The court heard arguments on the lethal injection case in January.
The Supreme Court today upheld the three-drug lethal injection method used by the state of Kentucky in a 7-2 decision, clearing the way for an unofficial moratorium on executions to be lifted.
Justice Thomas thinks it's "obvious" that death penalty opponents will do what they can to obstruct the death penalty, which makes it important to establish a "bright-line rule" that will spare the states the pain of further litigation. But the Court has denied the states this mercy: "(T)oday’s decision is sure to engender more litigation. At what point does a risk become 'substantial'? Which alternative procedures are 'feasible' and 'readily implemented'? When is a reduction in risk 'significant'? What penological justifications are 'legitimate'? Such are the questions the lower courts will have to grapple with in the wake of today’s decision."
Justice Stevens concurs. Noting that the case today does not foreclose further litigation of the issue, he gives the states some advice: consider ending the use of the paralyzing drug (pancuronium bromide). The Court won't find its use unconstitutional, but the states might be well-advised to end it on their own.
Stevens also writes at length to take the position that the death penalty itself -- because of its "negligible returns to the State" -- is "patently excessive and cruel and unusual" in violation of the 8th Amendment. This, as Justice Scalia puts it in his separate opinion, "repudiates (Justice Stevens') prior view and ... adopts the astounding position that a criminal sanction expressly mentioned in the Constitution violates the Constitution."
Kentucky and most of the other states with the death penalty use a three-step process to administer a so-called lethal injection. First, an inmate is injected with a barbiturate general anesthetic that essentially renders him unconscious; if administered correctly and in the right dose, this drug should prevent the inmate from feeling pain. A second drug is then administered to paralyze the inmate; this drug is meant to prevent disturbing muscle spasms that sometimes accompany death. The third drug stops the heart and causes excruciating burning sensations. The most significant problem with this lethal cocktail is that because the second drug paralyzes the inmate and prevents him from reacting, there is no way to know whether he feels pain from the injection of the third and lethal drug.
Medical monitoring of the inmate could help prevent administration of the heart-stopping drug unless the inmate is unconscious and unable to feel pain. But the plaintiffs offered an even simpler alternative: administer a lethal overdose of the barbiturate general anesthetic, which would render the inmate unconscious and stop his breathing. States should not rely on a flawed execution method that carries the unnecessary risk of pain when a more humane alternative is available.
President Bush, strolling near the Rose Garden, announced a climate change plan today.
Revising his stance on global warming, President Bush today proposed a new target for stopping the growth of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. President Bush also called for putting the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions from electric power plants within 10 to 15 years.
Mr. Bush doesn't intend all the catastrophic consequences of his simple decision to offer legislation to regulate carbon emission. But then, by this point he should be quite familiar with the concept of unintended consequences. And he needs to recognize that he cannot pass "sensible "legislation. (I have serious doubts that any legislation on this topic could be sensible.)
All he can do is set the stage for next year's legislation, by giving away the rhetorical store and weakening the already modest backbone of Republican legislators. The liberal world order will not let go of their global-warming assault on free economies until hell freezes over -- by which point, obviously, the global-warming theory will be visibly disproven.
It took so long for Bush to even acknowledge the human role in global warming that whenever he even mentions the topic, some people act like it's big news.
But in an era where a consensus has emerged that forceful action is required to save the planet, Bush's essentially empty words are not very different from silence. And to the extent that their intent is to subvert sincere attempts to find solutions, they're actually worse.
Bush's trick on climate change is to wait until others are about to embrace mandatory limits on greenhouse gases, then make a major speech about goals and process, without any specifics on measures or penalties.
A model on a Paris catwalk.
France is the capital of the fashion world, its catwalks dominated by waif-like women who are often much skinnier than their real-world sisters. But that may change: The French parliament's lower house this week approved a bill that would make it illegal for anyone — including fashion magazines, advertisers and Web sites — to publicly incite extreme thinness.
Pro-anorexia websites are certainly disturbing. Pictures of painfully thin young women, tips to curb appetite, advice on how to abuse laxatives, tips on preventing your teeth from being damaged by constant vomiting. Clearly no adult with two brain cells to rub together wants vulnerable young people exposed to such material: it is corrosive, corrupting and deeply upsetting.
