Gangsters in Blue

• Amazing color photographs from the Great Depression.
• Smoke or deal pot, and the SWAT team will violently break into your home in the middle of the night. But beat a man within an inch of his life, then run from the law, and the SWAT team will come for you in broad daylight, surround your house, make several announcements over a bullhorn, and give you the opportunity to surrender peacefully.
• Lawmakers, regulators take aim at prepaid credit cards. Because of the drugs.
• Have no idea if this actually happened. But I hope it did.
• New York City cracks down on “illegal hotels“, basically making it impossible for a non-profit, private home or apartment owner, or any other party to rent a room to out-of-towners without getting all the proper and prohibitively expensive hotel permits. Great example of how regulation often protects big businesses, and screws over just about everyone else.
• Time lapse puppy-to-adult video.

• Research team claims they’ve found Atlantis.
• Read this terrific Baylen Linnekin Reason piece on New York’s “lobstah pushah” and the regulation of food trucks.
• How to respond to a public insult.
• Something isn’t right, here.
• Some stunning, heart-wrenching photos from Japan.
• Fox Business Network, meet the Broken Window Fallacy.
• Alabama man shot by police who raided his house by mistake gets a $500,000 settlement.
• More questions about James O’Keefe’s editing decisions, raised this time by the news site started by Glenn Beck.
• http://ifyouwatchitbackwards.com/

• Another isolated incident.
• Woman investigated for civil rights violations after posting ad for Christian roommate on church bulletin board.
• Photos of Muslims wearing things.
• Primer on early coverage of the latest Wikileaks dump. Abbreviated version: Your government lied to you.
• Here’s a commercial featuring a catapult that launches tiny pies at bugs.
• I’m tired of these motherfucking crocodiles on this motherfucking plane.
• This Randy Quaid stuff is really, really strange.
• Fallout from the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.
• David Brooks longs for the days when all sitcoms were about families. He’s right. It was a simpler, more wholesome era of  television. It was also an era that only existed in David Brooks’ mind. I’m sure he’ll find a way to blame libertarians for this.
• Vintage photos of the New York City Subway.

• Headline: SWAT team requested for violent midgets.
• Lawyer for officer in Bear-Bear shooting says he acted “in self-defense.”
• ….and most historians agree that was the day America ended.
• Puppycide in Clayton County, Georgia.
• Interpretive Captcha art.
• From the comments, an interview with Josh Ritter.
• Facts about South Park.
• Beautiful collection of color photos from the 1930s and 1940s.

• Woman claims massive police raid on her home caused her miscarriage. She was accused of violating city animal control ordinances. Her attorney says she was later cleared. In addition to the usual overkill, there’s also a certain irony in bringing a SWAT team to confront someone charged with neglecting dogs.
• Close-up photos of dew-covered insects.
• Great post by Will Wilkinson on “Earth Hour.” I thought the counter-protests in which people burned as much energy as possible were silly and not particularly helpful to the discussion. But Will makes a very good point about energy consumption and poverty.
• Old pictures of drunk Brits.
• “Area police officers were involved in hundreds of vehicular collisions last year that could have been avoided had the drivers adhered to traffic laws and basic roadway etiquette, according to official reports.”
• Woman paints people to look like paintings, then photographs them. Result: Rather nifty.

Award-winning photojournalist gets arrested in West Virginia for photographing a mall Santa, then attempting to photograph a police officer who harassed him about it. An overly protective parent complained that his kid was included in one of the photos. Given that all of this transpired in a public space, photographing the Santa, the kids, and the cop are all perfectly legal, by the way.

Which is probably why the photographer was charged with battering the arresting officer and resisting arrest, not for taking the photos that caused the confrontation in the first place.

(Hat tip to the Injustice Everywhere Twitter feed.)