Oh, so NOWWWWwww You suddenly get it?
Posted: March 15, 2013 Filed under: Marriage Equality | Tags: Rob Portman 5 Comments
Some times people are so transparent that you wonder why you can’t literally see through them. Rob Portman’s conversion to a born gain PFLAG member just strikes me as a bit shallow. I’m not the only one who finds his sudden change of heart about marriage equality to be more about him than about actually recognizing that civil rights under the law should apply to every one. This bit is from Matt Ygleisas at Slate.
I’m glad that Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio has reconsidered his view on gay marriage upon realization that his son is gay, but I also find this particular window into moderation—memorably dubbed Miss America conservatism by Mark Schmitt—to be the most annoying form
Remember when Sarah Palin was running for vice president on a platform of tax cuts and reduced spending? But there was one form of domestic social spending she liked to champion? Spending on disabled children? Because she had a disabled child personally? Yet somehow her personal experience with disability didn’t lead her to any conclusions about the millions of mothers simply struggling to raise children in conditions of general poorness. Rob Portman doesn’t have a son with a pre-existing medical condition who’s locked out of the health insurance market. Rob Portman doesn’t have a son engaged in peasant agriculture whose livelihood is likely to be wiped out by climate change. Rob Portman doesn’t have a son who’ll be malnourished if SNAP benefits are cut. So Rob Portman doesn’t care.
It’s a great strength of the movement for gay political equality that lots of important and influential people happen to have gay children. That obviously does change people’s thinking. And good for them.
Why is it that some people only seem to do the seemingly right thing only when it impacts them?
Krugman has similar thoughts on the topic. Why is it these folks can’t empathize with situations involving other people’s children? Is it really that far of stretch to say his conversion is nice but hardly praiseworthy given the circumstance that he was a rigid homophobe until it impacted him?
But while enlightenment is good, wouldn’t it have been a lot more praiseworthy if he had shown some flexibility on the issue before he knew that his own family would benefit?
I’ve noticed this thing quite a lot in American life lately — this sort of cramped vision of altruism in which it’s considered perfectly acceptable to support only those causes that are directly good for you and yours. We even have a tendency to view it as “inauthentic” when people support policies that aren’t in their self-interest — when a rich man supports higher taxes on the rich, he’s somehow seen as strange, and probably a hypocrite.
Needless to say, this is all wrong. Political virtue consists in standing for what’s right, even — or indeed especially — when it doesn’t redound to your own benefit. Someone should ask Portman why he didn’t take a stand for, you know, other people’s children.
So, here’s another weird thing. All the folks talking about this particular angle seem to be in the economics business. Is it because we’re intrigued by what motivates people to choose one thing over any other thing?
I think we should have compassion for all peaceful people. Yglesias and I would express our compassion in pretty different ways: he would have a powerful government use force to grab people’s wealth and give it to others and I wouldn’t. But where we agree is that you shouldn’t have to wait until the state interferes with your peaceful son before you start advocating that the state not interfere with other people. So, for example, maybe Portman’s son doesn’t smoke marijuana or snort cocaine. But if he did, it would be admirable for Portman to come out in favor of legalizing marijuana and cocaine. It would be even more admirable if he came out in favor of legalizing them absent any evidence that his son uses them.
I guess we have to leave it to the psychologists to tell us why some people just don’t come around to the compassionate, wise, and just thing to do until it gores their ox. I wish I could be a bit more bottom-lined about this and just be glad there’s another vote out there for marriage equality. Still, the entire circumstance and now the media adoration pouring all over Portman just doesn’t have that fresh sanctified smell to me. It does seem that I may be suffering a symptom of my career choice which again, studies how people make choices.
Friday Reads: The Ides of March
Posted: March 15, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Bobby Jindal, budget, Eric Cantor, Higgs boson, imagine no religion, mars rover, Paul Ryan 28 Comments
Ah! The Ides of March and today’s political men with that lean and hungry look are upon us! Let’s check out what Eric Cantor, Bobby Jindal and Paul Ryan are up to. All of them have that creepy angular look that makes my skin crawl. I always wonder if their supporters are as odd looking and grinch-like?
Ryan “looks with such ferret and such fiery eyes” and is trying to ride the same old budget that the voters soundly rejected in November.
Ryan’s budget is a retread of his previous offerings, the same ideas that were rejected by voters in the 2012 election. Like the old Bourbon kings, he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Once more he doubles down on the failed ideas of the past, and once more he brazenly seeks credit for making hard choices while refusing to tell us what those choices are. The cowardice and lack of candor reflect just how unpopular these ideas are.
The basic strategy is the same; the only new packaging is the pretense of balancing the budget in 10 years. Ryan does that by adopting the $600 billion in “fiscal cliff” taxes that Republicans voted against, the Medicare tax hikes that were part of the Obamacare that Ryan proposes to repeal, and, most brazenly, the infamous $716 billion in “Medicare cuts” that Ryan and Romney and legions of Republicans have railed against over the last two election cycles.
Ryan’s basic strategy is unchanged. He would lower rates on income and corporate taxes. He does this despite studies showing that lowering rates over the last decades have produced more inequality, but not more growth. With the top 1 percent capturing a staggering 121 percent of the income growth coming out of the Great Recession, and corporate profits at record highs as a percentage of the economy, Ryan still argues that if they just had more money, they would start investing here at home.
The lower tax rates, Ryan claims, will be paid for by closing loopholes and eliminating “tax expenditures” — only he reveals none of
those that he would close. Studies show millionaires could give up all their tax deductions and still pocket a big tax break from the Ryan plan. By definition, middle class families will end up paying more — and will face the loss of tax deductions for mortgages, for employer-based health care, for state and local taxes and more. No wonder Ryan doesn’t want to reveal what’s behind the curtain.
Ryan then calls for cutting $4.6 trillion in spending over 10 years from projected levels. $2.5 trillion of that comes from repealing Obamacare and gutting Medicaid. That will leave, according to estimates of the Urban League and the Congressional Budget Office, 40 to 50 million more poor and middle-income Americans uninsured, even as the wealthy and multinationals pocket their tax breaks. In addition, Ryan promises to dismember Medicare 10 years from now, turning it into a voucher that will push more and more costs on seniors over time.
Ryan would cancel the “sequestration cuts” for the military over the next decade while cutting even more from domestic services. All domestic services — education, border patrol, workplace safety, food and drug monitoring, research and development, Head Start, infant nutrition, etc. — would be cut to levels not seen in modern times. Naturally, Ryan does not identify what would be cut.
His budget is expected to pass the House yet again even though there is no chance in the Senate and no chance that “Obamacare” will be repealed. Yet, he’s consistent which is more than we can say about Eric Cantor recently. You know Cantoe. ” Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort s if he mock’d himself and scorn’d his spirit that could be moved to smile at any thing.”
Cantor seems newly pained by his reputation as an ideological roadblock. In Virginia, his favorable rating is twenty-seven per cent, a fact that makes a statewide run for office in the near future a dim prospect. Cantor explained why he argued at the retreat against using the debt ceiling as political leverage. He had been hearing from donors on Wall Street and in the business community about the potential impact on the markets. “Most people would say incurring debt at this point is allowing money for bills that you already incurred,” he said. “It’s to pay the bills.” Eight days earlier, at a press conference, Obama had made the same argument.
Besides, there were better fights to come. Conceding the debt-ceiling vote was a simple way for House Republicans to prevent the
U.S. government from going into default, which would be disastrous for the economy here and abroad. It also meant they could save their leverage for the coming fight over the automatic spending cuts in the sequester. “We’re not trying to sit here and just obstruct,” Cantor said. “We’re trying to solve the problem, and we’ve been put in this position, I guess, perception-wise, that all we want to do is obstruct. So this is an attempt for us to get on firmer ground.”
To win over the right, House leaders promised three things. They would demand that the Democratic-controlled Senate write a formal budget, which Senate Democrats have avoided doing for several years; if the senators didn’t pass a budget, they wouldn’t get paid. Second, they promised conservatives that the cuts in the sequester would be kept intact or replaced with something equivalent. The final promise was far more daunting: Paul Ryan would write a budget that balanced within ten years. “Big goal,” Cantor said, and he sounded relieved that it wouldn’t be his job; Ryan’s last budget, which included severe spending cuts, didn’t promise to come into balance until the late twenty-thirties. “People were concerned that it took too long to balance,” Ryan said. To make the budget balance in a decade, the level of cuts will have to be extreme. Cantor may have led his colleagues out of the debt-ceiling canyon only to get them trapped in another one.
I pointed out that, because the fiscal-cliff deal included more than six hundred billion dollars in higher taxes over the next ten years, Ryan’s job might be a little easier. Cantor flashed a mischievous grin. “Irony!” he said.
He’s got the ALEC plan for wrecking the state down pat. “He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”Jan Moller with the Louisiana Budget Project said he fears a financial blow to the state’s most vulnerable citizens.
“At a bare minimum, a tax overhaul should not be an excuse to make the state’s poorest citizens pay more, and they would suffer the most from the governor’s proposal to raise sales taxes,” Moller said in a prepared statement.
Barfield said something will be proposed to offset any increase for low- and lower-middle-classes.
“They would be in no worse position than they are today,” Barfield said.
Barfield said the administration wants to encourage job creation and economic growth, which help elevate the poor.
One has to wonder how the national ambitions of these men jibe with voters given their agendas benefit very few people. I suppose the idea is to appease the big donors and hope that every one else just votes based on name recognition and glossy mailers. Still, Jindal’s popularity sits at 37%. As mentioned above, Cantor’s popularity sits at 27%. Ryan’s last poll was the election.
“This is the start of a new story of physics,” said Tony Weidberg, Oxford University physicist and a collaborator on the Atlas experiment.
“Physics has changed since July the 4th – the vague question we had before was to see if there was anything there,” he told BBC News.
“Now we’ve got more precise questions: is this particle a Higgs boson, and if so, is it one compatible with the Standard Model?”
The results reported at the conference – based on the entire data sets from 2011 and 2012 – much more strongly suggest that the new particle’s “spin” is zero – consistent with any of the theoretical varieties of Higgs.
“The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is,” said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela.
As is often the case in particle physics, a fuller analysis of data will be required to establish beyond doubt that the particle is a Higgs of any kind. But Dr Weidberg said that even these early hints were compelling.
“This is very exciting because if the spin-zero determination is confirmed, it would be the first elementary particle to have zero spin,” he said.
“So this is really different to anything we have seen before.”
Even more data will be required to explore the question of more “exotic” Higgs particles.
This HuffPo article suggest that there will even be fewer Americans for those Republicans to fool in the future as religion in America hits new low!!
The number of Americans who claim to have no religious affiliation is the highest it has ever been since data on the subject started being collected in the 1930s, new research has found.
Sociologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University analyzed results from the General Social Survey and found that the number of people who do not consider themselves part of an organized religion has jumped dramatically in recent years.
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, the number of “nones” — those who said they were religiously unaffiliated — hovered around 5 percent, Claude Fischer, one of the researchers with UC Berkeley, told The Huffington Post. That number had risen to only 8 percent by 1990.
But since then, the number of people who don’t consider themselves part of a religion has increased to 20 percent.
No wonder Republicans want to tank public education. I’d say there’s a bit of intelligent life left here!
Finally, the Mars Rover “Curiosity” finds some astonishing things on Mars.
The verdict is in: Mars’s Gale Crater was habitable in its distant past, perhaps during the same period in which microbial life was establishing itself on Earth between 3 billion and 4 billion years ago.
That is the conclusion scientists have reached after NASA‘s Mars rover Curiosity analyzed the first sample ever culled from deep in a rock on another planet. Curiosity used a first-of-its-kind drill to extract the sample.
Now, only seven months into its mission – a period set aside primarily for testing the rover’s various instruments – Curiosity has already given researchers the answer to the broad, basic question they set out to answer: Did Mars ever host environments suitable for life?
The issue of habitability is “in the bag,” said John Grotzinger, a planetary geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and the mission’s lead scientist, during a press briefing announcing the results on Tuesday.
The minerals in the tiny, gray, ground-rock sample exposed by Curiosity’s drill speak of abundant standing water, conditions neither too acidic or too alkaline for life, and the minerals that would have provided a ready energy source for microbes, if any had been there.
Wonder what Pat Robertson will say about this?
and what’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Jindal proposes a huge tax increase on the Middle class
Posted: March 14, 2013 Filed under: Bobby Jindal | Tags: ALEC inspired tax abuse 17 Comments
This is almost unbelievable. Jindal’s released his tax plan in a push to eliminate all corporate and income taxes in the state. This plan is likely to kill many small businesses and will push up taxes for the majority of folks in Louisiana. It is also a killer tax for tourist-related industries. This is an ALEC-inspired scheme so it’s possible the plan will pop up in other states with Republican governors. I can’t say enough about Louisiana being the Petri dish for the virus that is ALEC. It is hyper-regressive. It’s a total slam to the purchasing power and incomes of most families and is unlikely to inspire any movement to the state. Most corporations rank life style and availability of good education, cultural events and sports teams above corporate tax schemes when listing relocation criteria.
The proposal — which would tax $1.4 billion in services not currently taxed by the state — will be debated in the legislative session that starts next month.
Legislation detailing the proposal has yet to be filed. However, the Jindal administration gave an overview of the plan, which would take effect in January. The details include:
- Raising state sales tax by 47 percent. The state sales tax would increase from 4 percent to 5.88 percent.
- More than tripling the state cigarette excise tax by raising it from 36 cents a pack to $1.41 a pack. The increase would put Louisiana in line with what Texas charges.
- Eliminating half of the tax exemptions used by the oil and gas industry.
- Creating rebates for poor families and some retirees.
- Erasing scores of tax exemptions, many of which would disappear with the elimination of the state’s personal income and corporate taxes.
The governor’s changes would punt Louisiana to the top of the list of states with the highest combined state and local sales taxes. The average combined rate now would top 10 percent.
Just to give you an idea of what that means to those of us that live and shop in New Orleans:
The planned increase in the sales tax would raise the current rate by about 47 percent and would come on top of local sales taxes. Residents in New Orleans, for example, would pay a combined rate of about 11 percent under the plan.
The proposal also calls for increasing the state’s cigarette tax from 36 cents to $1.41 per pack.
Louisiana already has one of the highest combined average state and local sales tax rate in the country and the increase would put the state at the top of that list, according to information from The Tax Foundation.
Sales taxes would be expanded to some services under the plan, said Tim Barfield, Jindal’s point man on the tax proposal. A number of professional services, such as healthcare, legal services and construction, would be exempt from sales taxes but the administration has not yet produced a definitive list of which services would be taxed.
I think this would just about sew up my already firm habit of buying just about everything but food on the internet.
Senate turning into the Ted Cruz Show: Would you like to play a game of “Wacko Birds”?
Posted: March 14, 2013 Filed under: Republican politics, right wing hate grouups, Tea Party activists | Tags: CPAC, gun control, Ted Cruz 9 CommentsYes, it’s another post demonstrating that Ted Cruz thinks he knows more than everyone else. He continues to spew lectures more appropriate for school children than adults. Cruz lectured Senator Dianne Feinstein on the Constitution. She fired back. You can see her response to his uppity asshole comments.
Feinstein became furious at one point with Cruz, who she saw as lecturing to her about the meaning of the Constitution and why
the framers of that document used certain language.
“I’m not a sixth-grader,” she told the freshman Tea Party favorite. “I’m not a lawyer, but after 20 years, I’ve been up close and personal to the Constitution. I have great respect for it. … It’s fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I’ve been here for a long time. I’ve passed on a number of bills. I’ve studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well-educated, and I thank you for the lecture.”
Cruz responded by asking Feinstein if she also thought she had the power to interpret the First Amendment by deciding what books people could read.
Feinstein said she was happy that child pornography was illegal, and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) stepped in, bringing up controversies in Cruz’s home state over the content of its textbooks.
Ted Cruz seems to be on a fast track to replacing Jim Demint as the most bombastic–and therefore least effective–idiot in the Senate. Given he’s got some great competition in Rand Paul, that says a lot. He’s already garnered comparisons to McCarthy and McCarthyism already. CPAC has declared Cruz its new American Hero and Cruz appears ready to abuse the legacy of Ronald Reagan like the rest of the delusional Republican masses. I wonder how many pictures of Ronald Reagan grace the focal points of Republican toilet stools throughout Red State America? Astrolube to the Stars any one?
Cruz (R-Texas) was the keynote speaker at the annual Weyrich Awards dinner in downtown Washington, a gathering of conservative groups and activists. He’ll deliver the closing speech at CPAC on Saturday evening.
Upon his arrival, Cruz joked about sequestration and Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) recent suggestion that Cruz, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) are “wacko birds.”
“It is wonderful to be among friends or, as some might say, fellow wacko birds,” he said, to laughs from the crowd. “If standing for the Constitution, standing for liberty, standing for values makes one a wacko bird … then I am pleased that birds of a feather flock together.”
Cruz, a Tea Party favorite who rode grassroots enthusiasm to defeat establishment Republican candidate David Dewhurst in a runoff last summer, has been a star of the conservative movement since he took office in January. Cruz spoke for 40 minutes and received multiple standing ovations from the crowd of a few hundred people.
Cruz has his own concept of why Republicans lose elections these days. They’re simply not good enough at lecturing people about their own interests, I guess.
Cruz said that in order to “win the argument” against Democrats, two key words should be “tattooed on every [Republican’s] hand”: “growth” and “opportunity.”
If Republicans can stress those two ideas instead of focusing on cuts and negative ideas, he said, they’ll be able to convince the American people that Republicans are actually the party that’s best for struggling Americans.
“One of the most painful things about being a conservative is how many elected Republicans do not understand that our policies work — and they work especially for those struggling to climb the economic ladder,” he said. “We’re not going to win the argument unless we understand that our ideas work.”
This concept is one that President Ronald Reagan understood, he said.
“President Reagan didn’t have to agonize over a speech about how to convey that because he lived it. He understood this is who we are as Americans and every one of us in this room understands that also.”
It’s a little early in his career to get a good handle on how far this particular “wacko bird” can go but I have a feeling that-unlike Demint–his type of crazy is powered by a few more braincells than your usual neoconfederate revivalist. Get ready to embrace that old timey plantation religion.
Thursday Reads: Goodbye Google Reader, Pope Francis and the Dirty War, and Other News
Posted: March 14, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Ancient Burials, Argentina, dead pigs, Dirty War, Google Reader, James Holmes, Pope Francis, Shanghai River, Steubenville Rape Trial, truth serum 37 Comments
Good Morning!!
For the mainstream media, the big news yesterday was the election of a new pope. I’ll get to that shortly, but first I’ll address the even bigger news for bloggers–the imminent demise of Google Reader. Google announced last night that it will be shutting down the popular application on July 1.
From The Atlantic Wire: Like a Dagger to Bloggers’ Hearts, Google Just Killed Google Reader.
Journalists and geeks united in exasperation on Wednesday evening when Google made a very sad announcement: The company is shuttering Google Reader. We should’ve seen this coming. And those that didn’t see the inevitable death of Google’s RSS feed organizer and reader might’ve easily missed the news, since Google buried it halfway down an official blog post about a bunch of other stuff. But it is true. The search giant will pronounce Reader dead on July 1, 2013. Based on the somewhat storied history of Google killing Reader features, though, we’re pretty sure someone will start working on an alternative within the next few hours.
Apparently most computer geeks weren’t surprised, because Google stopped updating and servicing the reader back in 2011, even when they could have done so using cloud computing. But plenty of people were freaking out. Immediately after the announcement, twitter went nuts and the pope jokes faded into the background. Here’s Tom Watson at Forbes: Google’s Strange Attack on Bloggers and the Public Internet: the Massive Reaction to Reader Shutdown.
Does Google understand the concept of corporate social responsibility? That seems to be the basic question around the company’s strange decision to shut down a tiny service that serves as a major audience conduit for many thousands of bloggers, citizen journalists, and self publishers.
Google’s announcement today that it is destroying Google Reader, the most popular RSS syndication tool was a massive blow to the blogging community – and to most of those speaking out tonight via social media, an entirely unnecessary attack on an important corner of the public Internet by a company with more than $50 billion in revenue and a newly-won reputation as a tech giant on the move.
“That giant “NOOOOOOOO” sound is the Internet’s reaction to Google’s most unpopular decision in — well, as far back as I can remember,” wrote Pete Cashmore at Mashable, in a post emblematic of the flood of negative reaction to Google’s strange decision.
The thing is, Google is the giant gorilla of the internet–so it can do whatever it wants and everyone else has to just deal with it. Here are some articles with suggestions of how to do that, but be aware that things could change quickly. I downloaded Feed Demon last night, and then learned that it is now going to go out of business when Google reader shuts down.
Lifehacker: Google Reader Is Shutting Down; Here Are the Best Alternatives
Ars Techinica: Poll Technica: Where should we go when Google Reader is put out to pasture?
Forbes: Google Reader and the Underpants Gnomes
ComputerWorld: Google Reader alternatives roundup; RSS FTW!
Now, on to pope news.
I found some articles last night that address the biography of Pope Francis a hell of a lot more realistically that the corporate media did yesterday. The best is probably this one by investigative reporter Robert Parry: ‘Dirty War’ Questions for Pope Francis.
If one wonders if the U.S. press corps has learned anything in the decade since the Iraq War – i.e. the need to ask tough question and show honest skepticism – it would appear from the early coverage of the election of Pope Francis I that U.S. journalists haven’t changed at all, even at “liberal” outlets like MSNBC.
The first question that a real reporter should ask about an Argentine cleric who lived through the years of grotesque repression, known as the “dirty war,” is what did this person do, did he stand up to the murderers and torturers or did he go with the flow. If the likes of Chris Matthews and other commentators on MSNBC had done a simple Google search, they would have found out enough about Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to slow their bubbling enthusiasm.
Bergoglio, now the new Pope Francis I, has been identified publicly as an ally of Argentine’s repressive leaders during the “dirty war” when some 30,000 people were “disappeared” or killed, many stripped naked, chained together, flown out over the River Plate or the Atlantic Ocean and pushed sausage-like out of planes to drown.
The “disappeared” included women who were pregnant at the time of their arrest. In some bizarre nod to Catholic theology, they were kept alive only long enough to give birth before they were murdered and their babies were farmed out to military families, including to people directly involved in the murder of the babies’ mothers.
Instead of happy talk about how Bergoglio seems so humble and how he seems so sympathetic to the poor, there might have been a question or two about what he did to stop the brutal repression of poor people and activists who represented the interests of the poor, including “liberation theology” priests and nuns, during the “dirty war.”
More at the link. Some other sources of information on Bergoglio:
Alternet: Cardinals Elect a New Pope from Argentina — Does the New Pontiff Come with a Dark Past?
2005 story in LA Times: Argentine Cardinal Named in Kidnap Lawsuit
Via Greg Mitchell, a 2011 article from The Guardian: The sins of the Argentinian church
A final note–I’ve heard that the name chosen by the new pope may not be a tribute the St. Francis. More likely after St. Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuits.
In other news…
Yesterday was the first day of the Steubenville rape trial. The Atlantic Wire is following the story closely, so it is probably the best source for updates. From yesterday:
Enter the Trial in Steubenville, Where the Cast Is Not Merely Football Players
The case of two high-school star football players accused of raping a 16-year-old girl as they travelled party to party last summer finally heads to trial on Wednesday morning in Steubenville, Ohio, the small fading steel town that became the focus of a social-media firestorm in big-time football country this winter. As the spotlight returns with open media access around but not inside Jefferson Country juvenile court, America will start putting faces to names that have been dragged through the headlines as violently as that Jane Doe from West Virginia allegedly was, while heavily intoxicated, on August 11. But a lot has happened since the hackers and leakers and protesters descended upon the town of 18,000 with a tortured past, beyond the shooting threats and the revoked scholarships and the FBI investigation — indeed, there were even developments late Tuesday night: The country may have looked elsewhere, but there’s a new judge after ties to Big Red football forced yet another legal player to recuse himself, and the hackers have now returned to the social-media pile-on as investigations into police cover-ups have given way to actual prosecution in the courtroom, where the alleged victim might testify after all, her friends can now testify against her, and the suspects are already speaking out.
The article then offers “a who’s who” of everyone involved in the crime and the trial. A couple more links:
The Steubenville Defense Will Center on Date Rape Not Existing
America Finally Hears the Case for the Victim on First Day of Steubenville Trial
On the trial of James Holmes in Aurora, Colorado, Time Magazine had a shocking report yesterday: Judge in Aurora Case Calls for Use of ‘Truth Serum’— But Does It Work?
If accused Aurora mass shooter James Holmes wants to enter a plea of insanity in the “Batman” movie theater massacre, he will have to agree to narcoanalysis.
That’s the ruling from judge William Sylvester, who made the narcoanalysis— in which defendants are injected with drugs to lower their inhibitions and presumably be more willing to tell the truth about their alleged crimes under questioning by prosecutors — a condition of an insanity plea.
WTF?! There’s no way forcing a defendant to take truth serum could be constitutional.
Experts were surprised by the legal determination that “truth serum” could be required in order for Holmes to use the insanity defense. They say that drugs touted for “narcoanalysis,” which typically include the barbiturates sodium amytal and sodium pentothal, are are not effective and certainly not reliable enough to meet legal standards of evidence.
“I was floored by it,” says Scott Lilienfeld, professor of psychology at Emory University upon learning of the ruling, “The claim that truth serum is truth serum is no longer taken seriously by anyone in the scientific community to my knowledge.” Moreover, Colorado is one of the states that apply the “Daubert” standard, in which scientific evidence can be disputed by the defense or prosecution. It requires that evidence meet certain standards to be admissible.
To pass the Daubert test, truth serum would have to be widely accepted in the scientific community and research literature and its use would have to yield a known error rate, both standards that experts say narcoanalysis does not meet. “In my view, it would not stand up,” says Lilienfeld.
But a former prosecutor, now a law professor at the University of Colorado and defense attorney, Karen Steinhauser, told CBS News that the technique is allowed under Colorado law. However, it is used so rarely she could not find any relevant case law.
Unbelievable!
The mystery of the thousands of dead pigs floating in China’s Shanghai River has been solved. Bloomberg: Shanghai Finds 6,600 Dead Pigs as Farm Confesses to Dumping
The number of dead pigs found in Shanghai’s Huangpu river climbed to at least 6,600 as the official Xinhua News Agency reported a farm in neighboring Zhejiang province confessed to dumping carcasses in the water.
The municipal government pulled 685 hogs from the river yesterday, adding to the 5,916 it had retrieved earlier, according to a statement on its website. A farm in Jiaxing admitted to discarding dead pigs in the river, after 70,000 of the animals died in the city from crude raising techniques and extreme weather at the start of the year, Xinhua said yesterday, citing the Jiaxing authorities. The Xinhua report didn’t specify whether other farms were involved in the dumping.
The discovery of the hogs comes as China’s legislature addresses food safety and citizens become more vocal on public health and environmental issues. The government said March 10 at a National People’s Congress meeting that it plans to create a regulator with broader authority to ensure food and drug safety and said the agriculture ministry will oversee the quality of farm products.
Finally, Beata posted this ancient burial news link this morning in the late night thread, and I thought I’d include it here to make sure that Dakinikat and JJ see it: ‘Medieval knight’ unearthed in Edinburgh car park dig
The remains of a medieval knight or nobleman found underneath a car park are to be moved to make way for a university building.
The grave and evidence of a 13th Century monastery were uncovered when archaeologists were called to an Edinburgh Old Town building site.
An elaborate sandstone slab, with carvings of a Calvary Cross and ornate sword, marked the grave.
It’s amazing what’s buried under parking lots in Great Britain!
Hey–I managed to avoid news about the economy and Village politics, and I wasn’t even trying! Now it’s your turn. What are you reading and blogging about this morning?
peej
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ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
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Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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