Things haven’t changed much. Our street still hasn’t been plowed. I don’t blame the mayor for that, even though I don’t hold her in very high esteem.

Cities plan their budgets for the kind of weather that they normally expect. We haven’t had a snowstorm like this in ten years, so naturally I don’t expect them to budget for this kind of storm.

What I do blame the mayor for is proclaiming out loud that all the streets, not just the primary but the secondary and the tertiary (that’s us) streets would be plowed. Did she think that merely saying so out loud would make it so? The Streets Department simply doesn’t have the resources.

Oh well.

One of the big benefits of this storm followed by the extended cold weather is that the neighborhood has been exceptionally quiet. No traffic noises of any kind. No trucks, no motorcycles, or any other vehicles passing through, and no idiots who don’t know how to parallel park in a very narrow street. And no parked cars revving their engines while the driver sits playing with an app on his phone.

Yes, it’s been like an extended holiday.

I walked to the Acme yesterday. The temperature was well below the freezing point but there was very little wind, so it wasn’t bad at all, now that I’m acclimated to the lower temperatures. Most of the sidewalks, but not quite all of them, were shoveled with a path so I didn’t have any serious problems. The main annoyance was the jerks who were riding their bicycles on the narrowly shoveled sidewalks. They are annoying at the best of times, but when the path is only wide enough for one person—where are the cops when you need them?

The episode of Wanging On that I listened to during breakfast was especially good, I thought. When Maria read the first question I almost did a spit take with my cereal, and it was especially difficult to eat from then on as the laughs just kept on coming.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has banded together with eight other prosecutors from Minneapolis, Arizona, Texas, and Virginia to help each other litigate cases of federal law enforcement officers who commit crimes.

The group is called Fight Against Federal Overreach, or FAFO, which by a coincidence is also the acronym for “fuck around and find out”, a phrase that Krasner apparently uses when he prosecutes rogue law enforcement officers.

Despite Republican Vice-President J.D. Vance claiming that the agent who shot Renee Good had “absolute immunity”, like everything coming out the administration thesis days, that’s a crock of bull.

“There is a sliver of immunity that is not going to save people who disarm a suspect and then repeatedly shoot him in the back, from facing criminal charges,” [Krasner] said. “There is a sliver of immunity that is not going to save people who are shooting young mothers with no criminal record and no weapon, in the side or back of the head, when it’s very clear the circumstances didn’t require any of that.”

Under an 1890 U.S. Supreme Court decision, federal officers do have immunity from state prosecution for “necessary and proper” actions performed while doing their jobs.

On a few occasions, courts have allowed such prosecutions to go ahead. In 2001, a federal Appeals Court ruled that Idaho could prosecute a manslaughter charge against an FBI sharpshooter who killed white separatist Vicki Weaver during the Ruby Ridge standoff of 1992. It was the first time a federal agent had ever been charged as a killer while doing their job, NPR reported.

There’s more here.