Maybe there is hope, but hie, hie!

Maybe there is hope.  

I promised Fred that I'd wow him with productivity today, beginning with dealing with financial misdeeds, my favorite thing.  So I filed "cow udder balm" under The Castafiore's "operatic make-up products" (for which The Troupe reimburses us biannually).  So I managed to reroute the deposit of my automatic PCIP premium payment to my dear friend President Obama's "Hit List Necessities" (drone maintenance, mainly, and hostess gifts) -- with occasional faulty landings in the National Debt Fund morass.

Buddy the Freakishly Large Kitten, who, at age 2 is having another growth spurt (damn Maine Coons!), complete with a reappearance of his affinity for chewing wires, woke me.  He'd overheard the "productivity" comment and was going to be my aide in seeing it through.

Trouble was, I couldn't straighten my right leg, and who the heck knew where the left one even was?  My right arm was also misplaced, though I could definitively testify that the hand at the end of that arm was swollen and vcry cold.

"Pain pill," thought I, "and a cat with thumbs and whatever other attributes are necessary to the making of a good italian roast in my newly cracked cafetière, and once made, poured over the precise -- in measure as in temperature -- jigger of milk into my ugly green mug and brought to my thirsty lips... and not spilling a God-damned drop because I did manage to mop our wing of the Manor's West Extension yesterday, before falling into a coma."

And, again, as many times before in this blog, I long for a Pensieve.  ["The Pensieve is primarily a device for storing memories outside of one's own head."]  How many other bloggers do you know who long for a Pensieve?  Oh, hush up, Fresca.  (I miss Fresca.  We've never met, yet I miss her!)  Some people are just good people without the requirement of hoops, psychometrics, and disclosure of voting history.

See?  Now, YOU, too, wish for me a Pensieve.  And coffee, and such cats as are necessary to that coffee's procurement, and two 7.5/325 Endocet.  A veritable Peace Train of things.

Aha!  Never mistrust this mind, no matter how far gone, how medicated, how self-pitying, how covered with what appear to be moss-and-lichen twigs -- the lichen we attribute to my funkalicious osteomyelitis and ill-advised skinny dips in the moat during the off-season;  the moss can only be due to my crusty celadon-green Naturalism.  (Naturalism, where the Tea Party was meant to end up, those Baggers!)

But as Brother Yusuf Islam's vintage Peace Train now took over my brain, and its humming eradicated the harmonics of my pain and the displacement of my limbs, and the cats miraculously did manage to hoist my ugly green mug and precise coffee demands to my bedside table -- and after a mere 20 minutes of waiting for the meds to kick in... I grabbed the laptop to see how the world was.  And Peace Train went from thought impediment to badly gurgled half-tones to a full-voiced joyful rendition.  Feel free to join in:


Now I've been happy lately, 
thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be, 
something good has begun

Oh I've been smiling lately, 
dreaming about the world as one
And I believe it could be, 
some day it's going to come

Cause out on the edge of darkness, 
there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, 
come take me home again

Now I've been smiling lately, 
thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be, 
something good has begun

Oh peace train sounding louder
Glide on the peace train
Come on now peace train
Yes, peace train holy  roller

Everyone jump upon the peace train
Come on now peace train

Get your bags together, 
go bring your good friends too
Cause it's getting nearer, 
it soon will be with you

Now come and join the living, 
it's not so far from you
And it's getting nearer, 
soon it will all be true

Now I've been crying lately, 
thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating, 
why can't we live in bliss

Cause out on the edge of darkness, 
there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, 
come take me home again


Why are you singing, all belly-free and without an inhibition in sight, much less on your shoulder?
Because even before I could locate the information necessary to determining whether the world had made it overnight, my eyes spied the title of an editorial:  "America’s Retreat From the Death Penalty."

Your voice is further buoyed by the small fact that it isn't a signed guest op-ed, or even a signed regular old tired op-eder.  It's a full-fledged New York Times editorial board piece.

