Louisiana Tries to Kill Death Row Inmates the Natural Way:
Here's one you might not have heard about: So, at Angola, the state penitentiary nestled in the muggy taint of south Louisiana, death row inmates are kept in a cell block of tiers that don't have air conditioning or proper ventilation. They were built in 2006, one of the newest parts of Angola. The temperature gets to 90 to 110 degrees inside during the summer. The prisoners must stay in their cells 23 hours a day. Three inmates with health conditions that are exacerbated by heat filed a complaint, saying it violated their rights under the American With Disabilities Act, as well as being cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution. The trial, with the Louisiana Department of Corrections and the wardens as defendants, just wrapped up this week.

During the trial, it was revealed that officials at Angola tried to skew independent monitoring of the heat levels. "[P]rison officials installed window awnings and tried blasting the tiers’ outer walls with water cannons to attempt to lower the indoor temperatures" in direct violation of a court order. The appalled judge said that the prison was either a bunch of stumblefucks or they were deliberately tampering with evidence. Judge Brian Jackson is going to visit the tiers himself on Monday.

Essentially, the state of Louisiana is torturing its prisoners on death row. And the reaction, as you might expect, has been shrugged shoulders and mumbles of how the criminals are getting what they deserve. If you believe that, you are a fucking animal. (Frankly, if you support capital punishment, you're a fucking animal, but let's not get into that argument today.)

Because, see, let's introduce you to Damon Thibodaux. He was released from Angola's death row after 15 years last September when DNA evidence exonerated him. That means that Thibodaux, an innocent man, was forced to endure not only the hell that is Angola, the hell that is imprisonment in isolation, but the searing, visceral, physical hell of years of living in an oven. That's why you don't torture.

By the way, the cost for a person sentenced to death, from incarceration to execution, is in the tens of millions of dollars. The cost to install air conditioning on Angola's death row? Probably around $550,000.

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Why Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly Are Cunts (Racism and Sexism Edition):
In her latest "column" (if by "column," you mean "the skidmarks of the unclean soul"), Ann Coulter defends Bill O'Reilly from Lawrence O'Donnell, which, if you think about it, is a little like Rodan defending Godzilla from a Tokyo tank attack (interesting, "Tokyo tank attack" is one of the Rude Pundit's favorite new sexual positions, involving an asshole, a speculum, two mutually masturbating Japanese men and...well, do the math). See, O'Reilly said, shortly after the verdict acquitting George Zimmerman of murdering Trayvon Martin despite the fact that George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Marton, that single black mothers are to blame for violent crime by black youths.

Thus spaketh O'Reilly: "White people don't force black people to have babies out of wedlock. That's a personal decision -- a decision that has devastated millions of children and led to disaster both socially and economically. So raised without much structure, young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs. Nobody forces them to do that -- again, it is a personal decision." At this point, to say that Bill O'Reilly says something ignorant and racist is like saying that Bill O'Reilly took a breath. Oh, and O'Reilly also blames the entertainment industry for making thugs look glamorous, which is something they totally never did in the salad days of Jimmy Cagney flicks.

Never one to let a blatantly hateful statement go unsupported, Coulter praises O'Reilly for speaking truth. She gives a bunch of history and statistics about how Lyndon Johnson ruined everything, lines that are just cut and paste jobs from her latest book (no, really, self-plagiarism is how she "writes" "her" "columns" and gets paid for them). She scratches, "Liberals keep using the bad consequences of their policies as an argument for more of the same policies. Government subsidies to unwed mothers increase the illegitimacy rate, which in turn leads to poverty, criminal behavior and more illegitimacy. So Democrats reverse cause and effect to claim it's the poverty that causes illegitimacy and then demand more payments to unwed mothers."

And O'Reilly concludes, "The solution to the epidemic of violent crime in poor black neighborhoods is to actively discourage pregnancies out of marriage, to impose strict discipline in the public schools, including mandatory student uniforms, and to create a zero tolerance policy for gun and drug crimes imposing harsh mandatory prison time on the offenders." Of course, the notion of institutional and societal racism having an effect here is completely lost on these conservative cockbiters.

Now you may be sane and think, "These two stupid fuckers are missing something big. But I can't put my finger on it."

Coulter says, "We know poverty does not cause illegitimacy." That's an argument you can have with Coulter if you enjoy chasing your tail around a tree. But here's the deal: we do know what prevents illegitimacy - sex education, access to birth control, and abortion.

Follow the bouncing ball of blatant obviousness here: If we take Coulter and O'Reilly at their word, then what would make for lower crime rates? Fewer criminals, all those bastards born to those wretched black single moms. And what would ensure that fewer babies are born? Well, shit, start with honest sex education, the kind that O'Reilly and Coulter oppose. Move on to access to birth control - at school or at, you know, Planned Parenthood - which O'Reilly and Coulter oppose. And if all else fails, make sure that women with unwanted children can get safe abortions, which O'Reilly and Coulter oppose, paid for by Medicaid, which would cause O'Reilly and Coulter's heads to explode like so many melons under Gallagher's novelty sledgehammer.

