Proud about ignorance

by cogdogblog

Palin Proudly Owns Her Creationism
[Via Little Green Footballs]

She did her best to obfuscate the issue during the campaign, but her book completely settles the question: Sarah Palin is an “I didn’t come from no monkey!” creationist.

Elsewhere in this volume, she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.”

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We keep hearing that there are no fundamental conflicts between science and religion, that scientists should be kinder to those who find comfort in God.

All well and good until you have a major political figure deny science, deny the facts. And deny them in such an exquisite illustration of ignorance. She displays such a disrespect for what I, and millions of others, have spent our lives working on, as do most deniers of evolution and other scientific facts, like relativity.

When I see a supposedly educated person espouse such an uninformed opinion, I really do fear for America’s ability to succeed. For countries that actually have leaders that recognize the facts of the world around us will be much better poised to find successful solutions to difficult problems.

Meanwhile we will have the media captured by someone who unashamedly snubs reality. Are scientists supposed to just be nice and keep their mouths shut in order to not displease some people?

One reason I moved away from the Republican Party was their increasing reliance on anti-scientific rhetoric. (That, and the shredding of the Constitution by Iran-Contra.)

Looks like I do not have to worry about any reconnection with the Republicans any time soon.

[Listening to: Siberian Khatru from the album "The Haunted Melody" by Steve Howe Trio]

Senate rules are awesome!

by Hey Paul

Can a GOP walkout really stop the climate bill?

[Via Congress Matters]

No.

I’m posting from the road, on my phone, so this won’t be as comprehensive and link-rich as it should be, but here goes.

It’s been pointed out that there’s a rule in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that requires the presence of two minority side Senators for a markup to go forward. But like most such rules, it’s probably not “self-executing,” meaning that in order for it to have an effect, someone needs to show up to point out that there aren’t the requisite number of minority Senators in attendance. A majority side Senator could certainly do that, but why? The job of protecting minority rights belongs chiefly to the minority. Let them do it. And when they do, you politely point out that if you’re present enough to object, then you’re present enough to count towards a quorum.

Now, this particular rule requires two minority Senators, not just one. That sounds like a rule designed by someone who had been burned by the one-Senator rule before. So technically, one Republican can show up, point out that there aren’t two, and try to invoke the rule. And if that happens, what can the chair do about it?

Well, one way around it is the way the Judiciary Committee traditionally deals with a similar rule. They ignore it.

Another would be to bypass the formal use of the committee entirely, and use Rule XIV to move the bill to the floor when they’re ready. That is, Chairwoman Boxer could convene a meeting of anyone who’s on the committee and who wants to participate in the process, and in effect simply ask them, “If this were a committee markup, what amendments would you offer, and how would you vote on them?” Then she could alter her draft bill accordingly, and either try to move it to the floor under Rule XIV, pass the resulting document on to the next committee of jurisdiction for its consideration, or set it aside for whatever future merger process the leadership may have planned for it.

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I wrote about this the other day.The Republican members of the committee were going to vanish, making it impossible to continue because 2 minority members were required for markup to continue.

But it requires someone to be present to ‘notice’ that the minority members are absent. If no one ‘notices’ then things are fine. What an perfectly diabolic way to get around a rule.

And then if someone from the GOP does show up to ‘notice’ well, the majority just says that this is not a real committee meeting. “We just happened to get together to talk about the bill. Want to join us?”

Parliamentary procedure at its best!

It will be interesting to see the response

by simone.brunozzi
The must-read solutions book — “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis” by Al Gore.:
[Via Climate Progress]

The long-awaited sequel to An Inconvenient Truth comes out Tuesday. If you want a preview, Gore and the book are featured in an excellent Newsweek cover story, The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.

In September, Nature Reports Climate Change asked me (and several others) to suggest three books to read ahead of the Copenhagen conference. Of those, they then asked me to review Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis:

When your last work led to an Oscar and Nobel Prize, anticipation is high on the sequel. And former US Vice President Al Gore’s new book delivers. Our Choice, due out in November, is a wonderfully readable treatise on climate solutions.Whereas An Inconvenient Truth framed the crisis that climate negotiations are tackling, this followup spells out what needs to be done.

