The Blog of Walker: December 2011

Walker Morrow · at 11:22 AM

I realize I'm coming to these respective parties quite late, but I still thought they were worth mentioning.

First, Xanthippa takes a good, hard look at Carrier IQ and what it's doing with peoples' smartphone data.

Second, Michael Geist explains the goverment's lawful access deception.

Also, don't forget about INDECT. Seriously, what with SOPA, PROTECT IP, and God knows what else, we seem to be looking forward to an increasingly acronymized world.

Walker Morrow · at 9:13 AM

Radley Balko writes in the Huffington Post on student arrests in the United States. It's more interesting than you might think:

A headline-generating study, published in the journalPediatrics this week, suggests that approximately one in three Americans is arrested before age 23. That's up from about one in five in 1965, the last time a similar study was conducted. The study used data from surveys given to the 7,335 people who enrolled in the federal government's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1996.

This study, a recent joint initiative between the Departments of Justice and Education and a spate of anecdotal stories in the news all suggest a surge in the arrests of minors, and particularly in arrests that originate in schools. But the federal government is both fighting the "school-to-prison" pipeline while continuing to fund the same programs that critics say are causing it. Moreover, because the government hasn't been collecting data on school-based arrests, and the little available data shows overall arrests of juveniles are down, it's difficult to determine if a problem exists, much less whether federal initiatives are solving it -- or contributing to it.

Balko explains some of the background to his piece here:

But while researching the piece, I looked up juvenile arrest data for the U.S. It turns out, juvenile arrests are down over the last 20 years, and pretty significantly. That didn’t make sense. So I went back and looked at those school-to-prison pipeline articles. Yep. Lots of anecdotes, but most all of them lack hard data about school arrests. National statistics for school-based arrests just don’t exist, though there have been some localized studies that suggest there could be a problem.

Regular readers might have noticed that I link to Radley Balko's work - and the links that he recommends on his own site - quite a lot. The fact that he would put out a piece like this one, with the methodology that he used, is exactly why I do.

Walker Morrow · at 10:06 AM

My latest piece for Examiner.com ( alright, so my break there was shorter than I thought it would be ) talks about some interesting poll results that have the BC Liberals tied for second place among the province's top three parties. Granted, it's a long time until our next election, but it's fun to speculate.

Walker Morrow · at 9:06 AM

As part of this, Terri Theodore reports in the Globe and Mail on the BC government's rather lame defense for its unconstitutional drunk driving laws: we need to breach peoples' constitutional rights because not doing so places them "in danger."

The public will be in danger if a B.C. Supreme Court judge doesn’t suspend a ruling that struck down the province’s drunk driving law, a government lawyer said.

George Copley told Mr. Justice Jon Sigurdson on Monday that the regulation that allowed automatic roadside suspensions has saved dozens of lives and more than halved injuries since it was implemented over a year ago.

The public would be safer if nobody was allowed to drive, period. Taking away everybody's vehicle would make things far simpler for everybody involved in enforcing public safety on our roads, from police officers to prosecutors to judges to lawmakers. But anybody who proposed such a thing would look like an idiot, and even if they weren't immediately laughed out of whatever room they happened to be in, constitutional rights tend to pour cold water over such ideas. Indeed, that's sort of the point, and it's a consideration one always has to keep in mind if one is placed in charge of trying to keep us from killing each other: how safe can we make people vs. how many freedoms can we take away?

For obvious reasons, driving drunk and killing someone in the process is not a freedom that should be celebrated - that's why it isn't - but a draconian punishment for drivers who have done nothing more than blow over .08, with no due process or ability to appeal is a ridiculous extension of this concept, and deserves our contempt.

Just in case the time-tested "it's for your safety" argument doesn't work, the government's lawyer in this case tried another classic: the ol' "we're out of money" shtick.

Mr. Copley also warned of “financial chaos” for the provincial government if the judge ruled that it had to pay back the thousands caught up in the scheme.

In other words, violating peoples' constitutional rights and causing them real harm should be a cost-free venture as long as the government is doing it. After all, you or I certainly wouldn't be expected to financially compensate someone for damages ( such as loss of car, and subsequent loss of job and/or home ), would we?