It's a cruel calculus, for sure, but it's only so for playing on the nutzoid right-wingers' field. Shit, Coulter says the solution is to go back to a time when women were required to have husbands in order to qualify for welfare. So who is being crueler? (Answer: Coulter.)

Oh, by the way, you know the other effect that the sex-ed/birth control/abortion axis of access would have? Many, many empowered black women not held back by unwanted children, which probably would cause O'Reilly and Coulter to head to the Fox "news" panic room to wait out the horrors, balling madly and frantically until Coulter, like a female praying mantis, bites O'Reilly's head off.

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Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Go Kamikaze on a Bottle of Cold Sake:

At the Oshkosh, Wisconsin, AirVenture, a week of airplane-related events that just wrapped up on that humorously named town, people cheered "Tora! Tora! Tora!", which was an "aerial reenactment of Pearl Harbor." That was last Friday. Of course, Pearl Harbor didn't happen until December, but that never stopped Midwestern yahoo fucktards from getting their war on. It might have been a Day That Shall Live in Infamy, 9/11 before 9/11 was cool, but, goddamn, them explosions are pretty, like flowers of fire.

In Japan yesterday, people marked the 68th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. They had a moment of silence, released doves, prayed, declared peace, and lit paper lanterns.

One imagines that people in Oshkosh might feel it's a missed opportunity for a really cool fake nuking they can photograph with their iPhones.

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Late Post Today:

The Rude Pundit must confront the forces of Death. 

Back later with more redemptive rudeness.

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Washington Post's Marc Thiessen: Here's Some Conservative Lies That'll Scare Idiots:
In his latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "the logical frog-leaps of a former Bush toady"), torture supporter and former Jesse Helms staff member Marc Thiessen (who was so much more interesting in drag as a teen girl named "Tiffani Amber" on Saved by the Bell) says that because people don't trust President Obama because of the IRS "scandal," national security will be harmed because Congress might pass rules governing NSA surveillance.

And if your reaction to that groin-pulling twist of irrationality isn't "The fuck?" then you are an idiot.

Let's get past this really quickly. Let's just bend Thiessen over his desk and give him a fast fisting, one that he'll obviously enjoy and then hate himself for enjoying:

He writes that the terrorism threat that has caused us to go bugnuts in Africa and Asia came from NSA spying. "Yet the House of Representatives just nearly stripped the NSA of one of its most vital terrorist surveillance tools," he says. Except the problem is that the surveillance tool that Congress almost regulated (but didn't) is the collection of metadata, not the listening in on foreign calls, which is where the bomb-happy "chatter" came from. In other words, Congress would have done nothing to hinder this latest freakout.

Thiessen says, "Many Americans see the IRS scandal as emblematic of an increasingly lawless administration." Except, of course, that there was no IRS scandal, unless you go probing the gooey folds of the minds of deranged teabaggers and Darrell Issa.

He attacks Obama because "Congress refused to pass Obama’s Dream Act, so Obama issued an executive order directing immigration officers to no longer deport an entire class of illegal immigrants who came here as children, regardless of individual circumstances, and to give them work-authorization permits."

Yet the truth of the matter is almost completely different: "The executive order taking advantage of prosecutorial discretion in deportation cases will cover individuals brought to the United States through no fault of their own before the age of 16 who have lived in the U.S. at least five years and have no criminal record. They must also have earned a high school degree or served in the military, and still be under 30. Those who meet the criteria can get deportation proceedings (or the threat of same) deferred for two years and seek work permits."

That's not "regardless of individual circumstances." That's "only in specific cases."

And on and on it goes, with Thiessen dropping faux examples of Obama's "lawlessness" like so many turds from a cow's ass, such as Obama's recess appointments when the House refused to recess but wasn't actually meeting, as well as the kind of executive actions that Thiessen supported when George W. Bush was his employer. Somehow, this all connects back to how Americans distrust the government when it comes to spying on them and then that will make al-Qaeda gleeful.

Marc, Marcy, Tiffani, baby, listen. Let the Rude Pundit coo in your ear: It is possible, nay, probable, that people can hold two thoughts in their heads. Yes, yes, obviously the small-headed fuckers who read and believe you don't count. But we can actually think that there is no IRS scandal and that NSA data collection is a problem. We can think that Obama is being sane on immigration and paranoid on security.

But, obviously, you have a lot of lying to do, and, fortunately, the Washington Post's editorial page to do it on.

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A Brief Note on a Death (A Follow-Up)

A Brief Note on a Death (A Follow-Up):
(This is about a situation I first described on June 19.)

