Here's a rather unlikely scenario:

FORT WORTH -- The son of a convenience store owner opened fire on an undercover narcotics officer because he thought she was entering the store to rob it, police said today.
....
"According to his statement, he saw the ski mask and the gun in the officer's hand, he thought they were bring robbed so he fired the shot," Lt. Jesse Hernandez said in a news release.
...
Three officers went into the store to arrest the man, wearing dark hoods on their heads that left only the eyes exposed.
...
Police had originally said that the officer had on a bullet-resistant vest and was not wearing a hood.

"Follow-up investigation reveals that the injured officer was wearing a concealment hood and had her gun drawn at the time she entered the store," the released said.

The unlikely part: The fact that the son of the convenience store owner lived long enough for the truth to come out about this police screw up.

According to police, Bao Nguyen, (pictured, left) confused the officer for an armed robber because she entered the store wearing a ski mask and dark clothing.

"If I don't shoot this person, then they will shoot me first, and then my dad," Nguyen said.

Why, do you suppose, is someone from "doberman.ftc.gov" searching google for gun owner blog's?

What a way to start out the new year in New York City. You could really spin this in a couple of ways.
This year's fatal police-on-civilian shootings so far outnumber civilian-on-civilian slayings by one.
Maybe the $105 parking tickets (which put Seattle to shame) have something to do with the rage.

And I thought that Connecticut towns were revenue happy. Seattle is apparently so desperate for cash that its agents will ticket people who park and leave their lights on!

John Seth was not happy when he returned to his car after making an early afternoon delivery in downtown Seattle last month and found that he'd left his lights on.

He was even less pleased when a city parking-enforcement officer handed him a $28 parking ticket. Not for being in a space illegally or for having an expired meter — it was for those headlights.
...
Seth, a driver for the film company Film Stop, had no idea he could get a parking ticket merely for forgetting to turn off his lights — and he's not alone. The handful of police, city and court officials who could be reached yesterday said they'd never heard of anyone being penalized for such a thing.

"Even I am not aware of a law" that makes leaving lights on a citable offense, said Leo Poort, legal counsel to the Seattle Police Department. "It'd be news to me."
...
If there's any silver lining for Seth, it might be that if he had gotten the ticket today, it would be $38 instead of $28 because of the city's efforts to balance the 2003 budget.

At some point there will simply be so many laws that anyone out in public, and maybe even some simply defined as being in a public place, can be fined/ticketed/arrested for simply being.

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"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." - Ayn Rand

Six Dead, 25 Hospitalized After Choking on New Year's Rice Cakes in Japan
And you thought drinking was Dangerous.

Silliness abounds all around tonight's celebration in Times Square.

I saw someone from Countdown Entertainment on Fox News claim that the 83,000 watts of power required to light the ball are being generated using clean, green wind-generated electricity.

Can't you just picture it, pristine, clean, silent windmills churning away on top of NYC buildings, piping their captured green energy over to the sparkling, shimmering shining ball of consumption?

How, you ask, can they risk that there might not be enough fickle wind available to power their oversized erector set? How can an event attended by half a million and viewed by another 500,000,000 million people worldwide rely upon a power source as spotty as wind generated electricity?

Maybe they'll run some wind mills all week charging up batteries that they can use as a back up, storing up enough power so if the wind isn't blowing they can still claim to have powered the ball using wind power.

Nah.

What they are going to do is arbitrarily declare that the ball's electricity, drawn off the same grid as every other damn thing in the city, is 'from' a windmill farm in upstate New York. That's right, ConEd is going to supply power to the ball from a grid primarily powered by fossil fuel generated electricity, but they are claiming that the 83 kW required to run the lights are magically the same 83kW that they are donating from the Fenner wind farm, even though there is no guarantee that the wind farm will be generating watt one at midnight tonight.

Electric energy entering the grid is fungible, and to claim that power from a windmill, which might not even be turning at midnight, is powering the lights of the ball is ludicrous feel-good bunk. That'd be like claiming that you could put a drop of distilled water in an twelve quart pot of tap water, stir, then reach in with an eye-dropper and pull out the same drop of distilled water that you earlier added.

The only wind power making this ball's light up is the hot air of those who are trying to politicize and "green" up this event.

Problem solving 101

Problem, discovered in the FAQ for tonight's celebration in Times Square.

Q: Will there be public restrooms available?

No. There are no public restrooms available.

Solution, the Sneaky Leaker.

Then, with no sense of irony apparent, the FAQ offers up this advice:

Q: Will there be areas in Times Square designated for disabled persons?

A. The police will set aside a viewing area for disabled people, located on the northwest corner of 43rd Street. However, this area will fill up quickly and it is advised that disabled visitors arrive early in the day.

I posted a few weeks ago about a NY resident who was being prosecuted on a weapon's posession charge after he used an unlicensed gun to defend his home.

Well, it happened again on Saturday.

[Homeowner Mike Freamon] was given an appearance ticket and released.

Police also seized three legally owned rifles from Freamon's house, which he said had been burglarized before.

"I'm angry at [alleged burglar], but there's nothing I can do," Freamon said. "This leaves me in a bad situation; now I'm unarmed."

The law is an ass.

Here's tonight's random pondering:

What does it say about Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com that three of the seven items on Mr. Bezos' wish list are now "currently unavailable" from Amazon?

LawMeme reports that the FBI is investigating Clonaid's unlikely claim of having cloned a human being. I asked in a comment over there

By what grant of authority, or for the purpose of investigating what crime, does the FBI plan to investigate Clonaid's unlikely claim?

Although another anonymous respondent assured me that "Human cloning is illegal in the United States. If Clonaid did in fact clone a human in the USA then they have commited a serious crime", a quick search of the US Code turned up no statute criminalizing cloning.

Can any reader shed some light on this one? Under what right, absent perhaps some federal research dollars being misdirected to fund this research, can the FBI spend time on this matter? FDA inspectors, maybe, but the FBI?

And how does this fit into its renewed focus on the war against terror?

UPDATE: I did quick Lexis searches in the US Code and the CFR and I found nothing criminalizing cloning. The linked yahoo article mentions:

The United States has no specific law against human cloning. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates human experiments, says its regulations forbid human cloning without prior agency permission, and it has launched an investigation into whether Clonaid illegally performed any work on U.S. soil.

At most this is a regulatory infraction, so why is the FBI wasting time on this?

Another UPDATE: Justene of Calblog commented at LawMeme:

I think the reason why the FBI is "wasting time" on it is that the Executive Branch clearly opposes cloning and is going to do what it can even though the Legislative Branch has not made it illegal yet.

I fear that I agree. I'd written an answer to my own question when I posted the first update but I wasn't ready to accuse Bush of using a federal police force for such blatantly politically motivated intimidation.