First things first. Two years ago, Miami-Dade County prison guards punished a 50-year-old mentally ill prisoner named Darren Rainey for pooping in his cell by locking him in a shower pouring out 180 degree water. The Burn Foundation advises us that tap water can cause third-degree burns in a mere five seconds once it reaches 140 degrees, but Mr. Rainey spent two hours in that shower, and while the water couldn't have stayed that hot for two hours, Mr. Rainey's skin had come off his body by that time, and then the guards sent in another prisoner to clean up the mess. They must have decided that was a teachable moment. But we can give Miami-Dade County a teachable moment of our own, by demanding that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate Mr. Rainey's death, as local and state officials have had two years to do, and have failed to do. Personal to the fools who tell us that too many prisoners get cable TV and internet: civilized people do not burn prisoners to death. No, really, I've gotten this kind of comment before, from people who obviously have a lot of rage they can't deal with.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Obama Administration's Department of the Interior to reject further oil and gas drilling in the Arctic, CREDO still helps you do that. If the sight of oily seals don't move you, if the fact that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet doesn't move you, if the resulting disappearance of polar bear habitats doesn't move you -- well, actually, I don't know what would move you at that point. But our political chattering classes want to drill offshore everywhere in the name of energy independence. What a bunch of goofballs -- if energy independence were the reason to drill in the Arctic, why isn't it a reason to build more wind and solar farms? They might then change the subject to "high consumer prices," but as we know from breathing 12 times a minute, prices come down once technologies become widespread, and anyway it's not all about high consumer prices for our glorious fossil-fuel chieftains, but CEO salaries. With no 91% millionaire tax bracket to discourage them, they only make decisions that benefit themselves -- delicate ecosystems be damned, difficult oil spill cleanups in frigid water be damned.
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