Dispatches from the Flying M

Huckabee's Willie Horton?

Mike Huckabee had a long record of granting pardons and commutations when he was governor of Arkansas--granting twice as many as his three predecessors combined. He was often influenced to grant these pardons by friends and acquaintances, especially among the clergy, and sometimes just by fandom--he pardoned Keith Richards for a traffic offense after meeting him at a concert.  Most of us would probably like the ability to pardon certain people (or to be backstage at a Stones show), but never get the chance.  Huck had the chance and used it often.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, necessarily.  In general, we put too many people in jail in this country, and while there's often a good reason for those incarcerations, many more are ineffective and serve just to turn misguided people into hardened criminals.

For a project I'm working on, I've been doing a lot of reading and studying up on criminal psychology, learning about repeat offenders and especially those driven by their bizarre mental issues toward serial crimes--killers, abductors, rapists, the lowest of the low.  For the most part, incarceration is the only solution to these issues--in a structured environment, these people can become functional citizens.  But they can't be removed from that structured environment because then they'll immediately return to their old patterns.  I'm not saying they don't exercise conscious choice when they carry out those crimes, because they do--otherwise you'd see them trying to pull them off in front of police officers, say, or in public places.  Any criminal who plots an act and commits it in secret has decided to do so, and thought it through.  But the compulsion driving these people is so ingrained that while it can be altered by altering the criminal's living arrangement,  it can't be removed.

So for Huckabee to have commuted the sentence of Maurice Clemmons, who was sentenced to prison for 60 years while already serving a 48-year term (and facing a possible 95-year term on other charges), was a big mistake.  Huck says the Arkansas parole board agreed with his decision. Still, the guy served only eleven years, then violated his parole and served another five. After Arkansas cut him loose, he moved to Washington state and got into trouble again. He was recently released on bond, after being arrested on child rape charges.

He seems to be suffering a psychotic break.  He believes he can fly, and he is convinced that President Obama will soon be visiting him to announce that he is the Messiah.  He recently forced his wife and various younger relatives to strip for him, declaring that families should spend part of every Sunday nude.  He's certain the world is ending soon. He's a bad, bad guy and he should not be out in society. At this moment, it's believed that he's wounded and possibly dead, so that probably won't be a problem anymore.

Yesterday he allegedly ambushed four police officers in Lakewood, WA, shooting and killing them in a coffee shop as they worked on laptops, doing paperwork before their shift started.

On Fox News yesterday, Huckabee said he was undecided about a presidential run in 2012. He sounded ambivalent.  Honestly, he's probably making more money as a Fox personality and radio host, and he's never managed to attract enough of the Republican base. But if a guy he let out of prison--a guy with a history of violent crimes and mental issues that might have been caught and contained in jail--killed four cops, then his political career is effectively over anyway.

Stray thought

What would the world be like today if we'd had a competent administration from Jan. 2001 to Jan. 2009?

Good move, Rumsfeld & Bush

"Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.

"The report asserts that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden at his most vulnerable in December 2001 has had lasting consequences beyond the fate of one man. Bin Laden's escape laid the foundation for today's reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan, it says."

The AP's full story is here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Appointment with destiny

More health care details

This post by Ron Brownstein goes pretty deeply into the weeds, but it explains in more detail than anything else I've seen how the Senate's bill bends the cost curve and creates a health care system that is deficit-reducing in the long term (reducing by $130 billion over the first decade, maybe $630 billion the second).  Republicans, of course, dispute that, even though the CBO confirms it and they're always happy to lean on CBO analysis when it serves their interests. Anyway, give it a look if you're awake and alert enough to get through it.  The basic thrust is that we'd be moving away from fee-for-service medicine, in which costs continually escalate because doctors are only paid to respond to problems, and more toward a system in which they'd be paid for keeping people healthy.

What will health care reform mean for your state?

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has posted a state-by-state breakdown of what health care reform will mean (without including the benefits of a public option). 

To me, the public option is very important, for both selfish and not-so-selfish reasons.  I think it's the best way to really make the private insurance companies pay attention, shape up their act, and offer lower premiums.  Plus as a self-employed freelancer, decent private insurance is hard for me to get, and extremely expensive for any kind of comprehensive plan--a public option would be an attractive one.  On the larger scale, it could make insurance easier to provide for small businesses, and the cost-lowering benefits would mean that people of lesser means could afford it, thereby reducing the amount we all have to pay for people who get all their medical care at the emergency room, usually when things have already gone really bad.

