How does a shitting President negotiate a peace agreement with Iraq?
The answer is ….. ‘DEPENDS.’
Thanks to Diane, a Rag Blog reader / The Rag Blog / Posted August 3, 2008
Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
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Painful Joke of the Day
Texas Republican Congressman Pete Sessions’ Week of Scandal
Self-styled ‘morality champion’ pays strippers with campaign money, raises funds from poker players
By Matt Glazer / August 3, 2008
Pete Sessions has had a bad week. [Pete Sessions is the Republican U.S. Congressman from the 32nd District of Texas.] After attending a Las Vegas strip club earlier this week (and paying for it with campaign donations), citizen journalists across the country cried foul. As Americablog points out, “Sessions was publicly livid over Janet Jackson’s ‘liberal values’ when she bared her covered boobs during the SuperBowl a few years back”.
Apparently the outrage began and ended with the Janet, Justin peep show.
Sessions spent more than $5,000 at Kane’s club that night in March, according to federal disclosures. Those reports show Sessions spent another $2,100 on his hotel.
Outrage, decency, hypocrisy, and forty deuce aside, who attended the Sessions fun-draiser? According to D Magazine, the major donors for session weren’t Texans. They weren’t citizens groups. No, instead it was a series of professional poker players.
For example, there’s self-described “professional poker player” Howard Lederer and his wife Susan with a combined donation of $10,000. Andrew Bloch, another “professional poker player,” gave $4,000. Doyle Brunson tossed some more chips on the table with another $4,000. Barry Shulman was in for $2,000, and Linda Johnson matched up to $500.
Now I’m sure all these Las Vegas residents are perfectly respectable citizens, and I for one am glad to see them engaged in the political process. But why did they choose a Dallas congressman as the vessel of their civic participation? Simple. Go to the congressman’s statement on proposed UIGEA regulations issued on April 2, 2008. Then note that this year’s Vegas cash started flowing on April 7, 2008. Seems like Nevada has bought itself an extra congressman.
This isn’t just a Democrat vs. Republican issue. In fact, the conservative Texas Eagle Forum told Gromer Jeffers of the Dallas Morning News, “What’s the difference?’ asked Cathie Adams, president of the Texas Eagle Forum. ‘I don’t think that it’s representative of the constituents of the district. I’m in shock.'”
The focus on Congressional District 32 is clearly spilling over into local elections.
Dallas County Democratic Chairwoman Darlene Ewing called upon Bill Keffer, a candidate for the Texas House, to return campaign monies received from Congressman Pete Sessions.
Bill Keffer is running again for the State House Seat 107, won by Allen Vaught in 2006. Keffer has made shutting down local strip clubs one of the centerpiece issues of his 2008 campaign. In his local campaign mailings, he rails against local clubs calling them “immoral and exploitative operations” (June 10, 2008). Yet, he is happy to take Sessions’ strip club money.
“It is hypocritical for Bill Keffer, who claims to be the champion of morality, to continue accepting Pete Sessions’ political patronage and strip club money. He should denounce Congressman Sessions for using a strip club venue to raise money, and he should return the monies given to him by Sessions or that Sessions helped him raise for use in his own campaign,” said Ewing.
Pete Sessions has played a major role in Keffer’s fundraising and political efforts since his 2006 defeat. Keffer frequently touts Sessions’ endorsement and Sessions has been making phone calls, sending letters, and hosting fund raisers on behalf of Keffer since the middle of the 2007 legislative session.
This is another example of the Republican Party wanting to dictate to Texans and Americans how they should live their lives, but not heed their own advice. It is time for us to vote against hypocrisy and vote for leadership. Sessions needs to go and Bill Keffer should never return to elected office.
You can read more on the Sessions situation at TexasKaos , and Talking Points Memo. In addition, if you know of any other candidate who has received a donation from Pete Sessions, let us know in the comments.
Source / Burnt Orange Report
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Congress, Pete Sessions, Political Corruption, Political Scandal, Republican Party, Texas
1 Comment
Another Piece of What Iraq Was Really About
Iraq arms sales request worth over nine billion dollars: Pentagon
August 1, 2008
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon said Friday it has notified Congress of proposed military sales to Iraq valued at more than nine billion dollars, including helicopters, tanks and armored vehicles.
The biggest proposed sale was for 392 Light Armored Vehicles, radios and anti-tank weapons at an estimated cost of three billion dollars, the Defense Security and Cooperation Agency said.
Congress also was notified of a possible sale of 140 upgraded M1A1 Abrams tanks as well as armored Humvees, tracked logistics vehicles, armored ambulances, vehicles to carry shelters and command posts, and trucks to transport heavy equipment.
It was valued at 2.16 billion dollars.
A separate 2.4 billion dollar helicopter deal would provide the Iraqi government with 24 Bell Armed 407 helicopters or 24 Boeing AH-6 helicopters, along with engines, missiles, mortars, machineguns, and rocket launchers.
Another proposed sale involved technical assistance in the construction of garrisons, training areas and operational facilities for the Iraqi security forces.
“The total value, if all options are exercised, could be as high as 1.6 billion dollars,” the DSCA said.
On Monday, the DSCA announced a possible contract to sell Iraq six C-130J aircraft, with engines and other equipment, which it said was worth 1.5 billion dollars if all options were exercised.
Source / Yahoo News
Death Row and ‘The Rat Trap’
Death row exonerations expose failings of the ‘snitch system’
By Christopher Moraff
Since 1973, 129 innocent people were released from death row — more than 50 of whom were sentenced to death based partly or wholly on false informant testimony.
Levon Jones is supposed to be dead.
If the state of North Carolina had its way, Jones, 49, would have been strapped to a gurney years ago, hooked to an IV and pumped full of a lethal, three-drug cocktail until he asphyxiated.
Instead, on May 2, he walked out of prison a free man after spending 13 years on death row, and another 24 months locked up awaiting retrial — all for a murder he almost certainly did not commit.
Jones — known to friends and family as “Bo” — was released with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Capital Punishment Project after the prosecution’s star witness recanted her testimony against him. (Lovely Lorden, a former girlfriend, admitted she’d collected $4,000 in reward money in exchange for testifying against Jones.)
He was an easy target: an African-American ex-con with a history of mental illness and violent behavior. When Lorden came forward with her story — a full three years after the 1987 shooting of a local bootlegger named Leamon Grady — Jones was doing time on an unrelated assault charge.
The prosecution felt little obligation to question the veracity of Lorden’s claim. And if the witness is to be believed today, investigators actually helped her keep her story straight.
As a result of Lorden’s testimony — and despite the lack of physical evidence tying him to the crime — a jury convicted Jones in 1993 and he was sentenced to die for Grady’s killing.
What Jones’ attorneys didn’t know at the time — and, as it turns out, didn’t really bother trying to uncover — is that Lovely Lorden had made something of a career out of testifying against people close to her. By her own admission, she has aided law enforcement in dozens of investigations and says she helped police make cases against several other boyfriends, as well as her own brother and sons.
