There is so much to opine with Romney's eleventh hour veep pick - here's Shitepoke's in a few quick bursts:
Romney is a narcissistic shape-shifter. In his run for the presidency - as a right-wing Republican - he has had to flee from every aspect of his past:
Romney-care in Massachusetts was the virtual blueprint for the dreaded Obamacare which he now vows to repeal.
The ballyhooed Salt Lake City Olympics turns out to be a $1.4 billion earmark boondoggle on the taxpayers' tab - with untold local graft and special interest draw-downs.
Bain Capital is a rich-man's Ponzi scheme centered around plundering undervalued companies, loading them with debt and management fees, firing the help, and selling off the pieces.
And his personal finances are unambiguously so fraught with flimflam, money laundering, and off-shore accounts that they'll never see the light of day in terms of disclosure.
While the ABO (anybody-but Obama) crowd will eat glass and vote for Romney, he has failed to convince the Ron Paul-ers, the Teabaggers, and the Christianists who view the election as a Hobson's Choice. AND these are just the Republican BASE, much less Independents.
The Ryan veep pick is a desperate ploy to energize the Push-Granny-Over-the-Cliff voters and the Wall Street royalists who are licking their chops over the final three BIG tranches of public money: Medicare trust fund, Social Security Trust fund, and Federal pensions.
The up-side is that it will also energize the Dem base at the horror of this preening little fascist NeoCon punk - riding on the coattails of this Mormon oligarch - who has deemed Ryan's budget scheme marvelous - who shills for the 1% and wants to swap Medicare for a discounted coupon-clipping scheme that will let me - at 75 years' old, with diabetes, high blood pressure, and a heart condition - go out and shop the for-profit insurance market for a really keen buy!
And YES it will throw Florida's 29 electoral votes against the wall - where 3.4 million Medicare beneficiaries make up the biggest voting bloc. And Romney's flimsy line to haul in another 4.3 million Hispanic Floridians with a Marco Rubio veep pick (who famously lied about his Cuban credentials) has now snapped in two.
Yeah, I know. We're well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, but this election year has loosed a jaw-dropping Republican attempt to create a partisan wedge issue out of whole cloth. The issue: American women's right and free access to birth control. And Surprise, they're foursquare again' it. Huh? Sound like something out of the 1950's? Well, at least let's get the playing field straight.
When Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) - gratuitously dubbed Obamacare by its opponents who were banking on - and desperately scheming for - its demise, the keystone to its implementation was the so-called national insurance exchange from which employers could purchase coverage for their employees.
Any existing healthcare insurer (Blue Cross, Aetna, Kaiser, etc.) would be required to meet certain minimum coverage requirements in order to qualify for the exchange. The law additionally specified that a range of preventative care be covered with no additional out-of-pocket cost to the insured - the unassailable logic that an ounce of prevention is worth untold millions of dollars in down-stream treatment costs.
Rather than getting deep in to the weeds of administrative minutiae, Congress opted to leave the specifics of these minimum requirements to the Department Health and Human Services to define. In the run-up to the 2014 implementation of Obamacare, these details fell under the purview of Obama appointee, Department Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
For that, Secretary Sebelius proceeded to publish the recommend minimum requirements for preventative coverage. For all: colonoscopies and range of cancer screening; for men: prostate exams and PSA tests; for women: mamograms, pap tests, and birth control pills.
In excruciating umbrage to sectarian institutions under the vaunted First Amendment, churches-proper were exempted from compliance with any-and-all provisions that stuck discord between public policy and private faith. For that, a Jehovah's Witness congregation would not be compelled to cover blood transfusions for its staff, neither would a Catholic parish be required to cover birth control for its direct employees.
The quotidian obviousness of these standards would routinely fly under the radar of any partisan dogfight. But, alas, there was a fly in the ointment: Republicans in alliance with parochial right-wingers would unleash the dogs of partisan war on whom they perceived to be politically vulnerable - one Barack Hussein Obama.
Republican speaker John Boehner (above) uncharacteristically descended from the speaker's dais into the well of the House to deliver perhaps one of the most disingenuous and dishonest partisan diatribes ever uttered.
Piling on was an endless cast of Catholic prelates, denouncing the Obama administration of flagrantly usurping his constitutional mandate to protect the sanctity of religion against secular authority.
And not to miss a chance at grabbing the media spotlight, de facto head of the Republican National Committee trash-talkster Rush Limbaugh piled on heaping helping of his signature hyperbole - memorably dubbing Georgetown co-ed grad student Sandra Fluke a slut for her advocacy of contraceptives in the school's insurance program - further suggesting that she sell porn videos of her sexual indulgences to pay for her recreational coitus - rather than looking to the government for a hand-out. Fluke's 15-minutes' of fame would famously land her a spot on the 2012 Democratic National Convention speaker-roll.
Stripping away all of the partisan and parochial fireworks, It all boils down to the obligations of the Catholic Church as an employer in constitutional democracy. Catholics, under the aegis of a plethora of corporations, have extended their reach into a multitude of extra-curricular activities, including schools, universities, hospitals, charitable outfits - you name it. And no one is dismissing their eleemosynary contributions to our society.
But in doing so, they employ a broad range of private citizens - many of whom have no interest in their religion. Accordingly, they must abide by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, agreeing to not discriminate in hiring practices based on a gamut of constitutionally protected categories, including race, creed, national origin, religion - and soon to come, sexual orientation and gender identity.
The little mentioned caveat is that 28 states already require religiously-affiliated organizations - irrespective of their pulpit preachments - to cover birth control in their employee insurance plans. And notwithstanding that ninety percent of self-identified Catholic women use contraceptives at some point in their lives, the Catholic hierarchy - performing in the role of partisan shills - was itching for a political dust-up with the Obama administration:
Hey, we're run by the Catholics. You know what we say about family planning: ain't no such thing. Anything that interferes with ovulation and sperm implantation is verboten. Hey, the Pope said it; we believe it; that settles it. If you work for us, check your U.S. citizenship and your First Amendment rights at the door. You want birth control benefits in your group policy, tough shit. Shut up; get pregnant; go home; rinse and repeat.
It seems abundantly obvious that the issue is more one of control, than birth control. Do Catholic-run corporations have the right to consider all of their employees communicants - even though they are already required to hire without regard to religion? Constitutionally speaking, the answer is unambiguously - no.
For that, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States finds itself on the horns of a dilemma: get out of businesses that serve and employee at-large citizens or get with the government program.
And alas, the Obama administration finds itself on a slippery slope to suborning theocracy: capitulate with Rome, tear down the firewall between church-and-state, and leave Thomas Jefferson spinning on a rotisserie in his grave.
