Month: April 2014

Washingtonpost.com:

An Oklahoma inmate who was supposed to be executed Tuesday instead died of a heart attack after the execution was botched, state officials said.

Clayton Lockett’s execution Tuesday night was halted after about 20 minutes due to an issue with a vein, the Associated Press reported. Not long after Lockett was deemed unconscious from the first of three drugs, he began “writhing on the gurney,” according to the Associated Press. He was declared dead 43 minutes after the execution began.

Lockett and Charles F. Warner were both supposed to be executed Tuesday night, Lockett at 6 p.m. and Warner at 8 p.m. After the botched execution, Warner’s execution has been stayed for two weeks. Lockett was convicted of shooting a teenager and watching as she was buried alive; Warner was convicted of raping and murdering his girlfriend’s 11-month-old baby.

The attorney for Warner had criticized the use of an experimental new drug protocol in the execution earlier on Tuesday.

Not to be overly simplistic here but how hard is it to kill people humanely?  Don’t get me wrong.  The descriptions of what these two were sentenced to death for doesn’t engender pity or sympathy from me.  One of them writhes in pain?  Boo-effen-hoo.  What did their victims do?

My problem surrounding all this “botched execution” stems from the idea that we, as a society, need to be better, far better, than those we are legally killing.   We somehow manage to put down our pets humanely, when their time has come.  Why can’t those on death row just be “put to sleep?”   Surely this isn’t such a difficult process.

Donald Sterling has been banned for life from the NBA.

Question:  Presumably, Sterling assumed he was having a private conversation.  Do we have the right to punish people for private conversation, regardless of how repugnant that conversation is?

I think Sterling is a pig but I struggle with the notion that Americans cannot have private conversations without the public’s prying eye.  Help me through this obvious psuh me/pull me feeling.  I had the same conflict with Dawg the Bounty Hunter.  He assumed his conversation was private.

Absolutely people are responsible for their public words.

Did Kerry speak the truth? Is it possible for 2 states to exist in Israel? Israel and Palestine?

Is there equality in the state of Israel now? Is Israel really a democracy? Do all the people have equal rights or do some folks have more rights than others?

On this very special day, Holocaust remembrance Day, I simply had to speak out regarding the Clippers owner, Donald Sterling.  Having listened to his entire exchange with his girlfriend, I was even more horrified.

When confronted with his blatant hypocrisy of the hatred towards Jews in Nazi Germany, of the overt prejudice Jews have suffered, this moron was till blind to his own hatred, his own inaction stemming from a  fear of being ridiculed by his supposed “friends”.

Not only is he racist, even worse, he is a coward. He does not represent me or any Jewish person I know.

Every major Jewish organization, including the Anti Defamation League, should come out strongly condemning this bigot.  In fact, I have left a message with their DC office and hope for a response today.

So for me, on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I honor my grandmothers family from Poland, whom all but one cousin perished at the hands of the Nazi’s simply for being Jewish, I honor them by standing up to bigotry, no matter where it originates.

Washingtonpost.com:

Blanche Porway remembers the guard tearing her from her mother’s hand as they stood in line at the Auschwitz concentration camp with hundreds of Jews and other prisoners. Her mother was led off to the gas chambers while Porway and her older sister were spared, only because the guards deemed them fit enough to work.

Porway, then 19, had already survived the ghetto in Lodz, Poland, where her father and brother had starved to death.
“My sister said, ‘I can’t take this,’ ” Porway recalled tearfully Sunday. “But I said, ‘We have to. We have to live to tell people.’ ”
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From the New York Times:

 

But if the federal government has moved on, Mr. Bundy — a father of 14 and a registered Republican — has not.

He said he would continue holding a daily news conference; on Saturday, it drew one reporter and one photographer, so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

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It has taken three days to get through Tuesday’s BOCS meeting.  I cannot tell you how many times I fell asleep listening to the droning on and on.  Little did I know that the fireworks would be at the end.  It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Gainesville Supervisor Candland needs to be assigned detention.  During that time he needs to watch some play by play video of Manassas City Council meetings.  Manassas City, once you get through the seemingly endless parade of anti-abortion activists speaking into the mic about something the City has no control over, is a model of how good government should work.  Mayor Hal Parrish is the quintessential southern gentleman  and most of the council pretty much follow his lead.  The meetings are  the genteel south at its best.

Mr. Candland was combative, snide and rude to those around him, in particular, Supervisors Nohe and Principi and Chairman Stewart.  He was particularly aggressive to Corey Stewart, challenging his budget presentation in derisive ways at every turn.  He accused Stewart of sticking it to tax payers this year and backing down in an election year.  It made no sense since Stewart had clearly explained the 5 year plan in terms of revenues, rather than expenses.

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