If you haven't seen it already, I thought some of you might be interested
in this late breaking story I just ran across on my favorite internet news
site.
BUSH RETAKES NEW MEXICO
ALBUQUERQUE, NM--New Mexico's five electoral votes swung back into
the Bush column Monday when George W. Bush executed
253 Las Cruces-area Democrats. With their deaths, the Al Gore-backing
Democrats were declared ineligible, wiping out the Democratic
candidate's narrow 252-vote victory margin in New Mexico and giving Bush
the state by just one vote.
"We express great sorrow for
the families of the condemned," said Karl Rove, Bush's
senior strategist. "We must keep
in mind, however, that these are not innocent people
we're talking about here. These
individuals were guilty of a variety of crimes, from
vagrancy to jaywalking to reckless
endangerment of pedestrians' lives through
inappropriate use of rollerblades.
And for these crimes, they paid a fair price."
Continued Rove: "The fact
that their deaths deliver the state of New Mexico to
George W. Bush, well, that's
merely a happy coincidence."
The New Mexico Democrats,
all of whom lived less than 20 miles from the Texas
border city of El Paso, were
arrested last Friday during a day-long law-enforcement
sweep by Texas state troopers. A
majority of the arrests were made in El Paso, where
many of the New Mexicans were
visiting friends or relatives over the weekend.
Asked if the executions were in any way motivated by his narrow
deficit in New Mexico, Bush said, "They most certainly were not."
"All 253 individuals were found guilty in a court of law," Bush said.
"They were given a fair, 30-minute trial and handed a punishment
commensurate with their
misdeeds. Blatant disregard for the law may be tolerated elsewhere, but not
in the great state of Texas. Or states close to Texas."
The New Mexico Democrats were administered lethal injection and
pronounced dead shortly after 3 p.m. in the El Paso Correctional Facility,
making them the
36th through 288th persons to be put to death in Texas this year.
Immediately afterward, their ballots were nullified in their home voting
district of Dona Ana County.
According to Texas Department of Corrections spokesman Martin Cobb,
27 of the executed Democrats were
employees of a Las Cruces software company. They had crossed the Texas
border to attend the weekend-long
Southwest Computer Expo at the El Paso Convention Center.
"All of the information we gathered on the Las Cruces 27 indicated
that they were questionable characters," Cobb
said. "Some had subscriptions to The New Yorker. A few were confirmed
members of the Sierra Club. One even
participated in a union-led teachers' strike a few years ago."
Despite cries of protest from families of the deceased, both the
Texas Board Of Pardons And Paroles and the
Texas Court Of Criminal Appeals refused to stay the executions. Rove,
however, is confident that they received a fair
trial.
"It was presided over by the Honorable Jacob T. Hayes, one of the
most respected and experienced judges in the state," Rove said. "You're
talking about a man
who is a close personal friend of such esteemed figures as the governor of
Florida and a former president of the United States."
Bush, who personally presided over the mass lethal injection,
expressed sorrow for those executed.
"It is a tragedy that these people chose to take their lives down
such a destructive path," Bush said. "Fortunately, they did not die in
vain, for their deaths will
serve as a deterrent to other New Mexico Democrats who are considering a
similar life of crime."
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Nancy K. Kubasek
Professor of Legal Studies
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio 43403
419-372-2379
[log in to unmask]
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