Problem Chylde: Live from Pressure Cooker, USA

Johnny Depp wouldn’t like my news round-ups.

(High) Court TV — Chicago Tribune

The case for cameras in courtrooms, including the Supreme Court, gets stronger by the year. All 50 states allow cameras in at least some state courts. Video technology continues to shrink and become less intrusive. Thousands of hours of court time already have been broadcast over truTV, the new name of Court TV, and conventional TV news shows and webcasts without a surge in obstructed justice, security problems or privacy violations for jurors or witnesses.

Death sentences vary by county, study finds — San Francisco Chronicle

The commission, a legislatively created body headed by former state Attorney General John Van de Kamp, met in Santa Clara on Friday for the last of three hearings to address concerns about the death penalty in California. The state has 669 condemned prisoners, the most in the nation, and has executed 13 people since executions resumed in 1992 after a 25-year halt.

The ACLU said 10 counties, with 68.5 percent of the state’s population, produced 83 percent of the 166 death sentences decreed by juries in the state from 2000 to 2007. The group examined data from the 24 most populous of California’s 58 counties.

San Francisco, where District Attorney Kamala Harris and her predecessor Terence Hallinan promised voters not to seek death sentences, was one of four counties with no death verdicts during the period. The others were Marin, Santa Cruz and Solano.

The counties with the most death sentences compared with murder cases filed included two in the Bay Area: Contra Costa, which ranked third on the list, and Alameda, which was fifth.
In death sentences per capita, the report said, Alameda County was eight times as likely to sentence someone to death as Santa Clara County. By the same measure, Tulare County, which headed the list, issued death verdicts at 13 times the rate of neighboring Fresno County.

Earliest recordings preceded Edison’s — Los Angeles Times

Using technology originally designed to play records without touching them, a team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was able to convert a series of squiggly lines etched onto smoked paper into an ethereal voice singing “Au Clair de la Lune, Pierrot répondit,” a refrain from a French folk song.

The piece was played publicly for the first time Friday morning at a meeting of the Assn. for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University by historian David Giovannoni, who unearthed it this month in the archives of the French Academy of Sciences.

Outrage and Controversy at NY Museum Art Show Depicting Police Brutality — Alternet

“The Blue Wall of Violence” is a 1999 installation that addresses police brutality. It focuses on the object that the police “mistook” for a dangerous weapon when they shot an unarmed person. The artwork consists of several elements: On the wall are six actual FBI silhouette targets which police use for shooting practice. Protruding from each of these is a cast of an arm. In each hand is an object — wallet, house keys, 3 Musketeers bar, squeegee, etc. Above each target is a date. In front of this is a coffin and in front of the coffin are three police batons which are moved by motors so that they each strike the casket every 10 seconds with a loud penetrating bang. The dates correspond to a day when an actual person was shot by the police and the objects are what they were holding when shot (For example, on February 4, 1999 Amadou Dialo was shot 41 times while holding his wallet, on Sept 24, 1994, 13-year-old Nicholas Hayward Jr. was killed while holding a brightly colored oversized water pistol …)

The whole article is superb.

Clinton not quitting: ‘I like long movies’ — Chicago Tribune

Clinton said the rules applying to super delegates having a right and responsibility to pick the best candidate for president also applies to the regularly elected delegates—those who are pledged to support a particular candidate for nomination. She indicated that delegates elected to support Obama, who outnumber those elected to back Clinton, could end up supporting her based on the outcome of upcoming state contests.

“Every delegate has a responsibility to vote for the person that they believe would be the best candidate and the best president, however they define it,” she said. “That’s what the delegates are going to do and that is something that will evolve over the next several months and I think there will be additional information that will inform those decisions coming from these upcoming contests.”

Well, Jesus Christ, Hillary: why does anyone who isn’t a delegate bother voting at all, then? Why should we count Michigan, Florida, or any other state if it’s the job of the delegates to blatantly ignore the people’s will?

