SharedThought

The Miami Herald ran a story today talking about George Bush’s swing through the state to raise money for the 2004 election. Here’s part of it:

The Florida jaunt caps a record-setting, two-week sprint in which the president will have raised more than $20 million — at least twice as much as any Democratic candidate has raised all year.

Supposedly, Bush wants to raise $200 million for the 2004 election. That’s about twice as much as he raised in 2000–when he had to beat a substantial field in the primaries! And here I thought we were in a new era of restrained political giving because of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

I’m pretty sure that bodysnatchers have taken over our Supreme Court. The Court’s latest ruling overturned the conviction of an adult male who performed oral sex on a 14 year old male. The court based its decision on the fact that a lighter sentence would have been imposed had the adult and minor been of a different sex. The decision involved a case from Kansas. I’m sure the residents of that fine state will be pleased with the decision. Remember that it was Kansas that wanted to eliminate teaching evolution a couple of years ago. Jerry Falwell is an East Coast liberal to that lot.

Maybe on Monday the Court will reverse its Florida election decision that gave the Presidency to George Bush! You can always hope, right?

The Neal Pollack Invasion is promoting today as Appropriate Michael Savage day. Check here for a post on that site for a bit more explanation. I was tipped to the goings on today by Bill Duckwing (poet, journalist, and moviestar). It’s a strange coincidence that today is Appropriate Michael Savage Day. I’ve got a friend who’s got a buddy who worked at INS. Just last week he gave me a hot bit about Savage. It turns out that Savage was up for a job in the Bush administration. He was being touted to head the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services in the new Department of Homeland Security. His background check did him in, however (recall Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood). According to my source, Savage had been photographed using a gay illegal immigrant to wash his car! What irony! Here’s the picture.

TalkLeft has an entry from March of this year detailing problems with the crime lab used to send Houstonians to Texas’ death row. The Houston Chronicle has run a number of stories here as well. This is a recipe for disaster. A tough-on-crime community that supports the death penalty, a former governor (George Bush) willing to blindly sign death warrants, and a crime lab willing to churn out evidence to support convictions. Is it any wonder that Houston leads the nation in killing its own citizens?

one girl’s life was the only slightly relevant blog I found on feedster discussing the death penalty. For that reason, I’m doing a trackback to the entry I found there. I guess this has become a non-issue in the United States?

What caught my eye was a story in today’s LA Times (registration required) about a man whose state-appointed attorney slept during his murder trial. Remarkably, no court in the state of Texas had a problem with the fact that this guy’s attorney was asleep during his death penalty trial. Even a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals (a federal court) didn’t have a problem with the sleeping attorney. Fortunately, the full panel of judges on the 5th Circuit decided to re-hear the appeal and decided that, indeed, you did not have a fair trial if your attorney was asleep. So what happened? The Hollywood ending would have the guy exonerated at a new trial. In the real-world ending, the guy pleaded guilty to the murder charges and will serve three consecutive life sentences. He won’t be eligible for parole until he’s 70!

It’s an interesting enough story as it is. What really interests me though is where this all happened: Houston Texas. Houston is in Harris County, where the sleeping attorney practiced law (at one time he had 10 clients on death row – some have been executed).

This is also George Bush’s Texas. In the 2000 election George Bush was asked about “sleeping lawyers” during a debate. Bush defended the death penalty and his state’s procedures. Harris County leads America in the number of its citizens who are executed. Of the 104 put to death in Texas from 1976 to 1996, Harris County proudly claimed 33. As of December, 1995, there were 404 people on death row in Texas, at least 111 of whom were tried in Houston. Check out this website for more information on Harris County and the death penalty.

Even though I’m philosophically troubled by the death penalty (does the government killing people to make people stop killing people make any sense?) I’m not anti-death penalty (used to be, am not currently, might be in the future). However, I’m sure as hell not going to visit Houston (also home to Enron) anytime soon. Michael Moore, where are you? I sense a documentary here!

Ks Weblog has a link to the Discovery Channel story about how Van Gogh’s Moonrise had been time authenticated using astronomical techniques. I had also heard the story on NPR last week. Check out that story and other related links here.

The LA Times (registration required) has a story about what happens when student artwork is perceived as crossing the line into criminal threats or intimidation. Here’s an excerpt:

Deciding on the right response is not easy, as a school district in Oconto County, Wis., learned in 1998 when a 13-year-old boy committed to paper a homicidal fantasy about a teacher.

The teacher, nicknamed Mrs. C., had assigned her students to write a story. The boy, identified in court records only as Douglas D., was talking in class, so she sent him to the hallway to finish his work.

Douglas’ story depicted Mrs. C. as “an ugly old woman” who angered a student named Dick by kicking him out of her classroom. With crude spelling, Douglas went on to describe how “Dick” returned to school with a hidden knife.

“The next morning Dick came to class & in his coat he conseled a machedy,” the boy wrote. “When the teacher told him to shut up he whipped it out & cut off her head. When the sub came 2 days later she needed a paperclip so she opened the droor. Ahh she screamed as she found Mrs. C’s head in the droor.”

