In 1993, William Osburne was convicted of kidnapping, assaulting and raping a woman in Anchorage, Alaska.  He spent the next 14 years of his life behind bars.  Osburne insists that he is innocent, the State of Alaska has in its possession DNA evidence which will once and for all prove his guilt or innocence, and Osburne has offered to pay for DNA testing out of his own pocket.  Allowing Osburne to prove—or disprove–his claim of innocence will cost Alaska literally nothing.

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court held today in a 5-4 decisionby Chief Justice Roberts that Osburne is out of luck.  Although Roberts conceded that “[i]t is now often possible to determine whether a biological tissue matches a suspect with near certainty,” he determined that Osburne has no right to pay for a test that could exonerate him for a crime he did not commit.  Allowing Osburne to prove his potential innocence, Roberts said, risks “unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.”

What the fuck?  The state has possession of the evidence.  The perpetrator will pay for the testing.  But the conservatives on the SCOTUS have a large enough block to prevent the pursuit of a “near certain” truth.

What is the point of having a system of criminal justice if the system is more important than the justice?

I would hope this sort of crap would have the libertarians howling with outrage.

He was also convinced that the government wanted to take away his guns and his freedom.

I wonder where he got that idea?  Could it be from irresponsible rhetoric like that of Michele “Amistad” Bachmann?

UPDATE:  According to the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) the Pittsburgh shooter was posting video of Glen Beck on Stormfront – “the worlds largest white supremacist online discussion forum.”  In the video Glen Beck, of Fox News Channel, is spewing about how Obama is going to round up all the “normal americans” and put them into concentration camps.  And this garbage is being put out on “america’s most watched news channel.”  And still people will make excuses for this kind of bullshit.

Oh yeah, and in the “Have you heard of the Lindberg Baby” department, Michele Bachmann is on the “re-education camp” bandwagon as well:

And the real concerns is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.”

UPDATE2:  This article has a nice rundown of the Glen Beck and Fox News incitements.  It also references a case I hadn’t heard of before – in August 2008 some dude killed 2 people in a Unitarian church in TN and left a note saying that he hated liberals and was going to kill them where they gathered.  I think this was right around the time Palin was talking about Obama “palling around with terrorists.”

Just nine people accounted for nearly 2,700 of the emergency room visits in the Austin area during the past six years at a cost of $3 million to taxpayers and others, according to a report.

We just might have to do something about healthcare sometime soon.  And the choice will probably come down to whether we want everyone covered or less people covered.

Hat tip to Nagasaki.

Electric cars have been getting a lot of buzz lately, but a more immediately viable transportation fuel of the future could be liquid derived from coal. Scientists have devised a new way to transform coal into gas for your car using far less energy than the current process. The advance makes scaling up the environmentally unfriendly fuel more economical than greener alternatives.

If oil prices rise again, adoption of the new coal-to-liquid technology, reported this week in Science,  could undercut adoption of electric vehicles or next-generation biofuels. And that’s bad news for the fight against climate change.

The new process could cut the energy cost of producing the fuel by 20 percent just by rejiggering the intermediate chemical steps, said co-author Ben Glasser of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. But coal-derived fuel could produce as much as twice as much CO2 as traditional petroleum fuels and at best will emit at least as much of the greenhouse gas.

Well, at least we won’t have to worry about going Mad Max on each other for oil.  

And the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal, but ffs, I was excited about visiting the Grand Canyon someday while Arizona was still habitable for human life.

Michele Bachmann brings the stupid like few others in the history of mankind.

You can see the confusion on Geithner and Bernanke’s faces give way to astonishment, recognition, and finally, disgust.

In 2001, Portugal became the only EU-member state to decriminalize drugs, a distinction which continues through to the present.  Last year, working with the Cato Institute, I went to that country in order to research the effects of the decriminalization law (which applies to all substances, including cocaine and heroin) and to interview both Portuguese and EU drug policy officials and analysts (the central EU drug policy monitoring agency is, by coincidence, based in Lisbon).  Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense.

From what I can gather, Greenwald is presenting the findings of his research on Monday at the Cato Institute (libertarian think-tank) in Washington DC.  If you are in DC and want to attend, or if you want to watch it live on-line you can register or watch it here.

The details, to say the least, should be interesting.

In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The mexican drug cartels are running rampant across our neighbor to the south, outgunning and murdering the mexican authorities that they cannot bribe or intimidate.  Why?  Because they are flush with cash due to the high price of illegal drugs caused by the US prohibition.  It’s definitely not because they are trying to run Dos Equis or Kool 100s across the border.

Friends of mine recently went to Egypt and Jordan and there were more State Department warnings about Mexico than either of those middle-eastern countries.  Mexico is in a bad way, and the situation rightly calls for a re-evaluation of drug prohibition.   

In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbor.

The rest of the editorial is well worth reading, but it doesn’t break new ground.  Aside from the bits about Mexico I’ve excerpted above, it’s pretty much the same, no-nonsense argument – prohibition isn’t working, has never worked and legalization will reduce crime and aid recovery.

Facilitator: “Now, let’s go to the news desk and hear the latest on the mother of the octuplets.”

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

And as I scurried from the couch, screaming in my best Dean-like fashion, changing the channel as fast as I could, I realized there were probably a lot more people who were scurrying just as fast toward their TVs to hear the latest octuplet news.

Sometimes I wish the terrorists would win.