We’re all so fortunate that the two cops who were deliberately attacked by a thug in a fleeing car on Friday are in stable condition and have been released from hospital.

Yesterday began for me with an email from a trusted friend. “You’re going to get contacted by a reporter. He’s writing a story about how Mayor Lee didn’t show up at Wednesday’s memorial in honor of fallen OPD officers. Nor did anyone from the City Council.”

I’ll never forget the time I had coffee with a member, whom I will not name, of the Police Commission—he’s no longer on it—and he very candidly admitted to me that he was in favor of the complete abolition of the police department. When my jaw dropped and I expressed astonishment, he said I shouldn’t be surprised—that he was hardly alone on the commission in that regard.

This question struck me as I was reading the essay, “Tuscaloosa,” in an issue of the Black Warrior Review, a literary magazine run out of the University of Alabama. The essay revisits the 1540 Battle of Mabila, in which the conquistador, Hernando De Soto, decisively beat the Choctaw warrior, Tuscaloosa, for control of central Alabama. Although Tuscaloosa lost, the fact that he fought back against the Spanish is interpreted by the essayist as “a refusal [to accept] the ideology of manifest destiny.”

Went back to Philz the other day after my boycott, which was due to their homophobia. I guess the CEO, Mahesh Sadarangani, realized what a dolt he’d been, because he recently apologized to the gay community and retracted his anti-gay rule. Of course, that was only after customers began shunning the chain, which threatened to bankrupt Philz.