Yesterday, Josh Marshall at TPM posted this comment, which I
think is very insightful and important. I
recommend that you take a few moments to read it. Here is the gist of it:
“The demand that Mexico pay for a wall has never really been
about money. As wasteful and needless as the wall is, its cost would be
manageable in the context of the total US national budget. The point of the
demand is humiliation. It is comparable to the way authoritarian regimes (like
China, for instance) sometimes charge the family of an executed criminal for
the bullets used to execute their loved one. It's not the money; it's
degradation.”
Another comparison I would make is how the SS required the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto to pay for the walls that walled them in.
ReplyDeleteThe state of Arizona now "encourages" defense lawyers to buy death penalty drug cocktails for their clients. This is happening because of the difficulty getting those drugs (suppliers do not want to support death penalty) and the increasing amount of botched executions.
ReplyDeleteOn a related media note, I find it fascinating that news of U. S. death penalty executions is fairly big news around the world but not in the U. S. itself (the Arizona story was probably news in Arizona but around the world it is "international news"). There has been limited notice in the U. S. of botched executions but as I listen to the BBC and the CBC (I live close to Canada) I hear more coverage of death penalty issues.