Based on 30 of Gore’s ‘Solutions Summits’ as well as one-on-one discussions with leading experts across multiple disciplines, the book aims, in Gore’s words, “to gather in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now”. Gore naturally focuses on energy, the source of most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and discusses many underappreciated strategies such as concentrated solar thermal power and cogeneration. He also devotes a full chapter to soil, a major carbon sink that is gradually degrading. Farming strategies for restoring soil carbon are described, including biochar, a porous charcoal that can potentially enhance the soil sink while providing a source of low-carbon power. And like its PowerPoint-based predecessor, Our Choice is replete with lush photos and simple but powerful charts. This [is] a must-read book for those who want a primer on all the key solutions countries will be considering at Copenhagen.

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Here is a guy who held summits with people from many walks of life in order to gather information for this book, who has altered his opinions as new data emerges, and I bet many people will just ignore him. While two guys who have no background in this issues and really talked to very few people (apparently mischaracterizing those they did talk with) will make the best seller lists.

We shall see but I am just completely amazed at the vitriol that gets thrown at Gore without any real basis. What has Gore every really DONE that makes him such a target? No sex scandals. No financial scandals. A Vietnam vet.

People can disagree with his politics but I just have no idea where the vitriolic disdain comes from. He is used as a scare word, like ACORN or Kennedy. It apparently does not matter that he is right more often than not and that many of the initiatives he sponsored have had huge positive impacts on us all.

I expect his ideas will be more useful and achievable, with lower overall costs , than those of Superfrteakonmics. They will most likely actually be based in reality.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Government, Politics, Science, Sustainability

More from the party of no

GOP Takes Clean Energy Bill Obstructionism To Yet Another Level:
[Via Crooks and Liars]

From NOW on PBS–Power Struggle. More available here.

This is what I hate having to explain to my relatives and friends abroad in Europe about politics in the US. We know that global warming is a fact. We know that our actions, if they didn’t cause global warming, definitely exacerbate it. We know that we must reduce our dependency on oil, for both ecological and political/strategic reasons. And yet, what we are able to do is hampered so predictably by the Republican party:

Here we go again. James Inhofe, the most prominent climate change denier in the United States Senate, has concocted a new and innovative strategy to thwart the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. To wit, he and his Republican colleagues on the Environment and Public Works Committee have worked up a plan to simply not show up for next week’s markup:

But Boxer cannot hold the markup unless at least two Republicans show up, and EPW ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) signaled that he has unanimous support among the panel’s minority members to boycott the session until they get more data on the legislation from U.S. EPA and the Congressional Budget Office.

Inhofe said he will wait for Boxer to file an official notice of the markup — expected today — before responding with his own declaration of the GOP’s markup strategy.

“As soon as we find out what her announcement is and what she wants to do, we’ll have our response,” Inhofe told E&E last night. “We’ll have our unanimous expression ready.”

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You have to admire their discipline. Ideology is always so much more important than actually doing anything. So minority of a minority can prevent government action. It might almost be admirable if Inhofe was not such a black helicopter denialist. But then, why should he really care about the rest of us? He has his.

I wonder who will play Inhofe in the stirring docudrama about this Profile In Courage?

Technorati Tags: Environment, Politics

Why our economy will continue to lack jobs

by Ethan Bloch
Wasted Talent and Corruption:
[Via Firedoglake]

Calvin Trillin explains explains that the cause of the great crash of 2008 was all the smart people who went to Wall Street. Once upon a time, the big jobs on Wall Street were filed with third-raters, the guys who slept through Rocks for Jocks at Ivy U. They got their jobs through their parents or their friends or people they charmed at homecoming. Their dreams were modest, a house in Greenwich and a sailboat.

Of course, Trillin makes this banal insight a joke, claiming that the old boys were only mildly greedy, but then Wall Street started importing really smart people, and making mountains of money. The third-raters weren’t able to comprehend the risks, but loved the buttloads of moolah (you gotta love Margaret and Helen) they were making. The smart people didn’t understand the risks either, but they pretended to, and uncontrolled greed led to the crash.

