OUR VIEWSDeaf to voice of peopleFour years ago, Iranians overwhelmingly elected a president, Mohammad Khatami, who campaigned on a platform of political, economic and social reform and, by inference, an end to the autocratic, heavy-handed rule of the hard-line clerics. Khatami even hinted that the time had come to patch up relations with the United States.
Little of that agenda was implemented. The country's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and the self-perpetuating Council of Guardians, who control the police, judiciary, television and military, blocked his reform efforts. Pro-reform newspapers were closed. Khatami supporters who were too outspoken in favor of reform were jailed or killed. Relations with the United States remain in the deep freeze.
Khatami was a reluctant candidate for re-election. He broke down in tears when he filed as a candidate. He campaigned on the same platform of reforms but said that he wasn't likely to do any better during his second term than his first.
Friday, Iranians turned out and re-elected Khatami by an even greater margin, giving him 77 percent of the vote against nine conservative-backed candidates. The message from voters, most of whom have no memory of the Islamic revolution of 1979, couldn't be clearer. They face the daily reality of 30 percent unemployment, an economy choking from the clerics' stranglehold and a repressive social and cultural atmosphere.
Perhaps Khatami can broker a peaceful transformation. But the aging cadre of hard-line clerics who run Iran show no willingness to ease their grip, even as Friday's election showed how dangerously divorced they are from the wants and desires of the people they rule. It is a stalemate that might outlast Khatami but it will not last forever.
McVeigh's executionWhatever mission Timothy McVeigh thought he was on came to a surreal and anticlimactic end, rather fittingly, in a federal government building, this one a death chamber.
Rows of satellite trucks were lined up outside the prison for an event that they could not broadcast, and TV reporters in Terre Haute, Oklahoma City and Washington endlessly rehashed an event of which they knew no more than their viewers. McVeigh was declared dead at 7:14 a.m. CDT after a clinical and dispassionate procedure in which he was hooked up to an IV loaded with poison.
McVeigh left behind no last words, only an overwrought Victorian poem to the virtues of bearing up, "bloody but unbowed," to the cruelties of fate. McVeigh believed himself a soldier in a cause, but that cause seemed to be only a cold personal revenge on the federal government.
He seemed to have no emotional grasp of the pain and grief he inflicted on the families and friends of the 168 people who died in his bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh said he was sorry those people died but they were "inevitable" casualties of what he regarded as "a legit tactic" in his war on the government. And the children, the babies? They were, he said, "collateral damage."
For that, he had the distinction of being the first person executed by the federal government in 38 years. And McVeigh did leave a legacy, not one he intended.
The events leading up to his execution brought an end to what had been a casual enthusiasm among most Americans for the death penalty. After an exhaustive trial, McVeigh's guilt was never in doubt, and McVeigh admitted the crime in a book. But his execution was still delayed for almost a month because of a stunning procedural error by the FBI. A national reconsideration is under way that if we are to have the death penalty, it should be invoked sparingly, after a meticulous trial that leaves no room for doubt and administered only to those capable of understanding their punishment.
It is perhaps uncharitable and overly vengeful to wonder whether the medieval renderings of hell, Dante's "Inferno" and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, might not be accurate. We are not to know McVeigh's disposition in the next world; his final disposition in thas world will be to have his ashes scattered in a secret location.
Martyrdom eluded Mceigh and so should any place in history. The Oklahoma City bombing and the people who died there are indelibly with us and will not be forgotten. McVeigh is gone and should be forgotten.
Back to earthThe Birmingham Aiport Authority made the right decision in eliminating a proposed third runway from its 20-year master plan.
The air traffic projections and other numbers don't support construction of the runway, which would have been parallel to the current east-west runway used by airlines.
Nor was it ever likely that the authority would be able to overcome public opposition to destroying the East Lake community to make way for the expansion. That trade-off would be too great even if projected growth in air service were much higher than it is.
With the overly ambitious runway proposal off the table, the airport authority can concentrate on more realistic plans for making the airport the best medium-sized facility it can be within its current boundaries — or perhaps with modest expansion of those boundaries.
