Business friendly, that's the watchword

Click image for full Chan Lowe/Sun-Sentinel cartoon.

Shoulda kilt 'em all

Remember when wilding was the new word to scare suburbanites? Remember the screams for revenge? The blood lust to execute these animals? They had gang-raped a passing jogger and beaten their identities out of her mind and into the umbra of amnesia.

Only they hadn't. The prosecution sent them to prison for something they didn't do.

With four other Harlem boys, all of whom refused plea bargains, he was convicted of attacking the jogger and sent to prison. More than a decade later, the convictions of all five were overturned. Another man — a serial rapist and killer who was unknown to any of the five — had convincingly implicated himself as the sole attacker of the jogger. DNA evidence backed his story.

I'm not attacking the prosecution. These five defendants confessed, although their confessions weren't really plausible. (Remember, the cops can lie to you when they interrogate you. They can tell you your confession will get you off with probation.)

Justice is hard. Even mere due process is hard. That's why I'm a skeptic about evidence - not a denier, I just need proof.

That's also one reason I'm against the death penalty.

Start making sense

Found this interesting:

In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organized enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. ...

Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. “This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighborhood context,” Dr. Campbell said.

The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines, girls playing with girls, boys with boys. They have an avid appetite for learning the local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behavior. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.

For me, the years between toddlerhood and puberty were filled with growth.  My mom taught me to read at 5, which opened the world to me.

She and my dad also inculcated fairness in me, although I think I had been born with a strong streak of it. The central issue of the time and place - Memphis, Tennessee in the mid-1960s - was race, and they were rare white liberals in our all-white neighborhood.

I ruefully remember telling my friends "that's illegal" a lot. I didn't know much about the law - how could I at that age? But I had a well-taught but still precocious grasp of the golden rule to compensate for my poor ability to keep track of the complicated rule-based codes of Christianity and etiquette. Forks and graven idols didn't matter to me a whit, but my vocabulary-challenged view of legality was really a sense of justice that I carry to this day, albeit more developed.

We moved several times, so I had new starts in which I could experiment with my social position. I was never an alpha (except in the classroom), but I could hold my own, and eventually I found sports as a path into kid society. At Little League try-outs, a schoolmate gibed, "Science and baseball don't mix." He had a forgettable Little League career; I became the best hitter in the league.

To fit in even better, I learned to identify the make and model of many cars - somehow important in elementary school - learned to bullshit from what little I knew of the automotive world into more. What does it mean to wind it out? I learned from the sound effects of other boys without ever having driven anything faster than a 3-speed spider bike.

Steeped in Darwin, also through my mom, I had that sudden aha moment when I realized the mythic nature of Christianity, at least the Bible Belt Christianity that surrounded me. Jonah and the whale, heavenly streets of gold, Noah's ark? All fanciful, just like Loki's liver or Athena's birth or Santa Claus. By the time I was confirmed, with puberty no doubt already well under way, I made reservations from doctrine at the altar. I was a cafeteria Methodist!

I also remember how different rich people were from poor. Boys in the richer neighborhood cared about cars. Boys in the poorer neighborhood had seen education as their meal ticket.

By the time I was 12, my identity was formed. There were many gaps to fill in, but the boy I was then is clearly the same as the man I am today.

(And I love the A.A. Milne reference in the page URL.)

Full of passionate intensity

The virtue of faith:

So, sadly, I don't think the execution of Troy Davis will have much effect on the national "conversation" about the morality of capital punishment or the glaring flaws in America's system of justice. Because while it's very reasonable to argue that "we" should only kill someone if we're really, really, really sure they did it, the modern American conservative is really, really, really sure about everything.

As in, not a virtue.

Sacrificial lamb

Click image for full Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune cartoon.

Bent past breaking

There is no campaign finance law that Republicans will not breach, including the Hatch Act:

According to PowerPoint slides the investigators collected, the briefings highlighted the importance of the "G.O.P. ground game" and talked about the "Republican Offensive," in certain states, while detailing the "Republican Defense" in others.

The investigators also found evidence that the Bush White House improperly classified travel by senior officials as official government business, "when it was, in fact, political," and the costs associated with this travel were never reimbursed.

This was all well known pretty close to real time, but now it appears unlikely that there will be any legal consequences.

 A spokesman for the Office of Special Counsel said Monday that because the administration officials had left office, it no longer has jurisdiction to file any charges. It also said that it had not made a formal referral to the Justice Department to ask it to pursue any possible charges.

A Justice Department official on Monday declined to comment when asked if it might file charges based on the report.

Yet another law gutted by being ignored at the highest levels! You thought we had a government of laws?

The New York Times is happy to imply equivalence without any report or evidence of similar behavior, because in modern journalism it's not allowed to distinguish motes from logs if the logs are in Republican eyes.

