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What’s a cop to do when he tases a friend over an iced tea? Stephanie Byron, a Florida woman who says she was tased by ex-Escambia County Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Wohlers last summer, claims that Wohlers went on to bake and offer her a “Sorry I Tased You” cake.

This tidbit comes from a civil lawsuit Byron filed against Wohlers in May with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. The tasing incident supposedly happened the previous summer, when Wohlers stopped by an apartment complex where Byron worked. According to the lawsuit, Wohlers took Byron’s tea and when she tried to get it back he used his taser on her. After she fell to the ground, Wohlers then “jumped onto Ms. Byron, kneeing her in the chest” and “forcefully removed the Taser prods.”

Byron alleges that Wohlers went on to bake her a cake featuring one stick figure tasing another and the message “Sorry I Tased You,” then texted Byron a photo of the cake saying he wanted to give it to her in person. Byron’s attorney filed that photo with her lawsuit.

Wohlers has denied the allegations, saying his taser was discharged in the course of “horseplay” with Byron. He resigned from Escambia Sheriff’s Office in July 2015, while under investigation for the alleged misconduct and filing a false report about the incident.

On Monday, the state Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission placed Wohlers on a one-year probationary period during which he can’t seek law-enforcement employment in Florida. Maybe Wohlers can use the time to explore what’s clearly an untapped police greeting-card market. Sorry I tased you, sorry I shot you instead of tasing you, sorry I forgot to turn on my body camera that day I shot you, sorry I implied to everyone that you were a sex trafficker, sorry I saddled your 11-year-old with a criminal record, sorry I helped wrongfully convict you… the possibilities are really endless.

[P.S. See Anthony Fischer’s recent Reason feature for why it can be so hard to prevent bad cops from getting new jobs.]

Building big monuments is the kind of thing potentates have been doing since the Pharaohs constructed the pyramids — except that more often than not these days, they produce not wonders of the world but eyesores of the world such as the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu’s “Palace of the People” in Bucharest — the world’s “greatest monument to totalitarian kitsch.” Here’s a list of top 10 dictator architecture gone wrong.

But, apparently, when the potentate represents your own party, his profligate plans deserve a pass — no matter how much they go against what you’ve allegedly stood for. That is pretty much what the Republicans have been doing when it comes to Trump’s infrastructure nationalism that I describe in my morning column at The Week. Indeed, Trump has picked up the liberal baton of Keynesian infrastructure spending, grown it by a factor of four, wrapped some gaudy jingoistic nationalism around it and what do the anti-pork, anti-spending, limited government conservatives do?

About 125 of them sign a letter throwing their undying support behind him! Among those endorsing Trump are fiscal conservatives such as Hearland Institute’s Peter Ferrara and Larry Kudlow — never mind that in addition to a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending, Trump wants to out-left the left and expand child credits and mandate three months of employer-paid maternity leave. And there are social conservatives and self-appointed guardians of high civilization and culture such as Bill Bennett and Roger Kimball — nevermind that Trump is to these things what the Joker was to Gotham.

No doubt there is a good dose of raw, partisan tribalism driving them. But what’s also to blame is the Clinton derangement syndrome. It has scrambled the conservative brain to the point that it can’t see that Trump is making a mockery of everything it has fought for over the last eight years.

In my column, I describe just how baseless Trump’s claims that America’s infrastructure is crumbling are and how misguided his plans to fix it in the name of keeping up with China are. If Hillary had proposed this, the GOP would have gone bonkers. Yet here we are.

Go here to read the whole thing.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a sweeping asset forfeiture reform bill into law on Wednesday, making California the largest state in the country to roll back a practice that critics say allow police to seize property with little to no recourse for the owner.

With Brown’s signature, California becomes the 17th state in recent years to pass some form of civil asset forfeiture reform. Nebraska and New Mexico have banned the practice outright.

Civil asset forfeiture allows police to seize property—most often cash and cars, but even flatscreen TVs, video game systems, and houses—suspected of being involved in a crime. Police do not have to convict or in some cases even charge someone with a crime to seize their property. Law enforcement groups say the practice allows them to target the ill-gotten gains of drug traffickers and organized criminals, but civil liberties advocates say the perverse incentives and lack of safeguards lead just as often to everyday citizens being shaken down for cash.