OTHER VIEWSJury gave smoker outrageous reward for his perjuryBy PAUL CAMPOS
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICEEven the most abject apologists for America's litigation system may have trouble digesting the verdict in the Richard Boeken case. Boeken is a 56-year-old securities broker suffering from brain and lung cancer, who sued the Philip Morris Co.
Boeken testified under oath that he did not become aware of warnings regarding the dangers of cigarettes until the mid-1990s. As a reward for perjuring himself in such a laughably ludicrous fashion, Boeken has won a $3 billion judgment from a Los Angeles jury.
Think about that: Instead of punishing Boeken for lying under oath about the most crucial aspect of his case — not to mention doing so in a way that would be an insult to their collective intelligence, if they had any — the jury awarded him a sum of cash equal to what a working-class person (that is, a typical smoker) would earn over the course of approximately 3,000 lifetimes.
The legal justification for such a bizarre outcome is that the verdict will "punish" the cigarette industry. This, too, is an egregious lie. Consider that the price of Philip Morris stock has nearly tripled over the course of the last year, despite verdicts against the company running into the tens of billions of dollars over this same space of time.
Only an idiot — i.e., a tort lawyer's ideal juror — could fail to understand that such verdicts do not actually punish the cigarette companies, who have already entered into a formal agreement with the government that allows them to fix prices at monopolistic rates in order to pass the costs of litigation onto cigarette smokers.
And only a fool could fail to grasp that, despite such legal "punishments" for the act of selling cigarettes, selling cigarettes will remain legal in America. For one thing, it is difficult to believe our public policy makers have not learned anything from the spectacular failure of previous attempts to eliminate the market for drugs and alcohol through legal prohibition.
By now even the most benighted politician must understand that making cigarettes illegal would only worsen the social ills they cause. Given this, the idea of punishing cigarette sellers for the act of selling their product to willing adults appears to be profoundly irrational.
Why, after all, are cigarettes considered "bad"? That smoking is hazardous to one's health is undeniable, and indeed the absurd lies of the cigarette companies regarding this fact provide the only good argument for legal action against them.
Still, many activities are hazardous to one's health — yet we do not normally consider that fact by itself to be a sufficient basis for condemning the behavior. Climbing mountains, sky diving, driving sports cars, drinking martinis, eating potato chips: Everyone knows that it is on the whole safer to avoid such things.
In all such cases, whether the risks involved are worth the pleasures to be had is something that can only be determined by the individual who decides whether or not to engage in the activity.
At bottom, the hysteria that fuels the war on cigarette smokers is based on the contemptible idea that the point of life is to stay alive for as long as possible. This idea feeds off two otherwise conflicting strains in American culture: a sort of metaphysical Darwinism that defines "success" as simple survival, and a twisted brand of Puritanism that considers all pleasure to be bad by definition. Combine these two impulses with the rapacity of the most shameless members of the legal profession, and you get cases like this.
Ultimately, such verdicts accomplish one thing: They transfer wealth from cigarette smokers to lawyers. In other words, such suits are a genteel species of theft. That those who are being robbed are generally poor and working class is not exactly a coincidence. And to claim this brand of theft is for the good of its victims gives new meaning to the word chutzpah.
Law Professor Paul Campos
can be reached at
Campus Box 401
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309
or paul.campos@colorado.edu
YOUR VIEWSPrisons becoming more dangerousHolman Prison in Atmore is preparing to receive the overflow of prisoners from Alabama jails. The prison is in the process of double-bunking all its dorms. They are already crammed in like sardines at Holman Prison. Each man in the dorms only has about 39 square feet of living space as it is. How inhumane will Alabama get before people begin to see how bad the situation really is?
Holman Prison is already way over capacity — illegally overcrowded. When the additional prisoners from the overcrowded jails are admitted, you can expect riots and blood shed. This bloodshed will be on the hands of Alabama officials and the citizens of Alabama who never bother to consider what is going on inside their prisons.
