The execution of Troy Davis says some things about our legal system which apply to lots of issues beyond the debate over the death penalty. I had some (very tangential) involvement in this matter, so I think I know the case well enough to say...
Month: September 2011
From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored--indeed, I have struggled--along with a majority of this.
Yes, I'd have to say that the primary responsibility for the pending execution of Troy Davis rests with Barack Obama. Article II clearly establishes the president's power to commute death.
There's a fascinating article up at History News Network calling for us to rethink our traditional narrative of party shifts in the mid-twentieth century, arguing that it was not the Great Depression that created the Democratic Party's dominance after World War II, but postwar prosperity....
This article on bottlenose attacking and killing porpoises in really brutal ways is weird enough. But it also turns out that dolphins' "crimes" against porpoises are kind of sexual in.
...while the prison waits for the Supreme Court to consider a stay request. It's hard to imagine this being anything but very temporary, but never give up hope I guess..
This won't be surprising to longtime readers, but I agree with Dargis in almost every detail here. Plenty of great art has been made by extremely odious human beings and I don't think it makes much sense to deprive ourselves of it, but the temptation...
Band whose last good album was released during the Clinton administration breaks up. I can't resist the snark, in part because of the inevitable attempts of people to delude themselves.
If there's a choice to be made between reducing grotesquely high unemployment and doing nothing in order to improve our political fortunes, the Federal Reserve must do the latter.
This week's WPR column thinks about the pursuit of "strategic paralysis" in context of James Scott's discussion of High Modernism in Seeing Like a State: As a doctrine, network centric warfare, like other attempts to create strategic paralysis before it, springs from the same idea...
Very interesting stuff, suggesting our standard estimates of death during the Civil War are significantly underestimated.
Mark Penn. Still the single biggest reason that I would still support Obama if the 2008 primaries were run again. And the fact that he was portrayed as some sort.