There's not a brilliant bit in it.  There's no new information.  There's just the recognition that the whims and moods of America, as determined by its sorta-elected judiciary, have always determined the death penalty policies of this country.  But if you talk to Most People, Most People believe that there is a standardized, measurable, referable, repeatable standard that we keep in the Judiciary Closet -- something like units of measure that are convertible to any bloody, murderous circumstance.

It's true!  Once a decade or so, depending, we fight and tousle, then we remember the Judiciary Closet, where we have stored our imaginary Standards of Legal Measurement, and we all finally gather at the corner pub (or Applebees, if there be no corner pub in what used to pass for your neighborhood) to salute the good King Edwards of the 13th and 14th centuries:

When the Roman Empire passed into history about six hundred years after the time of Christ, Europe then drifted into the Dark Ages. For six or seven hundred years mankind generally made little progress with regard to standardizing measurement. Sometime after the Magna Charta was signed in the Thirteenth Century, King Edward I of England took a step forward. He ordered a permanent measuring stick made of iron to serve as a master standard yardstick for the entire kingdom. This master yardstick was called the "iron ulna", after the bone of the forearm, and it was standardized as the length of a yard, very close to the length of our present-day yard. King Edward realized that constancy and permanence were the key to any standard. He also decreed that the foot measure should be one-third the length of the yard, and the inch one thirty-sixth. King Edward II, in 1324, reverted back to the seed concept of the ancients and passed a statute that "three barleycorns, round and dry," make an inch. 

What?  Oh, I forgot to tell you.  The "Dark Ages" is just code for "hie, hie -- hie unto your metaphors!"  In case you're having trouble following, and who wouldn't, unless she had the assistance of Amazing Felines, Pharmaceuticals, and superb Italian Roast, the standardization of measurement based on what is purely arbitrary has links to both power and the most boring of everyday stuff (barley corns and ulnae), and on these standardizations we build domes, skyscrapers, knickknack shelves, and our opinions about the death penalty.  That last item means, you poor caffeine-deprived, bed-ridden sufferer, life itself.  Toss in the Pyramids and Chichen Itza, as well as most preserved Mayan architecture, and you'll agree with me -- we are some lucky sons-of-bitches, to have such divine wonders born of arbitrary forearms and the relative humidity of a seed.

Before I die, and I do believe this is going to be my year, finally, I'd love to see the Mayan "ruins." I don't know, though, whether they've been rendered handicapped accessible.  How it would suck to make it to the bottom of all that brilliance, only to find no wheelchair ramp.

I feel a  "We the People" Petition coming on.  I'm sure that  "We the People" Petitions cover USAmerican civil rights beyond the borders as well as within.

Anyway, we have stashed away, thanks to people like Napoleon, Jefferson, and Galileo's pendulum, brass bars as arbiters of the standards dissent that falls upon We the People from time to time.  Carry the metaphor over to the Judiciary Closet, and you'll see the main reason we fail at even discussing the Death Penalty with any reasonableness whatsoever.

That's why I stopped discussing it, unless bullied into it.  I mean, I once wore the tiara of DP Abolitionist for a small but brave-hearted Amnesty International group (we even managed to free a Prisoner of Conscience, upon which occasion we drank wine from wax cups).

But somehow, overnight, the editorial board of the New York Times realized that Right is Right, and published this, of which I'll give you a salivary striptease:

America’s Retreat From the Death Penalty 

When the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, it said there were two social purposes for imposing capital punishment for the most egregious crimes: deterrence and retribution. In recent months, these justifications for a cruel and uncivilized punishment have been seriously undermined by a growing group of judges, prosecutors, scholars and others involved in criminal justice, conservatives and liberals alike. 

A distinguished committee of scholars convened by the National Research Council found that there is no useful evidence to determine if the death penalty deters serious crimes. Many first-rate scholars have tried to prove the theory of deterrence, but that research “is not informative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates,” the committee said. 

A host of other respected experts have also concluded that life imprisonment is a far more practical form of retribution, because the death penalty process is too expensive, too time-consuming and unfairly applied. 

