David A. Love: Executions in the U.S. are part of a racially-coded system of retribution. Poor people and members of racial minorities are more likely to receive a death sentence, as are those who are charged with murdering a white victim.
Celebrating Spiritual Death on Black Friday
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Coleen Rowley: How many remember that this “Black Friday” marks the 10th anniversary of George Bush’s famous presidential advisory just after 9/11 for citizens to do their patriotic duty by pushing their worries aside and going shopping?
Ending California’s Wasteful Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death
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Andy Love: California’s death penalty needs to be abolished. Putting aside the philosophical and spiritual questions about the immorality of the death penalty, it is costly, arbitrary, discriminatory, and unworkable.
Evolution/Devolution
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Andy Love: With recent polling that shows support for the death penalty has hit a 39-year low, and widespread discomfort over the execution of Troy Davis, a backlash is to be expected.
The Death Penalty as Ritualized Mob Violence
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David Love: When a white conservative audience cheered presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry over his execution record at a recent debate, it underscored what is wrong with the death penalty.
Where America Stands on the Death Penalty
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Richard C. Dieter: The public is deeply skeptical of the capital punishment process, shocked at its enormous costs, and quite ready to replace it with alternative sentences.
Vet Leader: Afghan War Deaths an “Atrocity,” War Should End
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Thirty U.S. American troops reported killed Saturday in an Afghanistan helicopter crash emphasizes the need for the U.S. to end operations sooner rather than later in that theatre of war, according to a Iraq/Afghanistan U.S. Marine veteran, who now is chair of the Veterans Caucus of the California Democratic Party.
The Case for Actual Death Panels
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Tina Dupuy: The person who rubbed our face in our own mortality, the most famous and wacky of Death with Dignity advocates, Dr. Kevorkian is no longer with us. He’d probably appreciate the irony in calling his death a loss for the dying.
Manning Marable: Provocative Scholarship In Life & Death
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Anthony Samad: Manning Marable, and his provocative scholarship, will be sorely missed. We’ve lost a true radical thinker and articulator of the African American experience in America.
Filibuster Reform Dies a Quiet Death
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Paul Hogarth: By a slim vote of 46-49 on Thursday, the U.S. Senate defeated a proposal by Jeff Merkley (D-OR) to actually require filibusters (as opposed to mere filibuster threats) before a 60-vote threshold is needed to end debate.
Glenn Beck’s Attacks on Frances Fox Piven Trigger Death Threats
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Peter Dreier: Glenn Beck has escalated his hate campaign against Frances Fox Piven, calling her one of the “nine most dangerous people in the world,” and “an enemy of the Constitution.”
Concerning Advocacy and Criminality
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Jonathan Farley: Why do campaigning organizations like the NAACP defend plain thugs but ignore genuine radicals?
Dear Terminator, Lay Off Our Executioners
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David Holtzman: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger can help. In what very little time he has left in office, he can give his legacy a considerable boost by commuting the state’s hundreds of pending death sentences to life in prison without possibility of release. As a Los Angeles resident on the world’s stage, he should be sensitive to his image at home and abroad.
CNN Reignites Death Panel Myth, Sparking My “Network” Moment
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Linda Milazzo: Corporate media’s constant drumming of death panel lies resulted in Section 1233 (which allowed Medicare to provide advance planning doctor visits every five years) being eliminated from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that passed in 2010. This week CNN was back using the same death panel misnomer, spreading the death panel myth. Well I’m mad as hell. I’m not going to take it anymore from CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS and talk radio. We, the people, deserve better.
Why Pat Tillman’s Death Matters
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Dick Price: Amir Bar-Lev’s powerful documentary, “The Tillman Story,” fleshes out the tragic arc of Pat Tillman’s life in what becomes less an anti-war movie and more the story of one indomitable family’s struggle for truth and justice in the face of arrogant indifference by our nation’s top military and civilian leaders, abetted by a cheerleading press.
Haiti: Eight Weeks After the Quake and Words Fail
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Georgianne Nienaber: So, the writer does what writers do and steps back, walking alone and searching for vowels and consonants that might describe what is unseen and impossible to understand. Then something happens that challenges the morality and duty of the writer. There is something on the ground that does not fit the pattern of stones and vegetation. A pelvis attached to a spinal column is lying in the open. Pieces of ribs, a wrist and a forearm are nearby. The writer knows it is human but wants it to be something else. It is familiar and something she has seen before.
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