Why Is This So Hard?

Radley Balko, telling it like it is (or rather, how it should be):

Want an alternate scenario were Agent Hicks unquestionably comes out unharmed?  Here it is:  The cops never raid the Korbe home in the first place.  They approach Robert Korbe at work, or as he’s about to enter or exit his house.  They don’t put Korbe’s family, the raiding officers, and Korbe himself at risk with the violence of a paramilitary-style drug raid.  Christina Korbe isn’t put in the impossible position of having to determine in an instant if the armed men who’ve just broken into her home are cops or criminals.  Robert Korbe is arrested without incident, and becomes another drug war statistic.  Agent Hicks goes home to his wife and kids.  The Korbe kids don’t have to grow up without their mother, and the Hicks kids without their father.

Obama, Use the Pardon

Clemency expert Margaret Colgate Love:

Well, I think it would be preferable, in my view, if the president used the power more regularly to benefit ordinary people and he used it to help the public understand how the justice system works. . . And so I think it’s kind of distracting when you get a lot of celebrities who are applying who would not ordinarily be eligible under the Department of Justice’s own regulations. . . .