The humor masks the ugly reality. The standing joke in law school is that the A students become professors, the Bs become judges, and the Cs become millionaires, or as we used to say in college, the business guys hired the engineers, and the science guys become professors.

The most obvious bad thing about smart people going to Wall Street is that it means we don’t have productive jobs for them in the fields they are trained for. If a bunch of physicists are working for Goldman Sachs, it means they aren’t doing physics. It means we don’t have work requiring physicists or their training. It means we are falling behind the countries that do have work for physicists. How many chemists do you think China has working in finance?

The second bad thing is the way financial elites make money. Floyd Norris gives a good picture in this column. They charge high fees, and hidden fees. To justify those fees, they have to produce huge returns, which they do by leverage. They rely on complexity and deception, particularly in swaps and derivatives. Wall Street has become more concentrated. All of these things are dangerous to the rest of society, which has to bail those incompetents out when they fail.

The third bad thing is that they aren’t doing the one thing we need for them to do: allocate capital to its best use. As Norris points out, dumping money into asset bubbles is a giant fail.

Many of the financial innovations of recent years were not designed to increase operating profits for customers. Instead, they sought to avoid taxes, or make accounting statements look prettier, or get around regulations seeking financial safety. At their worst, they boiled down to an offer to charge a customer a dime for letting him evade 20 cents in taxes. Such transfers do nothing for the larger society.

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Both parties are corrupted by the large sums of money being pumped into Washington. It is so easy to see who is doing the bidding of their corporate masters. Thus, nothing will be done over the next few years to really change the dynamic. In fact, I expect things to get worse and that the thing people really care about, jobs, will continue to be secondary to bolstering Wall Street.

I expect this to be the real realignment divide between those who want corporations to continue to have all the rights that citizens have with none of the responsibilities and those who want actual living human beings to come first.. Either a Republican Party that can foster another Roosevelt or a Democratic Party that can foster another Roosevelt.

I just hope the corruption of corporations can be reduced to a molehill instead of a mountain. And soon.

If not, America will not be much of a leader in much of anything.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Government

Living by rumor

Making Stuff Up:
[Via Eschaton]

Get used to a neverending stream of horseshit.

Getting like the 90s again.

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What do facts matter when rumor is so much more useful? Some people will just spread any old rumor without giving any thought at all to its veracity. Some of them are even called journalists. But not by anyone who actually cares about things like the truth.

And these lies will stay with a whole lot of people because a supposed authority figure told them it was true. Even when revealed to be false. But you can be sure that emails detailing this thesis will be making the rounds.

I guess Snopes.com will always exist to deal with this sort of matter, as if any of these guys ever check the facts. Reality-based views of the world apparently just do not work for a sizable fraction of Americans.

Technorati Tags: Politics

Why Fox News needs fact checking

by Rob Lee

Fox News Outfoxes Itself:
[Via Talking Points Memo]

If you’ve had Fox News on today, you’ve seen them cranking up the indignation machine over a supposed new incident between the network and the White House. The claim is that the White House denied Fox the same access other networks had to a press briefing at the Treasury Department yesterday. But we’ve looked into it, and it turns out that’s not what happened. Christina Bellantoni has the details on how a miscommunication over the TV pool feed has Fox playing First Amendment victim.

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Fox News, and a ton of reporters that never bothered to find out what happened, spent Friday claiming foul. Yet, according not only to the White House but also to people who were there, it was nothing of the kind.

Looks like some MSM were punked. Like Rush and Obama’s thesis. Or it would seem so unless you also had a better memory.

What is amazing to me is how many so-called journalists just fell in line with Fox, needing no other verification, yet, when the Bush white House was excoriating MSNBC, the crickets made more noise than the MSM.

I would rather believe that most reporters are simply incompetent rather than they take their marching orders from their corporate owners. I think one reason the MSM are failing is that they no longer select for good reporters. Edward R. Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley etc. got to the top because they were good reporters.

No more. Actually being good is more likely to get you a quick boot out the door. Read a book called Good Work or follow the Good Work Project. They show again and again that the veteran journalists, the ones who mainly got into the field because of the work of the earlier great reporters, who wanted to help create an informed citizenry, are finding those principles are no longer wanted in their business.

What is wanted is a focus on the bottom line, on bread and circuses. Thus we get hours devoted to something that was an obvious hoax to many at the time, with no real investigation into that possibility at all during those hours. The only reason it took off was the admission of a child hours later.

Shiny sells. And explaining does nothing for the bottom line. In fact, outright lying works much better. Not too many years ago, Fox won an appeal in which they stated that they had a First Amendment right to lie. That there was no law forcing hem to tell the truth.

Fox fired two reporters who refused to allow statements that they knew to be false into a telecast. They were fired. They sued for unlawful termination, winning in a jury trial. But they lost on appeal. The court said that there was nothing illegal with Fox presenting falsehoods!

It is enough to make you think that anyone who believes Fox is a legitimate news channel also believes wrestling is a legitimate sport.

They have a right to be viewed as the entertainment channel they mostly are. But just as we would not follow WWE because it represented an unfiltered view of an athletic endeavor, Fox should not be viewed as an unbiased source of news.

Money is more important than truth

by kevindooley
Fewer Americans convinced global warming is real:
[Via CEJournal]

The percentage of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the Earth is warming dropped sharply during the past year, according to a poll released today by the Pew Research Center For the People and the Press.

At the same time, there has been an almost equal decline in the percentage of Americans who say [...]

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Well, there certainly has been little in the science to cause such a drop, not only that humans are involved in climate change but that climate change is even happening at all. There have been no new, outstanding facts to cause this rapid change in opinion.

And this is truly a partisan issue. A majority of Republicans (57%) do not believe that climate change is happening at all. Only 17% of the Democrats feel that way. Half of all Democrats see the human cause behind these changes. Only 18% of Republicans do.

I would submit that the main thing that has happened has been a full court press by industries and organizations directly involved in carbon dioxide release.

Much like the tobacco industries spent decades trying to confuse people about the actual dangers of cigarette smoking, these groups are trying to do the same for climate change. Take a complex subject and make it even harder to understand. It kept the tobacco industry going full speed ahead for half a century. Truth is not what they seek. Profit it.

And they are much better funded than those who seek the truth. Deniers often are.

Luckily, not all corporations fell this way, as we have seen recently with those who disagree with the Chamber of Commerce. Let’s hope some of them do some things to combat the misinformation.

Because, the data shows that the world has warmed significantly over the last 150 years. Public opinion polls do not change those facts.

Technorati Tags: Politics, Science

Why we are so screwed

Questioning Moody’s:
[Via Balloon Juice]

Every now and then some journalism breaks out across this fair nation:

As the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody’s Investors Service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted, responded by purging analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody’s punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.

Instead, Moody’s promoted executives who headed its “structured finance” division, which assisted Wall Street in packaging loans into securities for sale to investors. It also stacked its compliance department with the people who awarded the highest ratings to pools of mortgages that soon were downgraded to junk. Such products have another name now: “toxic assets.”

Read the whole damning report. And can I say it is about damned time. There is a pulitzer here.

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There is just no accountability in the financial sector. They refuse to do the right thing, refuse to any reasonable regulation, fire those who see both moral and financial problems with the current situation and promote those who caused the problem.

Punishing those who were right and rewarding those that were responsible for the collapse. What an immoral business full of unethical human beings.

If they can not take care of their own business, and they continue to do things that will be harmful to the economy and to the rest of us, then perhaps government should step in. There does not appear to be anyone else who can. These guys will not regulate themselves and really do not care what the rest of us think.

Technorati Tags: Politics

CBO comes pretty close

The papers are full of news about the ‘record high’ budget deficit announced this week. But very little of this deficit is due to Obama at all. In fact, one could make the case that Obama’s efforts resulted in a smaller deficit than expected.