Should Obama Drop Out of the Race? — The Huffington Post

Plus, and here’s the most important point: It’s not over yet. Until it is, we can’t be sure of the outcome. And it would be a big mistake to end it prematurely. There’s been many a boxing match where one fighter won 14 rounds, only to get knocked out in the 15th.

All these Obama supporters calling on Clinton to drop out aren’t helping their candidate, either. They make Obama look like he’s afraid of a fight. And they themselves look like a stereotypical bunch of men telling a woman she can’t hack it in politics, so she might as well get back in the kitchen.

Shared because I do think a part of the Hillary Clinton concession demand is sexist, even if there are damned good arguments for the sentiment. She’s not a dizzy girl with no conception of politics. And when Huckabee was in the same stubborn lock with McCain in the Republican primary with not nearly the same chances at winning, you saw the calls for him to quit without the condescending belittlement being directed at Clinton.

12 City Businesses Facing Lawsuits Over Access For Disabled — Associated Press

Twelve Tucson businesses, including two hospitals, have been sued for allegedly of not being fully accessible to people with disabilities.

The suits filed by a Florida-based law firm target St. Mary’s and St. Joseph’s hospitals as well as the Doubletree Hotel, El Charro Cafe, Foothills Mall and Coffee Xchange, among other businesses.

The same law firm has filed hundreds of similar suits in nine other states and Washington, D.C.
The few owners who would comment when contacted Thursday said they weren’t doing anything wrong and that their buildings were just built before the Americans With Disabilities Act standards were adopted in 1990.

The federal court actions focus mostly on issues involving parking, access and bathroom size.

Lawyer: Gitmo Trials Pegged to ‘08 Campaign — t r u t h o u t

The brief filed Thursday by Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer directly challenged the integrity of President Bush’s war court.

Notably, it describes a Sept. 29, 2006, meeting at the Pentagon in which Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a veteran White House appointee, asked lawyers to consider Sept. 11, 2001, prosecutions in light of the campaign.

“We need to think about charging some of the high-value detainees because there could be strategic political value to charging some of these detainees before the election,” England is quoted as saying.

A senior Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, declined to address the specifics, saying “the trial process will surface the facts in this case.”

“It has always been everybody’s desire to move as swiftly and deliberately as possible to conduct military commissions,” he added. “But I can tell you emphatically that leadership has always been extraordinarily careful to guard against any unlawful command influence.”

The brief quotes England as a stipulation of fact and cites other examples of alleged political interference, which Mizer argues makes it impossible for Salim Hamdan, 37, to have a fair trial.

It asks the judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, to dismiss the case against Hamdan as an alleged 9/11 co-conspirator on the grounds that Bush administration leadership exercises “unlawful command influence.”

Greg Mitchell: Bush Confesses All to Oprah! — Huffington Post

In the days after Oprah Winfrey two years ago sliced and diced writer James Frey on her TV show for misleading the public with lies in his bestselling memoir, many liberal commentators expressed a single wish: to watch Oprah have the opportunity to do the same with President George W. Bush concerning the alleged lies that got the U.S. into Iraq (2,200 lost American lives ago). Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post columnist, observed, “If there were justice in the world, George W. Bush would have to give his State of the Union address from Oprah’s couch. . . . Bush should have to face the wrathful, Old Testament Oprah who subjected author James Frey to that awful public smiting the other day.”

Columnist Norman Solomon cited the Winfrey/Frey tussle, then charged, “Yet the journalists who interview Bush aren’t willing to question him in similar terms.” Jon Stewart contrasted Oprah’s tough questioning of Frey with obsequious TV news treatment of Bush, Rumsfeld, and others. Maureen Dowd compared “disgraced author” Frey with “a commander in chief who keeps writing chapter after chapter of fictionalized propaganda.”

So I have taken the liberty of pushing all this dreaming one step beyond, imagining an Oprah sitdown with the president—based almost word for word on the transcript of her session with Frey, with just a very few phrases obviously changed here and there. Here it is, without commercial interruption. It even has a happy ending.