of his pet issues.

Blogger Kip Esquire has been all over Paul for months about his opposition to gay marriage. I probably should have been paying more attention. It's not a libertarian position to say the government should only give special legal status to pairs of people if they are of an acceptable gender combination.

Paul's also not much of a libertarian when it comes to immigration, with all his talk about enforcing immigration laws, ending the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to all persons born in the United States, and "securing our borders," whatever that means.

Ron Paul is also an advocate for putting our currency back on the gold standard and abolishing the Federal Reserve Bank. Both those ideas seem a little crazy to me, but I have to admit I don't understand the issues well enough to be sure.

More recently, I've heard that Paul wants the United States to remove our military forces from all foreign countries. The argument is that having forces in other countries is costly and risks involving us in battles that are not our own. But withdrawing certain of our forces could allow other free nations to fall, which is clearly a bad thing for freedom. Also, it's a lot better to fight an enemy on foreign soil than on our own.

Some of Paul's supporters have defended the racist material in the newsletters---or at least Paul's response to it---by saying that even if Paul has racists thoughts, he would never use the government to do racists acts, because that goes against libertarian principles.

I think they are confusing policy and personal values. For example, I think the principle of free speech means that Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps should be not be prevented by force of government from saying the hateful things he says. But I would not want to elect him to office, or invite him into my home, or be photographed standing anywhere near him in case people get the wrong idea. Paul's not anywhere near that bad, but these newsletters still worry me.

Another response from Paul's supporters is that no candidate is perfect, and Ron Paul is the best there is. Sadly, this could be true.

Think about this for a minute: In the CNN interview above, Ron Paul says that if he wins the election he'll pardon everyone who's in federal prison for a non-violent drug offense. So by not supporting Paul, am I really saying that my distaste for a few racist newsletters is more important than freeing 80,000 people from bondage?

It's a haunting thought. Or it would be, except for one thing: Ron Paul is not going to be our next president. The Ron Paul presidency isn't going to serve the libertarian cause because there isn't going to be a Ron Paul presidency. It's just not going to happen, and it never was.

On the other hand, the Ron Paul candidacy has been serving the libertarian cause fairly well. Paul and his supporters have put a lot of great libertarian ideas out in front of the public, and that's a good thing. Among other accomplishments, Paul has gone a long way toward making drug war opposition an acceptable policy. That's a tremendous contribution to freedom.

Ron Paul's run for president has been a great publicity stunt for the libertarian movement, but if the newsletters start to make libertarianism look bad, it's going to undo some of our gains. In that case, it would be better if the public stopped hearing so much about Ron Paul.

We'll see what happens, but maybe it's time to bring the Ron Paul revolution to a quiet end.

Something calling itself The New Republic has an article by James Kirchick called "Angry White Man" accusing Republican/libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul of racism, and it looks pretty ugly. The piece quotes from some newsletters sent out in Paul's name during the 90s. It's vile stuff:

"Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began," read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with "'civil rights,' quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda." It also denounced "the media" for believing that "America's number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks."

This "Special Issue on Racial Terrorism" was hardly the first time one of Paul's publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled "What To Expect for the 1990s," predicted that "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves.'" Two months later, a newsletter warned of "The Coming Race War," and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, "If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it."

Ron Paul has not handled this very well:

reason: Do you have any response to The New Republic's article about your newsletters?

Ron Paul: All it is--it's old stuff. It's all been rehashed. It's all political stuff.

reason: Why don't you release all the old letters?

Paul: I don't even have copies of them, because it's ancient history.

reason: Do you stand by what appears in the letters? Did you write these...?

Paul: No. I've discussed all of that in the past. It's just old news.

This may be old news to Paul, but it's not old news to me. I never heard of these newsletters before, and I'll bet a lot of the people casting votes for him haven't either. Besides, "old news" is not a response. It's an attempt to avoid a response.

Sigh. Hanging out with libertarians now and then, I've had to learn to avoid those libertarians. The conversation usually goes someting like this:

One of Those Libertarians: I'm a libertarian.

Me: I'm something of a libertarian myself. I'm not a fan of big intrusive government.

OoTL: Me neither. We've got to find some way to stop affirmative action and welfare.

Me: Oh, hey, nice to meet you but I've got a thing...

I worry a bit about people who contemplate all the myriad ways government is abusing us and conclude that the biggest problem is laws that help minorities.

(Personally, technically, I think affirmative action is a bad idea too.  The government should not be telling us who to do business with based on race. But it's not the first problem I think of when I worry about the abuse of government power. It's not even the tenth problem, and maybe not even the hundredth problem.)

