Helen Prejean, Catholic nun and author of
Dead Man Walking memorializes Pope John Paul II by remembering her years long effort to persuade him to remove the "absolute necessity" loophole from the Vatican's opposition to the death penalty:
At last, in 1997, I finally got my chance to communicate directly with Pope John Paul II. It happened through the case of a Virginia death row inmate, Joseph O'Dell, whose spiritual adviser I had become and whose plea for justice had attracted the pope's attention. Lori Urs, who was working on the legal team trying to save Mr. O'Dell's life, visited Rome and handed my letter to the pope on Jan. 22, 1997. A friend of mine in the Vatican, present when my letter was delivered, assured me that John Paul read every word of my letter.
More from Prejean and more pundits below, including:
- Tom Teepen on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
- Steve Chapman on bipartisan hypocrisy on the filibuster
- Maureen Down on the intell commission's useless report
- David Broder and Michael Kinsley on GOP budget malfeasance
- Carla Marinucci on Dems post-Schiavo
- The Daily Cartoon
Prejean, continued:
And an impassioned letter it was, pouring into the pope's lap 14 years of searing experiences of accompanying human beings into killing chambers and watching them be put to death before my eyes. "Surely, Holy Father," I wrote, "it is not the will of Christ for us to ever sanction governments to torture and kill in such fashion, even those guilty of terrible crimes. ... I found myself saying to them: 'Look at me. Look at my face. I will be the face of Christ for you.' In such an instance the gospel of Jesus is very distilled: life, not death; mercy and compassion, not vengeance."
And later that year the Pope indeed officially removed the loophole and made the following statement in St. Louis:
A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil.
Bipartisan hypocrisy
The Chicago Trib's Steve Chapman echoes what George Will wrote recently, about how Frist and other Republicans would betray long-standing conservative principles if they tried to remove the filibuster from Senate judicial nominee deliberations. But Chapman jumps into the flipside of that formula to highlight a lengthy history--from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton--of liberals opposing the filibuster:
Liberals chafed when Southern segregationists filibustered civil rights legislation. By 1975, with Democrats in control, they were able to reduce the number of votes required to stop a filibuster, from 67 to 60 votes. In 1993, impatient with Republicans who were keeping President Bill Clinton from enacting his programs, former Carter administration adviser Lloyd Cutler argued that the filibuster was unconstitutional. But Republicans were not convinced.
They are now. In 2003, the conservative group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the filibuster (which was dismissed). Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) says the use of this tool against President Bush's judicial nominees "must end." The Wall Street Journal editorializes that judicial nominees have a "constitutional right to a vote on the Senate floor."
Chapman raises an interesting question: Is the fervor in favor of the filibuster (try repeating that alliteration five times real fast!) among Democrats a temporary convenience? For those of us "left-libertarians", it is not. We embrace many so-called conservative principles of government such as the filibuster, but apply them to an agenda focused on the common good and using government power not for the benefit of the already powerful and wealthy but for the disadvantaged and displaced.
Heed the ecological warning
Tom Teepen of Cox Newspapers, says now more than ever we need to heed the kind of warnings sounded by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the United Nations' four-year analysis, the broadest ever of the environment, with 1,300 public and private contributors from 95 countries:
There has been a mini-trend of sorts lately to pooh-pooh environmental concerns as falling somewhere between overwrought and hysterical. Environmentalism is dismissed as yesterday's fad, a relic of the counterculture '60s finally put in its place by the magisterial market economy.
And it is true that environmentalism has an unfortunate affinity for alarmism. Some of its gurus mimic the magazine-cartoon cliche of the bearded, berobed crank with his "The end is near!" placard.
The shortfall of predictions that population would outstrip food is a caution, and in fact the United Nations' paper reports good news on food production. It's up. And ever-cannier cultivation promises still more.
But much of what we consume, and much of what the very concept of life itself depends upon, cannot be cranked up to meet the demands of endless population growth and heedless exploitation. We cannot produce more oceans in our labs if we poison the ones we have. We cannot manufacture a new atmosphere if we degrade today's irreparably. There is no fairy dust for bringing back dead species.
If not panic, care at least is called for.
