"I'm in a two-point race with the Koch brothers' favorite Governor — Wisconsin's Scott Walker."

"By contributing today, you'll put another nail in the coffin of the Tea Party movement that's propping up Scott Walker's failed administration."

So writes Mary Burke in her first fundraising letter as a Democratic Party challenger to Walker, and I'm just wondering why it's okay to say "put another nail in the coffin." Whatever happened to civility? Remember when Sarah Palin was attacked for using a target image and tweeting "Don't retreat — RELOAD."

To be fair to Burke, targeting and reloading are metaphors of killing, but the metaphor of nailing down a coffin lid implies that one's victim is already dead. On the other hand, why bother to fight the Tea Party if it's already dead? I'm afraid the implication might be execution by burial, which is quite a disturbing topic. Excerpt from Wikipedia:

During the reign of the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi it is said that approximately 400 to 700 scholars were buried alive near the capital. They were condemned for saving books from destruction after an imperial ban on the classics....

Tacitus, in his work Germania, records that German tribes practiced two forms of capital punishment; the first where the victim was hanged on trees, and another, where the victim was tied to a wicker frame, pushed face down into mud and buried. The first was used to make an example of traitors, the second was used for punishment of dishonourable or shameful crimes, such as cowardice or sodomy....

In medieval Italy, unrepentant murderers were buried alive, head down, feet in the air, a practice referred to in passing in Canto XIX of Dante's Inferno....

"Considering Which Head or Heads May Roll for a Troubled Website Rollout."

A NYT headline... head- or heads- line.

Is severed head covered in the Obamacare-conforming plans?

The article, by Michael D. Shear, begins:

For weeks, the president and his aides have said they are not interested in conducting a witch hunt in the middle of the effort to rescue the website.

But they've gotten interested. Apparently, a witch hunt is just the right distraction for the holiday season. But heads are rolling, so the image is a guillotine — a reign of terror. But feel free to picture hangings (witch execution, American-style) or burnings at the stake (if you want to go medieval).

The possible targets include Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary; Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services; Mike Hash, the head of the health and human services health reform office; Michelle Snyder, the chief operating officer at Medicaid and Medicare; Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the website; Jeanne Lambrew, the head of health care policy inside the White House; David Simas, a key adviser involved in the rollout; and Todd Park, the president’s top adviser on technology issues.

Don't pick all women. That would look bad. Maybe Mike Hash and Todd Park, I'd say, just going on the optics of the names. You just need heads. Which heads would look best on a pike?



Ha ha ha. Remember George Bush's head on a pike? Those were the days! Oh, the distractions of yore! What would distract the folks today? Will Obama traipsing about the country for 3 weeks, right up until Christmas Eve eve, do the trick? Think of all the pretty, empathetic people that can be lined up behind him. Just like a choir of Christmas carolers... bringing good tidings of great joy. But heads must roll! It's execution time. More apt for the Easter season, but Christ, you know it ain’t easy/You know how hard it can be/The way things are going/They’re gonna crucify me.

No, no, no. Our modern Messiah must survive. The metaphorical executions must be directed somewhere lower down. I say Mike Hash and Todd Park and then throw in a lady too. Kathleen Sebelius. No, make it Marilyn Tavenner.

That's a nice array of heads. Enough of a purge to settle you down until the new year?

"Apple has acquired a company with access to 'the hose'..."

"... the nickname for Twitter’s stream of 500 million tweets per day."

$200 million for Topsy, which I've got to assume is named after the character in "Uncle Tom's Cabin":

A ragamuffin young slave girl. When asked if she knows who made her, she professes ignorance of both God and a mother, saying "I s'pect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me."... The phrase "growed like Topsy" (later "grew like Topsy") passed into the English language, originally with the specific meaning of unplanned growth, later sometimes just meaning enormous growth.

Is it in poor taste to name a company after a slave girl?

Or do you think the company was named after Topsy the elephant, famous for dying of electrocution, captured on film by Thomas Edison in the year 1903?

Initially, Topsy was supposed to be hanged, but other ways were considered when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals protested. Edison then suggested electrocution with alternating current, which had been used for the execution of humans since 1890.

Topsy was fed carrots laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide before the deadly current from a 6,600-volt AC source was sent coursing through her body, partly as a demonstration of how "unsafe" his competitor's (George Westinghouse) alternating current design was.

Is it in poor taste to name a company after an electrocuted elephant?



The hose.

"In all the years since the shooting, I have never come face-to-face with Franklin."

"I would love an hour in a room with him and a pair of wire-cutters and pliers, so I could inflict the same damage on him that he inflicted on me. But, I do not want to kill him, nor do I want to see him die...."

"This case definitely falls in the rarest of rare categories and warrants the exemplary punishment of death."

Said the judge, in India. 

Earlier, protesters outside the court had demanded that the four men should be hanged.

As they were escorted to the courtroom, the four men shouted to the crowd: "Brothers, save us!"

"Castro pleaded guilty to 937 counts, including murder and kidnapping, in exchange for the death penalty being taken off the table."

Then hanged himself in prison.

Kim Jong-Un has his ex-girlfriend — a North Korean pop star — executed by firing squad.

Hyon Song-wol was one of a dozen pop singers who were machine gunned for (supposedly) violating anti-pornography laws.

One source told [South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo] that some of the victims were clutching Bibles as they were killed in front of their loved ones — who were then ordered to live in the country’s notorious prison camps after they were found guilty by association.

Here's video of Hyon Song-wol singing "A Girl in the Saddle of a Steed":



According to Wikipedia, that was her greatest hit:

Our factory comrades say in jest,
Why, they tell me I am a virgin on a stallion,
After a full day's work I still have energy left...
They say I am a virgin on a stallion,
Mounting a stallion my Dear Leader gave me.
All my life I will live to uphold his name!

The jury grants Nidal Malik Hasan's request for martyrdom.

Or: The jury agrees with the prosecutor's argument that to give Hasan the death penalty would not be to make him a martyr.

“Do not be fooled,” Colonel Mulligan said. “He is not giving his life. We are taking his life. This is not his gift to God. This is his debt to society.”

60 years ago today, the Rosenbergs were executed.

Here's the NYT article that appeared on the 50th anniversary of the execution.

The available evidence now suggests to historians that Julius Rosenberg did in fact spy for the Soviet Union. The evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, however, is considered flimsy at best. But whatever they may have done, it is far from evident that they had handed Moscow the key to its first atomic bomb, as charged at the time.

The couple remain a special case. The United States has had many spies over the last 50 years, including some believed to have done great harm to American interests. Not one was put to death.

Here's the Wikipedia page:

The Rosenbergs were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War. In imposing the death penalty, [Judge Irving] Kaufman noted that he held them responsible not only for espionage but also for the deaths of the Korean War:

“I consider your crime worse than murder...
I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. We have evidence of your treachery all around us every day for the civilian defense activities throughout the nation are aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack.”

Commenting on the sentence given to them, Julius Rosenberg claimed the case is a political frame-up.

“This death sentence is not surprising. It had to be. There had to be a Rosenberg case, because there had to be an intensification of the hysteria in America to make the Korean War acceptable to the American people. There had to be hysteria and a fear sent through America in order to get increased war budgets. And there had to be a dagger thrust in the heart of the left to tell them that you are no longer gonna get five years for a Smith Act prosecution or one year for contempt of court, but we’re gonna kill ya! ”...

Marxist Nobel Prize-winning existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre called the trial "a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices – we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear ... you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb." Others, including non-Communists such as Jean Cocteau, Albert Einstein and Nobel-Prize-winning physical chemist Harold Urey, as well as Communists or left-leaning artists such as Nelson Algren, Bertolt Brecht, Dashiell Hammett, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, protested the position of the American government in what the French termed America's Dreyfus affair. In May 1951, Pablo Picasso wrote for the communist French newspaper L’Humanité, "The hours count. The minutes count. Do not let this crime against humanity take place." The all-black labor union International Longshoremen’s Association Local 968 stopped working for a day in protest. Cinema artists such as Fritz Lang registered their protest. Pope Pius XII appealed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower to spare the couple, but Eisenhower refused on February 11, 1953, and all other appeals were also unsuccessful.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, investigated how much the Soviet spy ring helped the USSR to build their bomb. In 1945, Moynihan found, physicist Hans Bethe estimated that the Soviets would be able to build their own bomb in five years. “Thanks to information provided by their agents,” Moynihan concluded in his book Secrecy, they did it in four. That was the edge that espionage gave them: one year.”

"What's so 'ugly' about the mockery?"

Asks grinder, in the comments to the post — "Texas Congressman: Masturbating Fetuses Prove Need for Abortion Ban" — about pro-abortion-rights bloggers mocking the statement of Rep. Michael Burgess, a former OB/GYN, who commented on the "purposeful" motions of 15-week-old unborns who may "stroke their face" and "have their hand between their legs."

I answered in the comments:

The Congressman described the fetus's humanity: It does something that we are invited to recognize as part of our shared human condition and therefore to appreciate its reality and to feel empathy.

The mockers are taking this delicately stated image of the fetus touching or holding its genitals and turning it into a picture of a baby masturbating — "jerking off," "spanking the monkey" — and asking us to laugh at it, even as we are expected to accept its being killed. The very thing that the Congressman used to call us to think of it as human, they would laugh at before killing it.

If you are going to take it into your hands to kill a human being, you don't diminish it and laugh at it first. For example, an execution — assuming it is permitted at all, as it is in the United States — is carried out with somber respect. Even as this human being will be killed, we must demonstrate that we understand the profundity of what we are doing.

Picture executions where the condemned person is subjected to mockery first. (That was done to Jesus, by the way.) Some would say any death penalty is wrong, just as some would say that any abortion is wrong. But few would say that ridiculing the condemned being — dehumanizing him — is acceptable.

In their eagerness to deny that the fetus is a person, abortion rights proponents — some of them — are making sport of it.

This reminds me of Kermit Gosnell joking about a large fetus, saying that it was big enough to walk to the bus stop. Think about why that was considered shocking by many people.

Let's remember that, under the law, the abortion right — in the Supreme Court's idealized image — is based on the idea of the woman's entitlement to define her own concept of "the mystery of human life." This is a "philosophic exercise" that "originate[s] within the zone of conscience and belief." This is a deeply serious matter — to the Court. But who believes it? Abortion opponents resist the idea either because they are sure the fetus is a human being or because they wouldn't trust the woman to base her decision whether to abort on sincere conscientious beliefs about the humanity of the unborn. Those who support abortion rights seem — for the most part — to have forgotten the nature of the decision that is reserved, under the law, for the woman. Laughing at the unborn is egregious evidence of this forgetting.

Here's an idea for an abortion regulation that I've never heard anyone else discuss, but which occurred to me as I've read and reread the Supreme Court cases. A woman seeking an abortion must sign a statement: I have reflected on the nature of the procedure I am about to undergo, and I attest to my sincere belief that it will not kill a human being.

Death on death row... by natural causes.

Night comes for the Night Stalker.

"Ramos was tied up at the woman's funeral. Mourners threw him into the open grave..."

"...  placed the woman's coffin in it and filled the grave with earth."

Character assassination attempted on 5th Circuit Judge Edith Jones.

This is truly scurrilous. I'm embarrassed for these organizations — so-called civil rights groups — who filed this complaint.

The lecture was not recorded, but witnesses recalled a number of Jones' controversial statements. The views she expressed included not only that minorities are responsible for more violent crime than are whites, but also that claims by death row inmates that racism or arbitrariness infected their prosecutions, or that they are actually innocent or even mentally retarded, are merely "red herrings," according to those who attended the lecture. She told the law students and other attendees that she thought the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling outlawing the death penalty for the mentally retarded did intellectually disabled individuals a disservice, and that to create such an exemption from execution was a "slippery slope," reads the complaint. "In describing … what Judge Jones said about these cases, I am not able to capture the complete outrage she expressed over the crimes or the disgust she evinced over the defense raised, particularly by the defendants who claimed to be mentally retarded," reads the declaration, filed with the complaint, of veteran Pennsylvania-based death penalty attorney Marc Bookman, who attended the lecture. "Judge Jones's disgust at how these defendants were 'using mental retardation' was very evident and very disconcerting," reads the complaint.