The Obama administration, just last week, announced that it was terminating its own version of the Office of Political Affairs, as Mr. Obama decided to move his re-election campaign operation to Chicago, with the duties of the political office being taken up by the Democratic National Committee.

Why would Karl Rove be afraid of being frog-marched?

Circles and arrows

Click image for full Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News cartoon.

Copping a drill

Click image for full Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune cartoon.

Sucking up to wingnuts

Why would a Louisiana magistrate go out of his way to compliment the alleged talents of the Fake Pimp of Wingnuttia?

Magistrate Daniel Knowles III, who cited the defendants’ potential as investigative journalists though he was critical of this incident, sentenced Mr. [James] O’Keefe, 25, to three years of probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine.

...

Mr. O’Keefe, whom the judge described as “extremely talented,”...

Louisiana elects its judges. Knowles was just playing to the crowd.

That's what you want in a judge, right? No reason to question the justice of a wrist-slap sentence - it's what the people wanted!

The other shoe

Scott Roeder killed abortion provider Dr. George Tiller. No allegedly about it:

Mr. Roeder has admitted to the shooting in jailhouse interviews and, as recently as last week, in a 104-page legal memorandum he filed himself to the judge.

Now he wants a platform for his anti-abortion politics as he claims he was justified in shooting Tiller down in church. (How's that different from what the right is so concerned about in terrorist trials?)

Imagine if Roeder succeeds in his defense and is found guilty only of voluntary manslaughter in the killing of Dr. George Tiller. Wouldn't he then become a target for an abortion rights extremist willing to do a stretch for manslaughter? How many would have to die before the courts saw the error of allowing such a defense in cases with premeditation?

Oh, right, no way an abortion rights extremist would get equal treatment.

Stand with the snitch

If law enforcement can't protect a witness from a two-bit gang member, it surrenders the field to violence. This punk needs to go away for a long, long time, till his balls shrivel up to the size of raisins at least and probably for life.

Mordred rules

It's not surprising that a political party that drove its entire public position for a decade off of perjury traps should view the law as pliable to whatever ends they desire.

A central theme of "Camelot" (the musical, not the Kennedy drama) is that the king is bound by law, too. Republicans such as John Ashcroft (though he's hardly the most extreme) could find no law that they would not run roughshod over. The fact that they would hold a man for more than two weeks on a pretext is just one more in a long series of usurpations.

Yet conservatives now want to refresh the tree of liberty. Glenn Beck thinks (I use the word think metaphorically) President Obama achieved coup by election. There's just no oxy in the man.

The Republican Party is a blight on American politics and, until responsible conservatives excise it, America will be unable to make the rational public policy decisions and compromises that are required for the survival of our democracy.

Third degree

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Not even a surprise anymore

Bushists lie when they testify. No one screams about perjury and the importance of the rule of law.

Circles and arrows

"And there was nothing he could do about it..." Not even at his own expense.

Click image for full Bruce Beattie cartoon.

Not bloodthirsty, but...

In a war zone, this crime sounds a lot like justice to me. Probation and a fine, I have no problem with, maybe even a lesser fine.

The italicized stuff is bullshit to smooth over ugly reality:

[Federal public defender Michael] Nachmanoff said in court documents that Ayala had a visceral response to learning of Loyd's injuries and in a "perfect storm" of conditions abandoned his years of discipline and made the wrong choice.

Many a soldier in the field would do the same if someone ambushed his buddies the way Abdul Salam did Paula Loyd.

They didn't teach you that in law school either?

"Trotter showed you his files because he has to. It's called disclosure, you dickhead."

Ted Stevens got screwed. It's pretty awful when the public integrity prosecutors lack integrity. It is still pretty obvious that Stevens was taking graft, legally or not, but no one should be convicted on obviousness.

Not enough

They sentenced juveniles to lockup for money. A more appropriate sentence than 7 short years would be the sum of all the unjust detention orders and sentences they handed down and the forfeiture of every cent, including salary, benefits, and retirement accounts, not to mention the kickbacks.

Incredibly, it took ten years from first reports until this corruption in plain sight was stopped.

Naturally, these judges were conservative hanging judges who ruled by fear and fiat. Their light sentences are another case of double standards for the rich and powerful - and that's the real standard of their view of law.

Still dreaming of a frog-march

Political dreams can come true, so I've learned. Even if it's too late for Joe Wilson's desire to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House, any perp walk that Rove's in would be good enough for me.

I just don't see the Democrats having the stomach for justice. Which is why they got the Justice that the Bushists gave them...

Doubletalk

In a story about their destruction of evidence of torture, the CIA claims:

CIA officials rejected the assertion that the agency had sought to hide evidence from investigators and said they had cooperated fully with the Justice Department investigation.

"If anyone thinks it's agency policy to impede the enforcement of American law, they simply don't know the facts," spokesman George Little said.

They won't lie either.