NY Times -- Nebraska abolishes the death penalty
"Opponents of the death penalty here were able to build a coalition that spanned the ideological spectrum by winning the support of Republican legislators who said they believed capital punishment was inefficient, expensive and out of place with their party’s values, as well as that of lawmakers who cited religious or moral reasons for supporting the repeal. Nebraska joins 18 other states and Washington, D.C., in banning the death penalty."
CNN -- ISIS is 'everywhere' in Syria's ancient city of Palmyra
"We consider this ... a culture battle for humanity and all the world," Abdulkarim said. "Palmyra is very important in the minds of the Syrian people and also the international community. Now we are very afraid."
Intn’l NY Times -- How ISIS Expands
"A central goal of the Islamic State is expansion. This week, the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, took over key cities in Iraq and Syria. It aims to build a broad colonial empire across many countries. A year after announcing its expansion goals, it is operating or has cells in more than a dozen countries."
USA Today -- 5 banks guilty of rate-rigging, pay more than $5B
"Once again the actual perpetrators and criminal architects of the fraud scheme will avoid criminal liability," said Gurulé, now a University of Notre Dame law professor. "While the payment of these large fines may help to reduce the federal deficit, such penalties will do little to change the pervasive culture of corruption that currently exists in the banking sector. Real change will only occur when corrupt bank officials are indicted, convicted and sent to prison for their crimes."
Reuters.com - Conservative Nebraska moves toward death penalty repeal
“But in a two-hour debate, state lawmakers said they have turned against the death penalty for a number of reasons. They cited religious reservations, the difficulty the state has in obtaining drugs used for lethal injections, the arbitrary application of the penalty to some murderers and not others, the specter of wrongful convictions and the emotional exhaustion of the families of crime victims who endure decades of appeals by death row inmates.”
Huffington Post -- Kim Bellware Nebraska Lawmakers Vote To Repeal The Death Penalty With Veto-Proof Majority
Republican abolitionists have criticized the death penalty as being out of step with conservative values of fiscal responsibility, protecting life and limiting the role of government.
The Atlantic The Death Penalty Becomes Unusual
In 2012, only 59 of the 3,144 counties in America actually sentenced people to be executed.
Three different perspectives on the the death penalty.
The Atlantic (June 2015) -- Jeffry E. Stern -- The Cruel and Unusual Execution of Clayton Lockett -- The untold story of Oklahoma's botched lethal injection—and America’s intensifying fight over the death penalty
From the chemical room, the paramedic heard someone say, “He’s trying to get off the table!”
The Supreme Court decided to consider the challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal-injection method. Oral arguments were scheduled for April 29, the one-year anniversary of Lockett’s death. Warner’s co-complainants have been granted stays until the Court decides the case or Oklahoma changes its execution method. Then–U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recommended that all states stop executions, at least until the Court issues its ruling.
That decision is expected in June.
Int’n NY Times -- Death Sentence for Boston Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Unsettles City He Tore Apart
To the amazement of people elsewhere, Bostonians overwhelmingly opposed condemning the bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, to death. The most recent poll, conducted last month for The Boston Globe, found that just 15 percent of city residents wanted him executed. Statewide, 19 percent did. By contrast, 60 percent of Americans wanted Mr. Tsarnaev to get the death penalty, according to a CBS News poll last month.
The jury was “death qualified” — each juror had to be open to the death penalty; anyone who opposed it could not serve. In that sense, the federal jury did not reflect the general population of the region. Massachusetts abolished the death penalty for state crimes in 1984 and has not carried out an execution since 1947.
BBC News -- Mohammed Morsi, Egypt's ex-leader, sentenced to death
Morsi has rejected the authority of the courts.
An Egyptian court has pronounced death sentences on ousted president Mohammed Morsi and more than 100 other people over a mass prison break in 2011.
The death sentence was also condemned by Amnesty International, which said it had become a tool "to purge the political opposition"
See also from The Far Center - Reconsidering the Death Penalty in Ohio
Governor Bush describes a moderate position on common core and immigration in an interview with Megyn Kelly
Fox News Video -- Megyn Kelly’s interview of Jeb Bush
“The simple fact is we need higher standards. They need to be state driven. The federal government should play no role in this, either in the creation of standards , content or curriculum.”
“As it relates to in-state tuition, it passed this year. A conservative Republican legislature led by a very courageous Speaker of the House, Will Weatherford passed this and the governor signed it under law. It didn't happen under my watch, but I supported that. Because if you've been here for an extended period of time, you have no nexus to the country of your parents, what are we supposed to do? Marginalize these people forever?”
Governor Bush shows some depth and gravitas in conveying
Christian values and their importance in Western Civilization.
The Federalist -- Mollie Hemingway Jeb Bush Defends Christianity And Religious Freedom. Good For Him.
“No place where the message reaches, no heart that it touches, is ever the same again. And across our own civilization, what a radically different story history would tell without it. Consider a whole alternative universe of power without restraint, conflict without reconciliation, oppression without deliverance, corruption without reformation, tragedy without renewal, achievement without grace, and it’s all just a glimpse of human experience without the Christian influence.”
Bush said “there is no more powerful or liberating influence on this earth than the Christian conscience in action.”
“From the standpoint of religious freedom, you might even say it’s a choice between the Little Sisters and Big Brother – and I’m going with the Sisters.”
WP -- Kathlen Parker -- Jeb Bush’s eloquent defense of Christianity
TheDailyBeast -- Book review -- How Liberals Ruined College
“College should be a place of new ideas and challenging views. Instead, liberals have made it a place of fear and intimidation.”
“Close to 60 percent of the four hundred–plus colleges they surveyed “seriously infringe upon the free speech rights of students.”
“The root of nearly every free-speech infringement on campuses across the country is that someone—almost always a liberal—has been offended or has sniffed out a potential offense in the making. Then, the silencing campaign begins.”
Money alone has not and will not fix the problems which are not unique to Baltimore.
Things that money alone cannot fix:
It’s important to have a father in the home or a mentor. Statistics also show that two young people who finish high school and get married before having children seldom end up in poverty.
The worst thing that city government can do to a poor neighborhood is to lower expectations. The “broken window” effect described by James Q. Wilson in the 1980’s was the basis of the concepts used by Mayor Giuliani to turn around New York City. Combating what can only be described as bureaucratic neglect in these areas can begin with code enforcement such as mowing overgrown properties and boarding up or tearing down vacant houses. Much of the cost of this can be placed as an assessment on the property of the absentee owners and recovered. I have been there and done that in Columbus, Ohio in the early 1980s. We reduced the code violations in a section of the city from 50% of vacated properties to less than 9%. It is not a matter of money or manpower, but a matter of political will.
Illegal drugs are a major contributing factor to the decline of inner city neighborhoods. Drugs are the cause of much of the violence and, along with poor schools, a cause of the flight of middle class families. When I was an orthopedic surgical resident in the Bronx area of New York City in the early 1970’s, I saw a community essentially implode and destroy itself with a heroin epidemic (see the movie “Fort Apache the Bronx”). Studies at that time showed that mainline heroin addicts committed 250 felonies each a year to support their habit. Discarded needles destroy all of the public green spaces. The place to begin is a zero tolerance for heroin which can also be well justified as a health policy related to AIDS and hepatitis and deaths from overdoses.
The teacher’s unions have been at least a part of the problem with the inner city schools. The results for those inner city children who have been able to go to charter schools have generally been better.
Perhaps ironically, I think that it can be argued that one of the things that could be done to improve both the issues of police misconduct and the perceptions of injustice in the inner cities would be for more states to abolish the death penalty.
WP -- Michael S. Rosenwald and Michael A. Fletcher -- Why couldn’t $130 million transform one of Baltimore’s poorest places?
“Sandtown-Winchester is crumbling, and there is little to suggest that two decades ago visionary developer James Rouse and city officials injected more than $130 million into the community in a failed effort to transform it. Instead there are block after block of boarded-up houses and too many people with little hope.”
Breitbart.com -- Krauthammer: Baltimore’s schools are a failure of liberal ideology.
“After talking about the problem of fatherlessness in Baltimore, Krauthammer said, “the other issue is the terrible schools, and the idea that they have been deprived of money is preposterous. Baltimore the second highest per-capita spending on students in the country……The public schools are rotten. What the parents need is school choice.”
NY Times - Thomas B. Edsall - Sex, Drugs and Poverty in Red and Blue America
“The problems of majority black Baltimore are extreme, but many of the trends found there are as extreme or more so in majority white Muskogee.”
“The Baltimore poverty rate is 23.8 percent, 8.4 points above the national rate, but below Muskogee’s 27.7 percent. The median household income in Baltimore is $41,385, $11,661 below the $53,046 national level, but $7,712 above Muskogee’s $33,664.”
WSJ -- William McGurn -- When America Loses a War
The real lesson is that bad things happen when the U.S. loses or walks away from a war.
In the 40 Aprils that have come and gone since, Vietnam has become shorthand for a political orthodoxy built on the idea that American military intervention overseas creates more problems than it solves. This thinking feeds an entire industry pumping out tedious lectures about “The Lessons of Vietnam.”
Still, the most obvious lesson of Vietnam is the one hardly ever acknowledged: the terrible price paid—human as well as strategic—when America loses a war.
Foreign Affairs Winter (1991/92 issue) -- George C. Herring
America and Vietnam: The Unending War
“Why did the United States invest so much blood and treasure in an area so remote as Vietnam and of so little apparent significance? Why, despite its vast power, did the United States fail to achieve its objectives? What were the consequences of the war for Americans-and for Vietnamese?”
Foreign Affairs -- Nov/Dec 2012 -- Fredrik Logevall
What Really Happened in Vietnam
“The Saigon government, meanwhile, was crippled from the outset by three principal shortcomings that no amount of U.S. intervention could overcome: professional military inferiority, endemic corruption, and insufficient popular support.”
Quartz -- Matt Phillips
Vietnam, ruled by communists for 40 years, is now the No. 1 fan of capitalism on the planet
Much like China, Vietnam remains an authoritarian country today. And it’s communist, too, but in name only. Things have changed a lot over the last 40 years. According to a recent Pew Research survey, Vietnam today has the single most positive views on capitalism of any country, with an enthusiasm that is even more widespread than in Germany, India, or the United States.
National Review -- Riot-Plagued Baltimore Is a Catastrophe Entirely of the Democratic Party’s Own Making
“American cities are by and large Democratic-party monopolies, monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the party. The results have been catastrophic”
“The evidence suggests very strongly that the left-wing, Democratic claques that run a great many American cities — particularly the poor and black cities — are not capable of running a school system or a police department. They are incompetent, they are corrupt, and they are breathtakingly arrogant. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore — this is what Democrats do.”
American Prospect -- In Baltimore, Police Thuggery Is the Real Violence Problem
As officials call for peace and nonviolence, perhaps the police could heed some of that same advice.
In 2014, police killed more than 100 unarmed people.
Townhall.com -- Nebraska Legislature’s Vote Signals Growing Conservative Support for Ending Death Penalty
“If there is one thing conservatives hate, it’s a failed government program that gives the state power it shouldn’t have. In recent years, however, there is one government policy many conservatives continue to rally behind even though it wastes millions in tax payers’ hard-earned dollars, puts innocent lives at risk and fails to keep Americans safe: the death penalty.”
“Fortunately, the tide is beginning to turn, and more and more lawmakers, scholars and pundits on the right side of the aisle now recognize that its bad policy to give an all-too-fallible government the power to execute its own citizens.”
International NY Times -- Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation as Russians Pressed for Control of Uranium Company
“Uranium investors’ efforts to buy mining assets in Kazakhstan and the United States led to a takeover bid by a Russian state-owned energy company. The investors gave millions to the Clinton Foundation over the same period, while Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s office was involved with approving the Russian bid.”
“Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.”
NYmag.com -- The Disastrous Clinton Post-Presidency
All sorts of unproven worst-case-scenario questions float around the web of connections between Bill’s private work, Hillary Clinton’s public role as secretary of State, the Clintons’ quasi-public charity, and Hillary’s noncompliant email system. But the best-case scenario is bad enough: The Clintons have been disorganized and greedy.
Stealing $500 is a felony. Defrauding the public of billions of dollars and paying a large settlement or fine is just the cost of doing business.
Jon Stewart -- Fraud City
The Fiscal Times - The Biggest Outrage in Atlanta’s Crazy Teacher Cheating Case
“If you don’t remember these kinds of creative prosecution strategies during the financial crisis, that’s probably because no prosecutor ever used them. Teachers ordered to falsify tests and the superiors who demanded it, amid desperation to save schools from destruction, deserve no mercy from the court. Bankers who ran a criminal enterprise to engage in the largest consumer and investing fraud in world history deserve our thanks.”
Consider that Kirsten Powers is a liberal columnist who usually supports Obama. Obama refuses to recognize radical Islamic terrorism by name but has near silence on the tragedy of the persecution and ethnic cleansing of Christians in the Middle East and elsewhere.
USA Today -- Kirsten Powers: Christians thrown overboard left to drown by Obama
“If a Christian mob on a ship bound for Italy threw 12 Muslims to their death for praying to Allah, does anyone think the president would have been so disinterested? When three North Carolina Muslims were gunned down by a virulent atheist, Obama rightly spoke out against the horrifying killings. But he just can't seem to find any passion for the mass persecution of Middle Eastern Christians or the eradication of Christianity from its birthplace.”
“Religious persecution of Christians is rampant worldwide, as Pew has noted, but nowhere is it more prevalent than in the Middle East and Northern Africa, where followers of Jesus are the targets of religious cleansing. Pope Francis has repeatedly decried the persecution and begged the world for help, but it has had little impact. Western leaders — including Obama — will be remembered for their near silence as this human rights tragedy unfolded.”
LATimes -- Victims ask that Tsarnaev’s life be spared
Death or life in prison for convicted Boston Marathon bomber
“They say they worry that long death-row appeals will only remind them of the bombings and block their healing process as victims.”
“Among those asking that Tsarnaev's life be spared are Martin Richard's family; Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downes, two newlyweds who each lost legs in the explosions; and the sister of MIT police Officer Sean Collier, who was killed in the manhunt leading to Tsarnaev's capture two years ago.”
"If there is anyone who deserves the ultimate punishment, it is the defendant," Kensky and Downes said in a statement Sunday. "However, we must overcome the impulse for vengeance."
Spiegel Online -- The Terror Strategist: Secret Files Reveal the Structure of Islamic State
An Iraqi officer planned Islamic State's takeover in Syria and SPIEGEL has been given exclusive access to his papers. They portray an organization that, while seemingly driven by religious fanaticism, is actually coldly calculating.
“Thousands of well-trained Sunni officers were robbed of their livelihood with the stroke of a pen. In doing so, America created its most bitter and intelligent enemies.”
Bakr was merely modifying what he had learned in the past: Saddam Hussein's omnipresent security apparatus, in which no one, not even generals in the intelligence service, could be certain they weren't being spied on.
“The plan would always begin with the same detail: The group recruited followers under the pretense of opening a Dawah office, an Islamic missionary center. Of those who came to listen to lectures and attend courses on Islamic life, one or two men were selected and instructed to spy on their village and obtain a wide range of information.”
“IS has little in common with predecessors like al-Qaida aside from its jihadist label. There is essentially nothing religious in its actions, its strategic planning, its unscrupulous changing of alliances and its precisely implemented propaganda narratives. Faith, even in its most extreme form, is just one of many means to an end. Islamic State's only constant maxim is the expansion of power at any price.”
“True to Haji Bakr's plan, the phase of infiltration was followed by the elimination of every person who might have been a potential leader or opponent.”
“As the West's attention is primarily focused on the possibility of terrorist attacks, a different scenario has been underestimated: the approaching intra-Muslim war between Shiites and Sunnis. Such a conflict would allow IS to graduate from being a hated terror organization to a central power.”
“In such a case, IS propaganda about the approaching apocalypse could become a reality. In its slipstream, an absolutist dictatorship in the name of God could be established.”
Fox News -- White House condemns ISIS video that purportedly shows killing of Ethiopian Christians in Libya
“In the video released Sunday, Islamic State militants in Libya shot and beheaded groups of captive Ethiopian Christians. The attack widens the circle of nations affected by the group's atrocities while showing its growth beyond a self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq.”
Boston Globe Op-ed -- Denise and Bill Richard - To end the anguish, drop the death penalty
“But now that the tireless and committed prosecution team has ensured that justice will be served, we urge the Department of Justice to bring the case to a close. We are in favor of and would support the Department of Justice in taking the death penalty off the table in exchange for the defendant spending the rest of his life in prison without any possibility of release and waiving all of his rights to appeal.”