What’s more, her work as a confidential informant didn’t stop after Jones was sent to death row. Jones’ attorneys sent In These Times copies of receipts that show Lorden was paid money at least seven times for her work as a confidential informant from December 2003 to April 2004, while Jones sat in jail.
Today, Lorden contends she testified against Jones under pressure from the police, in particular Dalton Jones (no relation), the lead officer in the case.
That doesn’t surprise Jones’ ACLU attorney, Brian Stull, who says it’s not uncommon for police to find a suspect first and worry about making a case later.
“I think often times they look at the usual suspects,” Stull says. “I think Dalton Jones was thinking, ‘This is a dangerous person, and whether he did it or whether he didn’t, I’m going to get him off the street.’ “
Jones owes his freedom in part to an astute federal judge who sensed something amiss with Lorden’s testimony during a 2006 penalty appeal.
In granting Jones a new trial, U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle, of the Eastern District of North Carolina, noted Lorden’s statements to police were “riddled with inconsistencies” and “reflect that Lorden is unable to fairly and reliably describe the circumstances of the offense.”
Unfortunately, the case of Levon Jones is not an anomaly. He is the fifth death row prisoner to be exonerated in the past year. Since December, North Carolina alone has released three inmates from death row after it was determined that they did not commit the crimes for which they were convicted. Of these three men, two, including Jones, were convicted on the false testimony of snitches.
The other, Jonathon Hoffman, was released in December 2007 after spending seven years on death row. His freedom came when the prosecution’s key witness — Hoffman’s cousin — admitted that he had lied to get back at Hoffman for stealing money and had been both paid for his testimony and given a reduced sentence for bank robbery. At the time of Hoffman’s trial, prosecutors withheld the deal from defense attorneys, the jury and even the judge.
A recipe for disaster
In a country where more than one out of every 100 citizens is now incarcerated, criminal justice advocates are scrutinizing the way in which police and prosecutors go about getting the information to pursue and prosecute suspects. This inquiry has increasingly focused on the extent to which incentivized informants and jailhouse snitches are contributing to the convictions of innocent people.
A cursory review of the Jones case would be enough to suggest something is wrong. But a thousand Levon Jones stories don’t elicit the same amount of outcry as one Kathryn Johnston case does.
In November 2006, Atlanta police gunned down Johnston — an elderly Atlanta grandmother — inside her home. The officers, who were from the city’s narcotics task force, claimed to be acting on information they received from a confidential informant that drugs were being sold from the house. That allegation turned out to be false.
The Johnston tragedy shined a spotlight on the cavalier use of informant information to obtain arrest and search warrants. The Justice Department launched a federal probe and, nine months after the shooting, in July 2007, the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on law enforcement’s use of confidential informants.
“We’ve got a serious problem here that goes beyond coughing up cases where snitches were helpful,” said committee chair Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) at the hearing. “The whole criminal justice system is being intimidated by the way this thing is being run, and, in many cases, especially at the local level, mishandled. … A lot of people have died because of misinformation.”
It isn’t known if any of those people have died at the hands of the state; but judging by some of the relevant corollary statistics, it’s plausible that some have.
Falsified informant testimony accounts for nearly half of all wrongful convictions in capital cases nationwide, according to data from Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions. Since 1973, 129 innocent people were released from death row — more than 50 of whom were sentenced to death based partly or wholly on false informant testimony, according to the Center.
Alexandra Natapoff, an associate professor of law at Loyola University and one of the country’s foremost authorities on the problems with paid informants, thinks that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“We have the most data on capital and homicide convictions because they are the most high profile,” she says, “so we have no idea how many wrongful convictions there are in larceny cases or assault cases or any other because nobody is paying any attention to those.”
Natapoff has written extensively on the role of snitch testimony in wrongful convictions and says that informants have become law enforcement’s investigative tool of choice.
“The government’s use of criminal informants is largely secretive, unregulated and unaccountable,” she says. “This lack of oversight and quality control leads to wrongful convictions, more crime, disrespect for the law and sometimes even official corruption.”
She continues: “If the criminal system can’t get homicide cases right, then it’s very unlikely that we’re getting other things right.”
A broken system
With the expansion of the “war on drugs” during the crack epidemic of the late 1980s, police began to abandon traditional investigative work in favor of insider cooperation. Cops say it’s almost impossible to make a drug case any other way. But critics say the practice has led to a “dumbing down” of police work across the board.
“The drug war has eroded law enforcement practices,” says investigative reporter Ethan Brown, whose recently published book, Snitch: Informants, Cooperators and the Corruption of Justice, traces the genesis of the informant culture and its effect on communities.
Those who study the snitch culture trace the problem to a criminal justice policy that has created the perfect atmosphere for what Brown calls the “cooperator institution” to thrive.
Most notably, Brown says, federal sentencing guidelines, adopted in 1987, have exacerbated the growth of the cooperator institution over the past two decades. Until a 2005 Supreme Court ruling gave judges more flexibility in sentencing, the guidelines made cooperating with authorities the only real option for defendants seeking leniency.
“Those guidelines really forced drug defendants into cooperating,” says Brown. “Very few people will look at that kind of prison time and not cooperate.”
But over the years, a practice once confined mainly to drug investigations has become standard operating procedure for the prosecution of all kinds of crime.
The reasons are myriad, but the simple matter of resources looms large. In a system severely taxed by an unwinnable drug war, relying on informants is a cheap and easy investigative option. It can cost thousands of dollars to house, feed and protect an actual witness until trial, and, depending upon the offense and the defendant, such protection can carry on for years after conviction. By contrast, criminal informants are often compensated with leniency or are paid small sums, and often simply released into the same streets from which they came.
“It’s all about this staggering misallocation of resources,” says Brown. “We have this incredible institution for cooperators and informants, yet, for the kind of cooperating we need the most, there are really no resources.”
This mutually beneficial relationship between police officers and their informants is what Natapoff calls “a disturbing marriage of convenience.”
Prosecutors and police know the pitfalls, but in many cases write them off as the cost of doing business and making cases.
In a 1999 study published in the Fordham Law Review, Ellen Yaroshefsky, a law professor from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, interviewed a number of assistant U.S. attorneys from the Southern District of New York and found that while most said they made every effort to be diligent in assessing the veracity of informants, they admitted it’s easy to get in too deep and lose objectivity.
In her study, Yaroshefsky described this as “fall[ing] in love with their rat.”
“You’re not supposed to, of course. You are trained to maintain your objectivity,” an anonymous participant in Yaroshefsky’s study said. “But you spend time with this guy, you get to know him and his family, you like him. You believe that he has come clean. Hopefully the assistant has a skeptical mindset, but the reality is that the cooperator’s information often becomes your mindset.”
Still, other times investigators are already working under an assumption of guilt and are simply seeking confirmation.
