NJ abolishes Capital Punishment

I just want to say, I'm proud to be a resident of New Jersey. Last week NJ Assembly and senate passed a law banning capital Punishment. I hope other states follow this soon.

There are so many things I hate about NJ. Too many people, no apartments to rent, lack of parking spots, bad drivers, bad Indian movie theatres...list goes on. But at least there is one thing to cherish about.

But on a serious note, two Indian students were killed in LSU. Chandrasekhar and Kiran kumar, RIP. This again raises the question of relevance/necessity of death penalty. How to punish the murderers. But let's talk about the motives. What I think is the robbery attempt gone bad. Reasons are poverty, easy availability of guns, bad neighborhoods, lack of education and good parenthood.

And apart from the LSU incident, 3 shootings happened in the last 2 weeks. one in Nebraska, two in Colarado. Different places, different people! But the underlying issue is easy availability of Guns. And I didn't hear any complaint from Dems or GOP candidates. Reason, Primaries. No one wants to be in bad books of the gun slinging Middle America. Shame on all the candidates. Yeah I know, NRA is fuckin' powerful. Thank God, we've Bloomberg!

As always I digressed. But just wanted to express my anguish about guns.

Happy Holidays,
Peace out.

Capital Punishment : Relevance

Read this last week, Injection of Reflection

Here's the first paragraph.

Texas has long been the Hang 'Em High state. In 2000, it executed convicted prisoners at the rate of almost one a week. Gov. George W. Bush seemed to take pride in turning down appeals for clemency. The "Decider" was known for spending as little as 15 minutes reviewing a death case. In a Talk magazine piece, Tucker Carlson reported that Bush mocked the plea of one double murderer on death row, pursing his lips in mock desperation and whispering, "Please, don't kill me." (Bush later said Carlson had "misread, mischaracterized me.")

No matter how much I try not to do Bush bashing in this blog, I can't help it.

In the yesterday's youtube - GOP debate, one viewer asked Huckabee "Capital Punishment : what would jesus do". Huckabee gave his best tap dance performance "Abortion is different from Death Penalty" .When the Host Anderson Cooper insisted for the answer, Huckabee said this "Jesus would be too smart to run for public office". For the record, Huckabee is a Baptist minister and cruising ahead in the popularity with his church credentials

But how come these hard core Christian preachers root for the death Penalty. I mean Christianity is about Compassion, isn't it?. And no offense, but all the jury members are not so intelligent or far from partiality. If they're so perfect OJ and Michael Jackson should be behind the bars now.

Heard one news item recently "man spends 20 years in jail for committing rape, proven not guilty after DNA test". But what if we kill the innocent Guy.

that's what happened in Texas. from the article
..At 9 a.m. on Sept. 25, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear the Baze case challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection. Michael Richard, convicted of rape and murder in 1986, was scheduled for execution that night. His lawyers rushed to file a new motion based on the high court's ruling, but their computer crashed and they missed the 5 p.m. filing deadline. A judge refused to keep open the state court. Richard was executed at 8:22 p.m.

So this person might be innocent. who knows?

For the record I don't completely rule out the death Penalty. Back in early 90s in India (near Chilakaluripet, AP)two men burned a Bus for the robbery purpose and killed 18 people. Court gave the Death Penalty after so much legal battle. But President of India K.R.Narayanan granted them clemency. Reason, these guys belong to SC/ST. Caste is so BIG in India that, it would rescue people from gallows also. I thought these two men deserve death penalty

My point/Question. Is it still relevant today? And why these Texans were so cruel?

Peace

Democrats and hedge fund managers : an unholy alliance

Being a left wing liberal, I used to think that democratic party fights for low and middle class interests. Not any more I guess.

Read an article in Washington Post last week, here is the link.

Hedge fund mangers are the new friends for democratic party people. I thought, GOP fights for the interests of rich people and their tax cuts. Since when, democrats started doing this?

For the starters Hedge funds are similar to mutual funds, but intended for High Net Worth individuals and institutional Trusts. Typical hedge funds require a minimum investment of 1 mil and keep the money for a minimum of 1 year. And the mangers would take 20% of your profits.

Sounds fair, but here’s is catch. These hedge fund managers who make approx 1 billion per year, pay 15% tax. 15% wtf !, I pay 30%. The loophole is, the profits made by the Hedge fund is categorized as Capital Gain taxes(usually 15%). But actually this should be categorized as pay for their work (taxed at 30 -35%). So Steven A. Cohen “Hedge Fund King” who made 900 mil last year paid 15% tax . Don’t get me wrong, I admire this guy. Just trying to show the disparity.

Warren buffet is the only billionaire who acknowledges this problem. The third richest man in US of A pays 15% tax and his secretary who makes 60 Grand per annum, pays 30% tax.

Coming back to article, we all know that We can’t take the lobbyists out of DC. No matter what kind of rules you pass they’ll comeback in a different way. We can’t eliminate this fund raising from the politics. But Hedge fund industry is the Democratic darling. Senator Charles Schummer (D-NY) now oppose legislation that would raise taxes on Hedge funds. What??

Just a little math from the article

“By taxing investment management services as ordinary income, not capital gains, the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the Treasury could bring in an additional $26 billion over the next decade.

The second measure in the House bill would shut down fund managers' abilities to shift compensation to offshore tax havens and defer tax payments on that money for years. Closing that loophole would reap the Treasury nearly $23 billion through 2017”

And the offshore tax heavens, that’s a whole different story. You just can’t imagine the kind of tax shelters these investment companies offer to their clients. As always, excellent report by PBS. Watch it at your leisure.

