This April we endeavor to spelunk the quintessential spoor of moral rectitude and other rectal prolapses. You might believe that being played the fool was a once/year recreational endeavor. How do you think Mary Jo Kopechne and her unborn child felt when they crossed that bridge?
We commence with the Los Angeles Daily Journal 117(32) 4 (2004). The Daily Journal is the Wall Street Journal of the California legal profession, forever sucking on lemons. Allow them to eructate without dilution:
"...blacks [sic] are actually underrepresented on the nation's death rows. Blacks commit 51.5% of all murders nationally but constitute about 42 percent of death row inmates.."
Have Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton mounted their hind legs on a Media soapbox and non-negotiable demanded that, by proportion, 22.61% more Blacks relative be put on Death Rows? Where is the counseling and empowerment? Maybe we can do something good by imposing busing. If not, impose it harder.
Robert Blecker, professor at New York Law School, professed for the Media, "We have somehow managed in the death penalty context to overcome centuries of embedded racism and administer a system of ultimate punishment where defendants will be judged more nearly by the circumstances of their crimes and the contents of their character than by the color of their skin."
The man has never parked in a Juror lot and tried to make it way down the street to the courthouse alive. Is he advocating a guilty verdict based upon evidence as opposed to allowed evidence? That is not very Liberal! Dr. Blecker, will you personally work to properly and proportionately overstock Blacks on death rows across this great nation, or allow the contemporary atrocities of Black underrepresentation to continue?
Women are 52% of the population. They are nowhere near 52% of national death row inmates. Uncle Al urges diversity sentencing until historical inequities of gender discrimination in State executions are ended - which is to say, grossly overcompensated at taxpayer expense. Studies must be done.
Given throughputs in Nevada and Texas, this will be like the March of Dimes. It will be stable highly remunerative employment for everybody involved except those who in theory are targeted to benefit. Social advocacy is a subtle thing off-spreadsheet.
The Berkeley Emergency Food and Housing Project celebrated its 2004 30th anniversary of "ending homelessness in Berkeley." It is so jazzed it dropped "Emergency" from its name, hence BFHP. Come well-dressed and RSVP. Hungry and homeless need not apply.
The affair will bestow its 2004 Humanitarian Award upon Roy L. Meisner, Chief of Police City of the Berkeley Police Department. Roy has dispensed emergency food and housing to an awful lot of awful people over the years. Now that is a government program! Perhaps the selfless folks soliciting $100-250 donations for the needy and their own pension plans (priorities not implied by listing order) need some traffic tickets fixed. Limousines overlap two parking meters. Is that fair?
I quote, "This year, BFHP experienced unprecedented increases in mandated expenses, specifically, Worker's Compensation premiums, medical benefit premiums (we pay 100% for our employees) and the City of Berkeley Living Wage Ordinance, which we wholeheartedly support. These *increases* [my emphasis] come to an annualized amount over $100,000."
Who ever got disabled opening envelopes of other peoples' cash and spending it? ICU/Paper Cuts must be brutal. Send flowers. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day (unless he is a vegetarian). Give a man a fishing pole and Worker's Compensation feeds him for the rest of his life. That is compassion.
Their left hands do not know what their far left hands are doing. How many employees do you think BFHP has? The Board alone is thirteen handsomely remunerated professionals. Salaried employees look like maybe another dozen, though there could be more. BFHP is rather coy about quantitating its overall benefited work force. There are lots of volunteers actually doing the work... but they remain ideologically pure by not being munificently benefited.
There are no Latino/Hispanic/Chicano surnamed individuals. Not a one. Charity apparently only goes so far. Do you suppose the Bay area is too far north for Mexicans to migrate? Perhaps it is like Hyannisport on the other coast wherein minorities are only tolerated as a conceptual basis for external imposition and taxation.
There will soon be that bright, bright day when 01 April is every day of the year, not just on the first and fifteenth of the month. Homeland Severity demands it. Do you have any problems with that?