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A Coloardo nursing home worker
is suing her employer and the Carbondale Police Department for
emotional distress after they staged an active shooter drill
without telling her that the threat was fake.

From
NBC 9 News:

In a complaint received by 9NEWS Tuesday, Meeker claims she was
taken hostage by a man with a gun while at work at the assisted
living center in Carbondale. Meeker says the gunman held her
against her will while she begged for her life.

According to the complaint, what she did not know at the time
was that the man with the gun was a Carbondale police officer, and
it was all a part of an active shooter drill that was taking
place.

Meeker claims that she was not informed of the training and
suffered severe mental and emotional distress since the
incident.

If her side of the story is accurate, that’s certainly a
terrible way to conduct such an exercise.

I reached out to the police department for comment. An officer
referred me to the department’s lawyer; I haven’t heard back from
him yet. I will update this story if that changes.

A Coloardo nursing home worker
is suing her employer and the Carbondale Police Department for
emotional distress after they staged an active shooter drill
without telling her that the threat was fake.

From
NBC 9 News:

In a complaint received by 9NEWS Tuesday, Meeker claims she was
taken hostage by a man with a gun while at work at the assisted
living center in Carbondale. Meeker says the gunman held her
against her will while she begged for her life.

According to the complaint, what she did not know at the time
was that the man with the gun was a Carbondale police officer, and
it was all a part of an active shooter drill that was taking
place.

Meeker claims that she was not informed of the training and
suffered severe mental and emotional distress since the
incident.

If her side of the story is accurate, that’s certainly a
terrible way to conduct such an exercise.

I reached out to the police department for comment. An officer
referred me to the department’s lawyer; I haven’t heard back from
him yet. I will update this story if that changes.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was on MSNBC earlier today
along with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) to talk about their joint effort
to reform prison sentencing guidelines. Because it’s MSNBC
eventually the host segued into Paul’s comments on The Rachel
Maddow Show in 2010, when he explained that while he supported the
bulk of the 1964 Civil Rights Act he had some philosophical issues
with government telling private businesses  who they could and
couldn’t bar from their private property. It was among his first
media appearances after winning his primary election that year, and
led to a firestorm of left-wing-generated criticism. Politicians,
after all, shouldn’t expect to have honest conversations ,
especially on partisan outlets.

Paul’s learned his lesson. Here was his response to the MSNBC
anchor today,
via Mediaite:

People need to get over themselves writing all this stuff that
I’ve changed my mind on the Civil Rights Act. Have I ever had a
philosophical discussion about all aspects of it? Yeah, and I
learned my lesson: To come on MSNBC and have a philosophical
discussion, the liberals will come out of the woodwork and go crazy
and say you’re against the Civil Rights Act, and you’re some
terrible racist. And I take great objection to that, because, in
Congress, I think there is nobody else trying harder to get people
back their voting rights, to get people back and make the criminal
justice system fair. So I take great offense to people who want to
portray me as something that I’m not.

His response shows a healthy dose of combativeness that suggests
Paul is readier than he’s ever been to mount a national
campaign.

Watch Reason TV’s latest Rand Paul interview below:

A Freedom
of Information request by the Chicago Tribune has yielded
a list of officers who collected at least 11 complaints each
between 2001 and 2006, when a scandal over how corrupt the Special
Operations Sections (SOS) of the Chicago Police Department (CPD)
broke. The Tribune
reports:

Four Chicago police officers from a unit at the center of one of
the worst misconduct scandals in department history amassed 200
complaints in the years leading up to revelations that they were
repeatedly abusing and robbing citizens, according to City of
Chicago documents made available this week to the Tribune.

The officers included former cops Jerome Finnigan and Keith
Herrera of the now-defunct Special Operations Sections. They racked
up 105 complaints against them to Internal Affairs from 2001
through 2006 – the period during which the officers took part in
robberies, illegal traffic stops and illegal searches of the homes
of suspected drug dealers and other citizens.

Finnigan was sentenced
to 12 years in jail in 2011 for plotting to kill another cop, while
in 2012 Herrera was
sentenced to two months for participating in three robberies
with SOS. Before being convicted, but after being charged, Herrera
insisted he and the other “special ops” members of the CPD were
just doing their job, which he says was described as getting guns
and drugs off the street “at any
cost.”

Craig Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago’s law
school who was involved in the litigation that spurred the creation
of the list,  says it’s evidence that the CPD could’ve clued
itself in to the corruption at SOS before 2006. Futterman also
insists not every cop on the list (which includes only cops who
have had at least 11 complaints in five years filed against them)
was a “bad cop.”

Since 2004 Chicago has spent an average of
$1 million a week settling and otherwise handling lawsuits
against the CPD.

“Can Burning Man Survive Grover Norquist?” is the latest from
Reason TV. Watch above or click the link below for full text,
links, and more.

View this article.

It’s no surprise that Lois Lerner,
the former Internal Revenue Service official whose name is now
eternally connected to politically motivated abuse of the tax
agency’s powers, doesn’t like conservatives. She’s a
registered Democrat who explicitly
targeted tea party groups during her tenure at the IRS. So the

release by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp
(R-Mich.) of emails
from 2012 in which she referred to conservatives as “rabid,”
“crazies,” and “assholes” (the “ass” is inexplicably redacted, but
I think we can assume) isn’t a shocker.

It is interesting, though, that she reacted to
overhearing Britons discussing America’s financial straits by
pointing out that “they don’t seem to see that they can’t afford to
keep up their welfare state either.”

But many people have strong political opinions, whether or not
they stupidly express those thoughts in emails sent through
government accounts. She would have still held those beliefs if
she’d confined herself to GMail—or kept her trap shut entirely.

And many of her critics have expressed similar feelings about
liberals. Or about both liberals and conservatives
(*cough* *cough*).

Strong political preferences are almost certain to be held by
people holding government office. That isn’t a reason to go looking
for rare candidates who have managed to develop the competence to
perform a responsible job without, somehow, acquiring political
preferences.

Because there’s almost certainly something seriously wrong with
such people.

The proper response to the “revelation” that people have
political biases is to make sure that they can’t wield government
power against those they don’t like. If the people who are going to
hold position in government are going to be biased, which is to
say, actual human beings, then those positions shouldn’t inherently
represent weapons to be used against the opposition.

Lois Lerner isn’t the problem. The power of the IRS—and so many
other government agencies—is a
bludgeon that will inevitably be used by almost anybody who gets
their hands on it.