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Back in 2004, Al's Morning Meeting readers were mailing me about something called "Internet Hunting."

The idea was to set up a remote-controlled rifle that Internet users could use to shoot real, live animals without ever leaving their desks.

Animals rights groups went nuts.

The Humane Society of of the United States started a mailing campaign to stop Internet hunting, and 33 states have outlawed it. Here is an article from the society's Web site warning of this travesty. Click here to see a CBS News story on the idea.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, despite all the hype, no one has actually hunted animals over the Internet:

Although the concept -- first broached publicly by a Texas entrepreneur in 2004 -- is technically feasible, it hasn't caught on. How so many states have nonetheless come to ban the practice is a testament to public alarm over Internet threats and the gilded life of legislation that nobody opposes.

With no Internet hunters to defend the sport, the Humane Society's lobbying campaign has been hugely successful -- a welcome change for an organization that has struggled to curtail actual boots-on-the-ground hunting. Michael Markarian, who has led the group's effort, calls it "one of the fastest paces of reform for any animal issue that we can remember seeing."

I would count this new feature on YouTube as one of the worst ideas I have seen being shared.  There are dozens of videos of reckless lads filling Super Soaker squirt guns with flammable liquids like WD40 and turning them into flamethrowers. These homemade flamethrowers include fire extinguishers filled with flammables and even a remote-controlled flame car that burns WD40. One video features what appears to be a child making a flamethrower out of a pen.

If you do a news story on this, I certainly would recommend doing everything you can to not glorify it. I would also avoid teaching the public how to do this.

It is difficult to know how widespread this practice is, but there are more than 300 flamethrower videos altogether on YouTube, many of which have had thousands of views. One had nearly 200,000 views, another more than 80,000. These videos are hardly a secret at this point.

Milk prices hit new record-highs last month and are now rising worldwide. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the prices will likely remain high through the rest of the year. Here is a question: How will school lunchrooms handle the higher prices?

Honestly, has it come to this? Some guys in Boston are pushing for bulletproof backpacks.

Click here for information. The Webinar is tomorrow.

See you live online.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer finds that when police get busted for DUI, they often get off much lighter than other folks:

The state is airing another ad against drunken driving this month warning, "Drive Hammered, Get Nailed."

But there's an exception out on the streets for some police officers.

Cops confronted with a drunken-driving arrest fare better than the average citizen, according to a Seattle P-I investigation of seven years' worth of internal discipline records, arrest reports, accident reports, license-suspension files and court documents statewide.

The P-I selected 63 cases from 92 to examine closely, focusing on active duty officers who consumed alcohol before driving police or personal vehicles. Most were street cops, but nine were assigned to county or city corrections duties.

Five sworn officers were not prosecuted at all, despite blood-alcohol tests indicating impairment.

A half-dozen officers kept their licenses after a drunken-driving arrest simply because their paperwork missed the deadline at the state Department of Licensing. Arresting agencies are given a grace period of 50 days to file the paperwork.

The paper goes on to explain the depth of the project:

For this project, Seattle P-I reporters sent public disclosure requests to more than 270 law enforcement agencies across Washington.

Some departments were fairly forthcoming with records, but the Seattle Police Department censored details such as the names of the officers who had been involved in DUI cases. (See a sample of a disciplinary report in which a police officer's name was still not released even after he was caught drunk driving, getting in a wreck with a police car and refusing to submit a blood test.)

Instead of giving up, the Post-Intelligencer found the details elsewhere and reported them. Nicely done.

Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.