It is no surprise that thugs with badges participated in a crime intended to overthrow the US government.

Thugs have had a tendency towards violent right-wing views for a long time. What has changed is that the wrecker convinced many of them to believe in a fantasy world in which the US government was guilty of imaginary wrongs.

The thugs who actually participated will be prosecuted. However, thugs who support white supremacism or Nazism are, and were, unfit to work as police, and would be unfit even if they did not support a coup attempt. How can we expel them?

The US has almost 18,000 thug departments, some very large and many quite small. Any thug who is dismissed from one department because of basic hostility to some aspect of justice can almost certainly get hired by another.

To clean any one form of that hostility — such as, right-wing extremism — out of these departments requires some sort of system to block that tendency. I can think of two ideas. There could be a system of blacklisting (thought that would call for safeguards against wrongful blacklisting). There could be a system of rebooting thug departments as was done Camden, New Jersey.

I wonder if it is possible to deny those ex-thugs the right to carry guns.

Wales is using Covid-19 as an excuse to completely ban protests, for instance about the death of a black prisoner in jail.

People must always have the right to protest, as long as they follow safety rules such as masks and distancing.

US politics today is a battle between evil yoked to identity politics and some kinds of justice yoked to identity politics — and the identity politics will make the two camps fight on and on.

I have to point out, however, that Republicans stole the 2016 presidential election, with voter-suppression. They try this every time. Sometimes the Democrats win by a sufficient amount to overcome the Republican election-rigging, and sometimes they don't.

Prosecutors have recognized that the taser is a lethal weapon.

The taser is meant to be a nonlethal weapon, though "less lethal" is a more accurate term for it. Yet these weapons can kill; and many of them can maim.

It is a good thing that cops carry these weapons; it stands to reason that the availability of that alternative to shooting a gun has avoided many killings. At the same time, the wild use of less-lethal weapons by thugs has caused many avoidable injuries. We need to consider their misuse as a serious matter even when they cause damage less than fatal.

And even when they don't cause any lasting damage _that_ time, it is a serious matter because it is crucial that cops don't have bad habits of using them.

President Museveni of Uganda says he won reelection, but his opponent, Bobi Wine, says the election was rigged.

Some forms of rigging are undeniable — for instance, shutting down the internet, and repeatedly arresting Wine. That makes it plausible Museveni has done other things to rig this election.