Walker Morrow · at 8:48 PM

That's the lesson coming out of this story, courtesy of some great work by Radley Balko at The Agitator:

Apropos of the post below, here’s a ruling from the D.C. Court of Appeals demonstrating just how powerless citizens are when accosted by police officers—even when the cops themselves are clearly in the wrong. What’s most troubling about the ruling is its mundanity. The law is established here. There’s really nothing to debate. It’s just a matter of the government rattling off the appropriate precedents.

The appellant is Terrance Crossland, who is asking the court to overturn his conviction on two counts of assaulting a police officer. Last April, Crossland and his cousin were approached by two D.C. Metro officers on patrol “to gather information about a rash of recent shootings and drug sales in the area.” Crossland was mowing his grass while smoking a cigarette. The police acknowledge that neither Crossland nor is cousin were doing anything unlawful. The two men were told to turn around, put their hands against a fence, and submit to a search. By both accounts, Crossland initially complied, then said, “Fuck this shit. I’m tired of this.”

Police say Crossland then elbowed one officer in the head, at which point he was punched, taken to the ground, kicked several times, and pepper sprayed. Both the trial court, the appeals court, and even the prosecution acknowledge that because Crossland was doing nothing wrong before the incident, it was illegal for the police to stop, detain, and search him. Nevertheless . . .

. . . as the trial court recognized, the APO statute “prohibits forceful resistance even if the officer’s conduct is unlawful.” Dolson v. United States, 948 A.2d 1193, 1202 (D.C. 2008) (explaining that the rationale for this rule is to “deescalate the potential for violence which exists whenever a police officer encounters an individual in the line of duty”) . . .

So even if the police illegally stop you, detain you, and beat you, you aren’t permitted to resist. Just roll over and take it. Submit.

More from Brian Doherty at Reason's Hit & Run.

Walker Morrow · at 8:42 PM

A few items:

Young, black, and frisked by the NYPD. H/t Balko.
More evidence that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is an asshole.
Cops benefit from more video records too.
Why Gibson Guitars had it coming.
The latest in the war on canines.
The Daily Beast and the Centre for Investigative Journalism on the increase in American police militarization. H/t Balko.
Whoops.
Some good news in the war on cameras.
Dean Scoville writes in Police Magazine on cops who lose their jobs for expressing the wrong opinions in front of the wrong people.

Also, prison guards behaving badly.

Walker Morrow · at 7:23 AM

Thandi Fletcher reports, via The Province:

OTTAWA — Canada's medical marijuana licensing system is vulnerable to abuse and needs to be tightened up, says the health minister after data emerged this week revealing a surge in possibly fraudulent applications.

"We're aware that there are opportunities and risks of the system being abused, which is why we are working to tighten up the system," said Steve Outhouse, a spokesman for Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, on Friday.

Outhouse was speaking in response to the Ottawa Citizen's recent series looking at medical marijuana licensing and use in Canada. The series was based on electronic data the Citizen obtained from Health Canada through the Access to Information Act.

The figures showed, for example, that between 2008 and 2010 applications to Health Canada for medical marijuana based on severe arthritis claims jumped 2,400 per cent.

There are two main changes Aglukkaq has proposed to prevent exploitation of the government's Marihuana Medical Access Regulations, said Outhouse.

They include better educating doctors on how to prescribe medical marijuana and eliminating the right of patients to be granted a licence to grow in their homes, he said.

"We want to be able to get more information out to doctors . . . because often doctors don't have all the information they need to make an informed decision as to whether or not to prescribe," said Outhouse.

"The other thing . . . we're proposing is that people wouldn't grow in homes. That it would be available through a centralized location, whatever company would grow it, to treat it as much as any other drug."

Also, this:

Outhouse said the health minister is concerned about the safety risks involved with allowing people to grow marijuana plants in their home.

What safety risks would those be, exactly? Most of the dangers involved in growing pot seem to be related to the fact that it's a crime to do so - which is largely a result of government policy. As long as your operation is up to code and doesn't pose a fire hazard, I can't see a risk to growing your own licensed medical marijuana any greater than a Cheeto overdose.

The nation's largest doctors' group — the Canadian Medical Association — has said the proposals would put even greater pressure on doctors to control access to a largely untested and unregulated substance, a drug that hasn't gone through the normal regulatory review process. Their licensing bodies have told doctors that they are under no obligation to complete a medical declaration under the current regulations and that anyone who chooses to do so should "proceed with caution."

I'm sorry, but I just don't see the point to these changes. Putting doctors in murky legal waters and making it harder for people in pain to seek alternative treatment vs. more people using marijuana by gaming the medical marijuana system, in a country where, in British Columbia, pot is a billion-dollar industry: why is this even a contest?

Walker Morrow · at 11:00 AM

Jacob Sullum at Reason's Hit & Run has the story:

A new Institute of Medicine report unintentionally highlights the fatal folly of censoring truthful information about cigarette alternatives until their manufacturers can generate the sort of costly, time-consuming studies that federal regulators demand before approving new drugs. Under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, a "modified risk tobacco product," which is any tobacco product identified as safer than cigarettes, can be legally sold only after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certifies that it will "benefit the health of the population as a whole, taking into account both users of tobacco products and persons who do not currently use tobacco products." In making that determination, the FDA is supposed to consider "scientific evidence." The IOM report, which was mandated by the law, suggests what sort of scientific evidence will be necessary. The short answer: the sort of scientific evidence that no one is likely to collect.

[...]

The IOM report's authors worry that "little is currently known about the products' health effects and whether they pose less risk than traditional tobacco products." Enough is known to say that smokeless products such as snus, e-cigarettes, and lozenges, because using them does not involve lighting tobacco on fire and inhaling the toxins and carcinogens thereby generated, are much safer than conventional cigarettes. Yet companies selling them are barred from saying so until they perform prohibitively expensive studies that would take years to complete. If the goal is to reduce smoking-related disease and death, that demand makes no sense, since cigarettes are already on the market and are indisputably much more dangerous than the alternatives. Smokers can dramatically reduce their health risks by switching to smokeless products. Suppressing the information that might encourage them to do so needlessly endangers their health. Godshall argues that the IOM approach "is terrible for public health because it urges the FDA to protect deadly cigarettes from market competition by far less hazardous smokefree alternatives."

Does this make sense to you? Me neither.

Walker Morrow · at 7:56 AM

I don't tend to comment much on American politics, unless it's about drug policy. I certainly don't intend to comment on the race for GOP candidate in the next election. However, since Newt Gingrich could conceivably become the Republican Party's candidate for president in 2012, and could therefore become the next US president ( in theory at least ), I thought my thoughts on drug policy and my thoughts on American politics should form an unholy union just this one time.

Basically, it all comes down to this: all that you will ever need to know about Newt Gingrich can be distilled down to his actions in 1995, when he did the following:

Speaker Newt Gingrich said on Friday that he would ask Congress to enact legislation imposing the death penalty on drug smugglers, and he suggested that mass executions of people convicted under such a law might prove an effective deterrent.

Mr. Gingrich, speaking to about 400 people at a money-raising event here for Representative Charlie Norwood, Republican of Georgia, said, "The first time we execute 27 or 30 or 35 people at one time, and they go around Colombia and France and Thailand and Mexico, and they say, 'Hi, would you like to carry some drugs into the U.S.?' the price of carrying drugs will have gone up dramatically."

Mr. Gingrich said his proposal, which he said he would make in a bill to be filed next month, would impose a mandatory death penalty on people convicted of bringing illegal drugs into the United States.

"If you import a commercial quantity of illegal drugs," he said, "it is because you have made the personal decision that you are prepared to get rich by destroying our children. I have made the decision that I love our children enough that we will kill you if you do this."

( H/t to Balko and TalkLeft ) This wasn't just empty rhetoric. Gingrich went on to introduce the Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996 to the House of Representatives ( scroll down a bit at the link ).

If I have to explain why this is a disgusting, evil thing, and why somebody who would be willing to "kill you" for importing chemical substances - all in the name of "our children" - is unqualified to lead a nation other than Singapore ( where similar policies, as well as being reprehensible, don't seem to have worked ), then I honestly feel sorry for you.

Plus, Gingrich says stuff like this.

Jacob Sullum makes a more comprehensive case against Newt Gingrich for Reason Magazine. So does Mark Steyn, with an old column re-posted on his site.