“[Sometimes] prosecutors are convinced they have the guilty guy, then they go about seeking to convict and do not carefully look at things that are funny about their case,” one of Yaroshefsky’s sources said.
Former prosecutor and now Howard University law professor Andrew Taslitz says that when he started out in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, his youth and ambition often clouded his judgment when it came to reliance on informants who had received incentives. He says he thinks his experience is the norm.
“Most prosecutors are very, very young, especially at the state level,” Taslitz says. “They’re new graduates of law school or they’ve done some other job for a few years but they’re mostly in their late 20s, early 30s tops, with very little experience. It’s one of the reasons that office policies that just tell them what to do are so important.”
Another problem is that many of the assumptions that courts make about how witness testimony is received simply don’t pan out.
The Supreme Court established the constitutional basis for using paid informants in 1966 with U.S. v. Hoffa, which decided that rewarding a witness for testimony does not violate due process. In its opinion, the court wrote: “The established safeguards of the Anglo-American legal system leave the veracity of a witness to be tested by cross examination, and the credibility of his testimony to be determined by a properly instructed jury.”
But Natapoff says, in practice, those mechanisms are deeply ineffective at protecting defendants from lying informants.
“Let’s say the government does disclose [compensation] and the jury knows about it,” she says. “You would think, and the Supreme Court certainly thinks, that that will make a difference. Well, psychological research has found that it makes almost no difference, that jurors ignore the fact that the witness is compensated.”
And that’s only for the cases that go to trial. Because 95 percent of criminal cases are resolved through plea agreements, defendants rarely get the chance to challenge an informant’s story or credibility.
“The Supreme Court has held that while defendants who go to trial are entitled to impeachment material about their informants, defendants who plead guilty are not,” Natapoff says. “So that means that most defendants will never see the deal that the informant got.”
In spite of all the potential pitfalls, police and prosecutors say the benefits of informants outweigh the potential for abuse.
Ronald E. Brooks, president of the National Narcotic Officers’ Associations’ Coalition, calls informants “indispensable investigative assets” and cautions against issuing a blanket judgment on the use of confidential informants by police officers for “a few instances of mismanagement or wrongdoing.”
“When we appropriately manage informants, great cases, ones that make our community safe are the result,” he says. “When informants are improperly used, the results can be devastating. But without the ability to freely use informants, law enforcement would have very few significant investigative successes.”
A call for reform
Since the 2007 House Judiciary Committee hearing in the wake of the death of Kathryn Johnston, little headway has been made in reforming the practice of using incentivized informants to send people to jail — and, possibly, execution.
According to the American Bar Association (ABA), 18 states now require corroboration of an accomplice’s statements. Those that require corroboration for other forms of incentivized witnesses, however, are few and far between.
Illinois currently mandates corroboration in capital cases, and courts in Nebraska and Oklahoma have required corroboration for jailhouse snitches. Texas, meanwhile, has a different requirement, not for jailhouse snitches, but for undercover drug operatives working for the police.
Criminal justice reformers say they want to make sure police and prosecutors are following protocol in how and when they use paid or incentivized informants.
Taslitz, who serves in the ABA’s Criminal Justice Section, says more transparency is needed during the discovery phase. For example, he’d like to see defendants who are negotiating a plea agreement have access to the information and witnesses being used against them.
In a 2005 ABA resolution that Taslitz helped write, the association urged federal, state and local authorities to require that informants meet certain standards of credibility and that courts mandate corroboration in all cases that involve jailhouse snitches.
But so far there has been little in the way of reform.
“It’s a slow process,” Taslitz says, “and it doesn’t have to necessarily be a matter of legislation, but it could be a matter of individual prosecutors’ offices adopting specific policies; it can be a matter of local ordinances; it can be case law where judges start to intervene. It’s a slow process and, as of yet, there is no uniform informants act.”
For cases that do go to trial, Natapoff has been pushing for “pre-trial reliability hearings” as a potential remedy. Under such a system, the burden would be on the government to prove witness reliability by a preponderance of evidence. Courts would be required to consider such factors as the criminal history of the informant, any compensation for their testimony, and other cases in which the informant has testified, among other things.
“Given the prevalence of informant falsehoods in wrongful capital convictions, such hearings should be mandatory in capital cases, even where the defense intends to concede guilt and move directly to the sentencing phase,” Natapoff says.
Considering that for every innocent person convicted of murder, a real murderer escapes justice, requiring such checks and balances is as much a victim’s rights issue as a matter of criminal justice.
For his part, in spite of losing a decade and a half of his life, Levon Jones says he holds no grudge against the snitch that put him on death row.
Rather, he attributes his ordeal to a miscarriage of justice.
Says Jones: “It was the system itself.”
Source / In These Times / Posted July 30, 2008
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged ACLU, Criminal Justice, Criminal Justice Reform, Death Penalty, War on Drugs
1 Comment
Texas Death Row : Those Who Are About to Die
Your Texas death machine gets rolling once again
By Jordan Smith / August 1, 2008
A Nation of Laws?
Scheduled for Execution Aug. 5: José Medellín
There is no doubt that the crime for which 33-year-old José Ernesto Medellín was sentenced to die was horrific. And there is no arguing that Medellín did not participate in the brutal gang rape in Houston that claimed the lives of two teen girls. There is also no question that Medellín, a Mexican national, was denied the opportunity after he was arrested to consult with Mexican consular officials regarding his detention and prosecution, as guaranteed under provisions of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which the U.S. is a party.
At issue now, just days before his Aug. 5 execution date, is whether that violation of Convention protection prejudiced Medellín’s defense and, more broadly, whether the state of Texas (or any other state) is actually required to enforce the provisions of international law. To international-law experts, including Sarah Cleveland, a former UT law professor who now teaches at Columbia, Texas’ failure to comply with the provisions of international treaties could have far-reaching implications. The U.S. “has relied repeatedly on the enforceability of this and other treaty obligations abroad,” she said. “If we do not keep our promises to our international partners, we lose the ability to protect our own citizens abroad and damage our nation’s reputation as a reliable player on the world stage.”
On June 24, 1993, then-18-year-old Medellín and six other young men gathered in a Houston park for a fight that served as an initiation rite into the Black and White gang. After the fight was over, the teenagers were walking along a set of nearby railroad tracks when they passed two young girls, 14-year-old Jennifer Ertman and 16-year-old Elizabeth Peña. The boys grabbed them; the two girls were raped multiple times, strangled, and left for dead. Medellín was charged, tried, and convicted of capital murder, but it wasn’t until after he was sentenced to death that the Mexican government was contacted about his situation, when Medellín wrote to Mexican officials from his cell.