California’s new law will require police to obtain a criminal conviction before they can forfeit assets under $40,000 and—more significantly—receive payment from the federal government’s revenue sharing program for the seizure. While the law will still allow large-scale seizures without a conviction, the bill’s sponsors say it will mostly close a loophole that police departments used to circumvent previous state law.

“It’s clear based on national media coverage, and hundred of calls that have come into my offices from people all over my state telling us about egregious abuses, that this was a bill we couldn’t let die on the floor,” California state senator Holly Mitchell said in an interview with Reason earlier this summer. “It seems reasonable to me that if you can’t convict me of a crime, you can’t assume my assets were gained through illegal activity.”

Under previous California law, a conviction was required to forfeit property valued under $25,000, but that did not stop local and state law enforcement from working with federal task forces, where there are no such rules. Working with federal law enforcement allows local police to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds from asset forfeitures they participate in.

According to a report last year by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm that has challenged asset forfeiture laws in several states, the Justice Department paid local and state agencies in California more than $696 million between 2000 and 2013, compared to $23 million in proceeds from state-level seizures.

“For too long, local and state law enforcement agencies have exploited a loophole in forfeiture law: the federal ‘equitable sharing’ program,” the Institute for Justice’s Lee McGrath said in a statement. “Because the federal government does not require a criminal conviction and pays a greater percentage of forfeiture proceeds back to state and local law enforcement than happens under state law, California agencies have routinely participated in equitable sharing.”

Mitchell introduced a similar bill in the California legislature last session, but it was voted down under opposition from state law enforcement groups, who said it would have cut off millions of dollars to local police and crippled their ability to go after drug cartels and organized crime. This year, Mitchell and other legislators reached a compromise with law enforcement groups that they say will preserve police’s ability to go after major drug traffickers while still protecting vulnerable citizens from petty and abusive seizures.

Earlier this year, the American Civil Liberties Union of California released a report finding that 85 percent of the federal asset forfeiture money flowing into the state went to departments that police minority communities, and that half of the DEA seizures from California involved people with Latino surnames. In 2013, the Drug Policy Alliance calculated the average forfeiture in California to be roughly $5,100.

“Solutions like SB 443 give communities plagued by injustice some relief,” Zachary Norris, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, said in a statement. “Low income people simply do not have the means to hire an attorney to get their lawfully earned cash returned to them. When their money gets taken by law enforcement, it’s a family crisis affecting rent, food, everything.”

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a sweeping asset forfeiture reform bill into law on Wednesday, making California the largest state in the country to roll back a practice that critics say allow police to seize property with little to no recourse for the owner.

With Brown’s signature, California becomes the 17th state in recent years to pass some form of civil asset forfeiture reform. Nebraska and New Mexico have banned the practice outright.

Civil asset forfeiture allows police to seize property—most often cash and cars, but even flatscreen TVs, video game systems, and houses—suspected of being involved in a crime. Police do not have to convict or in some cases even charge someone with a crime to seize their property. Law enforcement groups say the practice allows them to target the ill-gotten gains of drug traffickers and organized criminals, but civil liberties advocates say the perverse incentives and lack of safeguards lead just as often to everyday citizens being shaken down for cash.

California’s new law will require police to obtain a criminal conviction before they can forfeit assets under $40,000 and—more significantly—receive payment from the federal government’s revenue sharing program for the seizure. While the law will still allow large-scale seizures without a conviction, the bill’s sponsors say it will mostly close a loophole that police departments used to circumvent previous state law.

“It’s clear based on national media coverage, and hundred of calls that have come into my offices from people all over my state telling us about egregious abuses, that this was a bill we couldn’t let die on the floor,” California state senator Holly Mitchell said in an interview with Reason earlier this summer. “It seems reasonable to me that if you can’t convict me of a crime, you can’t assume my assets were gained through illegal activity.”

Under previous California law, a conviction was required to forfeit property valued under $25,000, but that did not stop local and state law enforcement from working with federal task forces, where there are no such rules. Working with federal law enforcement allows local police to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds from asset forfeitures they participate in.