OH BUT WAIT: Dateline February 10, 2012, Secretary Sebelius struck a sweet deal with the insurance companies - all based on a little actuarial arithmetic - something insurance companies are quite good with. It seems (surprise) that footing the bills for prenatal and maternity costs are one of the single biggest liabilities insurance companies incur - eating into shareholder profits like a buzz saw. It seems that reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies by a mere fraction would handily pay for the cost of contraceptives for untold hundreds of women.
So here is Sebelius' compromise: Any religiously-affiliated organization that objects to paying for contraceptives in its group policy may opt-out under Obamacare guidelines. The alternative: any insurance company participating on the exchange will agree to pick up the cost of contraceptives for those women - upon request - off-policy - and free of charge.
Done. Problem solved:
(1) Churches need not fret that a cent of their funds is spent to undermine their sectarian doctrine;
(2) Insurance companies - and their shareholders - are ensured optimum return on investment by minimizing unplanned pregnancy and maternity claims;
(3) American women receive critical range of family planning and preventative medical care; and
(4) The Constitution is spared - another day - from the ravages of theocrats whose longing is to institute denominational dogma into public law.
Shitepoke invites those of you, with attention deficit disorder spans sufficient to accommodate a 12-minute vid, to inform yourself in the full PBS NewsHour report of the compromise.
Shitepoke.com, February 9, 2012
Calhoun GA
Post Script: But make no mistake about it - the unrepentant pandering
of the Republican party on this one is an unambiguous assault on
women's healthcare. Whether it be the boys in the Party or the boys in
the clergy - none of the claimants has a single uterus among them.
During an interview with Spanish language network UniVision, Mitt Romney was pressed on whether it was fair for him to pay 13 percent of his income in taxes — as he did in 2010, according to his recently released tax returns — when many middle class families pay twice that percentage. Romney proceeded to claim that his actual rate is closer to 45 or 50 percent. Here's how he spun it:
You can pause at 1:15 for the purposes of this blog
Follows is a verbatim transcript of the Romney and UniVision exchange. Shitepoke inserts his dialog as if he had been participating in the interview:
UniVision:You just released your tax returns. In 2010 you only paid 13 percent of taxes while most Americans paid much more than that. Is that fair?
Romney:Well, actually, I released two years of taxes and I think the average is almost 15 percent. And then also, on top of that, I gave another more 15 percent to charity. When you add it together with all of the taxes and the charity, particularly in the last year, I think it reaches almost 40 percent that I gave back to the community.
Shitepoke: Charity? Whoa Governor. What the hell are you talking about? I'm sure you're familiar with Schedule B on your 1040 Return. On that form, your charitable deductions are deducted from your adjusted gross income before your tax rate is calculated. When you claim a charitable deduction, you disavow that amount of income as being subject to income tax - on the premises that it qualifies as exempt income according to the tax code. You cannot equate charitable contributions with income tax.
And what this "community" you're talking about? Let's put a lot of clarity in this: you're talking about the Mormon Church - in fact $4 million in the last four years alone - $4 million in income for which you have evaded taxes by virtue of the very "charitable" (shall we say) tax code which allows any organization with a 5013C charter to charge its operating costs directly to American taxpayers.
Sorry, but when you say "give this back to the community" you really mean funnel tax exempt income into the coffers of a bunch of thugs in Salt Lake City who - well - spent $30 million to defeat California Proposition 8 - denying marriage equality to gay Americans. Uhh, some community you have there.
Romney: One of the reasons why we have a lower tax rate on capital gains is because capital gains are also being taxed at the corporate level. So as businesses earn profits, that's taxed at 35 percent, then as they distribute those profits as dividends, that's taxed at 15 percent more. So, all total, the tax rate is really closer to 45 or 50 percent.
Shitepoke: Uhh, Governor. You've got me all discombobulated here. Let's draw the distinction between equity and dividends when it comes to tax liability. Capital gains is the measurement of your gain (or loss) in shareholder equity. It has noting to do with corporate taxation. Shareholder equity is not subject to taxation - either on the corporate balance sheet or on your own tax return. Only the gain or loss in equity is subject to taxation when you sell or trade a corporate equity position (stock). That the current income tax on capital gains is 15% is purely a value judgment on behalf of the Ways and Means Committee.
Dividends are corporate profits distributed to shareholders. Dividends are taxed as ordinary income - to you and all taxpayers. True, corporate dividends are declared after corporate profits are taxed, but so what. When you mix capital gains and dividends you are mixing apples and oranges. But you knew that, didn't you
UniVision:But is it fair what you pay, 13 percent, while most pay much more than that?
Romney: Well, again, I go back to the point that the funds are being taxes twice at two different levels.
Shitepoke: Mitt, you are as full of shit as a Christmas Turkey. Your income is 99% capital gains - or as the IRS calls it unearned income. From that you subtracted - really conned - the taxpayers out of millions in direct subsidy to the Mormon Church. So your effective tax rate was actually LESS than the 13% you paid - not MORE. But your lucky in one respect, no main stream media reporter will dare challenge you on your phony math.
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Not to put too fine a point on yesterday's South Carolina's presidential primary, but reflect that this election represented the essence of rarefied reflexive Southern conservatism:
1. No Democrats were on the ballot; so, presumably the only voters were card-carrying Republicans.
2. The modern Republican party is a product of the South - in reflexive revolt of post World War II socially progressive initiatives.
3. While the South loves Jesus and its women with equal fervor, Republicans, like Baptists, seriously believe that fifty percent of the human race doesn't have the human qualities to weigh in on the really important stuff - whether it be preaching the gospel or electing a president.
For that, this week's electioneering and voting in South Carolina took on a surrealistic aura, tapping into a well spring of antediluvian angst. Not to get too pedantic, but it's therapeutic to rewind sixty-four years to the birth of South Carolina politics as we know it.
James Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) represented South Carolina in the U.S. Senate for virtually a half century (1954-2003). But his unblemished record as a old-school cracker bigot reached its apogee in 1948, when he threw in for president under the States' Rights Democratic (Dixiecrat) Party - the first of the so-called Solid South Democratic factions to peel-off from tissue rejection, owing to their party's postwar progressive initiatives - in this case Truman's executive order to desegregate of the military. Outrage - outrage I tell you! That done it.
In one of his milder stump diatribes Thurmond allowed: "I wanna' tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."
Strom would bail out on the race-mixing Dems and switch to the more like-minded Republican Party in his 1956 senatorial race.