Ultimately, Medellín was one of 52 people on death row in the U.S. named in a lawsuit filed in the International Court of Justice (often called the “World Court”) by the Mexican government, which argued that the U.S. had failed to meet its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The relevant section of the Convention provides that in an effort to maintain “international peace and security,” people traveling abroad should have the right to talk with representatives of their home nation “without delay” if arrested, “committed to prison or to custody pending trial or is detained in any other manner.” These rights “shall be exercised in conformity with the laws and regulations” of the detention state, reads the Convention, “subject to the proviso, however, that the said laws … must enable full effect to be given to the purposes” for which the consular rights are intended.
Although Medellín tried to raise the violation of the Convention as a claim on appeal, the courts rejected his argument. In 2001, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled: 1) that the claim was procedurally moot because Medellín had failed to raise the issue at trial, 2) that as a private individual he didn’t have standing to enforce the provisions of the international treaty, and 3) that he failed to show the violation caused him any harm since he had been provided with “effective legal representation” at trial and that his “constitutional rights were safeguarded.”
Whether Medellín was in fact provided with adequate representation isn’t at all clear. According to court records, one of his court-appointed attorneys was actually suspended from practicing law during the time he was representing Medellín. And the question of whether these violations caused harm to his defense has never been adequately addressed.
While Medellín’s appeal was pending before the federal appeals court, the ICJ ruled that the U.S. had failed to meet its obligations under the Vienna Convention and that the U.S., “by means of its own choosing,” had to have the cases of every Mexican national reviewed by the courts. In response, Bush issued a memorandum on Feb. 28, 2005, that, in essence, ordered the state courts to “give effect” to the ICJ decision. (Bush also subsequently withdrew U.S. participation in the portion of the Convention that grants the World Court jurisdiction over Convention disputes.) Texas officials balked at the order, and the Court of Criminal Appeals agreed, noting that while the feds may have to honor treaty obligations, individual states were under no obligation to do so.
The question of enforceability made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the state, ruling that the state courts were not bound by the ICJ ruling absent any binding action of Congress. Medellín’s case has since been put to rest by the CCA, but scheduling his execution has caused a last round of wrangling: On July 6, the ICJ issued an order calling for a stay of execution, and on July 14, U.S. Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., filed legislation that would offer criminal defendants “any relief required to remedy the harm done” by violating the Convention. That legislation has not yet moved beyond committee assignment, prompting state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, to appeal to Perry to postpone Medellín’s execution. It is “inappropriate” for a state government to “undermine” foreign policy obligations – and it is especially important to consider the effects that dismissing these concerns would have on “Texans living, working, and visiting abroad,” he wrote.
That argument doesn’t appear to have impressed Perry. “The world court has no standing in Texas and Texas is not bound by a ruling or edict from a foreign court,” spokesman Robert Black told the Houston Chronicle. “It is easy to get caught up in discussions of international law and justice and treaties. It’s very important to remember that these individuals are on death row for killing our citizens.”
Feeding the Death Machine
Scheduled for Execution Aug. 7: Heliberto Chi
Is the Texas method of execution by lethal injection a “cruel and unusual punishment” that violates the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?
According to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, the answer is no. The method, at least as it is set forth in the written protocol by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, is legally sound, said the CCA earlier this year. On June 9, the court ruled that Heliberto Chi, scheduled for an Aug. 7 execution, is not entitled to a hearing to argue otherwise.
Yet in carrying out its executions, does the state actually follow its own protocol? If not, how can the CCA be certain that the injection method would actually withstand strict scrutiny? And if an inmate isn’t entitled even to a hearing on the matter, will we ever know the truth?
In fact, according to recently filed appeals – and, it would appear, to deposition testimony under seal in a Houston federal court – it’s hard to tell if Texas officials exert any meaningful control over the lethal-injection process. In 1977, Texas followed Oklahoma’s lead, adopting trichemical lethal injection as our method of execution, even though the only expert Texas officials consulted – a veterinarian – advised that the most humane method would be a single, massive dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital. Texas ignored that advice, however, opting for the trichemical cocktail developed for Oklahoma by its medical examiner, Jay Chapman, who, according to court documents, was not of the opinion that execution should be painless. “Perhaps hemlock is the answer for all the bleeding hearts who completely forget about the victims – and their suffering,” Chapman has said. “And we should worry that these horses’ patoots should have a bit of pain, awareness of anything – give me a break.”
And so the trichemical method was adopted and is now central to the claim that the method, as practiced in 36 states, is unconstitutional. In general, the three chemicals – sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride – are injected in succession, and each functions in order to: 1) sedate the prisoner, 2) paralyze all voluntary muscles, and 3) stop the heart. The ability to achieve this goal in a humane manner, however, rests upon the skill and expertise with which the drugs are administered and monitored. The risk of severe pain turns on the proper injection of the first chemical, a mild sedative generally used to temporarily render a patient unconscious during the introduction of anesthesia. Sodium thiopental is “ordinarily used to render a surgical patient unconscious for mere minutes only in the induction phase of anesthesia, specifically so that the patient may reawaken and breathe on his own power if any complications arise,” Dr. Mark Heath, a professor of clinical anesthesia at Columbia, said in a declaration filed with Chi’s appeal. In the context of lethal injection, the sedative is problematic because, if it wears off after the injection of pancuronium bromide, a drug that immobilizes all voluntary muscles – including the diaphragm – the inmate may feel excruciating pain, and, while conscious but incapable of communication, “suffocate to death while experiencing an intense, conscious desire to inhale.”
If monitored properly, these pitfalls might be avoided, but lawyers for Chi (and other death row inmates) argue that the absence of any oversight by medical experts or trained administrators renders the Texas execution method a torturous experience that certainly falls outside the parameters of the Eighth Amendment.
The CCA’s assurance that Texas’ lethal injection method is sound relies exclusively on the U.S. Supreme Court decision this year in the case of two inmates who challenged Kentucky’s use of the method. The Kentucky courts held a seven-day hearing, out of which came a full record for the Supremes to explore. In the end, the high court concluded that the manner in which Kentucky administers lethal injection, using the same trichem cocktail as Texas, is constitutional.
But that does not mean, the high court noted, that all protocols are created equal. In fact, it seems the only thing Texas and Kentucky have in common is that both states have written protocols. In practice, the differences are striking – including the fact that Texas does not use medical professionals to carry out or monitor the execution process, not even to ensure that the IV line is secured properly, that the individual drugs are mixed properly, or that the inmate is unconscious prior to being dosed with the second and third drugs. And that creates a strong likelihood for painful error.
Quantifying that likelihood, however, has been difficult at best for the lawyers representing death row inmates like Chi. State statutes governing lethal injection require only that execution happen by the “injection of a substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause death.” The only restriction TDCJ places on the process is that no “torture, or ill treatment, or unnecessary pain, should be inflicted.” What that means in practice has been hard to determine. TDCJ’s written protocol remained secret until 2006, when it was disclosed during discovery in a federal civil lawsuit. What the state – or the CCA – has known about this protocol over the years is also unclear.
