Duty to Warn

Tested: How Twelve Wrongly Imprisoned Men Held Onto Hope
Budd and Dorothy Budd
Brown Books Publishing Group
The plight of the wrongfully convicted is finally on the national radar screen, helped along by the miracle of DNA testing, groups that work on their behalf, and the willingness of state governmental officials to admit that there are serious flaws in the criminal justice system. While a number of articles and books have brought much needed attention to the problem, Tested is the first book to examine how the wrongfully convicted survived the hell of prison knowing that they are innocent.

The Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism (CICJ) which publishes the freepress.org made a comprehensive public records request on July 3, 2012 to virtually every county and municipal election official in Wisconsin. The Free Press wanted to look at the ballots from the June 5, 2012 recall election of Governor Scott Walker. As outlined in a previous Free Press article, our staff was concerned with the election results deviating so far from the exit polls that predicted an evenly divided vote – or too close to call. Walker won with a 7% discrepancy from the polls.

With Wisconsin’s history as a progressive and honest state, the CICJ did not anticipate any problems with our public record request. Imagine our shock when Kathy Nickolaus, the Waukesha County Clerk, sent us an 8-page letter containing directives that made it practically impossible for us to look at the Wisconsin ballots, which are public records under that state’s laws.

According to the Huffington Post, "President Barack Obama's reelection campaign and Democratic political groups have been eager for Romney to pick Ryan, the architect of plans to slash government spending and overhaul entitlement programs that Democrats believe are political losers." ABC agrees: "The selection of Ryan as running mate makes it far more likely that Medicare, Social Security, and dramatic spending cuts will be as central to the campaign conversation this fall as jobs and the economy. Adding some of those famed political third rails into the mix is not just a potential risk Romney is willing to take, it is also clearly a potential risk he felt he had to take."

So, cutting Medicare and Social Security are unpopular, and Obama benefits from Romney's risky move in picking a runningmate willing to cut them. That's the story.

Shell Oil's latest drilling plans are just the tip of the iceberg in what could become an environmental catastrophe for the fragile Arctic region. Earlier this month the oil company announced that it will begin drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off the coast of northern Alaska. Such activity would threaten the livelihood of countless endangered species - bowhead whales, beluga whales, gray whales, several seal species, Pacific walrus, polar bears, and about 100 fish species. More alarming still, the remote region is located 1,000 miles from the nearest Coast Guard base, making clean-up efforts near impossible should an oil spill occur.

This is American exceptionalism: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

But you have to say it without the doubt, the regret — the horror — of Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist extraordinaire and director of the Manhattan Project, who famously uttered these words in reference to the Trinity nuclear explosion in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert on July 16, 1945.

When you remove Oppenheimer’s moral awareness from the quote, it sounds more like: “Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice. I’d wipe ’em out. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn't kill innocent people. . . . That’s their tough luck for being there.”

The unrepentant Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima less than a month after the Trinity explosion, made this comment in an interview with Studs Terkel in 2007, in response to Terkel’s question: “. . .when you hear people say, ‘Let’s nuke ’em. Let’s nuke these people,’” — the terrorists — “what do you think?”

Thrill to the vibrant gymnastics grace of Gabby Douglas, the fierce tennis power of Serena Williams, the skill of Kayla Harrison in winning the first gold for an American woman in judo. Led by Missy Franklin and Rebecca Soni and others, the U.S. women’s swimming team as of Monday had harvested eight gold medals, three silver and three bronze. The U.S. women’s beach volleyball team, the basketball team and the soccer team are still in the hunt. American women are leading the way this Olympics.

It’s worth remembering why. Rules matter. Opportunity is vital. A level playing field, clear goals, fair referees all count. This success comes from the amazing talent and extraordinary hard work and discipline of these gifted athletes, supported by family and skilled coaching.

Introduction

Some state and local officials are blaming their governments’ budget problems on the compensation and benefits of public employees. They say they can no longer afford to pay what they allege is excessive remuneration for public workers.

Many federal officials say there is no money to provide health-care coverage for the public, extend unemployment compensation, increase social security benefits, provide more funds for education, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, or strengthen the social safety net for the record number of Americans in poverty.

But money can be found to address those issues. A problem is that vastly increased portions of the nation’s income and wealth have been taken by the rich, who also have enjoyed drastic reductions in their tax rates.

Although money is available to alleviate the nation’s problems, it is being hoarded by the wealthy instead of used for paying fair compensation to private-sector workers and adequate taxes to support public services.

Numerous other social ills also result from extreme economic inequality, with disastrous consequences to the U.S.

Here are the facts, ma'am:In the 2008 election, no fewer than:

• 767,023 provisional ballots were cast and not counted;
• 1,451,116 ballots were "spoiled," not counted;
• 488,136 absentee ballots were mailed in, but not counted.

Add it up: in the last presidential election, no fewer than 2,706,275 ballots were cast—and never counted. I have not included a quarter million (251,936) provisional ballots counted only in part (that is, for some offices).

That's the official number I've calculated from the records of the US Election Assistance Commission.

Approximately three million votes flushed away are ugly enough. But it gets worse.

Has it really been a third of a century since President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof? Has it really been over a quarter century since President Ronald Reagan yanked them down?

Yes and you betcha.

"On June 20th, 33 years ago, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof. Seven years after that, Ronald Reagan took them down," writes Brian Merchant in motherboard.com. "It was the end of 70s, a decade wracked with stagnant economic growth and a pair of debilitating oil price spikes—the second, caused by the Iranian revolution, actually occurred in 1979. The nation had seen firsthand the danger of rely ing too heavily on oil, and ordinary folks were sick of being besieged by high gas prices. So Jimmy Carter made what seemed to be a reasonable move: He started organizing a framework by which to wean us off the black stuff."

Today, as America limps through a recession that will never recover without the stimulus and savings promised by renewable energy, perhaps it is time to revisit the the "Carter Initiative" on a grander scale.

We wrecked Iraq, we pulled out, we redeployed in Anaheim.

This ain’t working, guys — I mean, firing rubber bullets into anguished crowds, siccing attack dogs on moms and children. I mean, inventing enemies, going to war, unleashing state-of-the-art firepower in all directions and eventually losing, but not before we've inflicted maximum suffering on the innocent and magnified the original problem tenfold.

We lose every war we fight.

Another way to say that is: We exacerbate every problem we militarize. Indeed, militarization is as much a part of the problem — as much a threat to civilization — as, for instance, terrorism or drugs. And the recent, ongoing community uproar in Anaheim, Calif., over two police slayings of Latino males in one weekend — and the subsequent police reaction to that outrage — illustrates the terrifying ineffectiveness of a militarized, "us vs. them" approach to conflict.

"They just released the dog and I had my baby," a woman tells the TV news reporter, bursting into tears. "The dog scratched me with his teeth."