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"He's going to have to hit a sitting jump shot"
Bob Kerrey talks about why -- against the odds -- he endorsed Bill Bradley for president.
By Jake Tapper
[08/06/99]

The thinker
Bill Bradley may have "big ideas," but as a notoriously cautious senator he sat out the big political fights.
By Joshua Micah Marshall
[08/06/99]

Pulling a Clinton?
George W. Bush is locked in a legal battle to keep him off the witness stand in a growing influence-peddling scandal.
By Robert Bryce
[08/05/99]

Texas attorney general helps Bush try to kill subpoena
In a signed affidavit, Bush claims he knew nothing about events in the so-called "funeral-gate" scandal, and appeals to a Texas court to keep him off the witness stand.
By Robert Bryce
[08/05/99]

Bedlam by the Bay
S.F. Mayor Willie Brown has a 30-percent approval rating. But can anyone knock him out of office?
By Anthony York
[08/05/99]

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In many cases, the crude cash-flow measure is as useful in deciding on a politician as it is in making a choice at the multiplex; you might as well see the worthless movie that everyone else has seen, or express an interest in the unbearably light "front runner," so as not to be left out of the national "conversation."

The hidden costs, alas, include a complete erosion of the critical faculties. I am as enthralled as the next person by the sheaves of money assembled for George Walker Bush. (What did he do to be shorn at birth of his Herbert?) But I'm even more fascinated by the fact that, as I write, he is about to sign his 93rd death warrant. There was an execution on the day of his inauguration as governor of Texas, which I don't count, and there has been one every two and a half weeks or so ever since.

Part of a governor's job is to review capital cases. The staggering pace of executions in Texas means that Bush has either a) been doing little else but reviewing death sentences or b) been signing death warrants as fast as they can be put in front of him.

This may also be helping him gain some of that much needed "foreign policy experience" about which the pundits have made the occasional frown. State officials from the Philippines and Guatemala have been touring lethal chambers in the United States as part of their research into improved methods, and according to Amnesty International a Filipino official was allowed to watch a killing in Texas in 1997.

The thorny question of race -- always such a minefield for the aspiring Republican candidate -- also gets a workout by this means. Many people remember the case of Karla Faye Tucker, the born-again pickax-murderess who showed -- at least by the standard of Christian fundamentalism -- signs of having been rehabilitated. Gov. Bush snuffed her in February of last year, over the protests of Pat Robertson and others.

But had he commuted her sentence, he would have been faced with executing a black woman, Erica Sheppard, who was next in line on the female death row and had foregone her appeal. Spare a photogenic white girl and then kill a defiant black one? Better to do away with both and avoid the row altogether. (Sheppard has since recovered her determination to appeal, and recently took part in a protest against the strip-searching of female inmates in front of male guards, another distinguishing feature of the Texas criminal justice system.)

Next page | Texas holds more than a quarter of the nation's death row juveniles