However, recent court filings suggest that the TDCJ and the Texas Attorney General’s Office may have been aware since at least March 2007 that Texas’ written protocol has little relevance to the realities of the death chamber. In a recent appeal (for inmate Carlton Turner, executed July 10), lawyers argued that the contents of a 280-page deposition of death unit Warden Charles O’Reilly reflect that “the written protocol is effectively irrelevant to the reality of how Texas carries out execution by lethal injection in practice.” The deposition remains under court seal and was only made available to defense attorneys under a confidentiality agreement inhibiting their ability to provide more specific detail. However, Turner’s attorneys argued, the information in O’Reilly’s deposition “demonstrates that the TDCJ’s assertions that the protocol is applied in Texas just as it is in Kentucky are unsupported allegations and, in large measure, simply false.”
So far, such arguments have not impressed the CCA. In Chi’s case, Judge Barbara Hervey opined for the court majority that because the Kentucky execution protocol is “materially indistinguishable from Texas’ … protocol … Chi’s Eighth Amend-ment claim has no merit.” At present, it appears that only one CCA jurist, Judge Tom Price, has any reservations about the legality of the process: “Apparently the Court will not tolerate actual litigation of the issue if it means the death machine meanwhile must stand idle,” Price wrote in dissent. “But we cannot fix the machine while the cogs are turning.”
Should Have Been Anticipated
Scheduled for execution Aug. 21: Jeffrey Wood
Jeffrey Wood did not enter the Gold Star Texaco in Kerrville until after he heard the gunshots.
He was sitting in a pickup truck parked outside the gas station – almost a second home to him, his sister Terri Been says, a real hangout where Wood often went to socialize with friends who worked there, including clerk Kris Keeran – when he heard gunfire. He ran inside, where he found his friend Keeran slumped over near the counter, dead from a single .22-caliber round that caught him between his left eye and the bridge of his nose. Holding the gun was another friend, Danny Reneau. Wood was shocked. Reneau pointed the gun at Wood and barked an order for him to grab a video surveillance camera and VCR. Wood was afraid, he later told police, and did as he was told. Reneau removed the store safe and the pair fled to the home of Wood’s brother in Devine.
Wood did not fire the fatal shot and did not participate in the robbery that preceded the Jan. 2, 1996, murder. Nonetheless, Wood was sentenced to die, based on the state’s “law of parties,” also known as the “conspirator liability” statute. The law provides that if two or more people agree to commit one crime but in the process commit another, each person is guilty of the crime committed – if the crime was “one that should have been anticipated.” This is a more nebulous form of traditional accomplice liability (aiding and abetting) that requires the state to prove specific, individual culpability. The difference here is in intent and foresight: Accomplice liability requires intent; conspiracy requires only a finding that the crime was foreseeable.
In Wood’s case, the state argued that he had planned with Reneau to rob the Texaco and therefore was responsible for Keeran’s death. But it isn’t at all clear that Wood was planning to rob the store. Wood told police that he’d heard Reneau talking with someone else (the store manager, Been says) about a possible robbery – the place had taken in $17,000 over Christmas, and the pair speculated that a similarly hefty stash could be expected just after New Year’s Eve, since the bank holiday would mean the money would not yet have been deposited – but Wood also said he believed the talk was “bullshit in the breeze.” (Family members have said that Wood did initially talk about robbing the store, along with Reneau, the store manager, and Keeran, but insisted that Wood, Keeran, and the manager all dismissed the idea.)
Critics have argued that Texas’ use of the law of parties unconstitutionally broadens the field of death-eligible defendants; the death penalty, they argue, should be reserved for the most culpable and most heinous crimes. In fact, Texas is the only state that uses a conspiracy statute to make defendants eligible for the death penalty. “To pass constitutional scrutiny,” Wood’s attorney Scott Sullivan argued on appeal, “a sentencing statute must not only narrow the class of persons eligible for the death penalty, it must also ensure sentencing decisions are based upon an individual inquiry” of culpability. Texas’ law of parties fails to do that, he wrote. The state, however, argues that the law of parties is not implicated in a decision to impose death: “The Texas capital murder scheme does not allow an individual to be put to death merely for being a party because the law-of-parties cannot be applied in answering the special issues” that jurors must answer, argued then-Bexar Co. Assistant District Attorney Lucy Cavazos. A death sentence is assessed only if jurors find that a defendant would pose a continuing threat to society and that there is no mitigating evidence that might lessen the defendant’s culpability. Yet Cavazos’ argument evades the fact that without the law-of-parties, defendants like Wood wouldn’t be eligible for death in the first place. The courts have sided with the state.
Wood’s case is similar to that of Kenneth Foster, who was sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of Michael LaHood by a companion, based on the Bexar Co. district attorney’s use of the conspiracy statute. Foster was scheduled to die last year but was spared when Gov. Rick Perry accepted the recommendation of the Board of Pardons and Paroles and commuted his sentence to life in prison. “I believe the right and just decision is to commute Foster’s sentence,” he said. Perry did not directly implicate the law of parties in explaining his decision but did raise the issue of culpability, saying he was “concerned” that state law allowed Foster to be tried jointly with triggerman Maurecio Brown.
Given the parallels between the Wood and Foster cases, Wood’s supporters question how the state can execute Wood without further damaging the credibility of the Texas death system. (Indeed, Wood’s sister, Been, argues that her brother is even less culpable of murder than was Foster.) “There will be a full package going to the governor, and I think you will see a lot of similarities between us and Foster,” Sullivan said last week.
Wood’s family and supporters also question whether Wood is actually competent to face execution. He was originally found incompetent to stand trial, because he could not adequately work with his attorneys and participate in his defense. During the sentencing phase, District Judge Stephen Ables ruled that Wood would not be allowed to fire his court-appointed lawyers and represent himself. Nonetheless, Wood would not allow his attorneys to present mitigating evidence – including evidence that Wood was abused as a child and had been diagnosed with serious learning disabilities. Moreover, school records show that Wood’s maturity was notably retarded – school officials noted that although he looked his age, he behaved like a child, constantly sought approval for actions, and was easily led and influenced by others. The evidence further erodes Wood’s culpability, Been argues. “Jeff was just dumb. He’s so trusting of people and has to get burned in order to learn a lesson,” she says. “He doesn’t deserve to die.”
Source / Austin Chronicle
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Capital Punishment, Criminal Justice, Human Rights, Texas, Texas Death Row
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McCain, Anthrax and the Afghan Blunder
See Video of McCain on Letterman in 2001 below.
‘Barely a month after the 9/11 attacks and while the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan was still underway, McCain was already eyeing a war against Iraq’
By Robert Parry / August 3, 2008
The scene of John McCain – during the anthrax attacks in October 2001 – opining to David Letterman that Iraq might be responsible underscores McCain’s central role in what may go down as one of the biggest strategic blunders in U.S. military history, the premature pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq.
