In a previous entry, I stated that the media, in their preoccupation with Martha Stewart’s supposed wrong-doing, was “ignoring the gutting of the campaign finance regulations, the languishing of the accounting reform bills, and the seeming disappearance of the Bush-Cheney-Enron connection from the headlines”.

Boy was I wrong! The media is ignoring a much bigger story: the Bush-Harken Energy story. Seems the Pres, who’s going to be giving a lecture to Wall Street on the recent spate of business scandals, needs to take a good long look in the mirror before he uses terms like “insider trading” and “corporate accountability“.

The news is all over the web, but the big media seems to be pooh-poohing the seriousness of the claims. That might not last long, since Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo is hinting about some powerful revelations in the new issue of The Washington Monthly.

I think its’s going to be a long, hot summer for the Boy Emperor.

The LA Weekly has a devastating article on the harshness of the death penalty as applied to mentally retarded defendants. After researching the cases of the 183 death row inmates in LA County jails, the Weekly discovered that there were 10 mentally retarded inmates waiting for execution. Of the 10, 5 had accomplices in their crimes, and in each of these cases, the accomplice was not sentenced to die.

The Weekly’s findings go to the heart of this death-penalty debate: questioning whether it is humanly possible to reserve the death sentence for the worst of the worst, or whether, in fact, it is often meted out instead to those least equipped to fend it off. In the cases we reviewed, where one of the killers was mentally retarded and the others were not, the answer seems clear. Retardation, instead of shielding the mentally impaired from the harshest possible punishment, swung wide-open death row’s door.

Most of these defendants will have their sentences reviewed, perhaps overturned or sent back for re-trial in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Atkins v. Virginia, which prohibits the execution of the mentally retarded.

Still, this unfair apportioning of the most severe sentence possible makes me glad that US District Court Judge Rakoff has ruled the Federal death penalty statute unconstitutional. His reasoning was that innocent people are too often sentenced to death, and that the vindicating evidence often comes after the sentence has already been carried out. Although his ruling applies only to Federal death penalty cases, he used evidence from the individual states.

“There is no good reason to believe the federal system will be any more successful at avoiding mistaken impositions of the death penalty than the error-prone state systems already exposed,” Rakoff wrote.

If perfect outcomes of trials cannot be guaranteed, then how can perfect sentences be imposed?

Got an e-mail at work the other day from something called “MAILSweeper“: “Incoming Profane Message Notification”.

The MailSweeper text analyzer has detected and quarantined an incoming message which contains profane language. This message will be quarantined for seven days and subsequently deleted.

This was a big surprise to me because 1) I didn’t know we had any filters at work and 2) I couldn’t imagine why I’d be getting “profane” e-mail at work when that’s what I have a Hotmail account for.

I checked with the system admin who informed me that we’d just turned the filters on because of some complaints MIS had gotten about employees receiving obscene e-mails. I asked them to release the e-mail so I could look at it.

It was my daily mailing from the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinion Journal (fascist conservatives, I know, but it’s important to know what the other side is thinking.) I couldn’t imagine what profanity the button-downs at the Journal would be sending, so I read through the entire thing. The only thing I could find was the word “porn” in a snippet about terrorist martyr recruiting techniques, titled “Suicide Porn“. So I tried sending an e-mail from my Hotmail account to my work account containing nothing but the word “Porn”. Sure enough, I got a MAILSweeper message.

I hate the petty, continual encroachments on my autonomy by scared pseudo-parents who think they know what’s best for me. This company has never been like that — one reason why I’m still here after 4 years. So– excuse me, but I’ve been a little obsessed about this issue.

I requested that MIS allow me to opt out of the MAILSweeper, telling them I would state in writing that I hold them harmless for any possible offenses which couldn’t be removed with the delete key. No dice.

I questioned the reasoning for instituting the filter, and though I received no answer, I was led to believe by my manager that the company was trying to make sure it didn’t violate any “hostile workplace” rules.

When I informed MIS that most sexual harassment originates inside a company and MAILSweeper only filters mail which originates outside the company, I was ignored.

When I informed MIS that I could not find any citation anywhere which indicated that “porn” was a profane word, I was told that MAILSweeper weighed many factors in its rating and that “porn” couldn’t possibly have been the only reason.

When I outlined the number of steps required for me to have an e-mail un-quarantined by MIS and what a waste of time it was, they told me that I shouldn’t worry about MIS’s time.

When I told them that I was an adult, that they trusted me to represent the company, to produce work upon which the company’s reputation rests, and that it seemed irrational to try to censor what I can read, they ignored me.

When I informed them that the filter did not prevent me from sending profane e-mails to outsiders and that the potential was there for ruining the company’s reputation by getting us listed on one of the spam blackmail lists, they told me that they weren’t worried about that.

I’m banging my head against the wall, aren’t I?