On a related note: Glenn Beck has taken some heat for saying that he would vote for a third-party Ron Paul over a Republican Newt Gingrich. In the words of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker:

Folks, there is nothing stopping you -- stopping us -- stopping the nation -- from electing a third party candidate to any office. House, Senate, even The White House. A candidate, or group of candidates, that promise above all else to honor the fact that you -- and not anyone else -- own yourself.

This means respect for the Rule of Law, because the only legitimate purpose of Law is to extend punishment for those who violate the rights of others within a framework of justice rather than vigilantism.

This means respect for personal autonomy, choice and freedom -- life, liberty and pursuit (but not a guarantee) of happiness.

There is nothing, my friends, that prevents actual political change and the correction of what is destroying our nation, save one thing: Recognition of who it is that actually owns you, and a refusal to vote for any candidate, in any race, irrespective of party affiliation, that either has a history of denying this basic fact or, if they have no legislative history, will not swear on their sacred honor (and upon pain of losing their job) that they will uphold the most-fundamental of all rights.

As far as I know, Denninger wasn't specifically talking about Gingrich vs. Paul, but I think what he said applies. Gingrich has shown in the past that he is clearly willing to disregard personal autonomy and fundamental rights ( like the right to not be killed by your own government ) for the sake of an arbitrary aversion to certain chemical substances. That, if nothing else, should mark him as the last candidate that any liberal-minded person ( in the classic sense of that term ) would want to vote for.

Update: Supervillain or Newt?

Walker Morrow · at 10:24 AM

As promised in August - alright, so my predictions were a little off - here is my appearance on The Propagandist podcast. I'm talking about Geert Wilders, right-wing politics in Europe, and the like. Feel free to make fun of the dumb things I say and the dumb ways I say them.

Walker Morrow · at 7:19 AM

Reason.tv:

H/t Anthony L. Fisher at Reason's Hit & Run. Also see Balko and Mark Frauenfelder.

Walker Morrow · at 10:16 PM

A few items:

A $1 million settlement from the City of Minneapolis for a flash-bang grenade that burned the skin off a woman's leg during a botched drug raid last year.
Whoops.
In which NYPD officers act like dicks.
"Film the police."
"At least nine felony convictions" for perjury, theft, and gunrunning as a result of an anti-blight initiative in Philadelphia.
In BC, the government has implemented all of the recommendations for police use of tasers that have come out of the Braidwood Inquiry, and is also bringing in new video surveillance standards in police buildings. Good for them.
Support Columbia, Missouri Chief Ken Burton.
In Columbus, Ohio, a 15-year-old boy was shot as part of a police investigation into pizza-boy robberies. He underwent surgery for a shattered femur and shrapnel in his left leg.
In Westminster, Maryland, a local police union is accusing the local cops of using money seized from drug raids to buy iPads and iPhones for commanding officers.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio: complete asshole.
In Minnesota, a candidate for leader of the state's Republican Party was apparently arrested at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, fingerprinted, and photographed...for having expired vehicle tabs.
It seems that the Seattle Police Department has a problem with "unnecessary or excessive force."

Also, prosecutors and judges behaving badly, just for kicks.

Walker Morrow · at 9:41 PM

I've decided to take a break - perhaps indefinitely - from my blog at Examiner.com, mainly so I can focus on other things ( like this site, fingers crossed ). Here's my latest, and possibly last, post, which couldn't be more fitting considering how friendly Bob Simpson has been toward me in the past.

Walker Morrow · at 9:50 AM

Occasional correspondent Andrew Phillips writes:

On December 8, 2011 Natural News posted a notice that every single tweet from the twitter network was being turned over the to the United States government as did theLake Minnetonka Library blog site and at the Free Republic web site as well . The Toronto Star reported that a judge ruled it reasonable back on Thursday Nov 9 the United States Department of Justice to seize the records of 3 twitter users in the WikiLeaks investigation. Not true they have now seized all of them. While back in March a judge ruled the government could have access to users personal IP accounts. A simliar provision is in the Crime Omnibus Bill the Harper government just rammed through the House of Commons. This BBC web site post talks of the Twitter redesign offer big name brands more prominence with which I have no problem that is merely business. But as it states, "…experts have warned that the company must be careful not to "compromise users' experience".

The Natural News article concludes with these chilling words, "...be careful what you tweet; some "researcher" may just "data-mine" it some day, to your dismay." Well here is something to consider when it comes to that data-mining possibility. In 2007 the State of Vermont passed a law forbidding the data-mining of prescription drug records (i.e., which drugs are being prescribed and how frequently) for marketing purposes. But on June 23, 2011 the United States Supreme Court ruled that big pharma had a right to private medical records and that the Vermont law interfered with big pharma and it's right to know everything about you.

According to this link at the Data Center Knowledge website site Twitter used managed hosting services from NTT America in Silicon Valley and Ashburn, Virginia until 2010. However in 2010 Twitter announced it would be hosting its on servers starting with a new facility in Salt Lake City, Utah. Earlier this year it also leased space in Sacramento, California with RagingWire Enterprise Solutions. That information confirmed here at this site. Now it is also starting up a server in the Atlanta, Georgia area using the enormous data center operated by QTS (Quality Technology Services) in downtown Atlanta. But what everyone doesn't know is it appears, as far as I can tell, there are no Twitter servers outside the United States of America.

In Russia where many people are questioning the legality of the last election. They are using both facebook and twitter so all their messages are also in the hands of the United States government. So any opponents of Valdimir Putin might have just earned themselves a visit from the state security service if the United States government hands those tweets over to Russia. Here in Canada we just concluded an open border pact of some sort with the United States. Anyone in Canada who has ever used twitter should understand it now appears your tweets are in the hands of the United States government.

But what exactly are the terms of the "deal" well as the Chronicle Herald from down east shows one of the "trusted" industries who will have access to the fast lanes are those same drug cartels that have had private medical information handed over to them by the United States Supreme Court as their "free speech" was violated. Will they now be handed the private medical records of Canadians as well?

Canada and the US will ramp up their recording and sharing of biometric data such as fingerprints for people who apply for visas. But what constitutes biometric data? Well the description at Wikipedia is biometrics consists of methods for uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits; which involve genes and characteristics of organisms.

Biometric identifiers are unique to individuals, they are more reliable in verifying identity than token and knowledge-based methods, however, the collection of biometric identifiers raises privacy concerns about the ultimate use of this information. However since they have already handed the drug companies access to everyone's medical records they have violated the privacy of every American citizen. In Florida schools they are using biometrics - a gross invasion of privacy - just so kids can get lunch. I wonder if that information will also be given to the drug companies.

What appears to have taken place is the single worst most egregious attack on civil liberties, freedom of speech, and personal privacy quite possibly in history.

Walker Morrow · at 8:12 AM

Kirk Makin reports for the Globe and Mail:

With a government omnibus crime bill on the verge of becoming law, Mr. Daubney said he felt compelled to issue a warning that federal priorities threaten to undo decades of correctional research and reform.

“Overcrowding is already severe at both the federal and provincial levels,” Mr. Daubney said in an interview. “It’s going to get tougher, and prisons will be more violent places. We may go back to the era of riots in prisons. I’m afraid it is going to get worse before it gets any better.”

H/t Aaron Wherry.

Walker Morrow · at 9:57 PM

Occasional correspondent Andrew Phillips wrote the following for his website the other day:

Supply-driven marketing not only turns the nation into pill-popping hypochondriacs, it distracts from Pharma's drought of real drugs for real medical problems.

If anything shows that medicine is returning to the dark ages and to stigmatizing people it is this nonsense. I'll say one thing for being left-handed it apparently makes me immune to the nonsense, fear mongering, stigmatizing, and ignorance being displayed by a pseudo-science operating on the same level as voodoo. Following my rule that someone always discovers something I haven't that WSJ article along side this article shows that Adult ADHD is the new disease, along with 6 others, that will be pushed by the non-existent medical criteria of the psychiatric industry.

2012, like in the movie, just might well be the year the world ends for a lot of people.

As to left-handedness and schizophrenia this article from the New York Times that says there isn't a correlation. So we have a situation where one article says it's true and another saying it isn't true. The NYT article links to another article where the findings against the link to schizophrenia is available. There is a second link to PubMED Canada that also disputes the schizophrenia connection to left-handedness. The second link also mentions the Bible of Voodoo Medicine the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that the psychiatric profession uses.