Last January, when Obama was President-elect, the CBO came out with an estimate for the 2009 budget year. Based on Bush’s policies, such as TARP (which added almost $700 billion), they projected the deficit to be $1.2 trillion. And this does not include the $800 billion stimulus package, which is spread out over two years.

So, the expected amount would be around $1.6 trillion. The current $1.4 trillion is a pretty close to that projection, but indicates that Obama’s policies may actually have saved the US a couple of trillion, based on the January CBO numbers.

By whatever token, the budget deficit is lower than most projections. Assuming the deficit really matters since people in each party keep changing their minds depending who is in the White House.

One of the things wrong with Obama

by bobster855 *

Lizardbreath: The Shameful Obama Administration:

[Via Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Economist Brad DeLong's Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based Semi-Daily Journal]

I did not work to elect Barack Hussein Obama so that his Justice Department could do things like this:

Lizardbreath: US District Judge Colleen Kottar-Kelly just ordered the release (don’t get excited, it’s not going to happen unless the Justice Department decides not to appeal) of Fouad al-Rubiah, one of the prisoners at Guantanamo. Read the opinion — there are a lot of redactions, so you can’t get the details, but we took a middleaged aircraft engineer who flew to Afghanistan for charitable purposes a short while before 9/11, cobbled together some insane story out of interrogations from unreliable informants, and tortured him into confessing to it. If I follow the course of events correctly through all the redactions, we then continued to torture him because the story we told him to confess to didn’t make any sense. And now we’ve asked a judge to keep him imprisoned on the basis of the confessions that the US interrogators found unbelievable.

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We continue to hold prisoners we have tortured that not only have no real value but whose continuing imprisonment is an embarrassment to our values. Now a judge has ordered the release of one such prisoner.

I fully expect Obama’s government to continue the detention of prisoners beyond any good reason. We have tortured them and kept them for many years so far. I imagine that we will keep them for a few more. History will not judge this well at all.

*This photo from the National Archives presents Generals Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower being shown how the Nazis tortured inmates at the Gotha concentration camp. I guess I would call this a stress position. The Germans also had defined documents detailing how their “Verschärfte Vernehmung” or ’sharpened interrogation’ was to be used. The document mentioned was a secret directive from Heinrich Muller.

UPDATE: A very nice discussion of the court case.

Technorati Tags: Politics

Thanks for the memories

Obama Surrendered To the Commies!:
[Via Balloon Juice]

Prepare for a complete and total shit fit from the 101st Chairborne, because the US is canceling the construction of missile defense sites in Czech Republic and Poland.

I’ll wait for Larison’s take, but I will say this- what would you think if China or Russia were building missile sites in Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico? How do you think we would react to that?

BTW- Every time I think of missile defense I am reminded of the John Rogers classic from several years back- “I Miss Republicans.” His word-fu is strong.

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Kung-fu Monkey is one of my favorite sites, mainly because he is one of the guys behind Leverage. But I knew him from before he made it. I Miss Republicans is from 5 years ago. How little has changed!

Here is how it starts:

No, seriously. Remember Republicans? Sober men in suits, pipes, who’d nod thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science. Remember those serious-looking 1950’s-1960’s science guys in the movies — Republican to a one.

They were the grown-ups. They were the realists. Sure they were a bummer, maaaaan, but on the way to La Revolution you need somebody to remember where you parked the car. I was never one (nor a Democrat, really, more an agnostic libertarian big on the social contract, but we don’t have a party …), but I genuinely liked them.

How did they become the party of fairy dust and make believe? How did they become the anti-science guys? The anti-fact guys? The anti-logic guys?

I’m not talking McCain, Hagel, Snowe, or Lugar, here, the cool hard-ass Republicans who still operate in the real world. I’m talking specifically about the guys running the party right now.

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Read the rest to see what a non-partisan writer has to say about the lack of grown-ups. Lest we forget.

So we are going to stop working on a program that has mainly been a boon for the military-industrial complex, not for any actual ability to protect us. I’m sure we will find some other useless project for them to get their corporate welfare.

I doubt a Republican like Eisenhower could get elected today (he was one of the grown-ups) but he was certainly right in his warning:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Technorati Tags: Politics

“The only appropriate response to people like this is open, mocking laughter.”

The Food Here Is Terrible and the Portions Are Too Small:

[Via Balloon Juice]

Some days I honestly think the current Republican party is little more than a long running Second City comedy sketch:

Protesters who attended Saturday’s Tea Party rally in Washington found a new reason to be upset: Apparently they are unhappy with the level of service provided by the subway system.

Rep. Kevin Brady called for a government investigation into whether the government-run subway system adequately prepared for this weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services.

Seriously.

The Texas Republican on Wednesday released a letter he sent to Washington’s Metro system complaining that the taxpayer-funded subway system was unable to properly transport protesters to the rally to protest government spending and expansion.

The WaPo has more:

Rep. Kevin Brady ( R ) said an 80-year-old woman and her 60-year-old daughter were forced to walk and pay for a cab because the subway system was so crowded. He said he heard many complaints from people who traveled long distances to attend the event, which served to challenge some of President Obama’s signature policies.

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So, the anti-socialists were unhappy with having to take the private option. I agree that most of us would love to be able to have a public option to turn to.

And why was the public option supposedly unable to perform at the levels they wanted? Well an update provides the answer:

*** Update ***

It gets even better:

Back in July HR3288, a Transportation and HUD appropriations bill, came up for a vote. It included $150 million for emergency maintenance funding for the DC Metro.

Brady voted against it.

The only appropriate response to people like this is open, mocking laughter.

I concur.

Yep, the very guy who is complaining about the poor service voted against the money needed to provide the service. Apparently in the world he lives, public transportation requires no money in order to be work. It just is, like the sun and moon.

If you want something to work well, you have to pay for it. Not wanting to pay for it but wanting to use it anyway sounds very un-American to me. Sounds vaguely like some form of welfare.

How about instead of trying to spend tax-payer money on an investigation, he helps spend some money to fix the problem. Because, as i have heard from people who know, a home baseball game at rush hour for the Nationals can really screw up Metro. About the same number of people hit the subway and that happens fairly often.

Technorati Tags: Politics

Lies are easier than facts

A striking lie-to-claim ratio:
[Via Political Animal]

A STRIKING LIE-TO-CLAIM RATIO…. Rep. Sue Myrick (R) from North Carolina delivered the weekly Republican address this morning, and while these addresses are largely meaningless, I was struck by how many falsehoods she was able to fit into a 369-word speech.

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Of course she got great care. She was working for the government at the time and got the wonderful health care they all do. How many women in the US get no care because they have no insurance? Well, in England and Canada, whose health systems are not going to serve as any sort of model for America, everyone gets care.

45,000 Americans die every year because of the lack of health insurance. I guess this is something that the GOP does not feel should be fixed.

UPDATE: Here is some information about one recent death where needed cancer medication was delayed for several months until the insurance company decided to pay for it. You will remember her from her portrayal by Sally Field in the movie Norma Rae. She was quoted as saying:

“How in the world can it take so long to find out (whether they would cover the medicine or not) when it could be a matter of life or death? It is almost like, in a way, committing murder.”

That is healthcare in America today. If you are rich enough or old enough or work for the right company, you can get timely medical care. If not, you don’t.

Technorati Tags: Health, Politics

“…will only add to the perception that justice is skewed in Texas”

Only in Texas would a death penalty case be upheld even after it has been revealed that the prosecutor and the judge were having an affair. I guess in Texas boinking the judge really does have professional benefits.

And, of course, the third world judiciary that is Texas, stated that the defendant should have brought this fact up in an earlier appeal, some 18 years before he knew that there even was an affair. It is almost like medieval tests for witches.

‘If he was really innocent, he would have brought these facts to our notice 18 years ago, before anyone knew there was an affair. Since he only told us about this after he found out about the affair, he must be guilty.’

I sincerely hope there is something not being discussed here because this really indicates how out of touch the Texas judiciary is.

Technorati Tags: Politics