She gave a speech. You don't have the text, but you'd like to destroy her. Why not just argue and debate about the ideas? Instead, you tell us about how you — who don't like her legal decisions — felt an upswelling of emotion over whatever it was she said.

Shame on you!

This was a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, attended by many students. I find it hard to believe no one recorded the speech. I hope a recording emerges and a transcript can be made, because I would love to compare Jones's actual statement to the assertions made in the complaint.

Did any of my readers attend the lecture and make a digital recording? I'd be happy to receive it.

"Is Murder in a State Without the Death Penalty a Mitigating Factor in a Federal Death Penalty Case?"

A 6th Circuit panel had said yes, in a case where a man was convicted — under federal law, in federal court — of a murder in a  national forest in Michigan.

From the opinion (PDF):

The question is whether the fact of the location of the body so close to a line that forbids the death penalty...

The body was located only 227 feet within the boundary of the national forest.

...  allows counsel to try to convince one or more jurors that imposing the death penalty in these circumstances would treat life or death in a random and arbitrary way based on chance. The phrase “any mitigating factor” plainly includes information about Michigan’s policy against the death penalty and an argument based on the absence of proportionality in punishment when life or death is made to turn on chance and the lives of other equally guilty psychopaths are spared...

 ADDED: En banc, the 6th circuit voted 12-4 to reverse. 

"Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell agreed today to two life sentences and waive his appeal rights..."

"... in exchange for the state taking the death penalty off the table.... Seeking the death penalty was overkill...."

"I believe death is the ultimate freedom."

"So I’d rather have my freedom as soon as I can get it."

ADDED: Meadhouse dialogue:

MEADE (on reading this post): So when she killed the guy, she was setting him free.

ALTHOUSE: Liberating his soul from his body. What's that line in a movie — "Go ahead and shoot, you'll be doing me a favor"? Casablanca!

MEADE: I hope you never murder me.

ALTHOUSE: I won't.

MEADE: Just for the record, I don't consider death the ultimate freedom.

'Wow! That is great. That is awesome!" — last words as execution drug kicks in.

Spoken by Richard Cobb, 29, after delivering what seemed to like his official last words: "Life is death, death is life. I hope that someday this absurdity that humanity has come to will come to an end. Life is too short. I hope anyone that has negative energy towards me will resolve that. Life is too short to harbor feelings of hatred and anger. That's it, warden."

"Prosecutors said today they will seek the death penalty for Colorado movie theater shooting suspect James Holmes."

"Holmes had offered to plead guilty and spend the rest of his life behind bars in exchange for avoiding the death penalty."

Holmes is accused of opening fire in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater on July 20, 2012, killing 12 people and injuring 58. By the time he had finished, a police officer has testified, there was so much blood the theater floor had become slippery. Bodies were left with horrific injuries and there was the eerie sound of cell phones ringing, over and over again....

Breaking news email from CNN.

Prosecutors not ready to let the Aurora theater killer plead guilty to escape the death penalty.

"In a court filing, prosecutors criticized defense attorneys for publicizing [James] Holmes’ offer to plead guilty, calling it a ploy meant to draw the public and the judge into what should be private plea negotiations."

Legal experts say the case pivots on whether Holmes was legally insane when he opened fire in a packed theater in Aurora, killing 12 people.

Is life in prison an acceptable deal?

"I wanted everybody to know that our Constitution is precious and that no American should be killed by a drone without first being charged with a crime."

A strange sentence... from Rand Paul's WaPo op-ed "My filibuster was just the beginning."

If you had asked me 5 years ago in what situation would an American Senator say that, I would have imagined a severe breakdown in our legal and political order.

Why would someone professing to care about the Constitution only want to know that an American has to be charged with a crime before he's blown away by something called a drone. Where's the right to counsel? Where's the proof beyond a reasonable doubt at trial? And if the sentence is death, isn't it cruel and unusual to suddenly bomb a man out of existence?

The Senator sounds as though he is begging for the last shred of pretense that we have a Constitution.