It sounds like some of Paul's supporters were those libertarians.

In a press release, Paul has denied writing the newsletters, denounced the contents, and more-or-less said he's sorry they went out in his name.

That's not good enough for me. I want to know how these letters went out for years without him doing anything about it. Maybe he trusted his people too much and didn't bother to read them, but in all those years, surely one of his friends came up to him at some point and said, "Paul, you need to see what's in the newsletter..."

Among the issues near and dear that I shall post on presently are the disastrous decision in New Jersey to abolish the death penalty, giving much holiday joy to the various deviant murderers awaiting their just desserts on Jersey's sadly slow death row, the Supremes taking on the supposed cruel and unusual nature of lethal injection, thoughts on waterboarding (is it really torture?), and of course, real true stories of life on the front line of criminal prosecution.

Heh, Virginia prosecutor Tom McKenna is back.

Unless the City Council does something other than rubber-stamp the Mayor's nominee, former FBI agent Jody Weis will soon be the next police superintendent. As an observer and commentator and self-important blogger, I'd like to offer him the following advice:

• Your initial top priority should be to eliminate corrupt cops. Indict them, fire them, or convince them to quit. Your commanders will say they can't afford to lose the manpower, but you'll get a lot more done when everyone is on the same side.
• Use the money you would have paid the bad cops to give some overtime to patrol. Maybe use a little of it to repair some of Chicago's ancient police cars so the extra cops will have something to drive.
• Speed up the investigation of all allegations of police misconduct. If the complaints are legitimate, the victims have a right to receive swift justice, and you need to show that police are not above the law. On the other hand, if the complaints are not legitimate, the officers have a right to be out from under the cloud of suspicion as quickly as possible.
• When a cop is actually convicted of corruption, have someone make a big 8" by 10" photo of him and a sign explaining how he disgraced himself and post it in police headquarters where other cops will see it. A web page wouldn't hurt either. (TarnishedStar.com is available.)
• You may know a lot about law enforcement, but as an FBI agent-in-charge you've never had to deal with some of the issues you'll be facing now, such as real estate, hiring, training, procurement, and union negotiation. You need to pick staff that understand these things, otherwise you'll be doomed.
• You have no patrol experience, and a lot of people will tell you to do a few ride-alongs in police car to get an idea what it's like. It sounds like a good idea, but it's not. The ride-along will be stage-managed so you don't see a damned thing that's real. Also, right now you know you are ignorant about patrol, so you'll probably be careful and rely on your subordinates, but you could do an awful lot of damage if you start to think you understand patrol after a week of riding in a police car.
• No matter how well you do this job, the powers-that-be within the City will force you out in a few years. There's nothing you can do to avoid this, so there's no point worrying about pissing people off. Screw them all, and make changes that you can be proud of.
• Bust a few crooked politicians. Take over the investigations at the end and slap the cuffs on yourself. The rank and file will accuse you of grandstanding for the media, but it will keep a few cops out of the crosshairs after you're gone.
• Focus on the most emportant part of police work, fighting serious crime, and let everything else slide.
• No matter how tight your manpower, it's always worth assigning cops to clear the warrant backlog.
• No matter how many cops you have available, it's always a waste of time to bust a restaurant for selling foie gras.
• Use your SWAT teams to stop violent incidents, not to start them. Dynamic entry into a suspect's house may be a great way to gather drug evidence, but eventually one of your shooters is going to kill a 92-year-old grandmother or shoot a baby's fingers off. It's not worth the risk just to bag a few minor dealers.
• Teach cops how to exploit an arrest. They haven't done their job unless they've looked up the offender's probation status, asked him about his associates, and asked him if he knows someone who has an illegal gun. Someone should also ask him if he knows any crooked cops, or if a cop has ever asked him for a bribe.
• Speaking of bribes, you should offer rewards to cops for reporting bribe attempts. This doesn't have to cost money. The department can offer cops rewards that no criminal could ever match as a bribe, such as a bump in seniority when bidding for their next shift assignment. (I think CPD may already do this.)
• If the department was a business, analysts would say that almost the entire value of the department consists of human capital, also known as trained and experienced people. Within the department, training should never stop.
• At the low end, you need to make sure that training and mentoring skills are a requirement for promotion.
• You also need to retain the people you've trained, so treat them well.
• I don't know much about how the police contract works, but here's something you can give the working police without costing the city a dime: Eliminate the residency requirement. Let cops live in the suburbs and work in the city if that's what they want to do.
• You need a training program at the high end too. The U.S. army trains its generals, and big companies often rotate their managers through all the major functions of the business before putting them in charge. No one should be considered ready for a top slot unless they've spent time in patrol, detectives, human resources, and internal affairs.

Anybody else have some bright ideas? Leave a comment.

The town of Lima, Ohio (population 40,000) has a 14-member SWAT team. According to their web site, the SWAT team deploys about once a week. Check out these badasses:

That picture is from their web site.  Here's another one from their web site:

Now that you've seen how these macho bastards portray themselves, would you be surprised to learn that on Saturday they raided the house of Tarika Wilson, a black 26-year-old mother of six---to arrest her boyfriend for selling drugs---and somehow managed to kill her and shoot the 1-year-old child she was holding?

As SWAT teams often do, they shot the household dog as they entered. Now ask yourself, given that police have TASERs, pepper spray, riot batons, and body armor, what kind of asshole discharges a firearm in a house with children in it just to stop a dog?

The target of the raid, Anthony Terry, 31, was arrested on the extremely lame charge of suspicion of possession of crack cocaine, and was being held in the local lockup.

The cop who killed Tarika Wilson was of course not arrested. In fact, as is usually the case in these kinds of atrocities, the police haven't even released his name.

The wounded child is expected to recover, but he had to have a finger amputated.

One of my favorite television shows comes back today to start its final season. It's The Wire, created by David Simon and Ed Burns. Set in Baltimore, the series is one of the most realistic police dramas ever created, with a plot that weaves complications through many layers of characters and institutions.

Consider the fate of Sergeant Thomas "Herc" Hauk, who in the fourth season is facing disciplinary action in front of a review board. What Herc is technically in trouble for is misusing police surveilance equipment and attributing the resulting information to a non-existent informant. The reality is that no one cares about that.

What Herc should be in trouble for is his mishandling the situation with Randy Wagstaff, a juvenile source in a homicide investigation. While questioning a gang member, Herc accidentally gave away Randy's identity. Labeled a snitch, Randy was beaten and his home was burned down, putting his foster mother in the hospital with second and third degree burns. The reality is that no one cares about that either.

What's really happening to Herc is that he broke a couple of promises to Bubbles the junkie, so Bubbles decided to get a little revenge by giving Herc a fake tip about a drug mule. When Herc stopped the car that Bubbles described, he went off on the driver while searching it, only to find no drugs and to discover that the driver was a church minister and well-connected community leader.

Everybody cares about that. Before the season is over, the division commander, the Deputy Chief of Operations, the Police Commissioner, and the Mayor are discussing exactly how hard to screw Herc into the ground.

In the world of The Wire, Bubbles is a power to be reckoned with: Almost everything bad that happened to the Barksdale gang in the first season was ultimately because a few of them beat up one of Bubbles's friends.

Bubbles is a good example of the approach the series writers take to handling characters. Bubbles is a heavy drug user, hustling his way from one hit of drugs to the next, putting up with some truly awful shit. He looks like he smells bad.

And yet Bubbles is also very smart. It's not that he has some contrived backstory like he used to be a college professor before the drugs. He's just very good at living the kind of life he lives. Within his world, he's mostly very effective, and it's clear that in a different world he'd be a success.

That's one of the themes that runs through the series, that people who are successful in the streets aren't much different from people who are successful in the "straight" world of politics or government.

For example, drug kingpin Marlo Stansfield may have started as a corner drug dealer, but he knows how to manage people and he's not afraid to take advice from his trusted subordinates. He has a training program for his enforcers that includes pistol marksmenship and mock wargames fought in deserted buildings.

Marlo also plans for the future, and one of the things he's clearly planning to do is to go around double-dealing middleman Proposition Joe and get heroin directly from Joe's supplier. Joe, who has literally gathered about half of Baltimore's drug dealers into a co-op, will probably be coming up with some crazy scheme to stop that.

Bubbles, Marlo, and Joe are typical of the best characters of the series, at once very realistic and yet somehow possessing mythic qualities.

No character in the series is more mythic than street thug Omar Little, who has spent nearly all his life earning money by ripping off drug dealers. He's so dangerous and violent and smart that he's grown to mythic proportions within the story itself. When he walks down the street, children scatter before him and drug dealers surrender their money and drugs without daring to start a gunfight. They know that by the time they see Omar, they've already lost.

The way Omar sees it, however, he's not a bad guy. After all, he only rips off drug dealers, not the working people of Baltimore, and he's never shot someone who didn't have it coming. In some ways, he clearly thinks of himself as a kind of cop, even going so far as to snitch on drug dealers and testify against them.

Despite all these vivid characters, the show is actually driven more by plot and theme than by character. However, the show never seems to sacrifice its characters to serve the plot. The writers achieve this in a way I've never seen before: The Wire has a massive cast.

The HBO cast page lists 57 people, not including characters being introduced this season, and I can think of a few they've missed. With such a large supply of characters, the writers never have to advance the plot by betraying a character. Or the viewers.

If you haven't been watching the series, I'm not sure that this season will make any sense to you. I'd almost suggest you buy, rent, or steal the first four seasons on DVD to catch up. If you don't like it, you can quit during the first season, but if you do like it, you really should see the whole thing.

Finally, I've just got to get this off my chest: The characters in The Wire are every bit as real as in The Sopranos, but unlike The Sopranos, the writers of The Wire understand what a story arc is. Things happen to people for a reason, and if people change, it's because something changed them. The big dramatic moments are earned, and the interwoven storylines pay off in the end. It's not always neat, but there's always a reason.

The creators of The Sopranos usually explained their meandering pointless episodes---and their meandering pointless seasons---as being just like real life, which doesn't always have reasons. In this, The Wire is different. The Wire isn't real life. It's a story about real life.

I don't read John Dvorak's PC magazine column very often, and when I do, I usually disagree with him.

In his latest column, Dvorak bashes the RIAA for its lawsuits against people who rip MP3 files from CDs even though they own the CDs. He finds this practice reprehensible, and he implies that when we see RIAA executives in public we should spit on them.

Well...OK, he got that one right.

I don't usually cover the abortion issue here, but I've been loosely following the Illinois Review's coverage of the Planned Parenthood fight in Aurora, and it's taken a really weird direction.

As I understand it, a front company called Gemini Office Development built a medical building in Aurora, putting it through the whole city approval process without ever revealing that Planned Parenthood would be coming in as the sole tenant and opening a clinic that performs abortions.

Opponents of the clinic have been fighting it using, of all things, the zoning rules. Jill Stanek says,

Based on the 3 issues, the ZBA will either decide to close down Planned Parenthood for multiple ordinance and zoning violations, or not.

If so great, the rule of law has prevailed.

That's absurd. Zoning boards are the opposite of the rule of law. Although there are some legitimate aspects, zoning is often little more than a way for local politicians and busybodies to try to control what other people do with their own property. That sort of thing used to bother conservatives.

To see what's being called the rule of law these days, consider this statement from attorney Peter Breen:

Aurora zoning ordinances...state [that] certificates of occupancy can't be issued when there are zoning irregularities. ... Not only have city officials acknowledged zoning screw-ups, zoning violations are now clearly visible, including parking, set-backs, and wrong approvals from the City.

(As quoted by Jill Stanek. Ellisions and insertions are mine.)

An entire business should be shut down and all those people kept unemployed because of parking and set-backs? What ever happened to the conservative demand that government should stay off the backs of business?

In an earlier article about this issue, commenter Larry Hau writes:

The most telling part of this whole situation was an interview with a Planned Parenthood spokesman on Hannity and Colmes. The spokesman said, "We followed the letter of the law." What I heard was, "we did everything we could to avoid following the spirit of the law." It seems that every day, new facts emerge to prove that I heard right.

The "spirit of the law"? Zoning ordinances don't have any spirit. They're just rules, and not terribly important ones.

How weird is it that one of the most contentious issues of our day would come down to zoning?

I often tell people I do political blogging, but the truth is that while I cover political issues, I don't usually cover actual politics. However, there was some sort of event in Iowa yesterday that everyone is talking about, and according to the rumors I'm hearing, it wasn't just another debate or poll but an actual election, so maybe I should say something about it.

I guess I'm most surprised by the results for Chris Dodd and Duncan Hunter, largely because I didn't know that Chris Dodd and Duncan Hunter were still in this race.

The Republican results worry me. In 6th place with nearly 4% of the vote, we're still a little too close to a Giuliani presidency for my comfort.

Oddly, the Iowa results mirror my best guess at the final election outcome. I think it will be Obama v.s. Huckabee, and I think Obama will draw a few more votes in the general election.

Either that, or else the Hillary Clinton election machine will keep grinding away, crushing all opposition, until she defeats Romney in the general election.

Or maybe something else will happen. You heard it here first.

