I know, I know. . . in year eight of the Bush-Cheney regime, we all know: things are not how they should be. They break our laws, take our money, and kill our children—and lie, lie, lie—it’s like breathing to them, and nothing should surprise us anymore. At this point, our cynical meters have pinned in the red zone; we console ourselves—or try to—with the knowledge that come next January, these criminals will be ushered into the dustbin of history. We’d like a little more accountability, but we’ll start with just getting these imperious, greedy cowards the fuck out of our White House.
And, yet, with all that scumbag fatigue, two stories from Wednesday’s news were still enough to spike my blood pressure, and dilate the pupils in my half-open/half-shut eyes.
First was the fourth part of a series called Careless Detention running in the Washington Post. The headline on page A1:
Some Detainees Are Drugged For Deportation Immigrants Sedated Without Medical Reason
When I was out on the road today, I got to thinking about how much it costs to maintain and drive an automobile. Doing some quick calculations in my head, I came up with a rough estimate of $8000 a year for my family's two vehicles. That figure includes one car payment, gasoline, insurance, taxes, maintenance, and repairs. $8000 represents 20% of our household income - almost equal to the national average of 19%, according to the Thoreau Institute. This figure has risen from 10% in 1935 and 14% in 1960.
Let's get hypothetical for a moment. Let's assume that every American household spends $8000 a year on transportation. That comes to a total of $880 billion for the entire country. Now, let's assume that we all reduce our transportation costs by 10%; we can car pool, buy more fuel efficient cars, buy less expensive cars, drive less, drive slower, and do a lot of other things.
Suppose we could take the money we've saved and pool it together - about $88 billion.
Just imagine what kind of public transportation systems we could build with an $88 billion annual budget. For comparison, the federal government currently budgets about $40 billion per year for highways, some of which could also be diverted toward public transportation since we'll be driving less and needing fewer new roads.
The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, the U.S. government's top psychiatric researcher said.
Community mental health centers, hobbled by financial limits, haven't provided enough scientifically sound care, especially in rural areas, said Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He briefed reporters today at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in Washington.
Insel echoed a Rand Corporation study published last month that found about 20 percent of returning U.S. soldiers have post- traumatic stress disorder or depression, and only half of them receive treatment. About 1.6 million U.S. troops have fought in the two wars since October 2001, the report said. About 4,560 soldiers had died in the conflicts as of today, the Defense Department reported on its Web site.
Based on those figures and established suicide rates for similar patients who commonly develop substance abuse and other complications of post-traumatic stress disorder, "it's quite possible that the suicides and psychiatric mortality of this war could trump the combat deaths," Insel said.
CBS has been doing a good job covering the issue of suicides among veterans. From November:
And again, from last week:
I'm going to do something horrible and politicize this issue. John McCain claims that he is veterans' best friend. His website states (amid a long list of ways he says he supports veterans):
John McCain has voted consistently to increase funding for veterans' benefits, recognizing that the people who serve our country should get priority over the disgraceful amounts of spending on corporate subsidies and wasteful pork barrel spending.
But this is a straight up lie. John McCain has hardly done everything he can to help soldiers after they've completed their service, least of all at the expense of corporate subsidies. As Think Progress, among many others, have noted:
Not only has he refused to support the 21st Century GI Bill, which the Veterans of Foreign Wars endorsed last June, he has consistently voted against increasing funding for the Veterans’ Administration, which oversees all medical care for veterans:
– Voted AGAINST an amendment providing $20 billion to the VA’s medical facilities. [5/4/06]
– Voted AGAINST providing $430 million to the VA for outpatient care “and treatment for veterans,” one of only 13 senators to do so. [4/26/06]
– Voted AGAINST increasing VA funding by $1.5 billion by closing corporate loopholes. [3/14/06]
– Voted AGAINST increasing VA funding by $1.8 billion by ending “abusive tax loopholes.” [3/10/04]
– Voted AGAINST a $650 million increase in veterans’ medical care funding. [8/1/01]
Seminal readers, I did some searching and came up empty-handed. Can you find a single veteran's group that has endorsed John McCain?
This morning the Washington Postreports that the military commission set up to try terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay is moving at a glacier pace, and is unlikely to try any of the 9/11 suspects before George W. Bush leaves office.
Efforts to bring detainees before a court within the framework of the ramshackle 2006 Military Commission Act have been wrought with legal challenges and delays, over the rules of the proceedings, over whether evidence obtained using torture is admissible, over whether waterboarding is torture, over whether defense attorneys can access classified information that helps their clients, and even over basic technical elements like courtroom interpreting.
In seven years, not a single detainee at Guantanamo has seen a trial. The first full case, of Osama Bin Laden's former driver Salim Ahmed Hamdan, is scheduled to begin June 2nd, however, Hamdan himself stated last week that he wants no part of the commission:
In a 40-minute exchange with Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, who is presiding over the case, Hamdan said that he would do anything to get into a regular American courtroom and that the military commissions process is a sham designed to trap him at Guantanamo Bay. He said his victory in a 2006 Supreme Court case, which forced the government to rewrite the rules for military commissions, was hollow because he has been incarcerated for seven years without any change in his conditions.
"I would like the law, I would like justice. Nothing else," Hamdan said.
“I believe it would be important to get every member of Congress on record: Do they stand with the hard-pressed Americans who are trying to pay their gas bills at the gas station or do they stand once again with the oil companies? I want to know where people stand, and I want them to tell us: Are they with us or against us when it comes to taking on the oil companies?”
The senator alludes in this false choice idiocy, to the gas tax plan she supports—a course so dislodged from sound fiscal policy that it merits endorsement by Senator McCain. Which is no exaggeration, because the senior senator from Arizona is perpetuating the same economic bastardization.
“Talk about a dumb idea. It will only encourage Americans to drive more, thereby increasing demand and causing gas prices to rise even higher. Driving more will also put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which fuels global warming. And this will cost taxpayers some $10 billion. It's a cheap political gimmick that does nothing to stem the rising price of oil.”
Climate change aside, this type of result should be expected anytime demand is stimulated in a market that has a supply ceiling, and an uncomfortably low one at that. An argument could probably even be made for raising said tax, to encourage lower demands and the conservation that comes with that, but this is of course is an election year, and not one friendly to people who think that far in advance.
The Houston Law Review will soon publish a new study that offers the first conclusive evidence that convicted defendants' race affects their sentencing. From the NY Times:
[The study] has found two sorts of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty there, one commonplace and one surprising.
The unexceptional finding is that defendants who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks. More than 20 studies around the nation have come to similar conclusions.
But the new study also detected a more straightforward disparity. It found that the race of the defendant by itself plays a major role in explaining who is sentenced to death.
You would think this study would serve as sufficient grounds for abolishing the death penalty. After all, the Fourteenth Amendment ensures equal protection of the law, including due process, to all citizens regardless of race, while the Eighth Amendment protects individuals from excessive, cruel, or unusual punishment. In 1987, civil rights attorneys used a similar study to challenge the Constitutionality of the death penalty on these grounds, to no avail:
Twenty-one years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that even solid statistical evidence of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty did not offend the Constitution. The vote was 5 to 4, and the case was McCleskey v. Kemp. That ruling closed off what had seemed to opponents of the death penalty a promising line of attack, and they are still furious about it.
But the results of this study are more robust than the one used in 1987, and the judge who wrote the majority opinion in McCleskey stated after retiring that it was the only ruling of his career he regretted.
Perhaps with a new study (and a new set of Justices…might have to wait a bit on that one, based on how uninterested the Court seemed this week in ensuring equal protection of voting rights) opponents of capital punishment will soon get another day in Court.
Reading through reports on yesterday’s Supreme Court decision upholding an Indiana voter ID law, and reading about the rules imposed by Indiana’s Republican legislature on potential voters—most notably presentation of a valid, unexpired, Indiana state or US federal government-issued photo ID at the polls before voting—my mind quickly leapt to the image of Seinfeld’s infamous Soup Nazi. That character (based on real-life New York soup-maker and martinet Al Yaganeh) was famous for offering the most coveted cup of soup in the city, but to deal with the long lines that formed at lunchtime, the soup man imposed a set of strictures—know what you want in advance, no questions, substitutions, or special requests, move to the left after ordering, cash only, have your money ready—that it struck fear in the hearts of many customers. If the sense of intimidation lead to hesitation or an inadvertent violation of a rule, the chef would deny service with the shouted admonition, “No soup for you!”
In Indiana (where the demand for $15-a-cup lobster bisque just isn’t as great as it is in Manhattan) the soup in this case is the ballot—and the rules make it very easy for poll workers to tell thousands of aspiring voters, “No vote for you.” Thousands more will be too intimidated or discouraged to even go to the polls and ask for their “soup.”
Our good friend Art Levine will be on BlogTalk Radio right now discussing the underreported voting problems in Tuesday's Pennsylvania Primary and the possibility (or not) for voting reform that will make our mechanisms of democracy accessible and secure.
That little cheer you heard on Tuesday afternoon, rising above the noxious symphony of a thousand backhoes and jackhammers that serves as the soundtrack for lower Manhattan these days, well, that was me, celebrating the news that the embattled head of New York City’s Department of Buildings, Pat “Splat” Lancaster, had finally stepped up and stepped down.
Lancaster, who has served as Commissioner for the entire reign of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was originally tasked with modernizing the DoB. . . which, under Bloody Mike, meant making it run more smoothly so that developers (don’t call them greedy, just call them Mike’s “base”) could demolish old New York, build their banal office towers, super-luxury high-rises, and boondoggle developments, and cash out before term limits forced a change at City Hall.
And to that end, I’d have to say Lancaster’s tenure has been an, er, um, smashing success.
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