Douglas apologized but was suspended from school.

I’m sympathetic to an artist’s need to express extreme feelings, but I have to admit after reading the story that I think the schools mentioned in the article acted appropriately. The tone of the article is surprisingly non-committal on the right to expression issue. It would have been easy to write a story that said the schools just don’t get it. They are punishing kids for creating art they don’t understand, etc., etc. The LA Times, to its credit, recognized that schools after Columbine are paying much closer attention to what students are writing (and painting).

Everyman Bill O’Reilly of Fox News fame has reached a new low. He’s leveled one of his patented blasts of vitriol at web writers for telling lies about him. Here’s something that I can say about O’Reilly that I’m sure is true: he’s a hypocritical moron. The article in question can be found here.

O’Reilly’s screed goes like this: the Internet is bad because anybody can say anything about anybody. Here’s an actual quote:

The reason these net people get away with all kinds of stuff is that they work for no one. They put stuff up with no restraints. This, of course, is dangerous, but it symbolizes what the Internet is becoming.

And here I thought that freedom of expression was a good, democratic, and universally appreciated value in our society. Maybe for O’Reilly that freedom belongs only to him and those who agree with him. Check out this nauseatingly pro-O’Reilly site if you dare. In case you’ve forgotten, this isn’t the first time that O’Reilly has lashed out at Internet writers. Last summer he was after the website oreilly-sucks.com for violating his “civil rights”. You can read about it here.

Any doubt that Republican members of Congress could be motivated by anything other than personal greed has flown out the window with the latest rounds of tax cuts. The Washington Post has an article here that discusses how much supporters of the tax cut in Congress will benefit from the tax cut on dividends.

Dozens of House members stand to save thousands of dollars thanks to the dividend tax cut that Congress passed last month, according to annual disclosure records released yesterday.

While many lawmakers reported little or no dividend income in 2002, others reported dividends ranging from tens of thousands to millions of dollars. If they conduct similar transactions this year, they will enjoy substantial tax savings under the measure that President Bush initiated and the GOP-led Congress enacted. Retroactive to Jan. 1, the top tax rate for dividends, now 38.6 percent, will drop to 15 percent.

Recall from Civics the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment states: “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the senators and representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.” The purpose of this amendment (which was not added to the Constitution until 1992) was to ensure that Congress couldn’t pile on personal benefits in the form of salary increases or other perks until after an election cycle had intervened. The framers wanted to give the electorate an opportunity to vote the rascals out if they disagreed with a change in congressional compensation.

Too bad the same could not have been required for other legislation (like the latest tax cuts) that so clearly benefits members of Congress.

Anyone who was sentient in early February this year remembers Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations. He was there to convince the Security Council that force should be used to disarm Iraq. As he stated: “My second purpose today is to provide you with additional information, to share with you what the United States knows about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” The presentation went on at length with a nice slideshow and cool charts. His fundamental point was this: the United States knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, and we (the United Nations) should use force to make sure they are gotten rid of.

It bothers me that few people seem to care that we haven’t found any such weapons in Iraq (except for maybe culturepimp, check out this post). The LA Times (registration required) has an article with a few Gallup numbers showing that people don’t mind that WMD haven’t been found. After all, Saddam was a bad guy. It’s good he’s gone — whatever the reason. Here’s some of the article:

The controversy has not inspired much public backlash against the war. In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll released last week, 56% said they believed the war was justified even if conclusive evidence of weapons of mass destruction is not found. According to the survey, 23% said it would be justified only if such weapons were found and 18% said they did not believe the war was justified at all.

Several pollsters have cited two principal reasons that most Americans are showing little inclination to second-guess the war.

GOP pollster David Winston noted that many Americans supported the war not only because of the claims about weapons of mass destruction, but because they were convinced that Hussein loomed as a broader threat to U.S. security and stability in the Middle East.

Second, the coalition’s relatively easy victory has dampened the instinct to look back, the pollsters said.

But wait a minute! We should all take a look back. If you recall, the existence of WMD by itself wasn’t enough to justify an invasion of Iraq. The United States invented a new doctrine of “preemptive war” to bootstrap the existence of WMD into a reason to invade Iraq. Under this doctrine, the United States can preemptively attack another nation to defend itself from a future threat posed by that nation. We had a hard time satisfying that standard even if Iraq did have WMD (how could Iraq’s WMD harm any of the 50 United States?). Even with WMD there was a very shaky basis under International law for our actions. Without WMD George Bush could be a war criminal.

And by the way, are chemical or biological weapons really WMD?

The latest estimates put the deficit for fiscal year 2003 (ending September 30) at $400 billion. Today’s Washington Post has the following to say about the latest federal deficit estimates from the Congressional Budget Office:

The recent tax cut will reduce tax receipts and raise spending by $61 billion over the next four months, exacerbating a continuing decline in federal tax levels. For the first eight months of the fiscal year, tax receipts have dropped $60 billion from last year’s levels.

At the same time that tax receipts are dropping and spending is increasing the Post has another article about how the House Republicans want to cut taxes by an additional $82 billion. Somebody stop them before they cut again!