In 1948. Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats peeled-off 39 Deep South electoral votes (including one so-called faithless elector in Tennessee) from the reviled turncoat white American Harry Truman - creating one of the closest presidential elections in history.
An implacable racist, Strom Thurmond harangued the Senate with the longest filibuster in history, speaking for a total of 24-hours, 18-minutes, in a failed attempt to derail the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Cots were brought for colleagues to nap on while Thurmond weighed in on - among other things - his grandmother's biscuit recipe.
Thurmond's family life was somewhat of cartoon - as he had a thing for beauty queens. He met his first wife Jean when he was judging a Miss South Carolina pageant in which she was a contestant. While she didn't win, Thurmond hired her - 24-years' his junior - as his personal secretary and proposed to her in an office dictation. Tragically, she succumbed of a brain tumor 13-years' later, childless.
But Strom really sent South Carolina's eyebrows northward in 1968, when he married Nancy Janice Moore, Miss South Carolina of 1965. He was 66 and she was 22. Yep, that's a 44-year margin of error.
Strom's and Nancy's union would produce four lily-white strapping South Carolinians in rapid-fire succession. Above circa 1990 (L-R): James Strom, Jr. (1972-); wife Nancy Janice Moore Thurmond; James Strom, Sr.; Nancy (1971-1993); Juliana (1973-); and Paul (1976-). Tragically, daughter Nancy was killed at the age of 22 by a drunk driver in Columbia, SC. Nancy and Strom separated (when he was 89) about a year after this idyllic portrait. Although they never divorced, Nancy did not attempt to hide her adulterous relationship with Dr. Thomas Rowland, Jr., president of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSA), whom she would quietly marry in 2003 - a matter of weeks after Strom's long overdue demise.
Good ole' Strom suffered from immortality disorder. And apparently South Carolinians were complicit in the deception - not wanting to relinquish their fetish on the 19th century. Accordingly, he ran for Senate in 1996 at the age of 94. Despite unambiguous clinical evidence of advancing dementia, the immobile, doddering, and drooling novogenarian - with signature sprigged hair, dyed the color of Tang - won handily by 9 points. For that, the insentient Strom spent most of his eighth term trundled in-and-out of Walter Reed Army Hospital on the taxpayers' dime, a sort of middle-finger salute to America, courtesy of the dullards of South Carolina.
But Stom's operatives weren't done yet. Intent on defying all odds, they went on to broker his 2002 senatorial prospects, banking on the would-be 100-year-old's unblemished electoral record. When it became obvious that Strom could no longer be propped up alive, they ran the following deal by Jim Hodges, then-governor of South Carolina: Strom would resign his Senate seat, provided the governor would appoint his estranged spouse Nancy to his unexpired term, allowing her to run, in her own right in 2002, as an incumbent. The Democratic governor declined to oblige, thus steering the Thurmond dynasty safely to the curb.
But Strom would not go out without fanfare. In the run-up to his 100th birthday, Republican supplicants lined up en masse to genuflect and offer up incense to the burnt-out effigy of the wrong side of history. Front and center would be Republican Senate Minority Leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi.
On December 5, 2002 at Strom's 100th birthday fete, Lott famously proclaimed - full open-mic: "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either." Thurmond nodded - like a bobble-headed nebbish - in nostalgic regret.
Presumably the manifold problems Lott was referring to were ... admit[ting] the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches. While desultory Republican colleagues would awkwardly leap onto the bandwagon in his defense, craven party leadership would throw Lott under the political buss- stripping him of his senate leadership status.
Strom Thurmond died in his sleep on June 26, 2003, at the age of 100-years and 200-days. But, alas, he would be denied the last word. On July 1, 2003 - only 5-days after his death - Slate Magazine broke the story of then 78-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Thurmond's eldest child. It seems back in 1925 the randy 22-year-old Strom had bedded a 16-year-old black household servant by the name of Carrie Butler - and in fact, carried on a relationship with her for quite some time. Essie Mae was the mixed-race progeny of that match.
Essie Mae Washington-Williams (1925-), mixed-race eldest child of Sen. Strom Thurmond and 16-year-old black household servant Carrie Butler
As an infant, Essie Mae was sent to Pennsylvania to be raised by her aunt Mary (Carrie Butler's older sister) and her husband John Henry Washington. In 1941, when Essie Mae was 16, Carrie broke the news of her highfalutin white daddy and took her to South Carolina to call on him. For that, it seems Strom had been a walk-on player in Essie Mae's life ever since, supporting her on-and-off at intervals - including paying her tuition at South Carolina State University (SCSU), a historically all-black black institution, where she graduated with a degree in business.
Essie Mae Washington wound up in California, where she earned a masters degree in education at USC. She married an attorney, Julius T. Williams, with whom she had 4 children. She went on to have a 30-year teaching career in the Los Angeles public school system. In 2005 she was awarded an honorary PhD from her undergraduate alma mater SCSU. That same year, she published a memoir, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, which explored her sense of dislocation based on her mixed heritage, as well as going to college in the Jim Crow South after having grown up in the North.
Slate Magazine's Diana McWhorter puts an exceptionally fine point on the stultifying enigma of Ole' Strom: .... "We need not dwell on the obvious mind-boggling hypocrisies here: that someone who ran for president on an anti-pool-mixin' platform was party to an integrated gene pool. Or that Thurmond's other signature political achievement—the 24-hour-without-bathroom-break filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957—was done in the name of sparing the South from 'mongrelization.' This form of duplicity has been a Southern tradition dating back to those miscegenating slave owners."
.... "Racial conflict as a diversion from class conflict is nothing new, of course. But somehow Thurmond's subterranean Freudian life—surreptitious relationships with a black daughter and her mother—brings a fresh level of appall to the immorality of his demagoguing. That it was just 'bidness' may account for why Strom Thurmond never felt compelled to ask the forgiveness of a race he devoted so much public capital to making miserable—a race that included members of his own family."
Fast Forward sixty-four years: now come the 2012 Republican wannabes: Mitt Romney, the plastic Mormon Jesus-denying heathen from Massachusetts. Rick Santorum, the sweater-vest wearing Pennsylvania plutocrat who looks down his nose at a little recreational sodomy (hey this is South Carolina). Ron Paul, the perennial whack-job who wants to legalize dope-smokin' and outlaw the Federal Reserve. Or the authentic Newt Gingrich. Why, they didn't know what hit 'em.
Brother Newt - although he hails from Pennsylvania - has spent his political life acquiring perfect pitch when it comes to aggrieved Southern populist rhetoric. For that, he was the hands-down beneficiary of two South Carolina debates - delivering back-to-back grand slams while his opponents looked on in stunned awe.
First came Fox News' Juan Williams - who as a black man has hilariously made a career of pandering to his white betters, embracing conservatism like a Clarence Thomas acolyte. But Newt's "Food Stamp President" epithet was even a bit much for the step-and-fetch-it Williams. Cornering Newt for his unambiguous racist dog whistle rhetoric, Newt doubled down on his attack on minorities and their putative lack of work ethic. The Myrtle Beach crowd erupted in adulation. Juan retreated hang-dog at being upbraided by his fellow Fox News colleague.
Then came CNN's John King - giddy at the prospect of airing out Newt's x-wife's dirty laundry as the lead-off pitch in Charleston's Convention Center. ABC News had only days' before supposedly broken the news of second wife Marianne - the one scorned by third-wife interloper Calista, the one sharing the stage with Newt. (By the way, those even remotely following Newt viewed this as stale news on a slow day - as Marianne had already spilled these beans in an 2010 Esquire Interview - with the same lurid detail.)
Ahh - painted in the corner of bargaining for an "open marriage" with X No. 2 and today's vaunted No. 3 Calista. Newt hammered the offense, blaming the media for the pain he inflicted on three marriages. Once again the room erupted with delight.
The take-home message: "Why, don't every man have an x-old lady out there somewhere ready to make his life miserable? I ask you." Perfect pitch for the self-selected chauvinist audience. Blam. Four hundred feet over the center field fence.
Thus, given the home-court game and the rarefied demographics, Newtie swept the floor with 40% of the South Carolina Republican vote. South Carolina Republican's gambit: buying into the party propaganda that Obama is an ineffectual poseur, incapable of uttering a cogent thought without his TelePrompter, ole' Newt is just the ticket to blow a hole in his cover.
This is not to say that Newt will fare similarly on Super Tuesday - but that his racist, homophobic, xenophobic sentiments are enjoying unbridled fervor among his primary supporters. For that, he will hold many cards in a brokered convention - inspiring and giddy news for Obama and the Democrats.
My next door neighbor invited me over for cocktails and hors d'oeuvres Christmas evening. I'm not really big on a house full of strangers, but I decided to be polite and put in an appearance. After makings the obligatory intros and indulging in some excruciating small talk, I seized upon a flute of champagne and took a seat in a corner.
So here comes a couple and plops down next to me. He: about 75-lbs overweight, already with a Christmas snootful; introduces himself as Dave, head of the Key West Homeland Security unit. She: with an opaque German accent; introduces herself as Olga, head of in-house security at the Casa Marina - a local world-class destination resort, now owned by Waldorf-Astoria, built by robber baron Henry Flagler in 1919 as the southern terminus to his spectacularly ill-fated 'overseas railroad.'
Opened on Christmas Day 1919, Key West's renowned Casa Marina grand hotel and resort was the investment of robber baron Henry Flagler, envisioned as the southern terminus to his Overseas Railroad which connected Key West to the Florida mainland in 1912. Ballyhooed as the Eighth Wonder of the World, Flagler conceived Key West as the nearest shipping port to the Panama Canal - an outlandish scheme that would never materialize. Alas, the railroad met a watery grave in the category five Labor Day Hurricane of 1932 - never to be restored to duty. The surviving viaducts were later sold to the state and provided the roadbed for the Overseas Highway, inaugurated in 1938.
The following repartee is obviously paraphrased:
First words out of Dave's mouth: "You know Obama is the first president NOT to visit the troops on Christmas. News said he called one service member from each of the branches from Hawaii. Couldn't be bothered to interfere with his $7 million vacation. Just disgraceful."
Olga: "Ahhh, agleed; youst deesglaceful."
Shitepoke: (Thinking to myself this could be interesting; I'll probably never see these people again) "Well, I see we obviously have a couple of Republicans, huh? " (I chortle lightly.)
Dave: "Nope. I'm an INDEPENDENT," he lied.
Shitepoke: "Come'on, Dave. You know in communism, you get one party. In American democracy, you get two. You have to pick one. An 'independent' is just a loaded term for a low-information voter. I don't perceive you to be that," I lied.
Dave: "We don't live in a democracy, you know," he sort of snapped and then caught himself.
Olga: (nods with adoration)
Shitepoke: "Ah, the old constitutional republic. Just a habit of mine, referring to a political system where you actually get to vote on your representatives. As to Obama and the troops. I seem to recall he spent the better part of a day up at Fort Bragg last week, declaring the end of the Iraq War - where we spent a trillion dollars and lost 4,500 American lives - where he elaborately decorated and profusely thanked several heroes. I'd think that'd be a tad more important. WE don't like to use our troops for political props," bearing down on WE, our respective political identities firmly established.
Dave: "Yeah it's a damn shame Obama just cut and run. That Iraqi government will disintegrate in no time. Mark my word, grave mistake."
Shitepoke: "Oh I see; the only thing wrong with the Iraq War is we didn't stay there long enough. How much more borrowed money would you like to see us spend on that project? And by the way, tell me about this $7 million dollars Obama is spending in Hawaii. That sounds like a fine vacation, doesn't it? Where did you get that price tag. Don't think I've heard that one."
Dave: "Heard it on the news today. Disgraceful, what with the deficit and all."
Shitepoke: "What 'news,' Dave?"
Dave: "Fox News." (of course!)
Shitepoke: "Well you might want to check a less overtly politically biased source, just for kicks."
Dave: "I'll have to say, Fox is the best overall source for unbiased news we have. A far cry from the Communist News Network. And that liberal cesspool MSNBC."
Shitepoke: "Dave. Dave. Have you really convinced yourself that Rupert Murdock's News Corp, at the helm of Roger Ailes, is really a source of unfiltered, un-propagandized news. By the way, what did Ailes do before Fox News?
Dave: (long ignorant pause) "Can't recall offhand. Who is he, now?"
Shitepoke: "Roger Ailes, president of Fox New cable network - campaign consultant to Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 - and former vice chairman of the Republican National Committee."
Dave: "Well, I'm sure the Communist News Network has more conflicting management than that," he nervously rejoined.
Shitepoke: "Well, Ken Jautz (CNN president) has hard career credentials - Cornell School of Journalism I believe - with no overt political affiliations that I am aware of. Does it bother you that News Corp gave a million dollars to the Republican Governors Association and another million to the Republican National Committee? Does that sound like the source of an unbiased point of view?"
Dave: "I don't see how that affects the integrity of Fox."
Shitepoke: "Really? That's an interesting point of view, I'll have to say. Are you aware that according to at least two independent university surveys, Fox News viewers know less than those who don't watch any news at all?"
