Ted Rall is a liberal who hates most things President Obama has done this year. I am (mostly) conservative, who thinks Obama is doing a decent job, although I can’t point out anything in particular that is great. So we’re kind of going in opposite directions, but I enjoyed pointing out to him recently on Facebook that it’s fun watching him hotfoot over to the other side!
I know Ted only slightly, from a gallery in Santa Monica that we were both in, Impolitic, that had rather fantastic parties. (Hi, Josh!) We also share the same publishers (NBM and Andrews McMeel), although my books there are about chocolate, and true love cartoons, and unfortunately he dropped the ball on those topics. (America Gone Wild: Cartoons by Ted Rall and The Year of Loving Dangerously). We’re also both in Slate and Gocomics.
But we had similar cartoons this weekend, both about murder by the state (capital punishment), although we were attracted to different stories. I am disgusted and appalled by states that still believe that they get to play God and decide when someone dies. On PURPOSE. This includes California, my current state. In the incident last week, Ohio did its damndest to kill Mr. Romell Broom for allegedly killing and raping a 14 year old girl. They couldn’t find a vein to torture him with their lethal drugs, which suffocate you and stop your heart. (Why didn’t they try waterboarding?) CNN points out that Ohio has had a few problems in this area before.
The LA Times had a good article about the attempted execution, saying the Ohio asshat officials wouldn’t allow him to talk to his attorney as it stretched out to 2 hours and 20 minutes, and that he started to cry, covering his face, after an hour. They also said he flinched when they inserted a shunt in his leg. Can you imagine that?!
Weisberg said California is a prime example of a state that retains a death penalty in theory yet rarely conducts executions despite having the nation’s biggest death row, with 685 condemned prisoners.
In California, executions have been on hold since early 2006: Lethal injections have failed to fully anesthetize inmates in six of the 13 executions conducted in the state since capital punishment resumed in 1976.
I think at this point, everyone would agree that it is cruel and unusual punishment in his case. Well, maybe not Ohio. I always liked them before. Not so much now.
Ted’s cartoon after the jump.
