Why am I losing respect for cops and the justice system?

Let me count the ways...

Twenty-one lousy days! And some sort of conditional suspended sentence at that? Are you friggin' serious?

If I went on this sort of a rampage, they'd be piping the sunshine in to me for many a long day, I feel quite certain of that. But apparently this asshat of a cop gets some sort of a special deal?

Let's recap, shall we?

He downs a couple dozen drinks. Commandeers a car, while lying about being a Vancouver cop. Threatens to "destroy" the driver -- who has since died, though the circumstances of that death are never explained in the article -- though based on this asshole's conduct I'm more than prepared to believe he killed the poor son of a bitch to keep him quiet.

Then he instructs the driver to take him to another nightclub, where he meets two other cops -- one of which is a "use of force" instructor at the local police academy, for the love of friggin' Mike.

Too drunk to control himself, he gets into a fight with a hapless friggin' newspaper seller that doesn't snap to quite quickly enough for this little nascent brownshirt -- so he and said instructor assault the newsie so savagely his doctor still won't clear him to drive months later? An assault, I should add, that a number of bystanders said was racially motivated?

And when the real on duty police show up, what do these three pricks do? Try to pin it on the victim, naturally.

Thus confirming what I've always known. That when it's called a police state, it's NEVER a good thing. Why didn't they just taser him already? Dead men don't talk, after all.

These pricks should remember that their ability to police ALWAYS depends on their perceived legitimacy.

The second the citizens they're purporting to defend start to believe they're just being preyed on... well, then it's a whole new violent bloody mess of a ball game.

After all, when they kick out your front door, how you gonna go? With your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun?

Posted While Waiting For Dechene

I'm sitting at my desk not working and waiting for one of two things--either a call from prairie dog City Hall and video game reporter Paul Dechene to get together for a late breakfast "meeting" (i.e. thinly-justified excuse to skip out of work and eat food) or at least the Six In The Morning news post he's supposed to do today.

(tap, tap, tap, tap...)

Breakfast is probably out because freelance writers don't like leaving their homes in the middle of winter (why was it snowing this morning?). And I guess this procrastinating editor will just have to be patient and take that 6ITM post when it's ready.

So in the meantime I'll just be sitting here reading this horrible, horrible column by Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald on the Obama (not Bush!) administration's suppression of evidence of the extreme torture inflicted on former Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohammed. Yeah, just when you think it's bad some jerk working in the news media has to go and type the phrase "genital slicing".