The punishment is supposed to be reserved for the very worst criminals, but dozens of studies in state after state have shown that the process for deciding who should be sent to death row is arbitrary and discriminatory. [Please click HERE for the remainder of the op-ed]

I almost feel that scoping out the rest of the world and what was done in it while I slept is unnecessary.  Over the cliff or not, who cares?  Aleppo, more dead, less, whatever!  Mitch McConnell grew a chin?  It was covered by his health plan and will help him govern more effectively. Hillary Clinton has faked yet another illness? (What do you expect from an hysterical female?  She probably couldn't hold an aspirin between her knees long enough to earn the Presidential Fitness Award.)

None of it matters.

Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace trainOh peace train take this country, come take me home again

I know, I'm being a gullible rube again.  Leave me to it, at least for the afternoon.  Let me be capricious in my generalizations of a Bunch O'Words, if it makes me happy.  Words matter.






Upcoming Scheduled Executions in the U.S.

All scheduled execution dates cited are tentative. A number of circumstances exist that can change the date.
To write a letter to stop any of the scheduled executions, please use this directory of government officials to direct your letters.


January
1/16/2013 Robert Gleason Jr. -- Virginia
1/16/2013 Ronald Post -- Ohio
1/29/2013 Kimberly McCarthy -- Texas
February
2/20/2013 Britt Ripkowski  -- Texas
2/21/2013 Carl Henry Blue -- Texas
March
3/6/2013 Frederick Treesh -- Ohio
3/21/2013 Michael Dean "Spider" Gonzalez -- Texas
April
4/10/2013 Rigoberto Avila -- Texas
4/16/2013 Ronnie Threadgill -- Texas
May
5/1/2013 Steven Smith -- Ohio
July
7/31/2013 Douglas Feldman -- Texas
August
8/7/2013 Billy Slagle -- Ohio
September
9/25/2013 Harry Mitts, Jr. -- Ohio
November
11/14/2013 Ronald Phillips -- Ohio
January
1/16/2014 Dennis McGuire -- Ohio
March
3/19/2014 Gregory Lott -- Ohio
May
5/28/2014 Arthur Tyler -- Ohio
October
10/14/2014 Raymond Tibbetts -- Ohio
January
1/7/2015 Warren Henness -- Ohio

REPOST in the wake of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' Shooting: Pollyanna's Glad Game

When a Congressperson is shot at point blank range in the head, it is time to examine the atmosphere that is informing our political and social makeup.


It is time to talk about these things, it is time to put up our "Polyanna Glad Games," and to pull our collective head out of the sand. Discourse, and its level of civility, matters.


Words matter.


There are desperately angry people who are desperately searching for leadership. The desperation has been increasingly palpable since President Obama took office -- his election having tapped into the barely suppressed rage of racists whose racism has heretofore managed to adequately explain their racist world. They feel intimately violated by the sweeping changes in the United States, no matter how intelligent or necessary that change has been.


It's been all "Don't tread on me" with neverending references to some abstract "Truth" and fantastical "Liberties" that our "Forefathers" apparently secreted from their very pores. 

Already I am reading things like "[t]here aren't many details yet, but whatever they turn out to be, they will be spun hard, and not in favor of liberty," that from Moonbattery on today's shooting. 


It's been nothing but racist, ignorant bullshit for way too long. And there has grown alongside of it a fluorishing political economy of wagging radio tongues and malevolent talking heads.


The sad thing is that those with real points to make on the conservative side of politics and governing have been drowned out, their thoughts and considered points trammeled by demagoguery.


There is a place for the right, the left, and the moderate.


There is no place, or, at least, there ought not be a place, for mindless followers spurred on by meanspirited Machiavellis.


Anyway, I lay the blame for Congress Woman Giffords death squarely on the shoulders of FOX News and those who put gun targets on the backs of public servants.


It will be a while before I play The Glad Game. How about you?

