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More must-see TV from the PBS NewsHour: who pays the price?

Today would have been John F. Kennedy’s 90th birthday.

June 11, 1963:

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?

Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Must-see TV, from the PBS NewsHour: what is the War in Iraq costing us?

(The full report is about three minutes longer than this clip, and includes discussion of countervailing costs — the cost of maintaining continuing sanctions against the Saddam Hussein regime, for example — and can be viewed here.)

Bill Moyers, after showing clips of old conversations with World War II veterans:

Every Memorial Day I think about what those men did and what we owe them.

They didn’t go through hell for a political system that functions on bribery, or for offshore tax havens that pass the cost of national defense from the conglomerates that profit from war to the ordinary people whose children fight it, or for an economic system that treats working men and women as disposable cogs to be tossed aside at a predator’s whim, or for an America where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Yes, our soldiers did fight and sacrifice for freedom, but as wiser men than I have said through the ages, when liberty is separated from justice, neither liberty nor justice is safe, and those who sacrifice for both are mocked.

On April 30, 2004, the late-night ABC News show Nightline aired a tribute to the fallen, showing photos of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq while Ted Koppel read their names. (Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns the local ABC affiliate, banned the broadcast on stations they owned.) Nightline repeated the tribute, with more names, on Memorial Day 2005.

Nightline is a half-hour program. If they had repeated the tribute this year, with no interruptions, they would have had only about half a second for each fallen soldier. We are currently at 3,455 dead — and counting.

I was born here in Ohio, and I’ve lived here all my life. When it’s finally my time to be executed — whether for some terrible crime, or because a brutal totalitarian regime has seized power — well, that will probably be in Ohio, too.

I just hope that when my time comes, they do a better job than these two times:

The execution team stuck Christopher Newton at least 10 times with needles Thursday to insert the shunts where the chemicals are injected.

He died at 11:53 a.m., nearly two hours after the scheduled start of his execution at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. The process typically takes about 20 minutes.

“What is clear from today’s botched execution is that the state doesn’t know how to execute people without torturing them to death,” American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio attorney Carrie Davis said Thursday.

“Having one botched execution is too many; that Ohio has now had two botched executions in as many years is intolerable.”

Officials said the delay was due to Newton’s size — he weighed 265 pounds. In May 2006, the execution of Joseph Lewis Clark was delayed about 90 minutes because the team could not find a suitable vein. He was a longtime intravenous drug user.

From war-planning to hurricane relief to execution technique, incompetents are taking over more and more government functions.

I wonder if executioners would do better work if our lethal injections were done like an old-fashioned duel: if the executioner misses the first time, the prisoner gets a turn, and they keep trading places until somebody’s dead.

Obama can take it, and he can dish it out:

Cartoonist D.C. Simpson drew this.

On The Daily Show Thursday night, John Hodgman examined George W. Bush’s frequent statements that he’s “looking forward to” things he’s not looking forward to at all.

Hodgman: The president is a legitimate optimist. He is compelled to always look forward.

Jon Stewart: Why do you say “compelled?”

Hodgman: Well, if he were to look back, he might see the trail of devastation he’s left behind him.

Gee, I wish I was optimistic.

Boing Boing found a slip-up on CNN’s International channel:

Okay, they meant to say “Blair resigns.” But I can dream, can’t I?

I bought my first computer 24 years ago today.

The computer magazines of the time kept reminding me that I was a pioneer, but I sure didn’t feel like a pioneer.

You want pioneers? How about the people responsible for this 5-megabyte IBM hard drive from 1956?

Thrilling Wonder has more.

Via Crooks and Liars, amusing political ads for Democrat Bill Richardson:

Thrilling Wonder has an ugly face contest and, no, I’m not entering. It’s true I’m ugly, but not at a competitive level.

And please stop telling me I’m selling myself short on this.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others. — Bernard Malamud, The Fixer

Different people have different opinions. Christian Dominionist Gary North said the purpose of freedom is to deny it to others:

So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

I don’t even have to guess who gets to pick out the “enemies of God” in North’s ideal world.

The folks at Crooks and Liars suggested three questions for the Republican debate:

Should the President have power to imprison U.S. citizens without charging them with a crime and without providing them a judicial forum in which they can contest the accusations against them, as the Bush administration did to American Jose Padilla?

Do you think the process of waterboarding — where the U.S. takes prisoners, straps them to a chair, and pours water on their face so they are in terror of drowning to death — is a practice consistent with America’s moral credibility in the world?

A recent worldwide poll showed that under the Bush presidency, America has become the third most unpopular country in the world — right behind Iran and just ahead of North Korea. Why do you believe that has happened?

I would have liked to hear how the candidates — particularly the rubber-stamp congressional Republicans — would have answered those questions.

Mac vs. PC ad parody with South Park-style animation. (This is not done by the creators of South Park.)