Ferguson and other links

Slate looks at all the different constitutional violations involved in police conduct in Ferguson. And Defeating the Dragons provides a good overview with links.
•A Washington Post column by a former cop reminds us that we have the right to refuse an illegal, warrantless search or walk away if the cop doesn’t have grounds to detain us. Only the columnist also says that you should never, ever exercise these rights and that if you do, what comes next is your own fault: “if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you … Later, you can ask for a supervisor, lodge a complaint or contact civil rights organizations if you believe your rights were violated. Feel free to sue the police! Just don’t challenge a cop during a stop.” Because cops are worried about their safety and people who disagree are apparently automatically dangerous (hat tip to LGM).
•Just as libertarians saw Ferguson as the turning point for libertarianism. George Will’s take is that it shows the evil’s of Big Government and proves that if you regulate sugary snacks, you’re inevitably going to have militarized police shooting black people because big government so there! No explanation for why this supposed total state control co-exists simultaneously with a steady gutting of environmental regulation and a failure to deal with climate change. And as one pundit points out local government is the one causing problems in Ferguson.
•Egypt probably took a lot of pleasure in lecturing the US on protecting the rights of minorities in Ferguson.
•Megan McArdle has decided we’d be much better off if Hilary Clinton had won in 2008 because she wouldn’t have given us health care reform, and that was what inspired the Tea Party and Republican intransigence. At the link, LGM demolishes the argument. Suffice to say, McArdle’s wrong, as she usually is.
•Slacktivist points out that for many people, defending religious freedom translates into oppressing the other side or securing your own sect’s power. And that cries to protect American Christians in the current violence in Iraq ignores that they’re not any worse off or more entitled to protection than Muslim sects or ethnic groups. “All you need to know is that it is the inevitable result of any situation in which the 95 percent majority is able to disregard the rights of the 5 percent minority. Or in which the 40 percent plurality is able to disregard the rights of all the smaller factions. Wherever rights are contingent, there will be conflict. Wherever religious freedom is contingent on which sect controls the sectarian government, there will be sectarian conflict.”
•Also on Iraq, Digby reminds us that ISIS isn’t an existential threat to us any more than Saddam, or Vietnam or all those South and Central American governments we overthrew: “They want to form a fundamentalist Islamic State in the middle east, which is bad, but it’s not bad in the same way that invading New York is bad. They are growing and with that growth they may form terrorist cells somewhere who want to do attacks outside the middle east. And I’m sure that’s true. That’s how it’s gone in the past. But as Steve Benen says, if President Obama were to go to the American people with all this, here’s what he would say based on all that information:
“By the way, ISIS terrorists want to kill Americans. There’s no imminent threat; we don’t have any actionable intelligence; and I’m not instructing the public to take any specific actions, but I thought I’d mention it. You know, just FYI.”