Dave: "I don't believe that," getting clearly testy now.
Shitepoke: "Give me your email and I'll forward the links."
Dave: "No thanks."
Olga: (as if on cue to change the subject and rescue Dave) "Vhat about dat see-tuation veed Obama's aunt - da vone veed no paasport?"
Shitepoke: (contemplating the suffocating irony of this stunt double for Brünnhilde in The Ring of the Nibelung - nattering about the status of someone else's - any one else's - U.S. residency.)
Dave: "Yeah. anyone else would have been deported. She's got a green card now and is up for citizenship in a couple of years. Nepotism of the worst kind. If she showed up on my watch list, I would have her deported in a minute, Obama be damned."
Shitepoke: "Oh you mean the aunt from Kenya - the half-sister of Obama's father? If I recall she came on a temporary visa around 2000 and applied for asylum shortly after. As I recall, her application is still under appeal - or at least it was. I would expect Obama would know her status, wouldn't you? Frankly, I haven't heard anything about her since the 2008 campaign - where it got practically no political traction. I'm glad she's a legal resident now. Ten or twelve years is a long time to work within the system. I'm sure you wish all undocumented immigrants were so respectful of the law."
Dave and Olga: (uncomfortably silent. Dave takes a king-sized gulp of his drink.)
Shitepoke: (changing the subject) "By the way, have you met Janet Napolitano?"
Dave: "No," he emphasizes, "I don't care for her at all."
Shitepoke: (sensing I was pushing the conversation to its testy limit) "Well that's not a very complimentary thing to say about your boss," I opined slightly sarcastically.
Dave: "She's NOT my boss."
Shitepoke: "Oh, I assumed you reported directly to her," as sarcastically as I could, realizing that I had hit paydirt in this exchange, "If I remember, she sailed through her confirmation hearings with practically no opposition. And look what you got in exchange: Governor Jan Brewer and the toughest immigration laws in the country. Sounds like a Republican twofer to me."
Dave: "What's your take on this 'Fast and Furious' scandal?"
Shitepoke: "I don't think I'm familiar with it," I lied, "Please excuse me while I mix a little. So good to meet you all. Merry Christmas."
Writer's Notation: When I first set out to write this piece, it was unambiguously from the perspective of Troy Davis' innocence and the monumental affront of lynching a man under the rubric of jurisprudence. Upon cursory research, I realized that I was way off base in my starting point. My conclusion, however, remains intact.
_______________________________________
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library sits ensconced in Ventura County's toney Simi Valley.
Dedicated in 1991, the $60 million tab for the original 153,000 square feet - double the most ever plunked down for a presidential library - was picked up by a veritable pantheon of Republican corporate paymasters, including Walter Annenberg, Lew Wasserman, Lodwrick Cook, Joe Albritton, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Sills, and John P. McGovern.
But somehow the tribute to the Gipper didn't seem quite vulgar enough, for in 2004, the same crowd ponyed up another undisclosed tranche of tax-deductible cash to fund the Air Force One Pavilion - a 90,000 square foot reliquary designed to showcase the Boeing VC-137C that served as the official presidential aircraft from 1973-2001.
Implemented under the smarmy title Operation Homeward Bound, Boeing disassembled the decommissioned flying Oval Office and transported it to the new Reagan Library Pavilion in pieces where it was restored to museum quality and mounted on buttresses 25-feet above the blinding travertine floors.
But they weren't done yet. In the run-up to Regan's one hundredth birthday in 2011, the Reagan Presidential Foundation shook down GE stockholders for another $15 million to throw a two-year birthday bash deemed Ronald Reagan Centennial Celebration. The centerpiece was a state-of-the-art General Electric Theater, named for the the NBC television series which Reagan hosted as pitchman from 1954-1962.
A life-long Democrat and former president of the Hollywood Screen Actors' Guild, Reagan's conversion to Republican corporate shill proved a quick understudy, as he seamlessly ballyhooed GE's Corporate Citizenship tagline. Accordingly, visitors to the Reagan Library can now watch 208 digitally-enhanced and colorized episodes of the General Electric Theater, the original info-mercials, replete with his signature pitches.
Indeed the veritable apotheoses of Ronald Wilson Reagan by his hyper-partisan supplicants stands in singular bewilderment to the unanointed. Twice-married, he seldom went to church, and had an estranged relationship with three of his five children children. The man who raised taxes seven of the eight years he was in office; raised the debt ceiling eighteen separate unopposed times; increased the national debt from $700 billion to $2 trillion; turned settled Keynesian theory on its head with the spectacularly failed supply-side economics; presided over the jaw-dropping felonies of Iran-Contra; and spent the better part of his second term in the fog of incipient Alzheimers - hardly seems a candidate for sainthood to the anarcho-capitalists that control his party today.
Notwithstanding, on September 7, 2011, the 2012 GOP presidential hopefuls made the hajj to Semi Valley to genuflect shoulder-to-shoulder in the Temple of the Secularly Infallible.
Their holy sacrament: to convince the faithful of their singular credentials, if nominated, to vanquish the dreaded interloper, Manchurian Candidate, thief of presidential history, and avowed communist intent on destroying America as we know it: one Barack Hussein Obama.
The challenge: how do you warm the cockles of a pavilion-full of Teabaggers? Texas Governor Rick Perry's paydirt: brag that you've presided over the execution of hundreds of your fellow citizens. Indeed, when NBC's Brian Williams recapitulated Perry's grim death tally - 234 during his gubernatorial tenure - the crowd erupted in spontaneous hoots and sustained applause.
When queried if he had lost any sleep over it, the preening Perry, in his imperious lock-and-load demeanor, smirked and gratuitously obliged his audience: No sir, I've never struggled with that at all. The room brayed with approval. The long moments of macabre amusement spoke embarrassing volumes in the decades-long animus that stokes the cultural fires of our sociopolitical discourse.
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By sharp contrast was the infamous cultural dustup that took place between Perry's predecessor, then Governor George W. Bush, and the religious right, in the run up to convicted murderess Karla Faye Tucker's 1998 execution - the first woman put to death by Texas in 130 years.
According to court records, in June of 1983, after spending a weekend hopped-up on drugs, Karla Faye Tucker and her boyfriend Danny Garrett conspired to steal and fence valuable motorcycle parts from a mutual acquaintance, Jerry Dean. Their gambit: more money to purchase yet more illicit drugs.
