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The Post in Which I Advocate Medieval Torture
Saturday, 2009 August 29 - 10:03 am
Long time no blog, I know. And there's so much going on! I'll just cram a bunch of unrelated things into this one post.

By the way, I remember the first time I heard my Dad say "Long time no see", when I was like seven years old; I thought he was on acid or something. "No see"? What kind of sentence structure is that? Can you please diagram that on the blackboard?

Anyway... so what's the most spectacular news item of the past few weeks?

1. Senator Ted Kennedy succumbs to brain cancer and dies at the age of 77. A liberal icon for decades, Kennedy was a champion for the poor and underprivileged, and became the political standard-bearer for his family after the assassination of his brothers (John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy). His career was tarnished by the infamous Chappaquiddick incident, which may have cost him the chance to be President both in 1972 and 1980.

Kennedy's death leaves the Democratic party one vote short of a 60-member super-majority in the Senate, because his replacement won't come for five months, when a special election can be held in Massachusetts. Why doesn't the Democratic governor appoint a temporary replacement? Because the Democratic legislature stripped the governor's office of that authority, when they feared then-governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, would be able to appoint a Republican replacement for "President" John Kerry in 2004. D'oh!

His death comes at an unfortunate time for Barack Obama, who was counting on Kennedy's support to push a health care reform bill through the Senate. Health care reform was a top priority for Kennedy for many years, and it seems tragic that he died before seeing it happen.

2. Swimsuit model Jasmine Fiore's body is discovered minus her teeth and her fingers, an apparent attempt by the killer to prevent authorities from identifying her. However, she is identified by the serial numbers on her breast implants. Police track her husband, former reality show Ryan Jenkins, on a thousand mile manhunt; the chase ends when Jenkins' body is found hanging by his neck in the closet of motel room in Canada.

The whole "identified by her breast implants" thing raises all kinds of questions. First, why did Jenkins go through all the trouble of extracting out Fiore's teeth and cutting off the fingers instead of simply burning the body? Should we all get serial numbers carved into our hip bones so that we can be positively identified in the event of deaths? When the next model is murdered, will the murderer now think to remove the implants from her body?

The other question in my mind is, do Fiore's friends and family feel that justice has been done, or do they believe Jenkins got away too easy by killing himself? Maybe it'd help if they got access to his body... with a pair of pliers.

3. A couple abducts an 11-year-old girl in front of her horrified parents at a bus stop. Eighteen years later, she is discovered in the backyard of Phillip and Nancy Garrido, where she has been kept captive along with two daughters, age 11 and 15. The couple pleads not guilty to 29 counts of abduction, rape, and false imprisonment. Also? The police ignored several neighbor reports of suspicious activity in the couple's yard, despite the fact that the man was a convicted rapist on parole.

I have a hard time believing people can be so evil. I'm not a supporter of the death penalty or of torture, but honestly, jail doesn't seem like enough punishment for these people. Maybe we should bring back the pillory?
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