I don't usually re-publish emails straight from political parties, but this collection of quotes following the 2001 elections, emailed by the DNC, is pretty telling.
I don't usually re-publish emails straight from political parties, but this collection of quotes following the 2001 elections, emailed by the DNC, is pretty telling.
Not murder in the literal sense, of course, though in this case the metaphor is less distant than one would prefer. As noted earlier this month, Texas Governor Perry abruptly fired the chairman and two members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission investigating the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham--a man who was almost certainly innocent--just days before the commission was scheduled to hear expert testimony that the lethal arson for which Willingham was put to death under Perry's watch was no arson at all.
Now the fired chairman, Samuel Bassett, tells the Chicago Tribune that, prior to his firing, he felt "pressure" from the governor's office regarding the Willingham case:
According to Bassett, the governor's attorneys questioned the cost of the inquiry and asked why a fire scientist from Texas could not be hired to examine the case instead of the expert from Maryland that the panel ultimately settled on. Following the meeting, a staffer from the general counsel's office began to attend the commission's meetings, Bassett said...
I.
On January 25, the New York Times endorsed Senator Hillary Clinton. At the time, the 1,100-word editorial stood out for both its tepidness and early appearance, coming near the front-end of the primary season. The piece ran in the paper the Friday before Super Tuesday, instead of in the Times’s symbolically-important Sunday edition.
Well before he officially launched his candidacy in mid-September, Wesley Clark was hailed as the Democrats' savior. Party strategists, convinced that the front-running Howard Dean would flame out against George W. Bush, saw in Clark not only a sensible political alternative but, just as important, an electable one. Clark's 34 years in the Army--which included a heroic tour in Vietnam and culminated in four stars--and his public criticism of the Iraq war had made him a darling among centrist liberals who saw a bemedaled general as the perfect antidote to the GOP's national security dominance.
This article was originally published on October 27, 1920.