When it comes to ADHD (Adult) under the ADHD in Adults Link here we see CHADD (Children and Adults with ADD), ADDA (Attention Deficit Disorder Association) both known fronts for the pharmaceutical companies that are run by psychiatrists. As to the financial cost of this scam this BMJ (British Medical Journal) article shows that while spending on drugs in Canada doubled between 1996 and 2003 of 1147 new patented drugs, "...the remaining 1005 new drugs did not provide a “substantial improvement over existing drug products.” We classified them as “me-too” drugs". In plain English the taxpayers in Canada paid more for drugs that weren't any better; and nothing more than knockoffs.

The big drug companies are now in the middle of the "patent cliff" which began in 2008 and will continue until 2016 with global annual sales of upwards of 643 billion dollars to be lost. The hardest hit will be Pfizer as you can see here. Pfizer makes the smoking cessation product Champix (Chantix in the US) and there are serious issues - like suicide - with that drug.

Effects from the drug, that work directly on the brain by the way, as are shown here where it points to the psychological side effects, handy for the voodoo industry, but there is also a Chantix (Champix) diabetes effect and a Chantix (Champix) heart attack effect as well. Chantix (Champix) appears to be so dangerous a whole cottage industry has grown up around the lawsuits outside of Canada; of which we hear nothing. Why?

Wouldn't it be funny if the stigmatizing, vilifying, and segregating of millions citizens in Canada who enjoy tobacco was so a drug company could peddle another dangerous drug? I know I'm laughing even thinking that possibility exists.

It is one thing to be viewed as different because of personal actions, attitudes, or even beliefs. It is quite another to be placed in that position because some people, who stand to profit, along with big government have decided your different; that has always ended badly for those on the receiving end.

You can take this test to see if your suffering Adult ADHD. Don't be surprised at the results. Welcome to the 21st century the new dark ages of voodoo science. Where quite possibly for many people 2012 will be the end of the world even though they're both physically and mentally in good shape.

Even if they're left handed.

Walker Morrow · at 9:46 PM

In my latest for Examiner.com, I talk about BC's new Centre for Court Administration, its new independent police watchdog, and its remarkably united New Democratic Party.

Walker Morrow · at 10:57 AM

H/t Balko for this account by The Infamous Brad of Occupy St. Louis v. the St. Louis police department:

All of the cops who weren't busy transporting and processing the voluntary arrestees lined up, blocking the stairs down into the plaza. They stood shoulder to shoulder. They kept calm and silent. They positioned the weapons on their belts out of sight. They crossed their hands low in front of them, in exactly the least provocative posture known to man. And they peacefully, silently, respectfully occupied the plaza, using exactly the same non-violent resistance techniques that the protesters themselves had been trained in. Downtown bicycle patrol cops had spent weeks coming to the Occupy St. Louis general assembly and working group meetings, paying respectful attention and engaging people in polite conversation, listening intently; who knew that they weren't surveilling protesters, as some of us paranoidly assumed, they were seeing what the protesters had to teach them about tactics! A few of the protesters stayed for a couple of hours, to maintain the stand-off; the police uncomplainingly and politely continued their occupation of the plaza, flawlessly turning Occupy St. Louis's tactics back against them.

This is how it is supposed to be done.

Walker Morrow · at 9:20 AM

Earlier, I considered trying to get an interview with Mount Royal Liberal MP Irwin Cotler about his views on Tory MP Brian Storseth's private member's motion to scrap Section 13(1) ( Bill C-304 ). Since Cotler is both a former justice minister under the Liberals and a relatively prominent figure in the Jewish community - which has some reservations when it comes to taking hate speech laws off the books - I thought it would be interesting to get his perspective. However, Cotler's own reservations about Bill C-304 have already become a matter of public record, so I don't think an interview will be necessary.

What I want to leave you with is something that Mark Mercer tipped me off to, for which I am indebted to him: an essay written by Irwin Cotler for the book Law, Policy and International Justice: Essays in Honor of Maxwell Cohen, which was published in 1993. I can't provide you with the essay itself without obtaining a physical copy myself, but here's the title of Cotler's essay: "The Right to Protection Against Group-Vilifying Speech: Towards a Model Factum in Support of Anti-Hate Legislation."