But calling for a ban is pointless, ill-informed, attention seeking and naive. It's pointless because banning such a website is well nigh impossible, not least because the content isn't illegal. Distasteful, ugly and distressing, yes, but not illegal.
Should such websites be made illegal? I don't think so. We probably all agree in principle that websites that encourage poor health and negative images of women (and indeed men, who are also victims of eating disorders) are undesirable, but the difficulty comes with deciding where the line should be drawn.
I think pictures of Nicole Richie at her thinnest are ugly to look at but they have been in wide circulation online on the pro-ana websites and in celebrity magazines. So what do you ban? The pro-ana websites? But than how about the celebrity magazines that also publish the photos? The photographers who take them? The agencies that buy them? The logical conclusion is that we'd end up with an "anorexia censor" checking publications for illegal images.
One of the questions the industry must address is the influence it has over women and their body image. The deaths of two underweight South American models earlier this year, one from anorexia and the other from heart failure, caused a flurry of news stories that suggested a cause-and-effect relationship between fashion's obsession with thinness and anorexia. But anorexia is a thousand times more complicated than a desire to fit into runway samples.
Still, being pounded over the head with the belief that thin, thin, thin is beautiful can chip away at the fragile self-esteem of a young girl . . . and at the confidence and spirit of smart and accomplished women. Any industry that threatens the mental and physical health of its employees and customers needs to engage in thorough self-examination.
For all the emphasis the fashion industry places on creative integrity and individual vision, an enormous part of the problem is that its members all too often can't shake off a junior high school mentality of wanting to be part of the popular crowd. All it takes is for one influential person -- designer, editor, model booker -- to pronounce a girl "major." Everyone wants to use the same in-demand models. Hot models lend status to modest shows and confirm the stature of big shows. Over a typical runway season, the same models appear so often on different runways that it is easy to become immune to how shockingly thin they are.
After a while, it seems normal that a model's thighs are the same circumference as a 12-year-old's upper arm.
A Pennsylvania gun shop owner scrutinizes the candidates' positions.
The battle over the word "bitter" between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has sparked a new look at the candidates and their stance on the Second Amendment.
In response to my inquiry about his specific position, Obama's campaign e-mailed me a one-paragraph answer: Obama believes that while the "Second Amendment creates an individual right, . . . he also believes that the Constitution permits federal, state and local government to adopt reasonable and common sense gun safety measures." Though the paragraph is titled "Obama on the D.C. Court case," that specific gun ban is never mentioned.
Obama's dance on gun rights is part of his evolution from the radical young Illinois state legislator he once was. He was recorded in a 1996 questionnaire as advocating a ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns (a position he has since disavowed). He was on the board of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, which takes an aggressive gun control position, and in 2000 considered becoming its full-time president. In 2006, he voted with an 84 to 16 majority (and against Clinton) to prohibit confiscation of firearms during an emergency, but that is his only pro-gun vote in Springfield or Washington. The National Rifle Association grades his voting record (and Clinton's) an "F."
There is no anti-gun litmus test for Democrats. In 2006, Ted Strickland was elected governor of Ohio and Bob Casey U.S. senator from Pennsylvania with NRA grades of "A." Following their model, Obama talks about the rights of "Americans to protect their families." He has not yet stated whether that right should exist in Washington D.C.
The Democratic presidential candidates' silence is part of a pattern. For years, the national party has downplayed its historic sympathy for gun control for fear that emphasizing it would be politically costly.
When Obama first ran for the Illinois Senate 12 years ago, he answered "yes" to whether he backed banning the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns in the state.
He's softened that position in recent years. When she was asked why Obama didn't sign one of the Supreme Court briefs, campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, "Barack Obama believes the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and he greatly respects the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms."
Clinton has a long history as an outspoken supporter of tough gun-control measures, but she, too, has moderated in recent months; last month in Wisconsin, she described how she once went hunting in Arkansas and shot a banded duck.
At a January debate, she called herself a "political realist, and I understand that the political winds are very powerful against doing enough to try to get guns off the street."