Not only has it been clear for many years that McCain’s speculation about Iraq’s role in the anthrax attacks was reckless – made even more apparent by the FBI now pinning the crime on dead U.S. bio-defense scientist Bruce Ivins – but McCain also told Letterman in that Oct. 18, 2001, interview that “the second phase is Iraq.”
In other words, barely a month after the 9/11 attacks and while the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan was still underway, McCain was already eyeing a war against Iraq.
McCain opened his appearance with the joke, “What is Osama bin Laden going to be for Halloween?” and then gave the punch line: “Dead.”
However, bin Laden managed to survive that Halloween – and apparently six others – in part because President George W. Bush didn’t commit enough U.S. ground forces to the battle of Tora Bora, allowing bin Laden and other key al-Qaeda leaders to escape.
Then, instead of staying focused on the challenge in Afghanistan and finishing the hunt for bin Laden, Bush heeded the advice of McCain and other neocons and shifted the attention of the CIA and the U.S. military toward Iraq.
Though federal investigators cast aside McCain’s suspicion of an Iraqi link to the anthrax attacks, McCain continued to pin other false charges on Saddam Hussein’s government, including allegations about illicit WMD and supposed operational ties to al-Qaeda.
For instance, on Feb. 2, 2002, McCain addressed the Munich Conference on Security Policy, giving a speech with the ambitious title, “From Crisis to Opportunity: American Internationalism and the New Atlantic Order.”
In it, McCain laid out the full neoconservative case for turning U.S. attention quickly toward Iraq.
“The next front is apparent, and we should not shirk from acknowledging it,” McCain said. “A terrorist resides in Baghdad, with the resources of an entire state at his disposal, flush with cash from illicit oil revenues and proud of a decade-long record of defying the international community’s demands that he come clean on his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.
”A day of reckoning is approaching.”
On March 19, 2003, Bush fulfilled McCain’s dream by launching the invasion of Iraq, succeeding in ousting Hussein’s government in three weeks but then finding a large U.S. expeditionary force tied down by a stubborn insurgency for the next five-plus years.
Captured al-Qaeda documents make clear that bin Laden and his inner circle viewed the U.S. attack on Iraq as a welcome gift, a chance for them to rebuild their organization inside Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country where al-Qaeda had old allies in the tribal regions and historic ties to Pakistan’s shadowy intelligence agency, the ISI.
Al-Qaeda’s Iraq strategy was summed up in a letter that a senior al-Qaeda leader, known as “Atiyah,” sent to Jordanian terrorist Musab al-Zarqawi in December 2005, urging Zarqawi, who was leading the “al-Qaeda in Iraq” contingent, to tone down his aggressiveness and take more time because “prolonging the war is in our interest.”
[To view this excerpt in a translation published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, click here. To read the entire letter, click Source..]
During Campaign 2008, McCain has sought to focus public attention on the supposed success of Bush’s “surge” strategy, which began in 2007 with the addition of about 30,000 more U.S. troops in Iraq.
Aided by the superficiality of the U.S. news media, McCain so far has been able to escape any significant criticism for his role in the central blunder of the “war on terror,” the premature pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq.
Besides playing into bin Laden’s hands, the U.S. concentration of forces in Iraq also enabled the Taliban to regroup and turn Afghanistan into an increasingly lethal front for American and NATO soldiers.
Recent U.S. intelligence also suggests that al-Qaeda is now preparing new terrorist attacks from its base camps inside Pakistan and is redirecting Islamic jihadists from Iraq to the Afghan-Pakistani theater, which always appears to have been al-Qaeda’s main concern even as Bush tried to sell the American people on the idea that the “central front” was Iraq.
Having not dealt decisively with the Taliban/al-Qaeda threat in 2001-02, the U.S. military now anticipates many more bloody years battling for Afghanistan and may have to conduct more cross-border aerial attacks inside Pakistan, possibly destabilizing that nuclear-armed country.
In many ways, this worsening Afghan fiasco can be traced back to McCain’s loose speculation about anthrax and his neoconservative pronouncements of almost seven years ago.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neeckdeepbook.com.
For more on this topic, see McCain’s Afghan Strategic Blunder / consortiumnews / July 22, 2008.
Source / consortiumnews
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Afghanistan, Bin Laden, Campaign Tactics, Iraq, Iraq War, McCain, Presidential Campaign, Terrorism, Video, War on Terror
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HEALTH : Is vitamin D Deficiency a Public Health Crisis?
‘Current guidelines are not enough to prevent vitamin D deficiency’
By Monica Reinagel
An article in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine charges that the government’s current recommendations for vitamin D intake are woefully inadequate. The author, Dr. Michel Holick, claims that the current guidelines, which recommend 200 IU per day, are not enough to prevent vitamin D deficiency in most people. Dr. Holick would like to see the RDA increased to 800-1,000 IU per day.
Without enough vitamin D, your body absorbs only a fraction of the calcium you take in. According to Dr. Holick, the absorption of calcium can be as low as 15% in the absence of vitamin D. The most serious consequence of vitamin D deficiency is an increased risk of osteoporosis (in adults) and skeletal deformaties (in children). It can also cause muscle weakness and immune defiencies.
Vitamin D is not very widespread in the food supply. Oily fish like sardines and herring are good natural sources. But most Americans get the lion’s share of their dietary vitamin D from vitamin supplements or fortified foods. (Milk, for example, is often fortified with vitamin D.) Keep in mind, though, that the amount of vitamin D in vitamin supplements and fortified foods is based on the current RDA of 200 IU–so even if you faithfully swallow a multi-vitamin every day, you may be coming up short.
The Sunshine Vitamin
The other chief source of vitamin D is not dietary but environmental. Your body can manufacture its own supply of vitamin D if you expose your unprotected skin to the sun’s rays. Experts estimate that a daily 15-minute sunbath at mid-day (with the sun hitting your arms, face and neck, for example) would be enough to top off your vitamin D stores. But these days, most of us are trying to mimize our sun exposure to prevent skin damage, and wearing sunscreen blocks the vitamin D-making process. And even without sunscreen, those who live further from the equator (such as in the Northern United States and Europe) will have trouble getting enough sun exposure to ward off deficiency in the winter.
How much vitamin D are you getting?
Are you even getting the current (and, some say, inadequate) RDA of vitamin D on a daily basis? Use NutritionData’s total consumption report to analyze a typical day’s diet and see. Don’t forget to add in any supplements you may be taking. (You can add those to your pantry as a custom food.)
Convinced that the current recommendation is too low? You don’t have to wait for the government to change the RDA for vitamin D–those wheels turn awfully slowly! You can set your own daily target for vitamin D or any other nutrient using the preferences setting on NutritionData. Read this post to learn how.
Source / NutritionData / Posted July 24, 2008
Thanks to Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog
Drawn and Quartered
Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog / Posted August 3, 2008
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Campaign Tactics, Cartoon, Electoral politics, Humor, Karl Rove, McCain
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Who’s Really Running Iraq?
Home Truths You’ll Never Read in the Press
By Patrick Cockburn / August 3, 2008
American politicians and journalists have repeatedly made the same mistake in Iraq over the past five years. This is to assume that the US is far more in control of events in the country than has ever truly been the case. This was true after the fall of Saddam Hussein when President Bush and his viceroy in Baghdad Paul Bremer believed that what Iraqis thought and did could safely be ignored. Within months guerrilla war against American forces was raging across central Iraq.
The ability of America to make unilateral decisions in Iraq is diminishing by the month, but the White House was still horrified to hear the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki appearing to endorse Barack Obama’s plan for the withdrawal of American combat troops over 16 months. This cut the ground from under the feet of John McCain who has repeatedly declared that ‘victory’ is at last within America’s grasp because of the great achievements of ‘the Surge’, the American reinforcements sent to Iraq in 2007 to regain control of Baghdad.
The success of ‘the Surge’ is becoming almost received wisdom in the US. This is strange since, if the US strategy did win such an important victory, why do America generals need more soldiers, currently 147,000 of them, in Iraq than they did before ‘the Surge’ started? But belief in this so-called victory is in keeping with the American tradition of seeing everything that happens in Iraq as being the result of actions by the US alone. The complex political landscape of Iraq is ignored. US commentators have never quite taken on board that there are not one but three wars being fought out in the country since 2003: the first is the war of resistance against the American occupation by insurgents from the Sunni Arab community. The second is the battle between the Sunni and Shia communities as to who should rule the Iraqi state in succession to Saddam Hussein. The third conflict is a proxy war between the US and Iran to decide who should be the predominant foreign power in Iraq. The real, though exaggerated, fall in violence in Iraq over the last year is a consequence of developments in all three of these wars, but they do not necessarily have much to do with ‘the Surge’.
The reduction in violence is in any case only in comparison to the bloodbath of 2005-7 when Baghdad and central Iraq was ravaged by a sectarian civil war. There were 554 Iraqis killed in the fighting in June 2008, which is only a third of the figure for the same month a year earlier. This is progress, but it still makes Baghdad the most dangerous city in the world. Asked on television about the security situation, Iraqis often respond that ‘things are getting better’ and so they undoubtedly are, but people usually mean that things are better than the terror of two years ago. Foreign television correspondents laud the improved security in the Iraqi capital and are pictured apparently strolling down a peaceful and busy street. What the television viewer does not see are the armed guards standing behind the cameraman, without whom the correspondents would not dare set foot outside their heavily guarded offices.
I do drive around Baghdad without armed guards and have always done so. But I sit in the back of a car with an Arabic newspaper and a jacket or shirt on a hanger masking the window next to me. I have a second car behind me in contact with us by field radios to make sure that we are not being followed. It is true that security is better, but this can be overstated. Each district iin Baghdad is sealed off by concrete walls. There are checkpoints every few hundred yards. Sunni and Shia do not visit each other areas unless they have to. The best barometer for the real state of security in Baghdad is the attitude of Iraqi refugees, particularly the 2.4 million people who fled to Jordan and Syria. Though often living in miserable conditions and with their money running out, the refugees are generally not coming home to Iraq and, when they do, they seldom return to houses from which they have been forced to flee. If they do try to do so the results are often fatal. Baghdad has few mixed areas left and today is 75-80 per cent a Shia city. The demographic balance in the capital has shifted against the Sunni and this is unlikely to change. The battle for Baghdad was won by the Shia and was ending even before ‘the Surge’ began in February 2007.
It was the outcome of the struggle for the capital that caused a large part of the anti-American resistance to make a dramatic change of sides, switching suddenly from fighting to supporting US troops. The attempt by al-Qa’ida in Iraq to take over the whole of the anti-occupation resistance in late 2006 was important in forcing other insurgent groups to ally themselves with the US as al-Sahwa or the Awakening movement. But perhaps a more important reason for the rise of al-Sahwa was that there was no point in the Sunni insurgents attacking the Americans if they were being driven from Iraq by the Shia. There are now some 90,000 former Sunni resistance fighters on the American payroll, but they happily express open hatred and contempt for the Iraqi government. Sectarian divisions in the country remain very deep. In the Fallujah area, for instance, it is very dangerous for either the Sunni chief of police or the al-Sahwa commander (they are brothers) to enter Baghdad. This is because Abu Ghraib at the entrance to the city is controlled by the much-feared and heavily-Shia al-Muthana Brigade, who might kill either of them on sight.
Another reason why violence has fallen in Iraq over the last eighteen months has little to do with ‘the Surge’, but is the consequence of the Shia militiamen of the Mehdi Army being stood down by its leader Muqtada al-Sadr. The one constant theme in his strategy, ever since he fought the US Marines in Najaf in 2004, has been to avoid direct military conflict with the US armed forces or his Shia rivals when backed by US firepower. This was true at the start of ‘the Surge’ in February 2007 and Muqtada has sought truces and ceasefires ever since. He did so after fighting with the Iraqi police in Kerbala in August 2007 and he renewed the truce six months later. In March this year the Iraqi army launched a military offensive to take Basra from the Mehdi Army, an attack which at first failed to make headway until backed by US airpower. But in Basra and later in Sadr City in Baghdad, Muqtada agreed to ceasefires which allowed his former bastions to be taken over by the Iraqi army. Muqtada did not fight because he knew his men must lose at the end of the day. For a military confrontation with the Iraqi army and the US he would need the support of Iran and this was not forthcoming.
McCain and other American politicians who believe that ‘the Surge’ has brought them close to victory, seldom understand the role Iran has played in Iraq in the last two years. Paradoxically, Iran and the US together are the two main supporters of the present Iraqi government. For Iran, Nouri al-Maliki in power in Baghdad leading a coalition of Shia religious parties allied to the Kurds is as good as it is going to get. The Iranians may vie with the US for influence over this government, but both want it to stay in power. “People fail to realise that the success of ‘the Surge’ was the result of a tacit agreement between the US and Iran,” one Iraqi leader told me. “There really is an Iranian-American condominium ruling Iraq these days,” said another.
Suppose McCain is elected US president in November and acts as if the US is the only decision maker in Iraq then he will face a renewed war. Iraqis will not accept the occupation continuing indefinitely and Iran will not allow itself to be marginalized. If McCain were to try to win a military victory in Iraq he could find the supposed achievements of ‘the Surge’ rapidly evaporating.
Patrick Cockburn is the Ihe author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.” A version of this piece appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
Source / counterpunch
Obama : Running While Black
‘Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain’
By Bob Herbert / August 2, 2008
Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.
You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”
There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us — the “us” being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.
Since then, Senator McCain has only upped the ante, smearing Mr. Obama every which way from sundown. On Wednesday, The Washington Post ran an extraordinary front-page article that began:
“For four days, Senator John McCain and his allies have accused Senator Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.”