I was bruised, bleeding, and soaked as I walked into New York Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia on Thursday's rainy afternoon. I headed up to the surgical ICU and saw Mary's exhausted sister and mother. They could barely speak. I offered my sympathy and asked when it was going to happen. "Saturday," her sister answered. They were just headed out to get coffee. "I'm glad you're here," Mary's sister said. "She'll be happy to have the company." She pointed out where to get the gloves and gown and then pushed her wheelchair-bound mother away. I looked at Mary in the bed and instantly wished that I hadn't come. But if I had stayed away, then I would have regretted not coming. Mary would have appreciated that: we had been in more than one situation at work where there was no good answer and no good outcome.

She did end up getting the liver transplant a few days after I wrote about Mary. What followed were weeks of ups and downs, as these things go. We weren't allowed to visit during that period. Her immune system had been weakened by years of battling Epstein-Barr, and she was susceptible to infections. Even her family could be with her for only a few minutes a day. She ended up needing two more operations. It wasn't that her body was rejecting the liver. It was that everything else that came along with her illnesses prevented her from benefiting from her acceptance of it. In the end, the last words from her family were that she had pneumonia and then a bacterial infection and that she was in a coma and that her brain was no longer functioning and then "Saturday." Since there was no longer any chance of her getting sick from us, we could visit. But only covered up because we might catch something from her.

The poet visited on Wednesday. She didn't believe the nurse who said that Mary was in a vegetative state. The poet talked to her, told her jokes, gave her a bracelet from her daughter, saw a tear come out of one of Mary's eyes. The poet insisted that Mary could hear, that Mary was listening. And she believed for a moment that a doctor had said there was hope. There wasn't. But she left glad that she had sat with Mary and, over email, encouraged several of us to go.

To say that Mary looked awful would be a vast understatement. She was a nightmare, a distorted image of herself. Gaunt from weeks without eating, her skin was an even deeper greenish yellow; her eyes were half open, fixed, sunken, surrounded by dark purple bruising, and coated with lubricant gel because she couldn't blink; her mouth hung limply open with a trach tube coming out. She was a vessel of air and fluids being pumped in, pumped out. She was a corpse being forced alive by machines.

I sat down and started talking because I couldn't think of anything else to do. I talked about a few things, I thanked her for helping me when she was the chair of the department, I told her that she would be missed, that I would miss her, and then I realized that I was talking to myself. I felt foolish, even a bit angry, unable to allow myself the thought that she could hear, knowing that people have to believe the things that get them through tragedy and that perhaps it's pessimistic of me to merely believe in what I can see. She wasn't there. I wasn't talking to her. And this sight of her was now going to compete with others when I remember her. I pulled off the gown and gloves, told her "Goodbye" and "Peace," and left.

On Saturday, the time of disconnection was 10:30 am. I received an email that "It shouldn't be long." I reloaded my email constantly for the next few hours until, about 2:30 pm, I got the simple message: "It is over." On Thursday, she will be buried.

There are very few people you can say this about, and, yes, even though, as I said in my last post about Mary, we were close, but not very close, she was a genuinely good person in a shitty world, the kind whose absence will be felt, who deserved far, far better than she got, dead at 42.

Last Thursday, when I walked out of the subway station at 168th Street to go to the hospital, thinking about what I was walking into, I didn't notice that the exit to the sidewalk had a step down. I tripped and fell forward, landing on my right knee and my hands. I used my hands to bounce off the sidewalk and twist around so that I came to rest on my back, on the wet concrete, rain falling down, mentally checking if anything was broken, wondering if I should take it as a sign to just turn around and leave, thinking how completely awful this day had become. People walked around me until a thin man came over to me and bent over. "Are you okay, man?" I asked him to grab my umbrella, which had flown out of my hands. He got it as I rose off the ground. He came back over and said, "I just wanna make sure: Are you okay?"

I stared at him for a moment and said, "I'm going to see a friend. She's dying."

He handed me the umbrella. I thanked him. "But are you okay?" he asked.

A couple of tears coming down, my knee throbbing, I said, "My friend is going to die" before limping towards the building.

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Dear Russia: Thanks for Snowden; Now Go Fuck Yourself

Dear Russia: Thanks for Snowden; Now Go Fuck Yourself:
No, really, it's great that Russia granted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a year of asylum from the United States government's crazed pursuit of him. Let's not praise too much: it's just another chapter in the story of Russia trying to maintain some of that Soviet-sized hard-on for a Cold War. As Republican strategist Tom Doherty said last night on soon-to-be-deceased Current TV, you can bet that if a Russian spying whistleblower had made his way to here, the Obama administration and members of Congress would have made a big damn deal about protecting his rights and shit. Not because, you know, they believe it, but because it skullfucks Putin in public.

