I missed this story last week, but apparently Pfizer is abandoning its New London headquarters, and the land that it used the power of government to steal from Kelo et al. now lays fallow.

Susette Kelo’s little, pink house in New London, Conn. — like the houses of all her neighbors — is now a pile of rubble, overgrown with weeds. But Pfizer, the company that called for the demolition in order to build a new research and development plant, announced Monday it is packing up and leaving town in order to cut costs after its merger with fellow drug-giant Wyeth.

[...]

The Fort Trumbull neighborhood Pfizer had bulldozed today consists only of “weeds, glass, bricks, pieces of pipe and shingle splinters,” according to the Associated Press. Nobody has built the high-rise hotel or the luxury condos the city’s planners had envisioned. The credit crunch and housing collapse took the air of out of that grand plan.

And Pfizer’s sparkling R&D facility that was supposed to anchor the city’s “rejuvenation?” It’s being shuttered as a cost-saving measure following Pfizer’s merger with Wyeth. Some of the 1,400 jobs there will move across the river to Groton. Some will be terminated.

The best-laid plans of central planners, it seems, have once again gone awry-unless you look at it from Pfizer’s perspective.

The Hartford Courant reports Pfizer may sell the building and the land, which it got for nearly nothing. Or it may lease it out. So, the drug giant still gets the profits from the government’s taking. But for New London? No more R&D jobs. No development of Fort Trumbull. Just some rubble where families once lived.

Despicable.

Update: I was on vacation last week, so I totally missed the fact that Steve Verdon covered this already. Still, we can keep being mad, right?

Brookins cartoon courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch via Doug Mataconis.

A self-professed gun nut named Caleb:

Saturday leaving my office, I was the subject of an attempted mugging by a member of the Indianapolis Choir Boy School of Good Men Who are Only Down on Their Luck.  As I was leaving my office, said altar boy came around the corner of my building to the left into the side parking lot, and as I turned to face him noticed the knife in his right hand.  The Chaplain’s Assistant demanded that we engage in an abbreviated barter process, wherein I would provide my wallet and car keys in exchange for not getting shanktified, which to him probably seemed like a reasonable exchange.

I politely demurred by hurling a cup of hot Starbucks at him while fishing my Beretta Jetfire out of the stupid pocket holster it was riding in.  After taking a face full of Columbia’s most popular legal export and confronted with a counter offer of bullets to his previous barter exchange concept, the young gentlemen decided that discretion was the better part of valor and made all due haste in a westerly direction.  For my part, I locked myself in my office, called 911 and waited for the cops to arrive to take my report.

Via Glenn Reynolds, who marvels, “Coffee — is there anything it can’t do?”

Of course, to paraphrase the old saying, you’ll get more with hot coffee and a gun than with hot coffee alone.

In new guidelines announced today, the Obama Administration has decided that it will deferring to the states on enforcing marijuana laws when those states have laws allowing the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors today.

Two Justice Department officials described the policy to the Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state laws.

The policy is a significant departure from the Bush administration, which insisted it would continue to enforce federal anti-pot laws regardless of state codes.

Fourteen states allow some use of marijuana for medical purposes: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

A small step in the right direction, but a step nonetheless.

Yes, that headline is not an exaggeration. The Chief of the Jericho Fire Department went to court and was shot by the police for disputing two tickets requiring two trips to the court house.

JERICHO, Ark. – It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn’t hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps.

The response from cops? They shot him. Right there in court.

Now the police chief has disbanded his force “until things calm down,” a judge has voided all outstanding police-issued citations and sheriff’s deputies are asking where all the money from the tickets went. With 174 residents, the city can keep seven police officers on its rolls but missed payments on police and fire department vehicles and saw its last business close its doors a few weeks ago.

“You can’t even buy a loaf of bread, but we’ve got seven police officers,” said former resident Larry Harris, who left town because he said the police harassment became unbearable.

But lets not be hasty, these brave men in blue are putting their lives on the line after all.

“When I first moved out here, they wrote me a ticket for going 58 mph in my driveway,” 75-year-old retiree Albert Beebe said.

Well obviously Albert Beebe was going 58 miles per hour in his drive way because why would the police lie. Oh…wait, they aren’t sure where all the traffic fine money went, hmmmm….