Upon breaking in Dean's apartment, they found him, presumably alone, asleep in his bedroom. Tucker jumped on Dean and restrained him while Garrett repeatedly bludgeoned him in the back of the head with a claw hammer. The blows caused the mortally-wounded Dean's airway to fill with fluid, producing a gurgling sound which got on Tucker's nerves. Obsessed with stifling the noise, she buried a pickax in Dean's chest, finishing him off in short order.
While Garrett was loading motorcycle parts into their van, Dean's traumatized girlfriend, Deborah Thornton, who had been holed up in the bedroom during the mayhem, accidentally disclosed her presence. Tucker attacked Thornton with the pickax and ultimately embedded it in her heart, another lethal blow. Tucker would later brag to friends that she experienced intense multiple orgasms with each blow of the pickax. Well okay.
Sentenced to death in 1984 (along with Garrett who expired on death-row of natural causes), Karla Faye Tucker would subsequently adopt the persona of a model death-row inmate, owing to a cell block conversion to Christ Jesus and tireless ministry to the incarcerated at the Mountain View Female Prison in Gatesville, Texas. Indeed, she feel in love with, and married, her prison chaplain Dana Lane Brown. She would resolutely repent, chalking up her atrocities solely to the influence of demon drugs.
In whipsaw cultural revolt, the religious right elevated the beatific soft-spoken white woman to celebrity sainthood, demanding her life be unconditionally spared. Those appealing to the State of Texas on her behalf read like a who's-who of the Christian right, including: Pope John Paul II, then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, televangelist Pat Robertson, and Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell.
The unambiguous double standard for a born-again, white women, as contrasted with the stereotypical framed and under-defended black man, was not lost to the progressive media - irrespective of her self-confession and the heinousness of her felony murders.
Karla Faye Tucker at Texas' Mountain View Female Prison
In a media ratings-buster, Karla Faye was even afforded the rarefied cameo of appealing for clemency on CNN's Larry King show in a live feed from Texas' Mountain View Prison. After an endless string of tear-jerking media-saturated appeals, when the Texas Pardons and Parole Board ultimately turned her down, Dubya, caught between a political rock and a hard place, also declined to oblige her - to the outrage - outrage, I tell you - of Christian fundamentalists. On February 3, 1998, she was offed by lethal injection.
Obviously not fans of Karla Faye Tucker, demonstrators advocate a more inventive method of extinction in the run-up to her execution for self-confessed felony murders.
In a interview with fellow conservative Tucker Carlson, the week before her execution, Bush confirmed that Bianca Jagger and a number of other noteworthy protesters came to Austin, seeking his audience and clemency for Carla Faye.
Carlson: Did you meet with any of them? Bush: No, I didn't meet with any of them!he snapped, as though I'd just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview, though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' Carlson: What was her answer?
Bush: Please, don't kill me, Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation.
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Refresh to: September 21, 2011. It was a single piece of stationery with the understated indesia of the Supreme Court of the United States debossed across the top, but it ordered that Troy Davis' life was about to end by lethal injection.
With withering economy of language, the decree read: The application for stay of execution of the sentence of death presented to Justice [Clarence] Thomas and, by him, referred to the Court is denied.
The gobsmacking irony of Clarence Thomas - the Supreme Court's only black face and unrepentant right-wing corporate toolbox - trivializing the life of a fellow black man, outrageously from his selfsame hometown, stood in stunning juxtaposition to their respective life experiences. Indeed, Justice Thomas' entire professional life begs the question: should staking a career out of not living up to the expectations of his peers be a crime? One concludes: not necessarily, unless perhaps his chosen field is one of public service. Go figure.
Notoriously mute Justice Clarence Thomas gets it down off-the-bench with wife Virginia (Ginni) Lamp Thomas, CEO and founder of Liberty Central, a right-wing lobby shop engaged in the shameless shake-down of corporations, many of which have had pending Supreme Court cases. Thomas falsified his annual financial disclosure forms to the tune of $700,000 in Ginni's take-home pay, for years 2003-2007, from the Heritage Foundation, a partisan Republican propaganda mill. When challenged by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Yale Law School grad Thomas gratuitously lied: "I didn't understand the forms."
Troy Anthony Davis had been on death row at Georgia's Jackson Prison for the past 22-years. He had been convicted of the 1989 shooting death of Savannah police officer, Mark Allen MacPhail, who was working private security guard the evening of his murder.
(L) Murder victim Mark Allen MacPhail shortly before enlisting in the Savannah Police Department. (R) Convicted assailant Troy Anthony Davis.
There was plenty to grieve for in the tragically extinguished life of 27-year-old Mark MacPhail, who was executed - yes executed - at the barrel of two .38 caliber pistol rounds: the first through his lungs and descending aorta, the second point-blank in his boyish face as he lay convulsing on the pavement. He bled-out and died within minutes in the suffocating South Georgia August heat, on the filthy oil-stained asphalt, outside a Burger King drive-up window, in Savannah's notoriously rough, black, Yamacraw district.
A staunchly-raised and über-patriotic military brat, Mark's father was a retired Army colonel. White, handsome, and buff, with an ingratiating adolescent grin, he had enlisted at the age of eighteen and served six years as a U.S. Army Ranger, married his high school sweetheart, and come back home to enlist in the Savannah Police Department where he had served with distinction for three years.
In addition to a grieving wife and mother, he left behind a two-year-old daughter, an infant son, doting parents, and countless friends, colleagues, and relatives. Hundreds of mourners, replete with local, state, and federal law enforcement officials - including a half-mile-long motorcycle entourage along Savannah's venerable palm-studded Victory Drive - attended his funeral at the historic Trinity Lutheran Church.
As we are want to say in the South: "It don't hardly get no worse than that."
By contrast, there was plenty of reasons not to empathize with Troy Davis. His father, an alcoholic Korean War vet, abandoned his family when Troy was five. His mother, an hourly healthcare employee, worked long and irregular hours, leaving Troy, and his two younger sisters, latchkey kids.
Troy was characterized as a poor student, dropping out of school in the eleventh grade. He was in-and-out of scrapes with the law most of his adolescent and adult life, universally known by the sobriquet Rah, street acronym for Rough as Hell. The crowd he ran with was notoriously sociopathic and known to be involved with narcotics. He had at least one prior gun charge for which he served probation. He once enlisted in the Marines but flunked the induction requirements due to his criminal priors. His civilian work record was sketchy to nonexistent.
As might be vulgarly called-out by ubiquitous white Southerners: "He was a sorry nigger." - without a scintilla of compunction between the corollary - "sorry white trash."