Families of the prisoners at Holman have repeatedly asked for help. They do not want their loved ones hurt or killed. Families of the prison guards should be asking for help for the same reason. We are being completely ignored and we need immediate intervention to prevent bloodshed. The people of Alabama need to know how serious this situation is. The families are scared to death for their loved ones who are at Holman Prison. We do not understand how come we are always ignored. Do we not live and breath just like everyone else? Our sons, fathers, brothers and grandfathers are in there facing a very serious threat. What do we have to do to be heard?
Why is Alabama continuing to hurt us like this? Is there anyone — anyone — out there who cares at all about us? I am asking the good citizens of Alabama to take notice and to consider how they would feel if they or their family member were subjected to this kind of cruelty. What would they do? Hopefully, they would write and call their representatives and tell them something needs to be done to prevent further overcrowding and the certain riots and bloodshed that are going to happen because of this. You cannot stuff grown men into such close quarters, making already very stressful conditions even more stressful, and not know what is inevitable.
Hopefully the citizens of Alabama will have a heart for the families who will be suffering over this too. It's not just the prisoners who will be hurt. The guards will be hurt, too. Take your pick. All of them — the prisoners, the guards and the families — are human beings. All of them are God's children just like you and me. Let us not allow this upcoming atrocity to happen.
Sherry Swiney, wife of Patrick Swiney — provably innocent and yet serving life without parole
P.O. Box 1891
Alabaster
IsolatingBigger schools are better, if we listen to educators, so they are closing community schools and busing the students. The deception in this is that as they close the community schools and move the students eight or more miles away from their homes accomplishes one very important agenda in public education: Isolate the parents from the schools. The last thing many educators want is a parent demanding a reason their child is not learning to read.
These same educators will put on a show for parents to get more tax money for education. Very little of the money ever reaches the classroom. The educators in Mobile county have found the Achilles heel. Threaten sports and other noneducation activities and parents will vote for a tax increase.
Sad to say the tax increases they have agreed to will make no difference. So they get to keep the sports, their tax dollars will go down that black hole and their children will be no better off.
Donald Dunlap
1335 Montevallo Road
Irondale
Change of heartAfter 10-plus years of staunch environmentalism during which Californians hugged their trees, refused to build those nasty environment-destroying energy-producing dams, demonstrated against the building of fossil fuel plants and chastised their neighbor states for allowing poisonous emissions to pollute their pristine California countryside, they are suddenly begging these same polluting neighbor states to provide them with some of those tainted energy resources, the production of which they so adamantly have opposed.
Obviously, Californians have had a change of heart and are ready to now make concessions to neighboring states, to wit, Keep the polluting industries — send us only the clean energy product!
Armond "Si" Simmons
104 Wadsworth Lane
Pell City
Chapter 12Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the escape when business is not clicking. It's really bad to see an investment go sour as that of Pride Restaurants fast foods.
Another sacred business our own dear Civil Rights Institute is waiting for Gov. Don Siegelman to sign a bill allocating it almost $200,000. The institute is not on the Chapter 11 trip but evidently on the needy list.
The lesson I'm learning is to be sure somebody wants what you are building and not to venture out on vengeance or unstudied dreams. My chapter 12 says stay out of business and get a job.
Henry L. McShan
97 Graymont Ave. West
LOOK BACKFrom Birmingham Post-Herald files:
50 years ago, June 13, 1951 State Senate caucus appears to have killed reapportionment legislation by delaying consideration until 24th legislative day.
Defense Secretary George C. Marshall says United Nations forces in Korea have advanced farther than expected.
25 years ago, June 13, 1976 Birmingham City Councilman Russell Yarbrough plans to ask for new attorney general's opinion on whether council can hold closed sessions. Mayor David Vann says 1973 opinion allows "informal" meetings, disputing Assistant Attorney General Bill Stephens who says 1975 opinion overturns earlier one.
Second U.S. representative accused of keeping woman on staff for sexual purposes, John Young, D-Texas, asks for investigations to clear him.
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