1) Dan McQuade has a new weekly column in the Philly Weekly, focused on the idiocy of the drug war. There are few policies stupider than the drug war, so I think this could be a really valuable addition to the media discussion.

In his first week, he talks about how goofy it is that we have those shots of cops 'celebrating' their big drug busts, when we know that within a week or two, there will be just as many drugs out on the street:

In essence, if the Philadelphia police seize 748 pounds of cocaine, 748 more pounds will soon be on its way into Philadelphia. ”By the end of two weeks, there will be little evidence left at all that a record–sized drug bust ever occurred, other than the police records and the past media reports,” David Borden, founder and director of the Drug War Resource Network, writes.

One thing I hope he covers is the total cost of the drug war to the City- from police to incarceration, etc. There are very few things that could magically put the city in a better fiscal position than ending this bizarrely stupid policy.

2) In an article after my own heart, the School District has closed down two failing Germantown Charter schools. This is the first time the district has shut charter schools down due to underperformance, and likely is long overdue. One of the schools was run by Germantown Settlement, the amorphous Germantown CDC writ large, that sucks up Germantown development money, and is part and parcel of the Donna Miller machine. Given how poorly Germantown Settlement does so much, the school underperforming is not surprising. Now, what about the other charters in Philly that are basically little fiefdoms of politicians and political groups?

There are some charters that seem to be doing very well. But too many were given to people who don't really appear to have any experience actually, you know, running schools. If the School District is serious about closing down underperforming charters, I suspect many of the little fiefdom schools will be closed.

3) Inveterate racist, and Geno's Steaks owner, Joey Vento wants an apology from the City, and a meeting with Mike Nutter. Additionally, he is threatening to sue the City- using a right-wing think tank from Atlanta- to change our anti-discrimination laws.

Just a reminder to anyone in the City thinking about meeting with Vento, are his statements like these:

[Illegal Hispanics] are killing, like, 25 of us a day … molesting about eight children a day … All we’re getting is drug dealers and murderers.”

......

What else is going on?

Below, Dan respectfully and appropriately asked for focus on the loss suffered by the Goode family. It is a loss that is both painfully particular--a family member--and horrifically general.

Horrifically general because it is one of several recent police shootings, one of all too many black men killed in our city, of people killed in our city, and of people lost to one part or another of an endlessly failing drug war.

Dan also pointed to Mayor Goode's careful moderation. But Mayor Goode also said:

"I don't know anything except that, when someone is shot in the back, it raises questions that need to be objectively looked at."

Stop there for a moment.

This, two weeks after police in another corner of the very same neighborhood--Germantown--shot another man who was fleeing, running away from them, fired into a house filled with 50 people celebrating New Year's Eve, killing one man and injuring two others, including the nine-year-old he was pushing up the stairs away from those bullets. A hardworking immigrant man is dead, the wrong man arrested, and no gun yet found.

This, the same weekend police shot and killed a man who, while having a gun, may or may not have pointed it at police. All we know is one of two officers saw him "slowly take his handgun out of his waistband and hold it down by his side."

I am not a police officer, I don't know if the shootings were 'justified', and I am not judging those officers, though I agree with the stark truth of what Mayor Goode said about how deep the questions are that are raised when someone is shot by the police in the back. There will be investigations for all of that. For now the mayor and police commissioner and DA have my trust.

But just stop and think about those lives that were lost, and for what.

The undercover officers who shot Timothy Goode were patrolling to make drug arrests. Maybe a person in that situation was selling, maybe he was buying and maybe he was doing nothing illegal, was just in one of the many corners of corners of our city where drugs and drug selling and people carrying guns are all around.

But this--being shot and killed in the course of some corner drug bust--it's an almost incomprehensibly huge cost. And it is not a cost that we can continue to bear.

David Simon, who co-writes "the Wire" on HBO, the clearest mirror to American cities I have ever seen, whatever Mark Bowden says, says the show is about "how contemporary American society—and, particularly, 'raw, unencumbered capitalism'—devalues human beings."

“Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them.

Histrionic or not, it's true. The near-half the people sitting in city jails because they cannot afford bail are being treated as expendable. The people hurt or killed on all sides of the battle for the corners, they are being treated as expendable. Same with the thousands of kids who enter high school but aren't there by the end. There's no point to my sitting here preaching except to say that it is pretty clear that our moral imperative is to revalue every person and block in this city.