Today I was on Geoff Berg's Partisan Gridlock radio show on Pacifica radio station KPFT, along with METRO Police Chief Victor Rodriguez. It was an hour-long show, but only the first half seems to have been recorded to MP3. Also, it didn't broadcast over the airwaves in some of the KPFT service area once I started talking: technical difficulties involving lightning. Here's what we have of it:

We have heard talk of “justice.” Is there anybody who knows what justice is? No one on earth can measure out justice. Can you look at any man and say what he deserves—whether he deserves hanging by the neck until dead or life in prison or thirty days in prison or a medal? The human mind is blind to all who seek to look in at it

METRO press release 13 April: (Source.) METRO blog post 16 April: (Source.) METRO twitter account 18 April: (Source.) I'm guessing someone talked to a lawyer and realized that random bag checks aren't such a hot idea, Constitutionally speaking. So we agree on that. Now, METRO, let's get together and send TSA packing.

John Brennan stripped naked at a TSA screening area Tuesday night in protest. He got arrested for his trouble. MLK and Henry David Thoreau would be proud. Brennan is charged with "disorderly conduct and indecent exposure." I've looked at the statutes (2011 ORS §163.465, Public Indecency, and 2011 ORS §§166.023, 025, Disorderly Conduct), and I don't see how the government makes its case on these facts. Interfering

• I wrote more than two years ago about Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas. Last week he was disbarred. I wrote: Aside from the ethical question, there are practical considerations. These Maricopa County Assistant County Attorneys, casting their lot with Andrew Thomas, are lying down with dogs. If Arpaio and Thomas’s fantastical castle in the sky comes crashing to the ground, those lawyers are going to be

Harris County Assistant District Attorney Rachel Palmer has filed an assumed-name certificate declaring that she will be doing business as Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center. Someone else has been doing business as Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center for about four years: Murray Newman, who started a blog by that name on 8 January 2008, and who has not been gentle with

Last Friday 15 TSA agents joined officers of the Houston Police Department, the Harris County Sheriff's Office, the METRO Police Department, and the Precinct Seven Constable's Office in "a synchronized, counter-terrorism exercise that focused on bus stops and shelters and transit centers." (Write On Metro, Multi-Agency Sting Operation on Rail & Bus Successful, h/t @frankbynum.) No actual terrorists were found in this exercise, in which officers "performed

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison," wrote Henry David Thoreau in Civil Disobedience. In April 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. sat in a Birmingham, Alabama jail cell, arrested for participating in nonviolent protests. Forty-nine years ago today, he wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail. I republish it here in its entirety because, while it is

I am opposed to employers holding the fact of petty non-moral-turpitude convictions against job applicants. Unless you are hiring drivers, you shouldn't care whether a prospective employee has had a DWI. I can't think of any job (from the office of the President right down to me and you) for which never having smoked marijuana is a reasonable qualification. (It's not like the drunk driver or the pot

When two of his prosecutors got caught hiding Brady Material, Oklahoma County DA David Prater issued a press release, reading in part: I recognize that this is not a one-time occurrence. There is no telling how many cases have been tainted by Pam Kimbrough and Stephanie Miller's concealment of exculpatory evidence. There is no telling how many people have had unfair trials in this county because Pam Kimbrough