Somewhere around midnight the evening before the crime, Troy Davisand his pal Darrell Collins were carousing and up to no good. They were at a party where they became embroiled in a stupefied argument over the connubial status of - and discourse with - certain girls in attendance.
Shortly thereafter, several involved in the altercation - including a Michael Cooper - decided to leave in a car. Davis and Collins reportedly tailed them outside on foot. As the car pulled out, passengers reportedly yelled insults and threw beer bottles. Packing heat, Davis fired several pistol shots into the offending vehicle. At least one bullet hit home, in Michael Cooper's jaw, wounding him superficially, as it turns out. Witnesses identified the gunman as wearing a white T-shirt with a [nondescript] printed applique on the front.
Michael Cooper was puking drunk at the time and barely knew who he was, much less where he was, when he arrived at the ER. Following protocol for shooting admissions, the hospital summoned police who took statements and searched the car in which Cooper was riding for evidence. A single .38 caliber shell was gouged out of the front seat passenger headrest.
About 1:30 a.m., Davis and Collins met up with another bro of theirs, Red Coles, who was engaged in an altercation with a vagrant - identified as Larry Young - ostensibly over the all-important ownership of a warm beer, in a desultorily lit Burger King parking lot next door to the Greyhound bus station.
Davis and Collins joined Coles in accosting Young. Young would later testify that Troy Davis struck him across the face with a pistol. MacPhail who was working private security detail with Greyhound, witnessed the commotion and took off across the adjoining parking lot in an effort to intervene.
View of Burger King parking lot from Greyhound Buss Station parking lot where Mark MacPhail was stationed
Troy Davis - wearing a white Batman T-shirt - fired at MacPhail, striking him in the chest. MacPhail collapsed, writhing on the pavement, before ever reaching the scuffle. Then Davis, fearing that MacPhail had seen his face (according to Collins' testimony) calculatedly squeezed-off another shot into his head to ensure he'd never talk. Then the three - Davis, Collins, and Coles - hightailed it into the Savannah darkness before authorities could arrive.
Let's put a lot of practical clarity in this thing. From a forensic standpoint, the situation could not have been more intractable: a poorly lit parking lot in a notoriously crime-ridden barrio; three truculent black men, probably drinking and/or doping, at least one of which was armed and loaded for bear; a homeless drunkard, an explosive altercation with gunfire; a dead cop; those directly involved scattered like the wind; and a spontaneous melee of adrenalin-amped opportunistic gawkers, from the Burger King and adjacent Greyhound bus station, notoriously worthless eye witnesses, virtually assured to dissemble when confronted with the law.
Notwithstanding, a gratuitous cop-killing seldom sets in motion the wheels of pedantic justice. For that, the Savannah Police Department and the Chatham County County District Attorney followed their unspoken marching orders: hunt down, indict, and and convict the perps of this travesty, and petition the State of Georgia to send them to their fucking maker, sooner, rather than later.
That Officer MacPhail died coming to the aid of a black man played heavily in the coverage of the tragedy, substantially defusing racial tension inherent in a signature Old South segregated city, where the forty percent black population lives pretty much below the poverty line.
The next day Red Coles, hardly a selfless witness, hired himself an attorney. Together they went to the Savannah police and reported Coles had witnessed Davis shoot MacPhail with a pistol. Accordingly, Savannah police issued a warrant for Davis on the charge of capital murder.
Under a shoot-to-kill, armed-and-dangerous, dragnet, Davis, accompanied by his sister, went on the lam to Atlanta. At the pleadings of his family, four days' later he also hired himself a lawyer. Driven back to Savannah by his minister, Davis proceeded to turn himself in.
All told, Troy Davis would go up on five contemporaneous charges resulting from his hour-and-a-half mid-summer night's rampage: (1) first degree murder in the shooting death of Mark MacPhail; (2) aggravated assault (drive-by shooting) of Michael Cooper; (3) aggravated assault (pistol whipping) of Larry Young; (4) obstructing an officer of the law in the performance of his duty; and (5) possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony. At trial, Davis plead not-guilty to all charges.
To MacPhail's murder, Davis' defense staunchly maintained his innocence - that when he heard the first shot, he fled running. Coles steadfastly contended that the had witnessed Davis shoot MacPhail. Collins, himself now lawyered-up, would also finger his former bud Davis. The District Attorney produced seven other witnesses, including the assailed Larry Young, willing to attest that Troy Davis was the shooter.
Although the pistol never turned up as evidence, ballistic tests confirmed that the two .38 caliber shells recovered from MacPhail's body were fired from the same gun as a .38 caliber shell recovered from the car in which Michael Cooper was a passenger. A pair of Davis' (reportedly blood-stained) shorts recovered from a clothes dryer in his Mother's home - the day after the incident - were ruled inadmissible for DNA testing, owing to spectacularly sloppy investigative work: in their haste, Savannah police had failed to secure a proper search warrant.
On August 28, 1991, after three days' testimony, a jury composed of five whites and seven blacks - after less than two hours' deliberation - found Davis guilty on all five charges. Two days later, the same peers spent seven hours to arrive unanimously at the sentence: death by lethal injection.
Curiously, the testimonies did not begin to unravel until 2000 - nine years' after the fact. The first to break rank was Larry Young, the genesis of the incident. In an interview with CBS News, he said that police suborned him to finger Davis. (One would think that Young, if anybody, knew who pulled the trigger - setting him up as an outrageous liar - either way.)
Another prime witness, Jeffrey Sapp, recounted that he was pressured to testify that Davis privately confessed to him. Sapp would later recant and deny having spoken with Davis.
Accomplice Collins confessed that police threatened him with the charge of accessory to murder if he didn't finger Davis. All told seven of the nine witness have since recanted all, or parts, of their testimony.
Davis' execution was halted no less than three times since 2007. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court even granted him a rarefied chance to clearly establish his innocence in a lower court.
But the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Georgia found that Davis' defense attorneys didn't meet that standard in an excruciatingly detailed 172-page ruling. Its conclusion: the recanted testimonies were suspect because they were not given under oath and prosecutors never got the opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses in court. After that hearing, SCOTUS declined to take up his case again.
On September 21, 2011 Troy Anthony Davis was administered a triple lethal injection of pentobarbital, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. At 11.08 pm he was pronounced dead.
Seldom, if ever, has a U.S. death row tableau captured such international notoriety - both for sympathy of Troy Davis, and the exercise of the blunt instrument of death as part and parcel to a clearly imperfect criminal justice system.
Summarizes oft-cited liberal blogger Julian Kunnie:
The arrogance of a system, the only one of its kind in the Western industrialized world, that views capital punishment as the meting of a justice, leaves a lot to be desired in the quest of justice given the United States’ history of injustice particularly against Black and all poor people.