‘We know that the government has its reasons for seeking the death penalty, but the continued pursuit of that punishment could bring years of appeals and prolong reliving the most painful day of our lives. We hope our two remaining children do not have to grow up with the lingering, painful reminder of what the defendant took from them, which years of appeals would undoubtedly bring.”
“We believe that now is the time to turn the page, end the anguish, and look toward a better future — for us, for Boston, and for the country.”
WP -- FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000
“The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.”
The Far Center -- Reconsidering the Death Penalty in Ohio
WP -- Republicans push for a permanent aristocracy
“On Tuesday afternoon, the House Rules Committee took up H.R. 1105, the “Death Tax Repeal Act of 2015,” with plans to bring it to a vote on the chamber floor Wednesday — Tax Day. It is an extraordinarily candid expression of the majority’s priorities: A tax cut costing the treasury $269 billion over a decade that would exclusively benefit individuals with wealth of more than $5.4 million and couples with wealth of more than $10.9 million.”
Never underestimate the ability of the Republicans to shoot themselves in the foot. There is no chance this would survive a veto and it just reinforces the Democrats campaign argument that they are the party concerned about the middle class and income inequality. The Republicans position should instead be that the Democratic policies over the last six years have not helped the middle class and even lead to more income inequality.
WSJ -- Hillary and the Liberal Way of Lying
How the Clintons pioneered the methods by which Obama sold his Iran deal.
“To you and me, the Clinton lies were statements demonstrably at variance with the truth, and therefore wrong and shameful. But to the initiated they were an invitation to an intoxicating secret knowledge.”
“What was this knowledge? That the lying was for the greater good, usually to fend off some form of Republican malevolence. What was so intoxicating? That the initiated were smart enough to see through it all. Why be scandalized when they could be amused? Why moralize when they could collude?”
Iran deal. An honest president might sell the current deal roughly as follows.
“My fellow Americans, the deal we have negotiated will not, I am afraid, prevent Iran from getting a bomb, should its leaders decide to build one. And eventually they will. Fatwa or no fatwa, everything we know about their nuclear program tells us it is geared toward building a bomb. And frankly, if you lived in a neighborhood like theirs—70 million Shiites surrounded by hundreds of millions of Sunnis—you’d want a bomb, too.”
“Yes, we could, in theory, stop Iran from getting the bomb. Sanctions won’t do it. Extreme privation didn’t stop Maoist China or Bhutto’s Pakistan or Kim’s North Korea from building a bomb. It won’t stop Iran, either.”
Remember, however, that every single republican candidate in the last presidential election also stated they would not let Iran get a nuclear weapon with no explanation about the risks or how they would do that. They also all stated that they would not accept raising even a dollar of taxes even if this was offset by 10 dollars of cost savings in the budget. Pandering in politics is not constrained to only one party.
Wall Street Journal - Terrorists and Their Quranic Delusions
Egypt’s grand mufti on ugly distortions of Islam masking a hunger for power and bloodshed.
“These groups have the audacity to dismiss any Quranic verses that don’t fit their claims. They declare unilateral war against both Muslims and non-Muslims who don’t share their barbarous mentality. They completely disregard the Quranic conception of human brotherhood and peaceful relations between Muslims and non-Muslims.”
NY Times -- The Supreme Court’s Death Trap
“The number of death sentences imposed last year, 72, was the lowest in 40 years. The number of executions, 35, was the lowest since 1994, less than half the modern peak of 98, reached in 1999. Seven states, the fewest in 25 years, carried out executions.”
“California has the country’s biggest death row, with more than 700 inmates. Many more of them die of natural causes — two since mid-March — than by execution. Last July, a federal district judge, Cormac J. Carney, concluding that California’s death penalty had become “dysfunctional,” “random” and devoid of “penological purpose,” declared it unconstitutional; the state is appealing.”
Washington Post - Alabama inmate free after 30 years on death row. How the case against him unraveled.
New York Times -- Eric Foner Why Reconstructions Matters
Americans will probably devote little attention to the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction, the turbulent era that followed the conflict. This is unfortunate, for if any historical period deserves the label “relevant,” it is Reconstruction.
Issues that agitate American politics today — access to citizenship and voting rights, the relative powers of the national and state governments, the relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism — all of these are Reconstruction questions. But that era has long been misunderstood.