According to a report last year by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm that has challenged asset forfeiture laws in several states, the Justice Department paid local and state agencies in California more than $696 million between 2000 and 2013, compared to $23 million in proceeds from state-level seizures.

“For too long, local and state law enforcement agencies have exploited a loophole in forfeiture law: the federal ‘equitable sharing’ program,” the Institute for Justice’s Lee McGrath said in a statement. “Because the federal government does not require a criminal conviction and pays a greater percentage of forfeiture proceeds back to state and local law enforcement than happens under state law, California agencies have routinely participated in equitable sharing.”

Mitchell introduced a similar bill in the California legislature last session, but it was voted down under opposition from state law enforcement groups, who said it would have cut off millions of dollars to local police and crippled their ability to go after drug cartels and organized crime. This year, Mitchell and other legislators reached a compromise with law enforcement groups that they say will preserve police’s ability to go after major drug traffickers while still protecting vulnerable citizens from petty and abusive seizures.

Earlier this year, the American Civil Liberties Union of California released a report finding that 85 percent of the federal asset forfeiture money flowing into the state went to departments that police minority communities, and that half of the DEA seizures from California involved people with Latino surnames. In 2013, the Drug Policy Alliance calculated the average forfeiture in California to be roughly $5,100.

“Solutions like SB 443 give communities plagued by injustice some relief,” Zachary Norris, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, said in a statement. “Low income people simply do not have the means to hire an attorney to get their lawfully earned cash returned to them. When their money gets taken by law enforcement, it’s a family crisis affecting rent, food, everything.”

A black teenager is facing charges in Prince William County, Virginia, for allegedly stealing a 65-cent milk carton from the school cafeteria. The teen, Ryan Turk, refused to accept a lesser charge in exchange for entering a diversionary program that required him to admit his guilt—which means the case is headed to trial.

It’s an absurd prosecution, according to Turk’s version of events as reported by The Washington Post. Turk didn’t steal anything, he claims—he qualifies for free lunches under a state program. He says he forgot to grab his milk the first time he was in the lunch line, and later went back for it. A school resource officer assumed he was stealing, and approached him.

Turk says he put the carton back, but the officer wanted him to take it to the principal’s office. The officer then grabbed him by the neck, handcuffed him, and charged him with two misdemeanors: disorderly conduct and petit larceny.

The officer—who is also black—tells a slightly different story. He says the teen threw the milk back at him, pushed him, and tried to get away.

Turk’s lawyer thinks racism was involved, according to The Post:

“No one needs to be punished for stealing a 65-cent carton of milk,” said Emmett Robinson, a lawyer who is representing the family and said Ryan’s arrest was related to institutional racism. “This officer treats kids like they’re criminals, and guess what happens — they’re going to become criminals.”

Turk had the option of entering a diversion program that would have scrubbed the charges from his record, but turned it down because it would have meant admitting guilt. Prosecutors are moving forward with the case against him.

That’s a huge waste of the criminal justice system’s time and financial resources—this farce should be abandoned, immediately.

But this case also highlights the absurdity of placing cops in schools and expecting them to handle disciplinary issues that should be left to teachers, counsellors, and principals. If Turk did something wrong—and it’s not at all clear he did—he should be scrubbing blackboards and clapping erasers, not facing charges.

Ex-Reasoner Michael C. Moynihan, the third wheel (heel?) of The Fifth Column, pronounced at the close of this latest (and longest!) episode of the world’s greatest podcast that it was our “best ever.” Then again, he was drunk, and had spent much of the time just cold rambling about porn.

No really, good stuff here, on topics including:

* Gary Johnson’s latest “Aleppo moment.”

* Hillary Clinton’s off-puttingness even when standing next to Donald Trump.

* The risible notion that a vote for not-Hillary is a vote for war, because Al Gore or something.

* California’s ridiculous put-condoms-on-porn-dicks ballot initiative.

* Kmele Foster getting called “coon,” “Uncle Tom,” and worse for not jumping to conclusions about officer-involved shootings.

* Ayn Rand’s great writing on racism and collectivism.

* Kmele’s new Yeezys (pictured).

Go ahead and give it a listen:

Now, here are the places you can download, interact with, recommend to your friends about, write glowing reviews of, and submit your fan-art to, The Fifth Column: iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.

Depending on the state you live in, you may be required to obtain an occupational license to become a plumber, an insurance agent, a hair braider, a manicurist, or even a racetrack employee. These licenses, which can take dozens or hundreds of hours of training to procure, afford privileged access to specific industries—and they can be revoked if certain standards aren’t met. But in six states, the same standard isn’t applied to one surprising profession: law enforcement.

Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, and Hawaii employ 26 percent of this country’s law enforcement officers, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. But they have no legal authority to revoke the licenses of cops who have been dismissed for misconduct. And even though the other 44 states can decertify police officers, there is no nationwide mechanism allowing every police department in the country to access an applicant’s work history with out-of-state departments. This information gap allows officers banned from working as police in one state to secure law enforcement employment in another state.

Police representatives would have you believe that “gypsy cops,” as such officers are sometimes referred to, represent an overstated and barely existent threat at best. In March 2016, Ray McGrath, the legislative director of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers (IBPO)—one of the U.S.’s most prominent police unions—told members of the Massachusetts legislature, “It’s not possible for an officer [fired for misconduct] to get another job in civil service,”according to a state House reporter for Boston University.

But bad cops can and do find work in law enforcement. Decertified police have repeatedly slipped through the cracks to find new jobs in the profession, often by moving to another state and applying to a department lacking the resources or manpower to do a thorough background check.

Although some efforts to track police decertifications exist, they are scattered and fragmented, varying from state to state, with no unified national coordination. That’s why police reform advocates have been pushing for the creation of a single, federally maintained database for more than 20 years.

The Chicago Tribune, which for more than a century was one of the Republican Party’s great kingmakers, has for the first time in its storied history endorsed a Libertarian for president, Gary Johnson.

In a 1,680-word editorial, the self-styled “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” whose only prior Democratic endorsements had been for Chicagoan Barack Obama, had harsh words for America’s two largest political tribes:

How could the Democratic and Republican parties stagger so far from this nation’s political mainstream? […]

This is the moment to look at the candidates on this year’s ballot. This is the moment to see this election as not so much about them as about the American people and where their country is heading. And this is the moment to rebuke the Republican and Democratic parties.

Though the paper clearly preferences Hillary Clinton in a two-candidate matchup (“Any American who lists their respective shortcomings should be more apoplectic about the litany under his name than the one under hers”), it nonetheless makes a compelling case against the Illinois native for her “up-to-the-present history of egregiously erasing the truth,” her corner-cutting ambition, and her policies. Excerpt:

Clinton’s vision of ever-expanding government is in such denial of our national debt crisis as to be fanciful. Rather than run as a practical-minded Democrat as in 2008, this year she lurched left, pandering to match the Free Stuff agenda of then-rival Bernie Sanders. She has positioned herself so far to the left on spending that her presidency would extend the political schism that has divided America for some 24 years. That is, since the middle of a relatively moderate Clinton presidency. Today’s Hillary Clinton, unlike yesteryear’s, renounces many of Bill Clinton’s priorities — freer trade, spending discipline, light regulation and private sector growth to generate jobs and tax revenues.

Hillary Clinton calls for a vast expansion of federal spending, supported by the kinds of tax hikes that were comically impossible even in the years when President Barack Obama’s fellow Democrats dominated both houses of Congress.

So what about the Libertarians?

Gary Johnson of New Mexico and running mate William Weld of Massachusetts are agile, practical and, unlike the major-party candidates, experienced at managing governments. They offer an agenda that appeals not only to the Tribune’s principles but to those of the many Americans who say they are socially tolerant but fiscally responsible. […]

Theirs is small-L libertarianism, built on individual freedom and convinced that, at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, official Washington is clumsy, expensive and demonstrably unable to solve this nation’s problems. They speak of reunifying an America now balkanized into identity and economic groups — and of avoiding their opponents’ bullying behavior and sanctimonious lectures. Johnson and Weld are even-keeled — provided they aren’t discussing the injustice of trapping young black children in this nation’s worst-performing schools. On that and other galling injustices, they’re animated.