In a half-joking manner, off-air, Doherty wondered why the White House or the CIA hadn't put out disinformation saying that Snowden is gay. That was definitely a missed opportunity, the Rude Pundit added. Considering how Russia has viciously turned on GLBT people, in official ways and in a surge of unchecked violence, he'd've been on the next plane to the United States.

To be clear, Russia has not outlawed homosexuality.  It has, however, outlawed adoption of Russian children by gay couples, no matter where they are from. It has declared, in law, that being gay means you engage in "non-traditional sexual behavior." And it has said that, if you spread "propaganda of non-traditional relationships to minors," you face fines and arrest. "Propaganda" is "the distribution of information aimed at forming non-traditional sexual concept in children, describing such ties as attractive, promoting the distorted understanding of social equality of traditional and non-traditional relations and also unwanted solicitation of information that could provoke interest in such relations."

Like marching in a parade or writing an online post or, in one case, wearing rainbow-striped suspenders.

In other words, Russia hasn't outlawed being gay. It's just made it a fuck of a lot harder to exist as a GLBT person there.

There have been mixed signals regarding whether or not the law would be enforced during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. While the Sports Minister said, "Hells yeah, we're arrestin' queers" (in a redneck Russian accent), a lawmaker and the IOC have said that it will not be. So figure skaters beware. (By the way, for a soul-crushing few minutes, look at the comments on that last link.)

The propaganda law was supported by 88% of the Russian people, who, for some strange reason, as if there's some unspoken official support, seem to feel like it's open season on gay people. Violence against gays has become shockingly public, with brutal assaults against gay activists. In such cases, the pro-gay rights marchers or speakers are as or more likely to be arrested than their assailants. In several cases, Russian dickheads show they're totally not gay by kidnapping gay men, torturing them by anally-violating them, and, sometimes, murdering them. And then they brag about it on social media because why the fuck not.

You gotta say this about Vladimir Putin and the Duma: by exploiting the irrational, unfounded fears of their ignorant population, they may hate gays, but they are truly cocksuckers.

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Ted Cruz Still Needs to Be Ditched:
Here's an anecdote that was related to the Rude Pundit: Freshmen at Princeton University are encouraged to take part in the Outdoor Action Frosh Trip, a six-day camping adventure with your fellow incoming students. When he was a young man from Texas, future senator Ted Cruz decided to go on this bonding experience. However, someone who was in the same group as him said that Cruz was such an unrepentant dickhead that several people on the trip discussed ditching him in the woods. Think about that: How do you become that dude? How big a prick do you have to be for Princeton students, some of the most privileged pricks in the country, to think, "Oh, fuck this guy. Let's leave him to the wolves"? And then for a couple of them to actually contemplate the possibility?

The answer, as has become amply clear to the nation at large and Republican Party in particular, is "exactly as big a prick as Ted Cruz is."

Because, at this point, with Senator Cruz polling at or near the top of the pack for the 2016 GOP nomination for president (2016 already, fer fuck's sake), with Cruz or reactions to Cruz (and stoned masturbator Rand Paul) dominating the media narrative about the Republican Party, with Cruz himself more or less calling his colleagues in his caucus a bunch of punks who would let Barack Obama fuck their prone asses if he wanted to, you can bet that Tom Coburn and Bob Corker are seriously talking about how to ditch Cruz in the ideological forest before he finally leads everyone off a cliff and onto sharp rocks below so vultures and cougars can devour them.

And why are Republicans, according to Cruz, "scared" and "defeatist" members of a "surrender caucus"? Because they won't take a mighty stand against the implementation of Obamacare by threatening to shut down the government unless President Obama agrees to shitcan the legislation.

Cruz says that Republicans need to turn the rhetoric around on who would be responsible for a government shutdown. They should say, "We’ve got to stand up and make the argument and win the argument that, ‘No, that’s not true. We have voted to fund the federal government. We want to fund the federal government. Why is President Obama threatening to shut down the federal government? Because he wants force Obamacare down people’s throats.'"

You got that? It's like a kidnapper saying to his hostage's family, "No, we have offered to free your son. We want to release your son. Why are you getting him killed by not paying the ransom?" Jesus, bastard that he is, at least in 1995 Newt Gingrich owned that he was causing the the government shutdown. At least he was willing to say, "Yeah, it's me shooting the hostage."

The Affordable Care Act is a law passed by a previous Congress. If you want to repeal it, then fuckin' get the votes to do it, with enough votes to override a veto. But if you want to know the pussy level of hardball that Cruz is playing, look at what else he said: "In order to win this fight, we need to get 41 Republicans in the Senate to make the same commitment."

That's how degraded the Senate has become. Triumph is merely being able to throw your body in the way while being bullied by some Texas yahoo with an inflated sense of self-worth.

Which, if you think about it, is how we got into this mess in the first place.

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