Day by day, it’s becoming hard to defend liberals track record in the congress and senate. They recently passed a resolution declaring “Ottoman empire committed genocide in Armenia 1000 years ago” So apparently Armenian lobby is very powerful. What’re these guys smoking. Of all the issues, Ottoman empire atrocities are important now?

Among all the Presidential candidates out there Ron Paul is appealing right now. I don’t agree with all the things he say, but this guy is sincere and know what he is talking about. Hard to believe that this libertarian is from GOP. I’ll write about his campaign in my next post.

Peace.

GOP and the Conservative Values

GOP always protrays itelf as a party with Conservative and family values. Their position on most of the issues also proves that. Pro-Life, anti Gay rights, "Intelligent Design", Opposition to contraceptives...

But lately, the party is losing it's image. Let's see the events.

Evangelical preacher Ted Haggard. Ok, this guy might not be a GOP senator or something but this guy was an adviser to White House on gay issues. Last November, a male prostitute alleged that Ted haggard paid him for sex and used Meth. Then the denials quickly followed and then the resignations. We've to see the guy in the movies Jesus Camp, in which he preaches, "we don't have to debate about what we should think about homosexual activity. It’s written in the Bible."

Then this guy went through a therapy and he's supposedly complete heterosexual Sexual now :-). We've preachers in church, who can just change the sexual orientation with some bible classes.

Then there's Mark Foley, this Guy is hitting on pages in Capitol Hill. They're all underage males. This guy is confronted by an abc contributor in Washington, and he resigned immediately and went into Rehab. I'm not sure why he's not punished until now. Damn the rehabs.
The problem/irony is, he is one of the opponents of child Pornography and crusader against child abuse and exploitation.

Now Larry Craig. We all know, this old man is caught in Minneapolis airport soliciting sex from a undercover officer. Then a Idaho paper outed this news. This guy went to court to withdraw his guilty petition. Sounds like fun.

No matter how much I hate these right wing nuts, I pity this guy. Poor guy! Didn't get any support from his party people. Mitt Romney literally threw this guy in front of a bus. C'mon man, this guy worked for you party campaign.


Here's the hypocrisy. This Larry Craig boycotted one of Bill Clinton's speech on Capitol Hill, because he "disgraced White House by committing Sex in the Oval office". And there are rumors in the DC area about his homosexuality, even before this Men's room incident. Craig is one of the vocal opponents to Gay rights.

Nice video from Jon Stewart's show, enjoy

David Vitter, Republican Senator from Lousiana. His phone number found in D.C. Madam's client list. Hustler Magazine identified this Phone number. It's funny that even Hustler is into political reporting coz of these "family guys"

Point I want to make here is why the mid America and the Bible Belt still considers the GOP as the savior of the Christianity. Is this cause of Karl Rove marketing skills or the Democrat's failure in wooing the church going public !

Religion blurs the vision so much that, we've people in USA who believe that Gay people getting married is the biggest problem in country right now. It's bigger than Iraq war, Katrina failure, poor infrastructure Children without health care..

Hope it changes in 2008

Peace.

happy days works

I happened to watch the most hyped movie in the recent past last weekend. The first thing that surprised, shocked and irritated me was the ticket prices. The movie released at many other centers in the US a week before and the web world has been flooded with positive reviews ever since and that in turn let this exhibitor raise the ticket prices to $12 for everyone over 5 yrs old. Let me get back to the movie and save this rant on the ticket prices for another post.

There has been a lot of hype on Happy Days in the web world, most of it, I think, is because Sekhar Kammula knows how to use the major telugu portals to his advantage. He is a graduate student and like many of us knows the lifestyle of an NRI. The good thing though is, he backed up the hype with a feel good movie. Movies with a college background/theme should be dealt with delicately. The first turn off in these movies is the way the classroom episodes involving teachers and students is dealt with. Often our makers try to generate comedy using some vulgarity. 99% of the times the students make fun of the teachers to generate laughs. The other scenes where formula movie makers try to win the youth and mass audience is by choosing violent episodes between the college students in a very unnatural way. There is a thin line between the good and the bad in these movies and this is where Sekhar Kammula emerges as a winner.

Nostalgia is a funny word. It is a bittersweet memory of the past, but most of us tend to remember the good and ignore the bad. When I was in Intermediate, I always felt my school days were awesome. I felt I should have done somethings differently in intermediate while I was doing my engineering. After a semester in Masters, I always thought of the good times that I had while doing my B.Tech. Most of the times, I forgot those "night-outs" before exams and other tough times and I always remember and thought about those days when we won a cricket game or when we had fun at freshers party or when we went out on a fun trip or about those days when we friends just sat and talked crap all night. This is exactly what made Happy days a winner.

SK has chosen to ignore the real life politics of caste, religion and other minor preferences which all slowly become the cause of violence in college and also the cause of love and hate moving forward in life and that is what takes Happy Days away from the real world and makes it a feel-good film. The performances are wonderful, except for the tenglish accent of chandu. The scenes between Tyson and Shravanti are awesome and deserve a special mention. Both appu and rajesh are at ease and natural. On the whole each and every character has been cast perfectly by SK and the characterization is perfect. Mickey J Meyer's music is the soul of the film. He is the next A.R Rehman. The songs are brilliant and the background score fantastic.