“If we’re going to have a real discussion about the place of public religion in our public spectacles, then let’s have one instead of some mushy, Wonder Bread platitudes about how great it is that Tim Tebow talks about Jesus and doesn’t get caught doing strippers two at a time in the hot tub. If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels. If we keep faith with those American values, then we might just let him off the hook enough to see if he simply can become a better quarterback than Andy Dalton.”
“There is always something a little nauseating in large spectacles of conspicuous public piety, but watching everyone on the field take a knee before the Penn State-Nebraska game, and listening to the commentary about how devoutly everybody was praying for the victims at Penn State, was enough to get me reaching for a bucket and a Bible all at once. It was as though the players and coaches had devised some sort of new training regimen to get past the awful reality of what had happened. Prayer as a new form of two-a-days. Jesus is my strength coach. Contrition in the context of a football game seemed almost obscene in its obvious vanity.”
“When someone hands you a flyer, it’s like they’re saying, ‘Here you throw this away.’”
“Imagine a libertarian Christianity, which urged individuals to give away as much of their property as possible to the poor, to forget about the sex lives of their neighbors and focus on their own, to pray more than politic and to forgive more than to judge. Imagine, in other words, Christianity, and remind yourself how alien Christianism is to it.”
![“The way I look at it, what I created can and may already have resulted in the death of an innocent person. And that’s pretty heavy.”
Donald Heller, the author of the 1978 California ballot measure that greatly expanded the list of murders eligible for capital punishment explains why he now opposes the death penalty:
I started thinking of some things that I never really thought about when I wrote it. One was the enormous toll it took on people involved. The human element — not [so much] the defendants but the people in the system. I was in a restaurant bar in Sacramento celebrating a settlement. At the bar was a lawyer I [knew]; his head was down on the bar and he was completely drunk. I said, “Are you OK?” He said: “They just sentenced my client to death, and I really like him and it’s just a bad decision.” Eventually he got out of criminal practice. I [also] started noticing the toll it took on judges pronouncing a sentence of death.I have a high regard for prosecutors — I could count on one hand the prosecutors I felt were unethical — but I saw the aggressiveness to get death. It became, with some, a game. I would see the quality of the court-appointed lawyers. Some were good, some mediocre, some less than mediocre. Defendants didn’t get what they were entitled to, and that’s why you [saw] quite a few reversals of verdicts in the Rose Bird court. That incensed the public. What the death penalty brought about [was] bad decisions and bad law.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lp6ideN6Lj1qz8qego1_400.jpg)
“The way I look at it, what I created can and may already have resulted in the death of an innocent person. And that’s pretty heavy.”
Donald Heller, the author of the 1978 California ballot measure that greatly expanded the list of murders eligible for capital punishment explains why he now opposes the death penalty:
I started thinking of some things that I never really thought about when I wrote it. One was the enormous toll it took on people involved. The human element — not [so much] the defendants but the people in the system. I was in a restaurant bar in Sacramento celebrating a settlement. At the bar was a lawyer I [knew]; his head was down on the bar and he was completely drunk. I said, “Are you OK?” He said: “They just sentenced my client to death, and I really like him and it’s just a bad decision.” Eventually he got out of criminal practice. I [also] started noticing the toll it took on judges pronouncing a sentence of death.
I have a high regard for prosecutors — I could count on one hand the prosecutors I felt were unethical — but I saw the aggressiveness to get death. It became, with some, a game. I would see the quality of the court-appointed lawyers. Some were good, some mediocre, some less than mediocre. Defendants didn’t get what they were entitled to, and that’s why you [saw] quite a few reversals of verdicts in the Rose Bird court. That incensed the public. What the death penalty brought about [was] bad decisions and bad law.
“The ‘war on drugs’ has been well lost, and should never have been waged. While it isn’t explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, I can think of no political right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time.”
“The government has as much of a right to control what I as an adult put into my body as it does what I put into my mind, it’s NONE of their business.”
Judge Jim Gray, the Republican who co-authored the Regulate Marijuana Like Wine Act and believes there will be an end to marijuana prohibition within two years.
(Source: d-0wn)
A woman was arrested for filming police officers from her own front yard. Then, when neighbors held a meeting at a private home to discuss ways they could support this poor woman, four cop cars showed up to ticket cars every car that was parked more than 12 inches from the curb. As Randy Balko notes, “they even brought a ruler.” Balko adds:
By the way, due to a $50 million budget shortfall, the city of Rochester is considering cutting 27 full-time police positions. If the the cops in Rochester have time to carry out petty grudges against citizens who dare to show support for a woman who was illegally arrested, maybe the city ought to consider cutting 40 or 50 positions instead. They could start with the cops in this video.
Every day, cops are wrongfully arresting people for filming them. And everyday, the the TV news reports on the Palins.
“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
“I’ve been in a thousand arguments over this topic. I’ve won them all, and I’ve convinced no one.”
(Source: ESPN)
“I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had problems with the police.”
