Today in Philadelphia police corruption

AS THE U.S. attorney tells it, Walter Jacoby was a Philly cop with a fraud scheme on the side.

Authorities said that Jacoby, who worked as a patrol officer and cell-block attendant in the 22nd Police District, in North Philadelphia, was supposed to safeguard the personal belongings of recently arrested and incarcerated individuals that had been placed in temporary storage.

Instead, Jacoby, 30, of Burholme, in the far Northeast, allegedly stole their debit and credit cards and used them to buy gas for his personal vehicle and various items for himself.

Jacoby was charged yesterday by criminal information, a process that typically indicates a plea deal is in the works. Both Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Brenner and defense attorney David Averett declined to comment on the case.

Jacoby is the 34th Philadelphia police officer to be charged with a crime since 2009.

via philly.com

'I prefer subways'

A nice bit of writing, from Dennis Lehane, in his novel "Moonlight Mile":

Gadi Dechter on Occupy Wall Street and the rich

Americans do not begrudge the rich their riches, but they do resent an uneven playing field. This is the chief complaint that unites and animates the Occupy Wall Street protesters. It’s a legitimate gripe, and with Wall Street bonus season just around the corner, it’s not likely to go away anytime soon.

via americanprogress.org

Rod Dreher on meritocracy

The ideology of meritocracy, though, depends on the fiction that there are no meaningful differences, in terms of nature or nurture, among us, and that we’re all starting from the same place, and have the capacities to excel equally, no matter what. It’s this ideology that can lead people to think that if you’ve failed, it must be your own fault. Sometimes it really is your own fault. It’s the must be that’s problematic.

via theamericanconservative.com

Read the whole thing.

Keep that gun where I can see it

Kevin Drum grouses about the California push by gun-rights advocates for "open carry" laws that let owners walk around with loaded firearms strapped to their side:

Maybe victory always makes people eager for more more more. But why don't they just accept their victory and bask in it instead? Get Heller and McDonald enforced around the country and call it a day. None of them cared about carrying guns around in public twenty years ago, after all. And if there's any way to get a sympathetic public to turn against them, demanding the right to have armed posses of obsessive gun enthusiasts marching around in supermarkets and bars and school corridors sure seems like a good way to do it.

I've written before that I don't think the Second Amendment is always and everywhere a good thing—if it were up to me, this would be one of those items to be decided at state-level, a la "laboratory of democracy" federalism. What's good for farmer in Kansas isn't necessarily great for my Philadelphia neighborhood. (And what's good for Florida certainly doesn't seem to be great here.)

That said, if we're going to live in a society where everybody's free to walk around armed, I'd prefer they have a pistol strapped to their hip—where I can see it, and judge the situation accordingly—rather than have them hidden in a waistband or jacket pocket: Concealed carry is permissible under California law, after all. It's not the guy with the Colt .45 strapped to his thigh that worries me; his intentions are clear and therefore mostly honorable. It's the people who hide their lethality that worry me. But I guess I'm in the minority.

Nicole Gelinas on Occupy Wall Street, and the death of Steve Jobs

It would be easy to say that Occupy Wall Street’s grief over Jobs’s death is a sign of the movement’s hypocrisy. In their first official statement, didn’t the protesters say that they stand with people “who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world”? And aren’t they demonstrating against the “1 percent” of the population to which Jobs belonged?

But the protesters’ affection for Jobs isn’t necessarily a sign of bad faith or ignorance. Rather, it could be a healthy discernment, however poorly articulated. The point is not that Jobs was “this different, quiet billionaire,” as one protester put it, but that he lived by the rules through which free-market capitalism should work. When Apple released a product that people rejected, such as the Apple III or the Lisa in the early eighties, the company suffered the consequences. Apple could not expect tens of billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury or from the Federal Reserve to save it from its own mistakes. Apple was not too big to fail. Before the iPod, the company was struggling. Apple had to make itself too good to fail—and that’s exactly what it did.

Contrast the capitalist world in which Jobs lived with “capitalism,” as the U.S. government has applied it to the big banks against which the Zuccotti Park crowd is—imperfectly—protesting. If you’re a bank or an insurance firm, and you create a product that your investors and your regulators can’t understand in a crisis, you aren’t punished, as Apple was when it released products too complex for its customers. Instead, you get rewarded with bailout money.

via city-journal.org

Why there's an Occupy Wall Street movement: The banks get bailed out, the poor have to pee in a cup

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As more Americans turn to government programs for refuge from a merciless economy, a growing number are encountering a new price of admission to the social safety net: a urine sample.

Policy makers in three dozen states this year proposed drug testing for people receiving benefits like welfare, unemployment assistance, job training, food stamps and public housing. Such laws, which proponents say ensure that tax dollars are not being misused and critics say reinforce stereotypes about the poor, have passed in states including Arizona, Indiana and Missouri.

via nytimes.com