It was anger over traffic tickets that brought Payne to city hall last week, said his lawyer, Randy Fishman. After Payne failed to get a traffic ticket dismissed on Aug. 27, police gave Payne or his son another ticket that day. Payne, 39, returned to court to vent his anger to Judge Tonya Alexander, Fishman said.

It’s unclear exactly what happened next, but Martin said an argument between Payne and the seven police officers who attended the hearing apparently escalated to a scuffle, ending when an officer shot Payne from behind.

I’m sure it was totally justified and in line with departmental policies. After all, who knows Payne might have had a pencil or paper clip on him. Those are danerous weapons you know.

Prosecutor Lindsey Fairley said Thursday that he didn’t plan to file any felony charges against the officer or Payne. Fairley, reached at his home, said Payne could face a misdemeanor charge stemming from the scuffle, but that would be up to the city’s judge. He said he didn’t remember the name of the officer who fired the shot.

What a shock the prosecutor backs up the cop who discharges his gun at an unarmed person in a crowded room and also wounds a fellow cop in the process. Police professionalism at its highest.

Alexander, the judge, has voided all the tickets written by the department both inside the city and others written outside of its jurisdiction — citations that the department apparently had no power to write. Alexander, who works as a lawyer in West Memphis, resigned as Jericho’s judge in the aftermath of the shooting, Fairley said. She did not return calls for comment.

Meanwhile, sheriff’s deputies want to know where the money from the traffic fines went. Martin said that it appeared the $150 tickets weren’t enough to protect the city’s finances. Sheriff’s deputies once had to repossess one of the town’s police cruisers for failure to pay on a lease, and the state Forestry Commission recently repossessed one of the city’s fire trucks because of nonpayment.

City hall has been shuttered since the shooting, and any records of how the money was spent are apparently locked inside. No one answered when a reporter knocked on the door on Tuesday.

So lets do a quick recap.

• The police shot an unarmed man from behind when in scuffle with 6 other police officers.
• No charges will be brought against the police officer from the local prosecutor.
• Nobody knows where the money from the various speeding tickets went.
• The police were writing tickets outside their jurisdiction.
• City Hall is shut down.

Anyone doubt that the cops saw this as their own private racket and were using the tickets to line their own pockets? And what is up with the police officers in Jericho? Are they all totally out of shape morons that couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag? Six of them are scuffling with one man and they can’t subdue him and the seventh feels he has the justification to shoot the “perp”?

A new study says that boys with “strange” first names are more likely to end up in jail:

Writing in Social Science Quarterly, Shippensburg University professor David Kalist says giving newborn males oddball, girly or strange first names may just help land them in jail.

In alphabetical order, the Top 10 “bad boy” names, according to Kalist, are Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell and Walter.

…[The report is based] on a study of some 15,000 names given to baby boys between 1987 and 1991. They found that the more unlikely the name, the more likely a boy is to commit a delinquent act.

The article goes on to suggest that merciless teasing during childhood gives rise anger and bitterness and, thus, incarceration. While I don’t see much likelihood of that for boys named, say, Alec, I can’t help but wonder if there’s not at least some degree of unaccounted-for selection bias involved (say in the upbringing provided by parents who would name a child Garland).

Others are apparently more interested in the humour value of the story.¹

[W]ithin moments of the Social Science Quarterly report’s release, many Web sites were already poking fun at it. Writing on the Laughing Stork Web site, Candy Kirby commented, “People warned my parents I would end up a hooker or a stripper if they named me ‘Candy.’ And look at me. I NEVER dabbled in prostitution!”

To which one can only say, as the Kurgan did, “Of course you are.”

UPDATE (James Joyner): Apparently, there is a never-ending fascination among scholars with this subject.  Back in October 2003, I posted on a “study saying people with unusual names have trouble getting hired in corporate America.”  A post from January of this year also referenced Kalist and Lee’s study.  I used both occasions, naturally, to invoke Shel Silverstein’s “A Boy Named Sue,” popularized by the late Johnny Cash.

Relatedly, I posted in October 2005 about Nicolas Cage naming his son “Kal-el.” While I refrained from Cash references, Kevin McGehee did not.

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¹ Candor demands that I confess that I seriously considered naming this post “The Importance of Being Ernest.”