Hence the championing of the cause of Troy Davis by millions of people around the world and in the United States, where over 650,000 petitions to the State of Georgia and organizations such as the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, along with Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu and actors and entertainers like Susan Sarandon and Harry Belafonte, have called for an end to his execution and a new trial.
Hundreds of demonstrators converge on the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta to protest the execution of Troy Davis.
Opined former President Jimmy Carter:
If one of our fellow citizens can be executed with so much doubt surrounding his guilt, then the death penalty system in our country is unjust and outdated.
Lefty flamethrower, filmmaker, and author, Michael Moore amped it up a notch:
I will ask my publisher to pull my book from every Georgia bookstore and if they won't do that I will donate every dime of every royalty [it] makes in Georgia to help defeat the racists and killers who run that state.
Retired Chatham County district attorney, Spencer Lawton, who originally prosecuted the case had a dispassionate different take, in a 09/20/11 interview with CNN:
There is the legal case, the case in court, and the public relations case. We have consistently won the case as it has been presented in court. We have consistently lost the case as it has been presented in the public realm, on TV and elsewhere...
It has been a game of delay throughout. The longer the delay, the more time they have to create not doubt, not honest doubt, not real doubt, but the appearance of doubt. And there are people who have not troubled themselves to acquaint themselves with the record, who don't know the facts, who do oppose the death penalty and who have been willing on the strength of that emotion alone to assume the truth of the allegations of the weakness of evidence in the case...
It's just been my policy, that I not comment on a pending case - and this case has been pending for two decades. For two decades, I've maintained my silence. That meant I could never respond...
So we have been at an extreme disadvantage in the public relations campaign for that reason, because we felt that we were ethically bound to maintain our silence and express our opinions and judgments on the facts in court, which is where we have. And every place we have, we have won...
I have no brief for the death penalty. If it were to evaporate tomorrow, it would suit me fine. On the other hand, it is a part of, a component of, Georgia's law and that's what I was sworn to uphold.
Prosecutor Lawton also said the question of duress cuts both ways.
I think that what you would find is there was as much duress applied to get the affidavits [by Davis' supporters] as the affidavits [from the witnesses] are said to contain allegations of duress on the part of police.
Prosecutor Lawton on Catholic church numerator Joseph Ratzinger's [Pope Benedict XVI] impassioned weigh-in:
This is not something I had previously thought the Holy See had expertise in, that is to say [The State of] Georgia's evidentiary rules.
Lawton additionally questioned why it took Davis' lawyers so long to get the witnesses to recant and why they then waited until eight days before Davis' first scheduled execution to make their statements public.
Georgia State Capitol overwrought demonstrators decry Georgia's murder in their name.
In conclusion, there are certainly arguments that Troy Davis should not have been put to death. But a rational contention that there was reasonable doubt as to his guilt - or that he was actually innocent - is not a serious argument.
Again and again, courts ruled Davis' conviction as being on legally solid ground. To reiterate, last year, the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of directing that a District Judge scrutinize and hold fresh hearings because seven out of nine eyewitnesses had supposedly recanted their testimony.
For that, Davis’s lawyers declined to put two of those witnesses on the stand, making their affidavits of almost no value. Judge William Moore, a Clinton appointee, found that of the five others, two did not, in fact, alter their original evidence and two lacked any credibility. He found that one, a jailhouse snitch, had genuinely recanted - but that it had been clear in the original trial he was a liar.
Judge Moore concluded that: the fresh evidence Davis' attorney had gathered amounted to little more than smoke and mirrors and the vast majority of the evidence at trial remains intact.
In an unprecedented coda, Moore added that: there has never been a scintilla of evidence that Davis' race has ever been a factor in his initial conviction or in it being upheld.
By contrast, to characterize a two-decade legal process that twice went to the highest court in the land as a lynching - as was frequently assessed in the liberal media - is to strip the word of all meaning.
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So where the hell are we? Please indulge my grossly anecdotal sampling of but two hyper-controversial death penalty cases - Karla Faye Tucker and Troy Anthony Davis - one self-confessed, the other not. Clearly, both guilty verdicts were rational and well within the rubric of beyond reasonable doubt - as understood by the average man on the street.
Accordingly, the sole issue is the application of the death penalty. Both cases rose to the level of public outrage: Tucker's from the impassioned right - and Davis' from the impassioned left - of the political spectrum. Therein lies the conclusion: when viewed from through the prism of human vicissitudes, we are collectively not up to affording government the ultimate power to kill its citizens, in an act of jurisprudence.
More practically: a system that has made itself powerless to give effect to its judicial verdicts in less than two decades should get out of the business of making such pronouncements.
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In a 1994 opinion dissenting from the Supreme Court's denying review in a Texas death penalty case (Callins v. Collins), Justice Harry Blackmun penned the following majestic phrases. Never was there a more moving and impassioned rebuke of the death penalty as an institution:
Justice Harry Blackmun (1908-1999); SCOTUS (1970-1994): appointed by President Richard M. Nixon and confirmed by the Senate 94-0; a life-long Republican, he distinguished himself as a card-carrying liberal, even becoming a passionate proponent for abortion rights in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade.
Bruce Edwin Callins will be executed tomorrow by the state of Texas. Intravenous tubes attached to his arms will carry the instrument of death, a toxic fluid designed specifically for the purpose of killing human beings. The witnesses will behold Callins strapped to a gurney, seconds away from extinction. Within days, or perhaps hours, the memory of Callins will begin to fade. The wheels of justice will churn again, and somewhere, another jury or another judge will have the task of determining whether some human being is to live or die.
We hope that the defendant whose life is at risk will be represented by someone who is inspired by the awareness that a less-than-vigorous defense could have fatal consequences for the defendant. We hope that the attorney will investigate all aspects of the case, follow all evidentiary and procedural rules, and appear before a judge committed to the protection of defendants' rights.
But even if we can feel confident that these actors will fulfill their roles, our collective conscience will remain uneasy. Twenty years have passed since this court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly and with reasonable consistency or not at all, and despite the effort of the states and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination and mistake.
From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored to develop rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved, I feel obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies.
Perhaps one day this court will develop procedural rules or verbal formulas that actually will provide consistency, fairness and reliability in a capital-sentencing scheme. I am not optimistic that such a day will come. I am more optimistic, though, that this court eventually will conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness 'in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that it and the death penalty must be abandoned altogether.' (Godfrey v. Georgia, 1980) I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive. The path the court has chosen lessen us all.