The paper dings Johnson for being “too reluctant to support what we view as necessary interventions overseas,” but concludes that “unless the United States tames a national debt that’s rapidly approaching $20 trillion-with-a-T, Americans face ever tighter constrictions on what this country can afford, at home or overseas.” Trump and Clinton are too “cowardly” to face up to this harsh truth. Kicker: “Every American who casts a vote for [Johnson] is standing for principles — and can be proud of that vote. Yes, proud of a candidate in 2016.”

The Tribune, which has urged several times previously for Johnson and Weld to be given a fair hearing at the presidential debates, thus becomes the sixth and largest American newspaper to endorse the Libertarian ticket, according to this running (and admittedly incomplete) list over at Wikipedia. The Detroit News threw its support behind Johnson earlier this week, writing that “[T]his is an endorsement of conscience, reflecting our confidence that Johnson would be a competent and capable president and an honorable one.”

So how many daily newspapers have endorsed Republican nominee Donald Trump? As far as I can tell, zero. The Wikipedia page has the count at 13-6-0, Clinton over Johnson over Trump. Six of Clinton’s editorial-board backers had endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012; of those, none of the editorials even mention Gary Johnson. (Though I could not locate one of the editorials in question, from Florida’s Sun-Sentinel.)

In addition, USA Today this week issued an editorial page judgment on the presidential race for the first time in its history, urging readers to not vote for Trump. (Last month Tulsa World, a traditionally Republican-leaning page that endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012, opted for none of the above.)

If these early trend lines hold up, Donald Trump will be the least-endorsed major-party presidential nominee in at least post-war history, and I would guess ever. The fact that roughly two in five American voters seem poised to vote for a candidate that 0 of 20 newspaper editorial boards can stomach says a lot of potentially interesting things about both Trump and the distance between newsroom and main street values. It would be an embarrassing reveal indeed if all the combined might of the nation’s unsigned editorials fail to deliver the desired result on Election Day.

Previous endorsement-blogging here and here.

U.S. military forces have been “ground down by 15 years of combat, the longest period of continuous conflict in American history” and “The country is employing its military at a rate it cannot sustain,” the editors of Military Times write in an editorial published earlier this week.

Comparing today’s present state of the U.S. military to “the troubled ‘hollow force’ era that corrupted morale and eroded readiness in the years following Vietnam,” the editorial also cites its own polling data which indicate active military service-people have had quite enough of the interventions of choice launched and administered by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The same military survey recently conducted by Military Times and Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families which showed Gary Johnson and Donald Trump in a virtual tie for support among the nation’s military also revealed that 55 percent “strongly” or “somewhat” oppose the “U.S. government’s continued involvement with nation building in the Middle East and North Africa.”

62 percent of those participating in the survey think the U.S. should be less involved with foreign aid and 51 percent think the U.S. should be less involved with “stability and state building.” 68 percent think the U.S. should be more involved with “homeland defense” and 62 percent want more done in the realm of “counter-terrorism.”

The Military Times editorial explains why support for the past generation of U.S. military interventionism is so unpopular with the military:

Beyond their break-neck operational tempo, military personnel have watched hard-fought gains evaporate in both theaters. Provinces and cities where American troops bled and died have fallen back into the clutches of brutal extremists whom the U.S. sought to displace in the name of peace, prosperity and democracy.

Helmand. Nangarhar. Kunduz.

Ramadi. Fallujah. Mosul.

The list goes on and on and these fights aren’t even over yet.

Adding that ongoing U.S. military operations aren’t just limited to Iraq and Afghanistan, but also include “conducting airstrikes in Libya, patrolling the South China Sea, training NATO allies along Russia’s borders,” the editorial argues that feeding “America’s war weary armed forces” with “vapid rhetoric” won’t boost morale or make them any better equipped to perform their necessary duties, but “clearly defining and articulating strategic purpose and objectives” before committing to a “military solution” could help the active armed forces be more inclined to believe in their mission.

It’s a statement that seems so obvious, you could imagine it doesn’t need to be said. But given the fact that one of the two people who will be the next Commander in Chief thinks he can treat service-people like his own personal toy soldiers, while the other has never met a military intervention she didn’t support, it’s as good a time as any to belabor the obvious.

Our military is tired and they need to stop fighting other people’s wars.