Texas's state police head testifies, at a state House committee meeting, that enough police were at the Uvalde school quickly enough, and were armed enough, to stop the massacre, and though the officers' failure to check an unlocked door sure doesn't make them look good, we should suspect a narrative that places all the blame on one guy, in this case Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo. But admittedly I'd also suspect a narrative that places all the blame on "lack of training," tired as I am of trying to make police into the Swiss Army knives of our civilization. What narrative would I not suspect? The one that finally admits that "more cops" isn't the answer to every conceivable problem, that "freedom" doesn't mean more and bigger guns for everyone so much as the freedom not to get mass-murdered, and that we can in fact keep semi-automatic guns off the streets without touching handguns or rifles. Can we get used to a world where we don't reflexively trust police? Of course we can! We're Americans, after all.
So now Trumpholes are putting up fake wanted posters on social media supposedly depicting folks who helped "steal" the vote for Joe Biden, and probably the only thing saving these Trumpholes from multiple defamation lawsuits is that potential plaintiffs don't know they're out there like that. Of course social media corporations suck at their job – by which I mean they’re failing to enforce their own standards for using their sites! – but dig this response from True the Vote's founder about "voter fraud": "I do think that when 80%+ of America is concerned about election integrity, something must be done to address the situation." We can easily guess that 80% figure doesn't describe what she wants you to think it describes, but why would "80% of America concerned about election integrity" mean the "something" that "must be done" should be "we should randomly accuse people of election fraud"? Hell, why does it mean "we should make it harder to vote"? This is what right-wingers do: identify "problems" and then tell you their solutions are the only solutions.
Finally, I haven’t been watching the January 6 hearings with any regularity, because I don’t need to be told who the assholes are, and how much of my rage do I really want to relive? But I will note the testimony of Shaye Moss and her mother, “Lady Ruby” Freeman, two Georgia election workers targeted by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani as “election stealers.” But most news reports haven’t foregrounded the fact that Trump supporters forced their way into Ms. Moss’s grandmother’s house and yelled that they were making a “citizen’s arrest” on the pair. Get ready for a lot more of that garbage as Republicans lose more elections. That only makes me angry, though – hearing that Ms. Freeman felt guilty over maybe being the “cause” of her family’s stress made me sad. I wish more Americans understood who really causes their pain, and I wish more bad people felt guilty about causing that pain. I don’t even mean Messrs. Trump and Giuliani, because they're irredeemable; I mean the would-be “citizen” cops, who may not be.