***************************************************************

The editorial below is one of the best, most thought-and-discussion provoking pieces I've come across in a good while. It's reproduced here in its entirety -- please forgive me for that and be sure to follow the link, because the comments are also well worth a read.

I am a Frank Rich fan. He is meticulous. He is candid.

And I usually agree with him -- there's that!

I haven't yet scoped out the responses to this editorial -- I am sure they're mounting -- but will post links to them. Maybe tomorrow! I am having a few days of... I don't know exactly how to characterize it... carefully crafted peace? It took me a week but I managed to trace the source of my acid stomach to all this mess.

We've been laid bare. I've been laid bare. Flailed, thrashed. My mind is bleeding.

And in other, more important news? Fred installed a birdhouse in the huge oak sheltering our suite in the northeast wing of Marlinspike Hall, where we have been living for a decade or so, rent-free but burdened by incredible maintenance cares -- all courtesy of Captain Haddock. Five minutes after hanging the For Rent sign, a robin moved in and began building!

Yes, I am playing the Pollyanna Glad Game, however did you know?

For a moment there was silence. The sky was darkening fast. Pollyanna took a firmer hold of her friend's arm.

"I reckon I'm glad, after all, that you did get scared -- a little, 'cause then you came after me," she shivered.

"Poor little lamb! And you must be hungry, too. I -- I'm afraid you'll have ter have bread and milk in the kitchen with me. Yer aunt didn't like it -- because you didn't come down ter supper, ye know."

"But I couldn't. I was up here."

"Yes; but -- she didn't know that, you see!" observed Nancy, dryly, stifling a chuckle. "I'm sorry about the bread and milk; I am, I am."

"Oh, I'm not. I'm glad."

"Glad! Why?"

"Why, I like bread and milk, and I'd like to eat with you. I don't see any trouble about being glad about that."

"You don't seem ter see any trouble bein' glad about everythin'," retorted Nancy, choking a little over her remembrance of Pollyanna's brave attempts to like the bare little attic room.

Pollyanna laughed softly.

"Well, that's the game, you know, anyway."

"The -- game?"

"Yes; the 'just being glad' game."

"Whatever in the world are you talkin' about?"

"Why, it's a game. Father told it to me, and it's lovely," rejoined Pollyanna. "We've played it always, ever since I was a little, little girl. I told the Ladies' Aid, and they played it -- some of them."

"What is it? I ain't much on games, though."

Pollyanna laughed again, but she sighed, too; and in the gathering twilight her face looked thin and wistful.

"Why, we began it on some crutches that came in a missionary barrel."

"Crutches!"

"Yes. You see I'd wanted a doll, and father had written them so; but when the barrel came the lady wrote that there hadn't any dolls come in, but the little crutches had. So she sent 'em along as they might come in handy for some child, sometime. And that's when we began it."

"Well, I must say I can't see any game about that, about that," declared Nancy, almost irritably.

"Oh, yes; the game was to just find something about everything to be glad about -- no matter what 'twas," rejoined Pollyanna, earnestly. "And we began right then -- on the crutches."

"Well, goodness me! I can't see anythin' ter be glad about -- gettin' a pair of crutches when you wanted a doll!"

Pollyanna clapped her hands.

"There is -- there is," she crowed. "But I couldn't see it, either, Nancy, at first," she added, with quick honesty. "Father had to tell it to me."

"Well, then, suppose you tell me," almost snapped Nancy.

"Goosey! Why, just be glad because you don't - need -- 'em!" exulted Pollyanna, triumphantly. "You see it's just as easy -- when you know how!"

"Well, of all the queer doin's!" breathed Nancy, regarding Pollyanna with almost fearful eyes.

"Oh, but it isn't queer -- it's lovely," maintained Pollyanna enthusiastically. "And we've played it ever since. And the harder 'tis, the more fun 'tis to get 'em out; only -- only sometimes it's almost too hard -- like when your father goes to Heaven, and there isn't anybody but a Ladies' Aid left."

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

By FRANK RICH
Published: March 27, 2010

THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.

But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.

Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.