I'll let you guess at what his conclusions in the essay might be, but I have a feeling that 1993 Irwin Cotler would agree with 2011 Irwin Cotler in objecting to Brian Storseth's motion.

Walker Morrow · at 9:54 AM

I gotta come up with a better title for this segment.

At any rate, instead of bitching and moaning about all the bad things that police officers do hither and yon, I figure I should praise good behavior as well.

Enter Canada's shiny new RCMP commissioner, Bob Paulson. Jim Bronskill reports, via The Hook:

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson told The Canadian Press that lying, cheating, stealing, intentional use of excessive force and blatant harassment will not be tolerated.
"We're going to suspend people immediately. We're going to seek their dismissal through a formal process and we're going to suspend their pay," Paulson said in his first interview as top Mountie. "Those are all powers that are available to me now."
The veteran officer, who assumed the high-profile job last week, says leadership and accountability within the RCMP are his immediate priorities. He stepped into the post as long-simmering concerns about harassment and bullying within the iconic police force boiled over, prompting an internal review and an investigation by the RCMP watchdog. The police force continues to feel reverberations from the case of a bewildered Polish immigrant who died at the Vancouver airport after being zapped repeatedly with an RCMP Taser.

Let's see if Paulson lives up to his promise. Perhaps he could start here.

Walker Morrow · at 8:48 AM

As the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs holds townhall meetings to determine what it thinks of Conservative MP Brian Storseth's private member's motion to scrap Section 13(1) from the Canadian Human Rights Act, Scaramouche offers up a few simple pointers:

1. Only an idiot would trust a hack bureaucrat, an utter mediocrity who, by the way, is none too bright, to pass judgement on what is and is not acceptable speech in the land.

2. The anti-hate provisions that we thought would protect us (from the phantom menace of scary Nazis who deploy uncapped Sharpies of doom) are now being used against us; these provisions dovetail perfectly with the sharia agenda of silencing the kafir who dares speak "blasphemy," and both the B'nai Brith and the now-defunct CJC have been on the receiving end of Muslims' complaints about them. As such, it is supremely frustrating that BB's Frank Dimant and the aforementioned Farber remain committed to the odious Section's retention in some form.
H/t BCF.

Walker Morrow · at 7:34 AM

A few items of interest.

Lucy Steigerwald at Reason's Hit & Run, Benjamin Carson at The Daily, and Radley Balko at the Huffington Post on police militarization.
An environment of harassment for women in the RCMP.
The officers involved in the 2007 tasering of Robert Dziekanski are set to stand trial in 2012 and 2013 on perjury charges.
In the US, financial year 2011 set the record for military surplus transfers to police departments. H/t Balko.
Yasha Levine in The Exiled on the LAPD's shoddy treatment of detained Occupy LA protesters.
The dodgy circumstances surrounding Vincent Rowell's death in a Jasper County, Alabama, jail cell in 2009.
Melbourne, Australia, police get testy with Occupy Melbourne protesters.
Anthony Cormier and Matthew Doig in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune on why unqualified, downright dangerous police officers are allowed to keep their jobs in Florida.

Walker Morrow · at 11:15 PM

Check it out: John Doyle's rat-in-the-snake dilemma.

Walker Morrow · at 7:44 PM

Aaron Wherry lays out a few proposals for change. Mark Jarvis contributes.

Meanwhile, a parliamentary practice that should probably be discouraged.

Walker Morrow · at 9:19 AM

A few items of interest.

Don't give your country of origin, get punished for "disorderly conduct."
Problems with police dogs.

The State of Illinois is fighting hard to punish Michael Allison for filming police and public officials in, of all places, public.

Meanwhile, prosecutors behaving badly.

Al Baker in the New York Times on the militarization of American police.

Five-year-old is ziptied, charged with battery on a police officer in Stockton, California.

An unarmed man is charged with assault with a deadly weapon in Orlando, after a police officer mistakes the man's reaching down to pull up his pants as grabbing for a gun - and shoots at him.

Adams County, Colorado authorities are the recipients of a lawsuit after detaining a deaf man for 25 days on domestic assault charges without providing a sign-language interpreter.

Retired Arapahoe County Sheriff Patrick J. Sullivan Jr., arrested on meth trafficking charges, is sitting in a jail named after him: the Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility.