the view from below

I love it when despots and despotic wannabes bicker.

John Darnielle of the band The Mountain Goats was asked by Weekend America to write a song for Super Tuesday. Darnielle writes on The Mountain Goats site:

Who do you think about when you think about politicians? Right, me too.

Lyrics:

“Down to the Ark”

The candidates met up in North Dakota
And they donned their black robes there in the chapel hall
They said a brief invocation to their cloven-hoofed prince
And they signed their names in blood on the vestry wall

In Christ you know there’s neither high nor low
And the void will claim all creatures small or bright
Seal up the borders or let everybody in
In the order of the serpent, there’ll be neither left nor right

And we pull down our blindfolds
And we reach out for the lever in the dark
Get a sticker for our shirts as we head into the sun
Proudly bearing the mark
Headed down to the ark

The applicants went down to Oklahoma
And they hired an accent coach to teach them the western twang
And several post-born babies learned the hard way:
Vampires only kiss you if they’ve sharpened up their fangs

And as Minnesota fell, so went Missouri
We met at VFWs in the snow
And we voted down the tax codes, and we voted down the war
So many names to choose from, just one way to go.

Go here to give the song a listen.

(Hat tip to Kehlkopfmikrofon.)

Explore similar themes more fully: “Satan, Government and Christian Anarchy” by Greg Boyd.

Sandy Szwarc of Junkfood Science writes about proposed legislation in Mississippi to forbid restaurants to serve diners who are designated obese by the state’s definition. Under the legislation, people with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or higher will be designated “obese,” and restaurants who serve such patrons will risk having their business license revoked.

Imagine the scenario: you walk into a restaurant, approach the hostess stand, and are subsequently asked to step on a device that measures your height and weight and calculates your BMI. If your BMI is less than 30, you get to eat. If it is 30 or higher, service is refused.

Szwarc questioned whether the legislation is serious, or just a pathetic attempt to make a point:

I called lead author, Rep. Mayhall, and asked if this was serious legislation or tongue-in-cheek to make a point. He kindly took a moment to answer my question while the legislature was in session. He said that while, regrettably, he doesn’t believe his bill will pass, this is serious. He wrote it, he said, because of the “urgency of the obesity crisis and need for government action.” He hopes it will “call attention to the serious problem of obesity and what it is costing the Medicare system.”

I wish I could say I am shocked, but this type of legislation is inevitable in today’s political climate.

See also:
Women’s Health News and Music City Bloggers

The next time you get caught in some relatively minor bureaucratic nightmare, consider the case of Paul House. House is very literally rotting away on Tennessee’s Death Row for a crime he didn’t commit. House was convicted of the 1985 rape and murder of Carolyn Muncey. House was sentenced to death because he was convicted of both rape and murder. He was convicted of rape because forensic testing revealed that semen found on Muncey’s clothing was consistent with House’s blood type. He was convicted of murder because blood stains found on a pair of House’s pants was Muncey’s blood.

Sounds all neat and tidy, right?

Everything is not always as it appears on the surface, of course. DNA testing later revealed the semen belonged to Muncey’s husband, not House. (This alone should have been enough to at least review House’s sentence, since he was only sentenced to death because he was convicted of rape and murder. Furthermore, the state argued in the original trial that the rape was the motivating factor for the murder. Since House did not commit the rape as first thought, it calls the whole case into question.) Numerous questions arose around the handling of the evidence in the case. While the blood found on House’s clothing did belong to Muncey, it apparently arrived there after the clothing was confiscated due to leakage or spillage of some of Muncey’s blood onto House’s clothing taken into evidence.

Finally, there are the questions surrounding Muncey’s husband, a man described by several acquaintances as a heavy drinker who threatened and physically abused his wife. Witnesses have stated that Mr. Muncey admitted to accidentally killing his wife during a drunken argument. These witnesses were all available to testify at the original trial, but House’s court-appointed defense attorney neglected to call any of them to testify.

While all of this was being discovered, House was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. His physical condition has now deteriorated to the point where he must use a wheelchair for mobility and can no longer feed himself.

After years of legal wrangling, House’s case eventually made its way to the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2002. In a 7 - 4 decision, the court ruled that Tennessee courts should examine the new evidence presented since House’s conviction. The State of Tennessee waited two years before “respectfully declining” the Federal Court’s mandate.

In June, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the case and ruled that “the central forensic proof connecting House to the crime — the blood and the semen — has been called into question, and House has put forward substantial evidence pointing to a different suspect.” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote House had “sufficiently demonstrated his innocence” and “no reasonable juror viewing the record as a whole would lack reasonable doubt.” The Supreme Court then sent the case back to federal district judge Harry S. Mattice, Jr. Mattice then gave the State of Tennessee 180 days to either release House or give him a new trial.

One would think the next steps for Tennessee would be simple: Either give House a new trial, or — and this would seem to be the more sensible thing — release House and try Hubert Muncey for murdering his wife. One would be wrong. Tennessee Attorney General Bob Cooper filed an appeal of Mattice’s ruling, and then asked Mattice to stay his 180-day order. Cooper claimed that releasing House would pose a “danger to the community.” Keep in mind that House can neither walk nor feed himself. (Mattice has not ruled on this request as of this writing.)

Paul House has spent over 20 years on Tennessee’s death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Even the United States Supreme Court agrees that no jury would be able to convict House today based on the evidence presented at the original trial. The only reason House remains imprisoned is that the state of Tennessee refuses to admit it made a mistake.

Furthermore, a sickening sort of politicization is at play here. Death penalty advocates refuse to accept the state could have made a mistake, because they are afraid doing so reinforces the arguments of death penalty opponents. The exhaustive efforts made to exonerate House are seen as nothing more than legal shenanigans aimed at freeing a guilty prisoner. Following is a sampling of the absurd comments I have seen in various online forums discussing the case:

“Just because the semen found on Muncey’s body and clothing don’t match House’s doesn’t mean he didn’t try to rape her.”

“I refuse to believe the police would have been dumb enough to transport the vials of Muncey’s blood in the same container as House’s clothing.” (Forensics experts have stated the blood on the clothing is consistent with “splashing” and likely occurred after the clothing was confiscated. Also, the police took four vials of Muncey’s blood, but only two and one-half vials made it to the FBI lab for analysis, and one of the vials appeared to have leaked.)

“There was a full trial with a judge & jury that heard this case in 1986. They found the man guilty. He is guilty. He needs to die. Get over it!”

“I trust the decision of the first jury, and I hope they eventually fry Paul for what he did to that poor woman.”

“This is just another case of a bunch of liberal lawyers wasting a lot of taxpayer money on appeals for a guilty man.”

Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen should do the practical, humane and just thing and issue a pardon for House, but Bredesen has stated that he prefers to let this case be resolved through legal channels. The only problem with that recourse is that while this legal tug-of-war continues, House remains imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit.

For additional information, see:
Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing (TCASK)
“Paul House should not be on Tennessee’s death row” by Peter Irons
“Criminal Science: The Paul House Case” by Simon Cooper (pdf)

Update: In the interest of accuracy, I want to point out that I am unsure if House was actually convicted of rape. The state certainly implied during the trial that Mrs. Muncey was raped, or at least that House tried to rape her, and, as stated above, the state considered the rape or attempted rape as the motivation for the murder, but it appears House was never actually charged with or convicted of rape.

I often feel overwhelmed with the outpouring of negative stories concerning the actions of various government entities. My cynical self tends to want to just write all of society off as hopelessly corrupt and crawl in a hole somewhere. I keep having to remind myself this isn’t a truly viable option.

Maybe I’m too idealistic (a charge directed at me rather frequently), or maybe I just expect too much from people, but I simply cannot understand how people can continue to defend the actions of government officials. Last week, I made some acquaintances aware of Roderick Long’s Petition to Abolish the Government of the USA. Here is one response I received:

Among the problems with abolishing government: in light of the human development that has occurred over the last few thousand years or so, it would in the short term at least take more bureaucracy to successfully dismantle government (and I would mark success or failure by death rates, starvation rates, homelessness rates, etc.) than to keep government running as it is. And then, in addition, miniature governments would simply spring up in the place of the big government that used to exist. Or, alternatively, the entire nation might turn into the Convention Center after Katrina.

The government is more than the IRS and the FBI. The government is your schools and your roads and your monetary system and your public housing - and once the government is gone, you’ve got to re-create all or some of that in a way that’s also profitable, because otherwise you have to implement a system of taxation - in other words, government. And if roads are built based on either where the tolls are profitable or where the citizens have enough wealth to build them out-of-pocket, and schools are built and run based on who can manage to construct, staff, and maintain them, then you still have a power system - it’s just a loose, uncheckable power system that ruins the lives of the rural and the poor.

I’m sure many would recognize this as another variation of the all-too-familiar argument, “Well government may not work that well, but it is better than any other ideas anyone has had.” But I am always left wondering how anyone knows this to be true, or more aptly: Do the supposed good things that government promotes (and, for the record, I think the benefits derived from any government program are very debatable) outweigh the bad things government does?

