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No two ways about it

This really has to suck. When I worked full-time in the newspaper business I used to bitch about annual raises that did nothing more than stick you into a higher tax bracket. I can’t imagine how I would have handled a situation in which my pay was cut, as Belo is doing, as well as suspending pension contributions to help cut costs. You would think that maybe it would be a little easier dealing with the situation while knowing that the overall state of the economy and the newspaper industry in particular stinks to high heaven. Well, no, I take that back. I wouldn’t think that but maybe some would. It’s somehow different when something dreadful happens as opposed to just thinking “what if” something terrible happened. It’s also different when something totally crappy happens to you instead of someone else.

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Dallas cop does finally does the right thing: He quits

Dallas police officer Robert Powell has been one of the most viewed cops on TV and the Internet during the last week or so. He was the cop who stopped the Houston Texans’ Ryan Moats for rolling through a stop sign outside a Plano hospital. Moats and family members were literally just minutes away from his mother-in-law’s death inside the hospital from breast cancer. Powell unholstered his gun and generally made an ass of himself while Moats’ mother-in-law died. Today Powell resigned from the Dallas PD.

This is one of those cases you can beat like a dead horse (to death, as Yogi Berra might say). The incident was not one about right and wrong. Moats in the technical sense was wrong. He ran a stop sign and he broke the traffic laws. Even emergency drivers like firefighters or paramedics don’t get a pass on traffic laws, they have to obey them like everyone else is supposed to do. 
But there is a great difference between what is right and what is common sense.  Powell clearly wasn’t using common sense after he stopped Moats. Powell might have made a case for himself that would help him avoid being fired or suspended. But he would be ridiculed by both fellow officers and the public for a good while at the Dallas PD.
Moats received and accepted an apology from Powell, according to news reports. Maybe Powell actually learned something from this. Perhaps if he steps back awhile and has a chance to reflect, perhaps he can be a police officer again. But if he feels victimized for his own shortcomings then it could be he ought to find another profession, like say a call center worker.