Law enforcement officers in Kansas raided the office of a local newspaper and a journalist’s home on Friday, prompting outrage over what First Amendment experts are calling a likely violation of federal law.
The police department in Marion, Kansas — a town of about 2,000 — raided the Marion County Record under a search warrant signed by a county judge. Officers confiscated computers, cellphones, reporting materials and other items essential to the weekly paper’s operations.
Stories about police abusing their authority and breaking the law have become like stories about mass shootings. They happen constantly, everyone wrings their hands, but no one is willing to actually do anything about the problem.
It’s what the poorly titled “Defund the Police” movement was/is about. The police serve no other purpose than to harass people and enforce the will of rich and politicians. So they need to be vastly scaled back.
While this is otherwise pretty great reporting, I found this sentence incredibly weird
Without the devices, she was left unable to stream shows onto her TV or use devices if she needed help, the newspaper said.
One of those things is significantly more important than the other, since she died shortly after this raid. Just a weird sentence overall.
Not that weird if we’re talking about the quality of life of a 98 year old woman. “Healthy” at that age might look like spending a great deal of time in your favorite chair watching your favorite shows on the television. After almost a century on this planet, you get a little tired.
This is probably one of the most important (legally and politically speaking) events to happen in the U.S. this year, but I feel like it will not get very much attention at all and might set a very dangerous precedent going into the next decade.
And the 98 year old woman whose house they raided just died on Saturday.