Evidence? John McCain needs no evidence. His campaign is about trashing the opposition, Karl Rove-style. Not satisfied with calling his opponent’s patriotism into question, Mr. McCain added what amounted to a charge of treason, insisting that Senator Obama would actually prefer that the United States lose a war if that would mean that he — Senator Obama — would not have to lose an election.
Now, from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr. Obama.
The Republican National Committee targeted Harold Ford with a similarly disgusting ad in 2006 when Mr. Ford, then a congressman, was running a strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. The ad, which the committee described as a parody, showed a scantily clad woman whispering, “Harold, call me.”
Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.
The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control. It was at work in that New Yorker cover that caused such a stir. (Mr. Obama in Muslim garb with the American flag burning in the fireplace.) It’s driving the idea that Barack Obama is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant, too big for his britches — a man who obviously does not know his place.
Mr. Obama has to endure these grotesque insults with a smile and heroic levels of equanimity. The reason he has to do this — the sole reason — is that he is black.
So there he was this week speaking evenly, and with a touch of humor, to a nearly all-white audience in Missouri. His goal was to reassure his listeners, to let them know he’s not some kind of unpatriotic ogre.
Mr. Obama told them: “What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky.”
The audience seemed to appreciate his comments. Mr. Obama was well-received.
But John McCain didn’t appreciate them. RACE CARD! RACE CARD! The McCain camp started bellowing, and it hasn’t stopped since. With great glee bursting through their feigned outrage, the campaign’s operatives and the candidate himself accused Senator Obama of introducing race into the campaign — playing the race card, as they put it, from the very bottom of the deck.
Whatever you think about Barack Obama, he does not want the race issue to be front and center in this campaign. Every day that the campaign is about race is a good day for John McCain. So I guess we understand Mr. McCain’s motivation.
Nevertheless, it’s frustrating to watch John McCain calling out Barack Obama on race. Senator Obama has spoken more honestly and thoughtfully about race than any other politician in many years. Senator McCain is the head of a party that has viciously exploited race for political gain for decades.
He’s obviously more than willing to continue that nauseating tradition.
Source / New York Times
Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog
Circuit Court Upholds Ruling : Texas Sex Toy Law Unconstitutional
Texas Republican AG Greg Abbott denied appeal
By Karl-Thomas Musselman / August 2, 2008
It looks like the 14th Amendment is going to win out over Texas Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected a request by Abbott to have the entire circuit court re-evaluate a ruling made earlier this year that found a Texas law banning the marketing and sales of certain sex toys an unconstitutional violation of the right to privacy under the 14th Amendment. Any appeal would now have to be made and accepted by the United States Supreme Court and there is no word from the AG’s office if they will seek to do so.
Houston Chronicle: Companies that own Dreamer’s and Le Rouge Boutique, which sell the devices in its Austin stores, and the retail distributor Adam & Eve sued in federal court in Austin in 2004 over the constitutionality of the law. They appealed after a federal judge dismissed the suit and said the Constitution did not protect their right to publicly promote such devices.
The appeals court struck down the ban in February, ruling that it violated the right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
I believe that prior to this ruling, certain toys, if owned, had to be considered “educational or instructional” devices.
Source / Burnt Orange Report
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged 14th Amendment, Civil Liberties, Constitution, Criminal Justice, Sex Toys, Sexuality, Texas
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Garrison Keillor : No Time for Dithering
‘In a month, the Republicans will convene a few blocks from my house and I’d like to stand across the street with a sign, but I can’t come up with the right wording. “Bleaughhhh,” maybe, or “Arghhhh.”‘
By Garrison Keillor / August 2, 2008
Another paradise day in our old river town and we linger over supper in the backyard and talk about the dry weather and bats (Do they eat 3,000 mosquitoes per night? No, says the family biologist) and cousin Bruce’s truck farm besieged by suburban yards, and of course Barack Obama’s audacious trip to Iraq and Europe. Meanwhile, the sun goes down and little candles come out and a fresh pot of green tea and nobody feels the urge to get up and go. We are taciturn people, but give us a paradise night, balmy, a slight breeze stirring, candles burning, and we are on the verge of vast intimate revelations – “I became a writer as a way of drawing attention to myself. I admit it. It had nothing to do with truth and beauty. It always was about me! Always!” – and I realize it’s my duty as host to say, “Well…,” and stand up and start clearing the table, otherwise we might stay too long and say too much
I talked more than usual since my wife and daughter, who do most of the talking around here, are gone gallivanting around Prague and Paris and I am starved for company. Nobody is bursting into the room in her wet swimsuit and throwing her arms around me. There is very little bursting or throwing going on, just tap-tap-tapping and the turning of pages.
I have been left behind to do some work and to water the flowers and also because I’m not a good traveler. My need to see great castles, churches and museums is at an all-time low. What I really want to see is Wyoming, and every morning I wake up with a strong urge to get in the car and go. Drive away from the rigmarole of business and find the high range and stand there amazed and gaze at the glittering stars, just like in the song.
I can’t remember a summer I loved so much as this. This is a factor of age – time is more precious when there’s less of it remaining – and partly it’s anticipation that the dogs of war who slipped in the back door eight years ago will soon be gone. In a month, the Republicans will convene a few blocks from my house and I’d like to stand across the street with a sign, but I can’t come up with the right wording. “Bleaughhhh,” maybe, or “Arghhhh.”
I stood watering the flowers this morning and then went upstairs and made my bed, two minimum-wage jobs that I am not well qualified for, apparently. But there is yet time to learn. As long as your mother is alive, you are still young, and mine is holding steady at 94, a tall tree shading us from mortality. Whenever I need to feel youthful again, I can trot out to Mother’s and there is my high school graduation picture on the wall, the solemn self-important youth of the spring of 1960, who – so long as I stay away from mirrors – I maybe still am.
It’s no surprise that John McCain likes to bring out his 96-year-old mother Roberta, I suppose. The problem is that she is a lot perkier than he. The gentleman has had a few bad weeks, thundering in a dithery way about America’s enemies, looking vaguely purposeful campaigning up and down supermarket aisles as if he couldn’t remember what kind of cheese he’d been sent to buy. He surely will hit his stride after the Republican convention, but at the moment he looks to be eight years too late. The brash Bull Moose independent of 2000 has made all sorts of accommodations since, abandoning common sense when necessary, and his unsteadiness over the past couple of weeks makes his age an unspoken issue: Anyone who remembers the Iran-contra years and the president who couldn’t remember is not anxious to see a genial oldster dithering in the Oval Office. There is more to the job than flashing a big grin. You do need to make sense now and then.
And now I realize that in writing about Mr. McCain I have left the hose in the flower bed and may have drowned some geraniums. There is a pool of standing water in the bed. I have soaked up some of it with a sponge, but I may need to call in a geraniumologist. Talk to you later. Keep the faith. The truth is marching on.
Source / Baltimore Sun
Thanks to CommonDreams / The Rag Blog