Let’s try a thread with none of those oppressive topic rules. Try not to go all Lord of the Flies.
Open Thread
Lazy blogger question – when was the last time a GOP presidential candidate gave a policy address on Iraq? If you narrow the list to likely nominees, has it even happened?
Chat about whatever.
Biblical Justice
I don’t like this:
The federal appeals court in San Francisco yesterday upheld a death sentence from a jury that had consulted the Bible’s teachings on capital punishment.
In a second decision on the role of religion in the criminal justice system, the same court ruled Friday that requiring a former prisoner on parole to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous violated the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.
In the capital case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit split 9 to 6 on the question of whether notes including Bible verses prepared by the jury’s foreman and used during sentencing deliberations required reversal of the death sentence imposed on Stevie L. Fields in 1979.
Mr. Fields, on parole after serving time for manslaughter, committed a series of rapes, kidnappings and robberies, and murdered Rosemary Cobbs, a student librarian at the University of Southern California.
After the jury convicted Mr. Fields and while it was deliberating his sentence, the foreman, Rodney White, conducted outside research, consulting several reference works and preparing a list of pros and cons on the death penalty that he shared with fellow jurors. On the pro side, he quoted passages from the Bible, including this one from Exodus: “He that smiteth a man, so that he dies, shall surely be put to death.”
They then sentenced him to having his eye gouged out a tooth pulled. Just kidding.
In all seriousness, I don’t think I need to go into detail as to why this is a bad thing.
One Tough Cookie
This is amazing:
Two weeks after Doris Anderson disappeared while on a hunting trip with her husband, the 76-year-old lay next to a creek surrounded by thick brush, alone and with no food or supplies.
Rescue teams had been through the mountainous area but found no sign of her. Knowing that she was only lightly clothed in temperatures that had dipped into the 30s at night, they had scaled back the search nearly a week earlier.
But they hadn’t given up.
On Thursday, a day after a sheriff’s deputy asked Anderson’s husband once again how the couple had become separated in the woods, the deputy and others returned to an area they had checked before and found her, alive, alert and in surprisingly good condition.
“We just asked her if she was hurt and talked to her about her family,” Trooper Chris Hawkins said Friday as Anderson recovered in a hospital from dehydration and a hip injury.
Doris Anderson is one tough cookie. Period.
Open Thread
I’m Back.
The view from Saturday:
Can’t say that I missed politics much.
The Understated Importance of Johns McCain And Warner To The Rightwing Movement
Publius at ObWings recently brought up a point that most seem to miss.
[T]he problem with Warner isn’t that he puts politics first. The problem is that he puts politics first while pretending not to do so. Few can furrow their brow on the Sunday morning talk shows better than Warner. But when push comes to shove, Warner never really did anything different than people like Inhofe.
Indeed, never underestimate the value of principled “moderates” to the overall GOP effort. The kabuki generally runs like this: George Bush proposes some extravagant new executive power, say legal sanction to pull the legs off of kittens. The Democrats reasonably agree (mostly) that pulling legs off of kittens is wrong, but usually lack the party discipline and/or the overall votes to stop the president on their own. Worse, nothing terrifies Democrats more than the thought that somebody might call them soft on terrorism for denying the president the power to deal with the awful kitten leg threat. The thought of David Broder calling them partisan practically reduces Democratic leaders to tears.
Mirabile dictu!, some combination of John McCain, John Warner, Lindsay Graham and Arlen Specter will step up and announce grave, serious concerns about the president delimbing kittens, dangling the possibility of sustaining a kitten-leg filibuster. Hey, Harry Ried says, let’s let these guys take the lead! Take that, David Broder! A month later the very concerned Republicans announce a compromise that looks almost exactly like what the president proposed in the first place. Blue dogs vote GOP, of course, leaving Harry Reid looking like a twice-fooled chump. Kittens lose. It happened so often that I named a post category after it.
Then again, that kabuki only worked when Republicans held a modest majority in both houses. No doubt the GOP was as surprised as the rest of us to find the whole enterprise completely unnecessary.
The Understated Importance of Johns McCain And Warner To The Rightwing MovementPost + Comments (23)
The Craig Conversation- Something I Paid No Attention To
I completely missed this:
It seems to me that the phrase, “the guy that we get out of the hood,” is an implied racial reference. It refers specifically to blacks, though one could say the officer meant to refer only to young black men from the ghetto who, in the officer’s view, are prone to commit crimes.
Either way, it’s still race-specific in a case that otherwise has no obvious racial dimension. To shame Craig into telling the truth, the officer could have used a different example, like, “I expect this from some punk we get off the street.” Or, “I expect this from some low-life, but not a Senator.” It’s also fairly clear from the context that the officer is not associating blacks with bathroom cruising, but with dishonesty and “disrespect” toward the police.
Why would Karsnia use a race-specific reference in this context? First, the officer may associate blacks in general, or at least those from “the hood,” with bad conduct. In the heat of the exchange, this particular example is the one that first comes to his mind because black men from poor neighborhoods are the kind of people he would most associate with dishonesty and disrespectful behavior.
Second, the officer may have expected that Craig would immediately understand the reference and be especially shamed by it as a law-abiding white person. “Not only were you engaged in this tawdry behavior but now you’re acting like a black thug who lies to a police officer about it,” he seems to be saying. I doubt the officer would have used the “hood” reference if he’d been talking to a suspect who was black. It simply wouldn’t have worked against a black suspect, whether that suspect was from “the hood” or not. It would have backfired even if used against, say, a wealthy black lawyer in a business suit. Further, in the presence of a black person the officer would have been sensitized to using a racial reference. It only works as a shaming technique if it’s one white person speaking to another, with no blacks around to object.
I can see how that could easily be interpreted as a racist comment, but when I heard it, I thought nothing of it. I remember my drill sergeants and NCO’s (white, black, hispanic, and other) in the army referring to “back in the hood” or “back on the block” (‘You might be able to get away with that back in the hood’ or ‘We do things differently here than back on the block’, etc.) almost interchangeably, and there was no racism in their statements when they made them, so I paid no attention to his remark when I heard it.
Interesting, though.
The Craig Conversation- Something I Paid No Attention ToPost + Comments (39)