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“Twenty years have passed since this Court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all and, despite the effort of the States and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake. This is not to say that the problems with the death penalty today are identical to those that were present 20 years ago. Rather, the problems that were pursued down one hole with procedural rules and verbal formulas have come to the surface somewhere else, just as virulent and pernicious as they were in their original form. Experience has taught us that the constitutional goal of eliminating arbitrariness and discrimination from the administration of death can never be achieved without compromising an equally essential component of fundamental fairness – individualized sentencing.
“It is tempting, when faced with conflicting constitutional commands, to sacrifice one for the other or to assume that an acceptable balance between them already has been struck. In the context of the death penalty, however, such jurisprudential maneuvers are wholly inappropriate. The death penalty must be imposed ‘fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all…’
“This Court, in my view, has engaged in a futile effort to balance these constitutional demands, and now is retreating not only from the promise of consistency and rationality, but from the requirement of individualized sentencing as well. Having virtually conceded that both fairness and rationality cannot be achieved in the administration of the death penalty, the Court has chosen to deregulate the entire enterprise, replacing, it would seem, substantive constitutional requirements with mere aesthetics, and abdicating its statutorily and constitutionally imposed duty to provide meaningful judicial oversight to the administration of death by the States.
“From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years, I have endeavored – indeed, I have struggled – along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed…
“In my view, the proper course when faced with irreconcilable constitutional commands is not to ignore one or the other, nor to pretend that the dilemma does not exist, but to admit the futility of the effort to harmonize them. This means accepting the fact that the death penalty cannot be administered in accord with our Constitution.”
—Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun gives up on the death penalty (Callins v. James, 1994).
Sunday night I tweeted, as Jon Stewart won his I’m-not-even-making-this-up ninth consecutive Emmy for Best Variety Show or whatever, that “Jon Stewart is like 63% of the way to being the guy he started out mocking. Maybe 64%.” And then today I stumbled across this, a Tom Junod profile of Stewart from next month’s Esquire that makes the case far better than I possibly could.
The thing is full of great lines, including the one I quoted this morning, and the one about how
even when Stewart’s a dick, he is never the dick. It is Stewart’s unique talent for coming across as decent and well-meaning when he’s bullying and hectoring and self-righteous. And this is because his talent is not just for comedy and not just for media criticism or truth-telling; it’s for being — for remaining — likable.
The bit about why nobody ever does a Jon Stewart impression is right on the money too. Read the whole piece, but the takeaway is this: Jon Stewart’s public persona is profoundly disingenuous, and ultimately toxic to American political discourse.
But there’s one part of the piece that I’d quibble with, and it’s the passage on Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, held in DC on the weekend before the 2010 midterm elections:
Three days before a crucial election, Jon Stewart had stood in America’s most symbolic public space and given a speech to two hundred thousand people. The speech wasn’t about his need to be a player or his need for power or his need for influence. It wasn’t about getting out the vote or telling people to vote in a certain way. It was about Jon Stewart — about his need for another kind of out. For years, his out had been his comedy. Now it was his sincerity — his evenhandedness, his ability to rise above politics, his goodness. And three days later, when the side he didn’t even say was his side was routed in the midterms, he pretty much proved his point. He was no player. He had no political power. He’d proven he was beyond all that by presiding over the biggest celebration of political powerlessness in American history.
There’s nothing incorrect here, but there’s one pair of dots that Junod doesn’t quite connect, and it’s this:
By holding that rally on that day, Stewart took two hundred thousand of his most political fans out of the game on electoral fieldwork’s biggest weekend. The kind of folks who would show up to a Jon Stewart rally are pretty much exactly the kind of folks who would knock on doors for local candidates in the run-up to an off-year election. And what did Stewart do? He gave them a reason not to.
If you believe in the political process, if you believe in civic engagement, if you believe in local communities, if you believe in reforming America from the ground up, the last thing you do is hold a huge fake rally for politics dorks in Washington DC on the weekend before the midterms. I mean, come on.
I used to love Jon Stewart. But that’s when he really lost me.
The faculty council of New York City’s Brooklyn College has unanimously condemned NYPD’s spying on their campus’s Muslim student organization, saying it has a “chilling effect” on academic freedom.
Documents made public earlier this month indicate that the New York Police Department has been monitoring Muslim student groups at seven local colleges – City, Baruch, Queens, Brooklyn, LaGuardia Community College and St. John’s. At Brooklyn and Baruch, the department sent undercover police officers to spy on the groups directly. St. John’s college is private, while the rest of those targeted are part of the City University of New York.
The NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim organizations was undertaken in concert with the CIA, whose inspector general is now investigating whether the Agency’s involvement violated the law.
The Brooklyn College resolution said that the faculty “opposes surveillance activities by the NYPD and affiliated agencies on our campus either directly or through the use of informants for the purposes of collecting information independent of a valid and specific criminal investigation,” and called on the college’s administration to reveal “their knowledge of or involvement in this surveillance and information gathering.”
Brooklyn College president Karen Gould, who took office in 2009, said the NYPD had not informed her administration of its spying.
Even The Economist has doubts about California’s privatization of public higher education:
“In 1990 the state paid 78% of the cost of educating each student. That ratio dropped to 47% last year, and will fall even more during the current academic year, after the latest round of budget cuts, overseen by Jerry Brown, the current governor and son of Pat Brown. In some ways, California has now inverted the priorities of the older Brown’s era. Spending on prisons passed spending on universities in around 2004.”
Aaron Kreider of Campus Activism offers some thoughts on Occupy Wall Street:
“Unlike Tahrir Square, there is no Muslim Brotherhood or April 6th Youth Movement (not to mention the many other Egyptian civic organizations) behind these protests. Instead we have Anonymous - a loose movement of liberal minded vigilante hackers and hacker wannabes. I’d trust their ideas on civil liberties, but not on democracy or anything else. They are more like nonviolent terrorists than grassroots democrats. And they might be less democratic than some violent terrorist (aka liberation) groups. Adbusters is far more legitimate but more of an arts project than a traditional social movement organization.”
British breakfast cereal Weetabix is paying kids to run and play wearing their logos:
“One day a brand ambassador will shoot up a school, and the potato snack company that paid him to endorse its products online will rush out a press release explaining that his actions don’t embody their values, which traditionally involve less screaming and death. And we’ll all be sadder and wiser. And we’ll buy something different. For about three weeks.”
Police in Santa Cruz, California, are using algorithms to predict when and where criminals will strike again:
“A crime is broken down to the two most likely chunks of time it is likely to occur in a certain area. Police are sent out every day with a map of the ten “hot spots” they should watch. The program does not give police probable cause to arrest anyone, but it does give them a good reason to ask questions when they see someone in the right area at the right time looking suspicious.”
Esquire nails the problem with Jon Stewart, and leaves America’s Sweetheart pinned to the wall, wiggling his limbs and squirming:
“Kids who couldn’t sleep at night worrying that their president was a bad guy and that their country was doing bad things could now rest easy knowing that their president was just a dick, and that their country, while stupid, was still essentially innocent. It was like you could get upset about what was going on but still live your life, because there was Jon Stewart right before bedtime, showing you how to get upset entertainingly, how to give a shit without having to do anything about it.”
Ralph Nader, Cornel West, and Gore Vidal team up to primary Obama with Superfriends list of six challengers:
“A slate of six candidates announces its decision to run in the Democratic primaries. Each of the candidates is recognizable, articulate, and a person of acknowledged achievement. These contenders would each represent a field in which Obama has never clearly staked a progressive claim or where he has drifted toward the corporatist right. These fields would include: labor, poverty, military and foreign policy, health insurance and care, the environment, financial regulation, civil and political rights/empowerment, and consumer protection.”
Students protesting planned tuition hike at the University of Guam.
Wisconsin’s Paul Soglin — sixties student activist turned hippie politico turned three-time Madison mayor — has had it with kids today. Get off his lawn!
Georgia students protest crackdown on undocumented enrollees.
Israeli students boycott nation’s largest dairy … over high prices.
SC student government prez survives impeachment vote after admitting authorship of asinine anonymous tweets.
Student government veep who ran on anti-drunk driving platform resigns after DWI arrest.
