Category: Everything Else

“The West Wing” wouldn’t have been the same without Leo McGarry. And we lost him today. 58 is way too young.

I’m surprised that Governor Schwarzenegger denied clemency to Williams.

From the information I have currently, I think I would have granted clemency simply because it seems to me that Williams alive provides a service to society by continuing to speak out about why gangs are bad. Williams can’t do that dead, plus his execution could polarize some members of the community in negative ways. I have not done an exhaustive review of the case though, so perhaps if I examined all the facts I might feel differently.

To be clear: I am not opposed to the death penalty as a concept. I believe that there are some crimes that display such a complete disregard for your fellow humans that it is not unreasonable to deprive the person who commits those crimes of his life as the price of their acts. That said, I am well aware that the American judicial system has massive systemic problems that result in the death penalty being applied unfairly. I think there should be a moratorium on its implementation until such time as we can fix those inequities.

Or put more simply, the system is broken, but I still think that some really evil bastards deserve to fry for what they did.

As I was doing my morning pass through my Bloglines feeds, I noted AmericaBlog’s John in DC calling attention to a piece in the Washington Post about whether extreme bigotry should be considered a mental illness.

John takes that ball and runs with it:

We should set a long-term goal to get the psychological and psychiatric associations to officially make bigotry a mental disorder. The religious right would flip, fun in and of itself, but this would set the tone for an entire change in the culture, where prejudice of any kind of is considered the work of sick people.

I have two problems with that advice; one scientific, the other tactical.

First, the science. While it seems pretty clear that the people talked about in the WaPo are indeed mentally ill, I wonder whether the bigotry displayed isn’t really just a symptom of the underlying disorder. Do we really need to create a new illness for this, or is it more likely that that the people in question are actually suffering from paranoia, or schizophrenia, or some other already-identified diseases?

Next, the tactics. Choosing “They’re mentally ill!” as a tactic with which to attack the Religious Right is not helpful. For if you accept the underlying premise, then prejudice against bigots also falls into the illness category. In other words, when both sides get to flog the other with accusations of mental illness on top of all the other mud they fling at each other, nothing really changes. And the people who really need help still won’t get it.

Finally, Shakespeare’s Sister beat me to the punch with the excellent observation:

Bigotry isn

RIP JFK.

Don’t let it be forgot
that once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot

Jacqueline Kennedy (as she was then called) said it best in the Life Magazine interview of her, the week after JFK was assassinated:

There’ll be great presidents again … but there’ll never be another Camelot again. Once, the more I read of history, the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes.

Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the book and lyrics to Camelot and in whose autobiography I found the quote above, said that he was never able to watch a production of Camelot again afterwards.

On the weekend before Thanksgiving six years ago, I bought my first-ever car: a Saturn SL2. It’s a great car that has taken me safely through two nasty accidents, still gets 30+ MPGs on the highway, and is very reliable. I will probably drive it until it falls apart.

So to wake up to the news that the Spring Hill, TN plant where my Saturn was made is slated to be closed was a little sad. It’s been years since Saturn was the “different kind of car company” it started out as. These days, Saturns are made in a number of GM plants, have reverted to steel frames, and are generally Just Another GM Brand. When the day finally comes that I do get another car, it’s not likely it will be a Saturn.

I wish I’d been able to get to see the Spring Hill plant in its heyday.

Wow, I go out to study for a few hours and all sorts of stuff hits the fan in Israel.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will quit his ruling Likud ahead of snap elections and form a new centrist party.

[snip]

Sharon will tear apart the movement he helped found to break from the far-right Likud “rebels” who opposed his withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip and potentially free him to give up more land that Palestinians seek for a state.

But the 77-year-old’s gamble is possibly the biggest of a military and political career built on risk-taking and polls indicate it is uncertain he can turn the popularity of the Gaza pullout into electoral victory.

Dumping the hardliners and moving towards the center. Good move. I hope it succeeds.

It will be interesting to see how the tinfoil hat crew responds. So many of them are convinced that Sharon is some kind of evil puppet master; I wonder how they’ll spin this?