This is not tax, or budget, or even about the economy.
This is about an activist, death-penalty loving, right-wing extremist group of Supreme Court Justices (the decision was 5-4, with Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts and Kennedy in the majority) that rewards a state for defying court orders to provide information, refusing to release information about the source of a drug used in a lethal injection. See Schwartz, Murderer Executed in Arizona, NY Times, Oct. 27, 2010 (execution of Jeffrey Landigan). It appears that the drug source is one not approved by the FDA. But the Supreme Court couldn't be bothered with such technicalities of law. It appears that the Court thinks that the execution of our own citizens as rapidly as possible takes precedence over issues such as state defiance of court orders or state use of illegal drugs.
Fine thing we have come to. A Rand Paul Bourbon County coordinator (included on an Oct. 26 ad for Paul as an endorser) stomps on a young woman MoveOn activist he doesn't like (see video here) and then demands that she apologize for instigating his vicious behavior (article here and here). Rand Paul issues a statement that equivocates--blames the jockeying of large crowds and full of pseudo "balance" about how neither side should behave badly. The implication, of course, is that perhaps the woman had asked for it, though he would rather his supporter hadn't stomped on her head on camera. Later A candidate for the U.S. Senate, Joe Miller in Alaska, uses his colleagues computers to register multiple votes in a poll to influence politics, and then lies about it. Article here. When finally found out, he treats an egregious lack of integrity as a trivial matter, demonstrating yet again his lack of integrity. Corporate dollars are flowing into attack ads (mostly supporting Republicans). See, for example, here and here and here. And of course many of those attack ads are misleading, untruthful or just downright mean. The new normal in the United States, it appears, is for fringe elements with zany views about everything from taxes to Social Security to jobs and lots of pent-up anger to act out on the public stage and expect--and perhaps receive--the people's support anyway.
The five Justices on the Supreme Court who voted to disregard the State's failure to reveal its sources so that a determination about the quality of the drugs could be made found that the prisoner being executed had failed to show enough harm to delay the execution. Eric Freedman of Hofstra has it right--the Supreme Court has now announced that "crime pays": “The state flatly stonewalled the lower courts by defying orders to produce information, and then was rewarded at the Supreme Court by winning its case on the basis that the defendant had not put forward enough evidence. That is an outcome which turns simple justice upside-down and a victory that the state should be ashamed to have obtained.”
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