This has been one of the best weeks in years for the Neocons and their agenda. A sinful city and thousands of it’s liberal, minority residents dead, cushy government contracts for Halliburton, newfound opportunities for Dubya to speak to his core constituency of redneck NASCAR fans, a natural tragedy so mediapathic that Cindy - remember Cindy? - her vigil, and unpleasant questions about the Quagmire in Iraq are promptly forgotten. And just tonight that damned liberal hippie William Rehnquist has died, so the administration can now replace him with a nice, gentle, ultraconservative right-wing nutjob.

I bet Karl Rove is happy, the fat fuck.

I’m a strong advocate of community policing, in the original sense of the term - community members keeping an eye out for crime, and taking the appropriate action.

I am, however, becoming more and more enamored of proactive community policing. Why? Because, sad as it is, if the police don’t, or can’t, catch someone in the act themselves, they’re unlikely to ever get their man. Proactive policing - making citizens’ arrests of ne’er-do-wells and then calling the police - has, in a lot of situations, much to be said for it.

Experiences this year - today, even - have shown me that giving the police - metaphorically speaking - a clear shot at a criminal generally isn’t good enough. It remains to be seen whether handing them a perp on a silver platter will be sufficient to get certain long-standing problems taken care of…