Just Not Right

Everyone one on the Boston jury was pro-capital punishment so it is not surprising that Tsarnaev got the death penalty.  It was not going to come out any other way.

I guess I never will understand how any rational person can think that killing someone you have in custody makes any moral  or logical sense. Put in its simplest form it is just revenge and not much beyond cold blooded murder. We make a big deal about our legal rituals and all that claptrap but when you get down to the nitty gritty we are still pretty primitive.

As I have said many times here, I don't believe in capitol punishment under any circumstances. Not for this young man or for anyone else. There is not a valid argument for why more death is the right thing to do.

Chicken Dancing

This is going to go over about as well as a screen door on a submarine. Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney are in the final stages of their merger and have decided that in order to retain all those "superstars" that screwed the business to the wall, knocked 50% off yours and my retirement savings and set the country/world up for a financial disaster deserve AWARDS. They would have been called BONUSES just a short time ago but us whiny common folk are kind of sensitive to the "bonus" word now that we have been totally screwed. They just can't seem to understand why we would be a little stressed over two failed investment banks, that have received $60 billion in federal bailout cash, plan to pay their obviously incompetent people more of our damn money. How silly of us!

Sam Stein reports:

The soon-to-be-merged financial giants — Morgan Stanley and Citigroup's Smith Barney — announced the payments during an internal conference call last week, but warned advisers against describing them in terms that would cause PR headaches.

"There will be a retention award. Please do not call it a bonus," said James Gorman, co-president of Morgan Stanley. "It is not a bonus. It is an award. And it recognizes the importance of keeping our team in place as we go through this integration."

Like I said in an earlier post...incompetence(theft?) should have consequences and it sure as hell shouldn't be a f**king reward. Why do they think there's nothing more important than keeping all these folks in place? Are they worried that some other financial institution that is rolling in cash is going to steal them away? Are there that many other lucrative opportunities in the rest of the financial industry?

Note: "Chicken Dancing" is just a term I use for stupid things.

Nothing But Muggers In Sharp Suits

I have absolutely no problem with people getting a bonus when they are part of a team that helps a company make a profit. I myself had part of my overall compensation in the form of a bonus based on earning goals. During my last year with the company I did not get any bonus because we didn't meet our earnings goals, which was fair enough, so this business with Merill-Lynch just really frosts me. Now we find out that these criminals(that is the correct word) paid out $15 BILLION in bonuses last year with nearly $4 BILLION of it in December. What really makes this insane is that this comes on the heels of news that the former CEO spent $1.2m on decorating his office. Click on the link and see the details of the remodel including the 87 grand for a freaking area rug.

They have the nerve to try and tell us that they had to pay out this money to "retain" top talent. What a laugh. If you work on Wall Street you are lucky to just have a job. I'd sure like to know where all this "top talent" would go if they didn't get their big bonus. To pile lie upon lie they are also insisting that this wasn't tax payer money from the $20 Billion bailout. Hello, money is fungible people. This is really despicable and the government should demand the bailout money back. You can read more here.

It's the Constitution

Once again Krugman is right. Obama doesn't have a choice under the oath he will take next Tuesday to ignore the crimes of Bush and his cronies. It's not about what is convenient and comfortable for Obama and his team. It's about the Constitution and what the long term consequences of ignoring the laws that have been broken are.

Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.

I'm as big a fan of live and live as the next guy but this is about the rule of law and there should be consequences for breaking it or ignoring or wiping your feet with it.

Electric Torture

OK, Christmas is over and it is time to get back to some of the real issues. Our friends across the pond, always admired for their civilized approach to law enforcement are in danger of slipping the reins and becoming more like their dangerous Yank cousins. Fortunately the British press is a bit more awake than ours and Johann Hari of the Independent has written a thoughtful argument against tasers. Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith is pressing for all the coppers in the UK to go full taser, it's a horrible idea, so it's right that they should be discussing it. We in the U.S. didn't get the opportunity for a public debate on whether we wanted our police to be judge, jury and executioner all in one. Now we are just routinely tortured and executed without due process and no one seems too concerned. Just last week the chief of police for Dekalb county (one of the metro Altanta counties) went before the county commission to ask for the money to equip each of his 3,000 officers with tasers. There just has to be a better way of equipping our police with the tools they need to keep the peace and do their jobs safely. I am not arguing that is not dangerous out there but the numbers show that most of the people (90%) tasered are unarmed.

Daniel Sylvester can't forget the night the police fired 50,000 volts of electricity into his skull. The 46-year-old grandfather owns his own security business, and he was recently walking down the street when a police van screeched up to him.

He didn't know what they wanted, but obeyed when they told him to approach slowly. "I then had this incredible jolt of pain on the back of my head," he explains. The electricity made him spasm; as he fell to the ground, he felt his teeth scatter on the tarmac and his bowels open. "Then they shot me again in the head. I can't describe the pain." (Another victim says it is "like someone reached into my body to rip my muscles apart with a fork.") The police then saw he was not the person they were looking for, said he was free to go, and drove off.

This did not happen in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or any other country notorious for using electro-shock weapons. It happened in north London and, if the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has her way, it will be coming soon to a street near you. In Britain there are 3,000 police officers trained to use Tasers as part of specialised armed response units, but Smith has fired a jolt forward. She wants there to be 30,000 Taser-carrying officers, authorised to use them against unarmed citizens, including children. These "stun-guns" fire small metal darts into your skin, and through the trailing wires run an agonising electric current through your body.

Smith is right to say that the police face a growing threat of violence, and these heroic frontline officers must have the means to defend themselves. She's also right to argue it better to use a Taser than to use a gun. But the police can already swiftly call out armed response teams, equipped with Tasers and firearms. If we move beyond this to a widespread culture of assault by electricity, it will only endanger the police – and the rest of us.

Smith wants Tasers to be distributed well beyond the ranks of specially trained firearms officers, but Tasers can kill. Amnesty International has just published a report showing that, since 2001, 334 people have died in the US during or just after Tasering. Jarrel Gray was a partially deaf 20-year-old black man involved in an argument in the street in Frederick County, Maryland, when the police approached him and ordered him to lie on the ground. He didn't hear them – so they Tasered him. As he lay paralysed on the ground, they told him to show his hands. He couldn't obey. They Tasered him again. Jarrel died in hospital two hours later.

Ryan Rich was a 33-year-old medical doctor who had an epileptic seizure while driving his car on a Nevada highway. He crashed into the side of the road. The police smashed a window to get into the car and Ryan woke up, startled. The police officer reacted by Tasering him repeatedly. Only when they were handcuffing him did they notice he was turning blue. He was dead before he got to hospital. The coroner noted dryly that the Taser "probably contributed" to his death. Taser International's brochures claim their weapons have "no after-effects."

There may, in fact, be even more deaths than are recorded. Taser International has responded to medical examiners saying their weapons kill not by changing their weapons, but by suing the medical examiners. After the chief medical examiner of Summit Country, Ohio, ruled that Tasering caused the death of three young men, they sued her, and she was forced to remove the conclusions from her reports. The president of the National Association of Medical Examiners says Taser International's behaviour is "dangerously close to intimidation".

Yet Smith appears still to be taking the corporate propaganda of Taser International – who dominate the international stun-gun market – at face value. The company are startlingly glib when their spiel begins to crumble. A recent scientific study conducted by biomedical engineers for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation found that nine per cent of the guns give a far larger electric shock than advertised. Some sent a 58 per cent higher voltage through the victim's body. Steve Tuttle, the vice-president of Taser, responded: "Regardless of whether or not the anomaly is accurate, it has no bearing on safety." The UK Defence Scientific Advisory Council has warned there is research suggesting that Tasers could cause "a serious cardiac event" when fired at children. But still Smith won't compromise.

Everyday on-the-beat policing does not happen in the tightly controlled scenarios imagined by the Home Office. It is messy and scrappy and carried out at high speed by people who are frightened and coursing with adrenaline: some 90 per cent of Tasered people in the US are unarmed. Matthew Fogg, who led a SWAT team in the US, warns that Tasers create a culture where "if I don't like you, I can torture you".

Read the whole thing.

Back here in the U.S. we have another statistic:

A naked man who was banging on doors and windows at a northside apartment complex died Wednesday after being shocked by Tasers at least three times during a confrontation with Harris County sheriff's deputies, authorities said.

About 4 a.m., deputies received calls from residents at the apartments in the 200 block of Dominion Park near Kuykendahl.

Investigators said the 46-year-old man was randomly knocking on doors and windows and yelling while walking around the complex. At one point, he kicked open a front door and briefly went inside an occupied apartment, officials said.

The resident "did not know who he was," said Lt. John Legg of the Sheriff's Office.

The first deputy arrived within minutes.

"He was immediately confronted by the suspect, who ran toward his patrol car, opened the front passenger door and climbed in," Legg said.

The deputy ordered the man out, but the man ignored his commands, yelling and flailing his arms, Legg said.

"He was incoherent," the lieutenant said. "The deputy said his eyes appeared glassed over."

The deputy's Taser had little, if any, effect, officials said. After the man got out of the patrol car and pulled out the stun gun's prongs, the deputy fired it again while struggling with the man, officials said.

Autopsy ordered

Another deputy arrived and ordered the naked man to back away, then used his Taser, investigators said.

Deputies were then able to handcuff the man, officials said.

He appeared to be unresponsive when paramedics arrived, officials said.

They performed CPR en route to Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

This is totally unacceptable. Here is another example of the police torturing and killing a mentally ill person with a taser. The horror is that this is becoming commonplace. We need to seriously rethink the use of tasers in this country and the British should take the lessons being demonstrated here to heart before they allow the same in their country.

h/t Digby

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

To borrow from Forrest...

The whole debacle doesn't really deserve a lot of comment other than to question how somebody as obviously stupid and venal as Blagojevich ever got to the governor's office of Illinois. Who in the hell is stupid or clueless enough to keep on using his office phone to committ what he surely knows are crimes when he knows someone as bulldog determined as Patrick Fitzgerald has targeted him in an ongoing and far-reaching public corruption investigation? It is not like Fitz is a newbie in the game and he already has felled a number of the governor's political, business and patronage associates and a former governor. The man is obviously not bright enough to pound sand and deserves to be impeached and serve some serious time in the joint.

Pardon Me? No, Pardon You!

While I sit here and wait for the dev guys to figure out why "optimistic locking" on the database (I have no idea so don't ask) is preventing me from testing, I was reading around and the subject of Shrub's upcoming pardons has surfaced here and there and there was also the comment by someone on Obama's team that torture prosecutions probably won't happen.

So we know that a herd of pardons is coming down the pipe. This last 8 years has been so full of criminal acitvity that has gone unpunished you just know that the pardon list is long and distinguised. Any ideas? I think we all can agree that Darth Cheney and Rumsfeld are going to head the list--guaranteed. Probably a good bet that anyone and everyone involved in the torture we didn't do is pretty much guaranteed to be preemptively pardoned as well. Who else? Skooter Libby, Turdblossom Rove, maybe Ted Stevens? There are, of course, many others that could show up...Mark Foley, Abramoff? Both of those would be a little harder to swallow but don't put it past Bush. We know he is a mean and vengeful person and could give a crap whether what he does is morally right or wrong. The last two would cause even Bush some heartburn, but don't think they're not being considered. Oh, and let's not forget the old BugMan Tom Delay. Have any other candidates?

GOP Insanity In Georgia

The Atlanta murder rate is 520% higher than the national average. The Georgia GOP has an idea. In the current state legislature session that ends to day, is a bill that would make it legal to carry a gun with a permit in myriads of public places such as state parks, historic sites, restaurants, public transportation...that's right you could carry your gun on MARTA. Supporters say the bill has a good chance of passage.

Granted these are people that have had a background check and are licensed to carry a weapon but this is absolutely insane. Why would someone feel it necessary to pack heat when visiting the Martin Luther King Historic Site or even when riding a train downtown from the burbs?

A lot of people such as the restaurant owners association and others were assured that this idiocy was off the table for this session but the supporters brought it back in the last minute hoping that in the rush to do something with the 300 pending bills it would just get passed which is probably what will happen. Maybe Governor Perdue will have a moment of sanity and veto it though that is unlikely.

Jailhouse Rock

NEW YORK (AP) -- For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report.

The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 -- one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world.

You have to ask yourself why we have a greater percentage of our population in the hoosegow than any other country in the world. Are we imprisoning people that shouldn't be in jail? How many of these folks are in jail for "drugs" like marijuana? Don't you think this might be a symptom of something fundamentally wrong with our society? We are supposed, if you listen to the wingnuts, to be a "Christian" nation so WTF is going on?

When you drill into the numbers a little it becomes even more insane...

"For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling," the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine."

Read the above paragraph and ponder what it is saying for a minute. If you are a black man between the ages of 20 and 34 there is a 10% chance your ass is going to be in jail. That, my friends, is insanity defined.

I'm all for being tough on crime and all that but don't you think the rationale for locking someone away should be to protect the rest of society from them? If you are guilty of a victimless crime and aren't a danger to society then I seriously doubt the value of locking you up just as "punishment". I think with a little creative thought we could figure out how to get you properly readjusted. Maybe we could make sure you had a good paying job, healthcare and some of that kind of stuff? There are mountains of work to be done in this country and surely some kind of community service would be better than sitting behind bars.