Teepen sounds the right note, I think, acknowledging the excessive alarmism, while saying that just because you think the boy cried wolf, doesn't mean you should open the fence gate and let in the wolf.
Curveball the Goofball
Maureen Dowd laughs at the recent report by the presidential commission on the prewar Iraqi intelligence failures:
As the commission's co-chairman, Laurence Silberman, put it: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policy makers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."
Huh? That's like an investigation into steroids in baseball that looks only at the drug companies, not the players who muscled up.
We don't need a 14-month inquiry producing 601 pages at a cost of $10 million to tell us the data on arms in Iraq was flawed. We know that. When we got over there, we didn't find any.
Dowd does what the commission could not--ask the right questions:
Please, no more pantomime investigations. We all know what happened. Dick Cheney and the neocons had a fever to sack Saddam. Mr. Cheney and Rummy persuaded W., "the Man," that it was the manly thing to do. Everybody feigned a 9/11 connection. Ahmad Chalabi conned his neocon pals, thinking he could run Iraq if he gave the Bush administration the smoking gun it needed to sell the war.
Suddenly Curveball appeared, the relative of an aide to Mr. Chalabi, to become the lone C.I.A. source with the news that Iraq was cooking up biological agents in mobile facilities hidden from arms inspectors and Western spies. Curveball's obviously sketchy assertions ended up in Mr. Tenet's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and Colin Powell's U.N. speech in February 2003, laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq.
Curveball's information was used to justify the war even though it was clear Curveball was a goofball. As the commission report notes, a Defense Department employee at the C.I.A. met with him and "was concerned by Curveball's apparent 'hangover' during their meeting" and suspicious that Curveball spoke excellent English, even though the Foreign Service had told U.S. intelligence officials that Curveball did not speak English.
By early 2001, the C.I.A. was receiving messages from our Foreign Service, reporting that Curveball was "out of control" and off the radar. A foreign intelligence service also warned the C.I.A. in April 2002 that it had "doubts about Curveball's reliability" and that elements of the tippling tipster's behavior "strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators."
But Curveball's crazy assertions had traction because they were what the White House wanted to hear.
Heat on Congressional GOP
David Broder spells out the consequences of failed GOP leadership on the federal budget:
Shaken by the fiasco of its misguided intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, the GOP majority that controls the House and Senate now must deal with the less dramatic but more substantive challenge of trying to write a federal budget for next year. [...]
Insiders tell me the odds are no better than 50-50 that the disagreements can be successfully negotiated when conferees from the House and Senate meet over the next couple of weeks. Failure would mean that for the third time in four years, Congress would flunk in its elemental duty to provide a coherent framework for fiscal policy.
Broder points out that failure to frame a budget leads committees to over plan spending in individual appropriations.
Michael Kinsley adds fodder to this discussion, pointing out some interesting historical trends:
Under Republican presidents since 1960, the federal deficit has averaged $131 billion a year. Under Democrats, that figure is $30 billion. In an average Republican year, the deficit has grown by $36 billion. In the average Democratic year it has shrunk by $25 billion. The national debt has gone up more than $200 billion a year under Republican presidents and less than $100 billion a year under Democrats.
Budget talk is boring, I know, but these pundits provide some effective ammunition for reaching those persuadable voters on the unconservative fiscal habits of Republicans.
Hopes and doubts for Dems post-Schiavo
The SF Chronicle's Carla Marinucci sees opportunity for Democrats following the Schiavo fiasco, but tempers that hope with valid criticism of national Dems instinct to duck for cover.
With the lingering death of Terry Schiavo played out on the national stage, political insiders say the wrenching drama may have unintended consequences: delivering Democrats a resonant "message" for coming campaigns that they -- and not the GOP -- are the party of less government.
All this doesn't exactly make Democrats "the party of Ronald Reagan," who espoused less government, says John Bunzel, senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution. "(But) it makes them the party of ordinary Americans who say ... this is a case where the government should stay out.
Marinucci then quotes some Republican and Independent critics who say the Democrats forfeited any advantage by sheepishly taking a "wait-and-see" approach, fearing to be on the wrong side of public opinion on a heated emotional issue.
Today's cartoon
... from Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: