The NY Times'
Bob Herbert, a relentless voice of conscience on the Bush regime's record on prisoner abuse and torture, reacts to recent news revealing dozens of murders of prisoners in U.S. custody.
Arkan Mohammed Ali is a 26-year-old Iraqi who was detained by the U.S. military for nearly a year at various locations, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. According to a lawsuit filed against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Ali was at times beaten into unconsciousness during interrogations. He was stabbed, shocked with an electrical device, urinated on and kept locked - hooded and naked - in a wooden, coffinlike box. He said he was told by his captors that soldiers could kill detainees with impunity.
More pundits below, including:
- Frank Rich on Schiavo
- Kinsley tries to connect Soc Sec and Schiavo
- Ron Brownstein on "smart guns"
- Molly Ivins on the inexcusable mercury scandal behind "Clear Skies"
- And, of course, the daily cartoon
Where's Dirty Harry when ya really need him?
Frank Rich throws in on the Schiavo mess, noting that Cecil DeMille had nothing on Tom Delay:
The religio-hucksterism surrounding the Schiavo case makes DeMille's Hollywood crusades look like amateur night. This circus is the latest and most egregious in a series of cultural shocks that have followed Election Day 2004, when a fateful exit poll question on "moral values" ignited a take-no-prisoners political grab by moral zealots. During the commercial interruptions on "The Ten Commandments" last weekend, viewers could surf over to the cable news networks and find a Bible-thumping show as only Washington could conceive it. Congress was floating such scenarios as staging a meeting in Ms. Schiavo's hospital room or, alternatively, subpoenaing her, her husband and her doctors to a hearing in Washington. All in the name of faith.
Like many Americans, I suspect, I tried to picture how I would have reacted if a bunch of smarmy, camera-seeking politicians came anywhere near a hospital room where my own relative was hooked up to life support. I imagined summoning the Clint Eastwood of "Dirty Harry," not "Million Dollar Baby." But before my fantasy could get very far, star politicians with the most to gain from playing the God card started hatching stunts whose extravagant shamelessness could upstage any humble reverie of my own.
Bush's principles between SS and Schiavo?
Michael Kinsley tries to figure out what consistency in a President "probably more motivated by principled belief than any other recent president."
And before you burst into flames, the rest of that paragraph:
He enjoys the stubborn conviction of the unreflective mind. Unfortunately -- or fortunately for the Democrats -- his principled convictions are often wrong and sometimes unpopular. This leaves an opening for rival principled convictions, if only the Democrats had some to spare.
There is no mystery. The common denominator is perceived political opportunism, but drastically miscalculated. Kinsley does get the answer right on why the public is rejecting Bush on both issues:
What Bush's tinkering with Social Security and his meddling in the right to die have in common is that both make life's last couple of chapters seem less predictable and secure. That may not matter to Bush, since he enjoys the ultimate security of knowing -- or thinking he knows -- what happens in the chapter that follows these two. And it looks pretty good. Others are not so sure -- about themselves or about him.
Smart guns the answer to school violence?
In the aftermath of Red Lake, Ron Brownstein poses what he thinks is the overlooked but obvious question:
Experts say that young people who commit school shootings often use guns stolen from adults; it could hardly be otherwise. ...
The answer has many pieces, from improvements in school security to more effective counseling for troubled youths. But part of it could be no more complicated than making it tougher for young people to use guns that don't belong to them. In an era of personalized technology, it seems reasonable to ask why it isn't possible to design guns that can't be fired by anyone except their authorized user.
Seems each individual has a unique "grip signature" that a gun may be able to recognize and disable if it's not the "authorized user". Research is underway at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Mercury pollution scandal
Molly Ivins tries to convey the absolute urgency of the imminent disaster of applying "cap-and-trade" mechanisms to heavy pollution like mercury:
God help you if you live near one of these future hotspots.
NRDC estimates an 841 percent increase for California, 176 percent in Colorado, 241 percent in New Hampshire and 56 percent in New Jersey.
"It is unconscionable [that] EPA is allowing power companies to trade in a powerful neurotoxin -- it is unprecedented and illegal," said William Becker, director of the bipartisan State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators.
Now here's another charming note.
As is becoming monotonously repetitious with the Bush administration, it turns out the EPA simply ignored scientific opinion on this subject. The Washington Post reports that the EPA based its new system of "regulation" on a cost-benefit analysis -- cost to industry vs. public health payoff.
"What they did not reveal is that a Harvard University study paid for by the EPA, co-authored by an EPA scientist and peer-reviewed by two other EPA scientists had reached the opposite conclusion. That analysis estimated health benefits 100 times as great as the EPA did, but top agency officials ordered the finding stripped from public documents, said a staff member who helped develop the rule," the Post reported.
It's been said--more venal than Nixon, by far.
Today's cartoon
From yesterday, by Etta Hulme of the Dallas-Ft Worth Star-Telegram: