Welcome to your Thursday open thread. It’s Thursday and I’m ready to pack up and get on Noah’s Ark. Seriously. I guess we should be happy the rain means April flowers!
Illinois has released many wrongly convicted people thanks to the work of students at Northwestern University. A previous governor actually imposed a moratorium because so many people had been released. Now it’s official:
The governor of Illinois signed a law on Wednesday ending capital punishment, saying it was impossible to fix a system that wrongly condemned 20 men who were later found to be innocent.
When the law signed by Democratic Governor Pat Quinn takes effect on July 1, Illinois will become the fourth state in the past two years to dispense with the death penalty after New York, New Jersey and New Mexico.
“To have a consistent, perfect death penalty system … that’s impossible in our state,” Quinn told reporters. “I think it’s the right and just thing to abolish the death penalty and punish those who commit heinous crimes — evil people — with life in prison without parole and no chance of release.”
The ultimate punishment will remain an option in 34 states and for federal inmates. No other Western democracies carries out executions.
“It is naive to think that we haven’t executed an innocent person. We stop looking after they’re executed.” said Ron Safer, an attorney who has defended death penalty cases.
Good for Illinois. It’s the 13th state to outlaw the death penalty.
It’s a RWNJ fight! Karl Rove’s astroturf group American Crossroads started running ads based on a Cato Institute study saying that unionized public workers make 42% more than non-unionized workers. Cato says Rove is misrepresenting the study:
But the author of the study, Cato director of tax policy studies Chris Edwards, tells me the ad’s claim distorts his data in two key ways. The ad says that unionized government workers get paid 42 percent more than non-unionized workers in general, a charge that seems intended to turn non-unionized workers of all kinds against unionized public employees.
In fact, Edwards points out, Cato’s study compared unionized government workers only with non-unionized government workers, not with non-union workers overall, and found the first group doing better. In other words, even if the study’s overall thrust is critical of public unions, Cato’s actual finding on wages would be likely to persuade workers that unions are a good thing — if you’re unionized, you make more than those in the same sector who are not unionized. Instead, the ad misrepresented the finding.
That’s not all. Edwards points out that the ad rips the 42 percent figure out of context, further distorting what his study actually found in another way. The study did claim the 42 percent number, but it went on to state specifically that this difference can be partly explained by “general labor market variations across states,” because “states with generally higher wages tend to be more unionized.”
The study concluded that once you factor in that variable, public sector unions can be said to increase pay levels by approximately 10 percent — not 42 percent, as the ad claimed.
Someone explain to me again why we want people making less money. I don’t get it. Isn’t the fact that unionized workers make more money an advertisement for union membership?