Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry, a Democrat, has put his imprimatur on a law that permits executing child molesters.

Senate Bill 1800, signed without comment by Henry, allows the death penalty or a life-without-parole sentence for a second or subsequent conviction for rape, sodomy or lewd molestation involving a child younger than 14.

Sen. Jay Paul Gumm, D-Durant, tried several times to pass a measure to allow second-time child molesters to be subject to the death penalty. It died three times in the House.
Gumm finally got the language attached to SB 1800 by Sen. Jonathan Nichols, R-Norman, and Rep. Fred Morgan, R-Oklahoma City. It establishes a child-abuse response team within the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

Gumm said the measure will make the state safer for children and send a message to child predators that they are not welcome in Oklahoma.

"We need to send the message as a state that if you repeatedly prey on our children, we will find you, prosecute you, convict you and execute you," Gumm said.

I do not recommend sampling the deep racism to be found at a pus-buckets like The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler or Little Green Footballs regarding Haditha, Ishaqui and Abu Ghraib. But even if you avoid web sites with Fourth Reich pretensions, some conservative bloggers give you a firsthand understanding of how Americans can commit atrocities.

I usually avoid visiting right-wing sites at all. But, with my husband away for weeks - he is my usual briefer on such garbage - I checked out 50 sites just to see what they were saying. This weekend's widespread rightwing complaint seems to be that the media suck because they have spent more time talking about what some U.S. Marines did than what some Canadians were caught allegedly preparing to do.

My husband has told me that it is bad form to directly link to right-wing web sites at Daily Kos, so I will just give you a few urls and excerpts.

The NYT is reporting:

Marine commanders in Iraq learned within two days of the killings in Haditha last November that Iraqi civilians had died from gunfire, not a roadside bomb as initially reported, but the officers involved saw no reason to investigate further, according to a senior Marine officer. ...

Creativity as insanity is hardly a new concept. Socrates wrote:

"If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the inspired madman."

Many great writers, painters, and other geniuses will tell you that when they are at the peak of their creativity, they are "out of their minds." They will look back on something they have made and not remember having made it. They will say they were not themselves when they were creating it. Maybe they will attribute this suspension of self - this takeover - to their muse or some ethereal other, not their real self. They may not tell their agent, but they will probably tell their therapist.

[Meteor Blades, who is traveling (safely) in Indonesia on a business trip and taking a rest from the Internet, asked me before he left two weeks ago to post this for him. - IP ]

Although Waterloo, N.Y., is its official birthplace, many locales - North and South - claim they were the originators of the practice of decorating en masse the graves of dead Civil War soldiers. Hard to know how long it took 19th Century politicians to latch onto this Greek-inspired ritual that we now call Memorial Day as a platform to spray us with their propaganda and phony patriotism. Not more than five minutes is my guess. Likewise, hard to know what Bill McGurn or his minions will write up for Mister Bush to spray us with this year. How can he top this vile lie from the 2005 Memorial Day speech at Arlington?