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there is genuine evil going on in texas
Was Willingham wrongly executed? The work of the state’s Forensic Commission was on the verge of debating a powerful report by noted fire investigator Craig Beyler annihilating the arson findings that sent Willingham to his grave. And then Perry stepped in to effectively halt the investigation.
Perry is plainly afraid that his own investigators will discover that the state likely put a blameless man to death. But what is he afraid of? Political fallout? What is mere politics when the credibility of a system that might have killed an innocent man – and might yet kill other innocents – is at issue? Our skittish governor has taken to calling Willingham a “monster.” Even if he was, we put men to death for their deeds, not their dispositions. He needed killin’ is no rationale for execution.
A real leader – a brave and honorable one – would want to know the truth, so that if evidence requires it, he and others responsible for Willingham’s death could make restitution and repent for shedding the blood of a blameless man railroaded to his execution. If hard-hearted Perry is so certain of Willingham’s guilt, why object to an investigation?
More importantly, if Willingham was wrongly put to death, all decent capital punishment supporters should want strict measures taken to ensure that this catastrophe never happens again. If we are going to have the death penalty, we have the solemn duty to use it responsibly. Right? Surely we Texans aren’t the kind of people so enamored of retribution that the actual guilt or innocence of those executed in our names is of no real concern.
This is not only a problem for Rick Perry. We live in a democracy. It’s on all of us. If Texas really did kill an innocent man, that’s a terrible tragedy. But if Texas and its governor lack the courage to face the truth and deal squarely with it, the tragic act will be magnified by deep and lasting disgrace, and we will all stand condemned by our collective moral cowardice. It’s much harder to live with painful truths than with comforting lies. But a people who would be on the side of right have no choice. (dallas news)
People familiar with Rick Perry’s leadership are probably not at all surprised by his reaction, though.
"If [Obama] gives them the extra troops they’re asking for, he loses politically,” Hersh said. “And if he doesn’t give them the troops, he also loses politically."
The Herald-Sun - Hersh Military waging war with White House
That about sums the whole damn thing up.
"In addition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States military is also fighting a war against the Obama administration at the White House, Seymour Hersh said in a little-noted speech at Duke University on October 13. The military is “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have Obama boxed in,” he said. Hersh, a Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, sees an undercurrent of racism in the Pentagon’s dealings with the White House. “They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it."
The Huffington Post (via retropolitics) (via buffleheadcabin)
"So, to re-cap: The [Washington] Post today has two former Bush officials, one former Reagan official, two right-wing politicians, a Fox News neocon, the CEO of America’s largest oil and gas producer, a defender of the right-wing Honduran military coup leaders, and one liberal columnist. That overwhelming right-wing presence on the Post Op-Ed page is anything but unusual (the day after it fired Dan Froomkin, The Post published Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Hayden, Charles Krauthammer and an Iran-hawkish screed from David Ignatnius, preceded by Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Ramesh Ponnuru). And that’s to say nothing of the always-pro-war Editorial Page itself, which typically advocates for those same positions. The Post is obviously free to publish whatever it wants, but, wth some very rare exception, its Op-Ed page under Fred Hiatt now really is the leading outlet for neoconservatve and related right-wing advocacy. It is one of those outlets typically counted as part of the “Liberal Media” by right-wing self-victimizers and their media amplifiers, yet The Post’s claimed devotion to airing a “wide range of views” is scarcely more credible than Fox News’ “fair and balanced” slogan."
Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)
"The unemployment rate has surpassed 10 percent for the first time since 1983 - and is likely to go higher. Nearly 16 million people can’t find jobs even though the worst recession since the Great Depression has apparently ended. The Labor Department says the economy shed a net total of 190,000 jobs in October, less than the downwardly revised 219,000 lost in September. But the loss of jobs exceeded economists’ estimates. It’s the 22nd straight month the U.S. economy has shed jobs, the longest on records dating back 70 years. Counting those who have settled for part-time jobs or stopped looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 17.5 percent, the highest on records dating from 1994. The jobless rate rose from 9.8 percent in September."
CBS News (via retropolitics) (via buffleheadcabin)
More doom and gloom. Hurrah.
"Since then—beginning with the Reagan years—finance has triumphed over the New Deal industrial order. Financialization, or what some have called financial mercantilism, triumphed by gutting the American industrial heartland. That is to say, the FIRE sector not only supplanted industry but grew at its expense and at the expense of the unions, the high wages, and the capital that used to flow into productive investment, not to mention at the cost of government social supports and government regulation that comprised the understructure of New Deal capitalism. Think back only to the days of junk bonds, leveraged buyouts and asset stripping in the 1980s. What was getting bought out and stripped so as to support the exorbitant interest rates commanded by those high-risk junk bonds was the material wherewithal of the American economy and the millions who depended on it for their lives and livelihoods. So today instead of unionized, high-wage industry, there is Wal-Mart. Our political economy is driven by “I banks,” hedge funds and the downward mobility and exploitation of casual labor, while industrial investment has been exported to the global south. This may account for the abject reliance of the Obama regime on the financial oligarchy and its intellectuals. It is a telling commentary on this great transformation of the past 75 years that Obama’s first 100 days did not feature at its core an industrial recovery act as FDR’s did. Instead, most attention is directed at restoring the well-being of the FIRE sector whose health is everybody else’s disease. "
Steve Fraser on the Crisis of Capitalism (via azspot)
So this is depressing…
Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw
But there is another less obvious bug in capitalism that I don’t believe regulation can quite handle. It is the fundamental flaw that our celebrated system rewards speculators much more than creators. A relatively junior hedge-fund manager or a bond trader on Wall Street makes a great deal more money in his career than Charles Kao, who invented the basic physics making optical communication a reality. Dr. Kao, now 73, won the Nobel Prize this year, but his net worth would not compare favorably with that of George Soros. Yet, who added the real value? Soros or Kao? In 2009, 30 million people sit unemployed in America. Yet, the speculators have managed to lift the stock market up, and the media pretends that we’re having a recovery. We’re not having any recovery. We need the innovators, the entrepreneurs, the creators, the scientists, the technologists—those who build value, those who create jobs—to lead us out of this nightmare. Not a bunch of speculators who make money regardless of whether value gets created or destroyed. In fact, many of them are incentivized to destroy value by spreading fake rumors about companies and stocks, and they do so often. Some get caught, most don’t. And our talented youth gets seduced by this profession of speculation known for its easy and abundantly flowing financial rewards, avoiding those that require much greater intellectual capacity. Most importantly, very early in their lives, our talented youth come to realize that fields that may earn them a Nobel Prize—cancer research or multi-core computing—may not make them rich. But moving money from here to there will. And thus, we lose Berkeley Ph.Ds in nuclear physics to hedge funds and MIT computer scientists capable of delivering computing to 6 billion people to derivative manipulation on Wall Street.
LOL @ everyone being really ignorant
you don’t even know these people, so there’s no point in arguing about it and hating on people.
like holy fuck
Do you ever read something someone has written and you just stare at it and stare at it because you have no idea what it means? It’s just a bunch of nonsensical garbledygook that someone apparently thought was clever?