I've been reviewing what Windypundit was all about this year, and it turns out 2007 was the year in which

• I backdated my 2006 year-in-review posting to make it look like I posted at the last minute on New Year's Eve when I really posted it around 11:15 on January first.
• A mysterious object crashed to earth.
• The Windypundit Media Empire expanded. Slightly.
• The War on Drugs had its single greatest accomplishment.
• I correctly predicted a 24 plot development.
• I tried to analyze what went wrong with the war in Iraq.
• I apparently had some issues about dentistry.
• radio station owners had more integrity than some police departments.
• I thought way too much about the Apollo 11 plaque.
• The Mooninite invasion went public.
• I posted my first modest proposal about the war in the middle east.
• I posted my second modest proposal about the war in the middle east.
• I wisely never posted any more modest proposals for the war in the middle east because I wasn't accomplishing what I was trying to do.
• I reviewed Barry Cooper's Never Get Busted Again video.
• I thought way too much about unscrewing light bulbs.
• I proposed some radical ideas for criminal justice reform.
• I wondered if my logo had enough balls.
• My dad got sick.
• the Chinese government censored Windypundit.
• for a brief, shining moment, PageRank 6.
• I released my own clothing line.
• I endorsed a candidate for the office of Attorney General.
• I took some pictures of April in Chicago.
• Idiots called the Virginia Tech victims cowards.
• Lou Dobbs didn't know what he was talking about.
• The Kathryn Johnston case just kept getting worse.
• I accused the state of Illinois of fibbing to organ doners.
• I got a real surprise on my cell phone.
• I had some additional thoughts about jury duty.
• I explained why "Gas Out Day" wasn't going to work.
• Minky!
• I wrote about the amazing technology we have at our fingertips.
• I explained why we have copyrights, and why they expire.
• The goverment protected us from having meat that was too safe.
• We were invaded by strange creatures.
• I may have accidentally attracted attention to my blog with a misleading title that implied the blog entry was about Paris Hilton getting screwed.
• A model shoot at the Morton Arboretum had unexpected visitors.
• I took some nice photos in Milwaukee.
• The zero-tolerance folks reached a whole new level of stupidity.
• I planned to review Andrew Keen's Call of the Amateur but never followed through.
• I took pictures at the Gay Pride parade, with special appearances by Maria Pappas, Rudy Giuliani, Sheriff Tom Dart, Chicago's biggest car thief, and lots of other people, including these cool ladies on motorcycles.
• I tried my hand at photographing models Nicole and Theresa. 
• Hamas cancelled a children's show.
• I got rated.
• I suggested a few more prison sentences for President Bush to commute.
• I learned about Scott's law and then was tried for breaking it.
• We learned that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff relies on his guts.
• I wrote a parody of how other famous authors might end the Harry Potter series and dozens of people contributed their ideas in the comments.
• Shirley Bassey got the party started.
• Windypundit celebrated its fifth birthday.
• More model photos here and here and here.
• I found out what happened to the defendent I convicted.
• I pointed out a few flaws in an anti-immigration argument.
• I posted about some "evil" lawmaking, including the insincerity of free punishment, the pure greed of profitable punishment, the bullying of piling on, the overuse of license suspension, the unconstitutional license of administrative punishment, and the twisted complexity of DUI.
• Rudy Giuliani explained what freedom really means.
• I discovered a disheartening reminder of the depths of human depravity.
• One of the prosecutors of the case where I was a juror contacted me.
• The TSA tried to spot anxious people at the airport.
• Janet Jackson's nipple still caused controversy.
• Florida's Governor Charlie Crist set Richard Paey free.
• Virginia Postrel was diagnosed with breast cancer.
• I switched the blog to MovableType 4.
• I committed journalism.
• The Chicago marathon gave us all a preview of how the city would handle a terrorist attack.
• Ann coulter explained the true meaning of Christianity.
• I took 800 photos of the 2007 Chicago marathon.
• I started my scattershot posts, mostly to get something posted without having to write it.
• I tried to analyze the economics of snitching and got a little help getting it right.
• I wrote a little about my father's experiences in the army.
• I hoped for a revolution.
• I realized our court system does not protect our happiness.
• Windypundit's traffic increased for mysterious reasons.
• Congress and President Bush outlawed the light bulb.
• Mike Huckabee didn't know he was an ape.
• I gave my readers some Christmas cheesecake.
• I was so late posting my year-end round-up that I didn't even bother to pretend I'd posted it in 2007.

As with last year, Dave Barry's roundup was funnier.