But even without that, every state benefits greatly from the plans under consideration in Congress. Here's just part of what the site says is in store for Arizona:

• 1.3 million residents who do not currently have insurance and 281,000 residents who have nongroup insurance could get affordable coverage through the health insurance exchange.
• 746,000 residents could qualify for premium tax credits to help them purchase health coverage.
• 853,000 seniors would receive free preventive services.
• 151,000 seniors would have their brand-name drug costs in the Medicare Part D “doughnut hole” halved.
• 63,700 small businesses could be helped by a small business tax credit to make premiums more affordable.

I'm one of those "nongroup" people, I guess.  Affordable coverage?  Sounds like a good thing from here.

The tragedy of our existing system is all those people who have no insurance, who never see a doctor, who have health issues they may not even know about, who are dying or going bankrupt because of a system in which insurance companies increase their profits by denying care to those who need it most.

One day, we'll get a single-payer system and give every American the health care a wealthy nation deserves. Until then, the bills before Congress now are better than nothing.

27.6 seconds

In the Nov. 23  issue of TIME Magazine there's a list of the 50 greatest inventions of the year.  One of the achievements included is a paper airplane flight of 27.6 seconds, which beat the previous world record by 3/10ths of a second. This airplane was folded by head of Japan's origami society.

To which I can only say, Bah, humbug.

I spent a month, in the summer of 1969, living in a lycée in Strasbourg, France.  While there, I realized that to my American tastes, the French toilet paper (which came in small squares, seemingly a cross between wax paper and sandpaper) had to be good for something other than its proclaimed purpose.  I folded one into a paper airplane and launched it out the second story window.

That sucker flew.

It caught a breeze and hung on, floating around the courtyard for a while.  When we realized it was sailing around a building and would go out of view, my friends and I ran downstairs and gave chase.  We made it far enough around the building to see it gently descend to earth on the far side.  Given that we watched it from the window for a while, then had time to run downstairs, then across the courtyard and around another building, I'd have to say that even if memory exaggerates to some degree, it flew for well over a minute, maybe close to two.

27.6 seconds, as we say on the street, ain't no thang.

Of course, I didn't have observers from the Guinness Book of World Records on hand, so it wasn't documented. No world's record for me. But origami dude, enjoy your fame while it lasts, because your achievement isn't all that special.

Fade to Black

I'm pleased to announce my collaboration with the great Italian artist Daniele Serra on a horror miniseries for Image Comics/Shadowline (publishers of my graphic novel Zombie Cop and horror/western miniseries Graveslinger, among other things) called Fade to Black. It's a five-issue mini that'll debut in March. The solicitation copy for the first issue will read:

Desert survival is hard, even without a cannibal cult in the mix.
Five people will find that out as they embark on the most terrifying journey of their young lives-only none of them are what they seem, and neither is anything else in this gut-wrenching horror miniseries.

Written by award-winning novelist Jeff Mariotte (Zombie Cop, Cold Black Hearts), with art by internationally acclaimed illustrator Daniele Serra (Pray for Death).

Here are the first three pages of issue #1 (in low-rez copies):

    

Capitol Tree

Today the tree that will stand in front of the United States Capitol as the Capitol Christmas Tree came to our town, on its 4,000 mile tour from the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest to Washington DC.  The tree is an 85-foot blue spruce, and it appears to be a beauty.  We couldn't see much of it--only one end of the very long trailer is open for viewing.  But we could see the top, and partway down its considerable length, as you can see in the picture below. 

This is the first time in history that Arizona has provided the tree, so we felt privileged to be able to visit with it for a few minutes and wish it well on its journey. We signed the side of the truck, along with thousands of our fellow Arizonans. In addition to this tree, Arizona is providing 80 trees for use inside the Capitol, and Arizona's schoolchildren have made almost 10,000 ornaments to hang on them.  The creator of one of those ornaments will travel to Washington to light the Capitol Tree with Speaker Pelosi.