So, it is with this in mind that I read this story a friend pointed out in The Washington Independent yesterday.

You see, after the events of 9/11, the Bush Administration ordered the CIA to hone its interrogation skills, something in which it had not been particularly proficient prior to that time, with very questionable, if not disastrous results.

Despite having nearly no off-the-shelf experience, the CIA was tasked by President Bush to come up with a robust interrogation program for the most important al-Qaeda captives. So the agency turned to its partners for assistance in designing its interrogation regimen: Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia—all countries cited by the State Department for using torture—among others.

And the results of this misguided directive? It depends on who you ask:

In short, despite innumerable statements from the Bush administration about the value of the CIA’s interrogation program, U.S. interrogators are still mostly in the dark—in the dark not only about al-Qaeda, but about how to effectively elicit vital national-security information from the detainees in its custody.

Despite warnings that torture really isn’t a very effective method for getting prisoners to yield information, the mysterious members of the CIA who conducted the torture (”Also unclear is who exactly conducted the interrogations, and what skill sets they had.”) continued the practice, despite misgivings among many of the people in charge.

The former senior official in operations recalled taking his concerns about torture to colleagues at the agency. “I made it clear that I thought it was unwise,” he said. “To a senior level. This was no later than 2003. I am being candid—it’s not like there was an argument. Everyone was like, ‘We got into this goddamn thing, and there was not any choice.’”

Now, I can guess what you are thinking, “Oh, man! That is terrible. Bush & Co. are awful. I’ll be glad when they’re gone. What’s for lunch?” But the truly chilling part of this story is the long term effects.

Nearly seven years after 9/11, the Intelligence Science Board finds CIA interrogations are still on a poor footing. The legacy of torture will be with the U.S. in myriad ways for a long time: perhaps through a prosecution of Rodriguez, or even interrogators themselves; perhaps through innocent Iraqis tortured by U.S. officials who then become terrorists and seek revenge; perhaps through its effect on interrogators themselves. “You don’t torture people and lead a normal life afterwards,” the former senior Operations official said.

I implore you to think about that last paragraph. At least remember it the next time some “evil terrorists” try to blow up some innocent Americans, or you see a news story about some CIA-trained monster going on a killing spree.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this article last night while I watched the sickening spectacle that was President Bush’s State of the Union Address. And I wasn’t just disgusted by the words the President was saying; I was equally disgusted by the people in that room with him who stood and applauded after each “money line.” I finally gave up and went outside and stacked firewood.

Where is the moral outrage? How can anyone defend the actions of government?

I’m going to crawl back in my hole now.

Austin Bean, a 19-year-old Nashville, Tennessee resident, was convicted on the charge of coercing a witness for posting a threatening message on the MySpace page of a 15-year-old girl who was scheduled to testify against a friend of Bean’s who was in jail. During Bean’s trial, it was discovered that he had posted a message on his MySpace page that stated “Police are Pigs,” or something to that effect. Bean’s MySpace page also supposedly included “glorification of guns and gangs.”

Upon Bean’s conviction, Judge Mark J. Fishburn sentenced Bean to two years probation. The conditions of his probation? That Bean stand outside Metro Nashville police headquarters for four hours twice a month holding a sign that reads, “Respect the police, they are not pigs as I stated on my MySpace page” and “There is nothing funny about guns and nothing cool about gangs.”

Bean’s public defender argued that the conditions of the probation were a violation of Bean’s First Amendment rights to free speech. Judge Fishburn saw a discrepancy in Bean’s repentant testimony and the content of his Web page. The Judge said his intention in the condition of the probation was to “to assist in the rehabilitation Bean testified he was seeking.”

Judge Fishburn did amend the conditions so Bean only has to stand outside the police headquarters for four hours once a month.

Bean, obviously having discovered a newfound respeck for authority, now says he wants to become a homicide detective.

The story is here.

Club 8’s The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming was a most pleasant surprise in 2007. It gets my vote for album of the year, hands down. Club 8 is Karolina Komstedt and Johan Angergård, and they record on Angergård’s Swedish label Labrador, whose praises I have sung here previously. (Angergård is also a member of the band The Acid House Kings and the driving force behind The Legends.)

There isn’t a bad song on The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming, but my favorite is the opening track, “Jesus, Walk With Me.” I just discovered the following video of Komstedt and Angergård performing the song in a church in Sweden.

Incidentally, Labrador just released the album on vinyl.