Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Dixon In Reverse
There was this guy who was tried for a murder he didn’t commit. The jury found him guilty, and he was sent to death row. He continually protested that he was innocent, but after his appeals ran out, they put him in the chair. The call from the governor’s mansion never came. They pulled the switch, and fried him like a strip o’bacon.
And new scientific DNA evidence has proven he was innocent after all.
Tragic, isn’t it? Just imagine how the poor fella must have felt, knowing he was being executed for a crime he didn’t commit. Well guess what. It hasn’t happened. Never, not once.
You think you’ve heard of it. You remember seeing a Time Magazine cover, essentially shouting it from the highest rooftops. Well, what really happened was that our prestigious picture-magazine was speculating that Roger Keith Coleman, who declared himself innocent of murdering his sister-in-law right up until the moment of his execution of 1992, was indeed innocent.
I hope they didn’t bet a lot of money on it.
Because scientific DNA testing has just confirmed, that Roger Keith Coleman…was guilty as charged.
The report from the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto concluded there was almost no conceivable doubt that Coleman was the source of the sperm found in the victim.
“The probability that a randomly selected individual unrelated to Roger Coleman would coincidentally share the observed DNA profile is estimated to be 1 in 19 million,” the report said.
A finding of innocence would have been explosive news and almost certainly would have had a powerful effect on the public’s attitude toward capital punishment. Death penalty opponents have argued for years that the risk of a grave and irreversible mistake by the criminal justice system is too great to allow capital punishment.
Had it gone the other way, it would have been explosive news. As it is, it’s a fitting story for places like…like the blog that nobody reads.
Now take a look at what you’ve got going on here. Roger Keith Coleman was an icon. A symbol. The flagship of the anti-death-penalty flotilla. The biggest balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day anti-death-penalty parade.
And the asshole was guilty.
It’s like Jeanne Dixon in reverse. You remember who Jeanne Dixon is, don’t you? She predicted that the President would be assassinated…and he was. In the years afterward, she predicted a lot of stuff. Some of it came to pass, some of it didn’t. When she got it right, it was big, big, big news. Nobody kept track of how many times she got it wrong.
This is the same phenomenon, backwards. Read this part of the article again:
The case had been closely watched by both sides in the death penalty debate because no executed convict in the United States has ever been exonerated by scientific testing.
Got that? Did you know that before today? I didn’t. Let’s repeat that one more time.
…no executed convict in the United States has ever been exonerated by scientific testing.
Nobody’s gonna talk about that. Nobody. It isn’t “explosive news,” as they say.
Well, it’s explosive news to me.
Personally, I am proud of my fellow countrymen who are concerned about preventing innocent people from being executed on death row. And I’m proud of that good feeling they get deep inside when they think they’ve achieved something that makes it a little less likely this will happen. I’m just not willing to sacrifice innocent women and children to give them that good feeling.
And based on what I see in the news…like, for example, this story…we don’t need our justice system to get any friendlier with the perverts, psychos, weirdos, and sickos. The stripped-gear-set has had its day in the media sunshine, and so far, just about every important tidbit of “news” suggesting that they’ve been handed some kind of a raw deal, has turned out to be either a mistake, a distortion of truth, or outright fraud.
Meanwhile, innocent men, women, and little itty-bitty kids are really being taken out into remote fields, violated, shot, stabbed, chopped up into pieces, and buried in shallow graves. Really. We don’t even say “oh, golly” when it happens anymore. It’s just kind of expected.
It’s just expected to happen to somebody else, that’s all. That’s the thing. Right there.
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