Apologists for the administration are leaning heavily on this story, which suggests the targeting wasn't primarily partisan.

They will use the "incompetence not malice" defense, coo over Obama's table-pounding and scapegoating, then carry on portraying the administration as hyper-competent.

Because you're the hero Ricochet deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt you. Because you can take it. Because you're not our hero. You're a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A fart knight.

Sigh.  Welcome to my world, Simon.

I once had a domestic abuse victim file a complaint with my Lieutenant after the second time I arrested her boyfriend for beating her up.  She claimed we were "harassing" him.

Good on you for standing up, though.  Whether she appreciated it or not, it was right.

During an email exchange with an old high school friend, he told me that the media was more biased to the right than the left.  Reeling off examples, he wrote, "The Boston Globe - conservative.  The Washington Post - pretty conservative," and then finished off with, "The New York Times - VERY conservative."

My gast was pretty much flabbered.

Yeah, but they wouldn't.

You seem to be possessed of the quaint notion that the people pushing this proposal have even the slightest interest in preventing illegal immigrants from voting.  They don't.  To the big-city pols, that's a feature, not a bug.

3 on the stand-down, flavored with 4.

2 on the cover-up.

This administation seems to move with events, rather than directing them.  For all the blather about "gutsy calls" the Bin Laden operation seemed rife with indecision.  I wonder what Obama supporters made of the scene inZero Dark Thirty where Jessica Chastain angrily scrawls "100 days!!" on her supervisor's window and underlines it twice.

So it makes sense that someone lower on the organizational chart had to make the tough decisions, with little info and no support from above, and their screwups were then covered up, lest they reflect badly on the absent boss.  Hell of a way to run a railroad.

Mine is from the video game Halo 3: ODST.  It's the icon of the Superintendent (aka "Vergil"), a supercomputer that runs municipal services in the futuristic city where the game takes place.  The "eyes" in the middle of the avatar change shape to convey various emotional states.  The larger version has the phrase "PLEASE REMAIN CALM" underneath, which I thought was Rico-ppropriate.

I picked it because I too try to be a helpful, productive, and competent public servant; and because I was playing that game a lot at the time I joined Ricochet.

Plus it's a bit like the girl who goes to prom in a homemade dress:  economic, sort of impressive, but gauche.

I imagine in the world of blinged-out cartel strongmen a homemade gun would mark you as that guy.

The fix for this is simple:  just include an atheist asserting that "there's no God" in the definition of religious proselytizing (since it certainly is).

Then watch them lose their appetite for this sort of thing.

In my experience, not much.  The National Guard, for instance, is under the command of the state governor, who would have to authorize its use.  Certainly, this can be done in the case of large-scale emergencies, but would essentially be out of reach on anything smaller.  You might be able to arrange some level of joint training, but the obstacles involved would be considerable.

For instance, some years ago in California, a Parks officer patrolling a wooded area came under fire from several individuals armed with automatic rifles.  Eventually, a tactical team in an armored vehicle was able to extract him.  I'm trying to imagine attempting to coordinate something like that on the fly, involving local, state, federal, and military authorities trying to get an appropriate vehicle on loan.  It would be a bureaucratic nightmare - the poor guy would have been dead before the third round of emails got sent.

A North Hollywood-type situation is not the only scenario where you might need to approach through a danger area or rescue a wounded individual.  Armored vehicles have been used for those purposes in other places as well.  The use of them in North Hollywood is just an illustrative example, which came to mind because it was a high-profile historical incident most people would be at least basically familiar with.

And Officer Collier is relevant precisely because he was killed by the same people the officers in the pictured vehicle were looking for.  His murder, and the serious wounding of Officer Donohue, certainly suggest that a vehicle with the capacity to resist small-arms fire would not be an unreasonable resource to have avilable under those circumstances.

No way that thing could stand up to an RPG.  While I don't know the specs of the particular model in the photo, generally police vehicles of that type have around half-inch steel armor, which will stop a high-powered rifle round but nothing much above that.  Even a civilian-available .50 BMG rifle would probably punch it.

The general role of such vehicles is 1) to make protected approaches to armed suspects who have a defensive position, and 2) to rescue officers or citizens who are wounded in open areas.  During the North Hollywood shootout, the LAPD used borrowed vehicles from an armored car company to accomplish the latter, since they didn't have any of their own.  Neither of these purposes is inappropriate or unreasonable.

Sure, they're expensive and can seem excessive.  But it's easy to point and laugh when you aren't the one hoping that your vehicle can protect you from incoming fire.  It's worth remembering that Sean Collier's conventional police car certainly did not protect his life.

Except that "our" hackers are attacking us as much, or more, than the Chinese are.

Isn't this a bit like arming the Crips and the Gangster Disciples in hopes they might help us resist an invading army?

DocJay on TV might make me get cable again.

Nonfiction:  The Tyranny of Cliches.

Fiction:  The Longfellow translation of Dante's Inferno.  I'm reading this at the same time I'm going through the video game adaptation.  Yay for Comparative Lit!  :)

Robert Redford. In every movie he plays a handsome man who comes off as aloof and sort of handsome, then in the end we find out that he is sensitive and handsome. Cut, print, Oscar.