Writing from the safety of Saskatchewan tonight:
Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts (R) says he plans to continue with the executions of the ten men on death row as soon as the drugs ordered from a West Bengal company arrive.
The Scottsbluff Star-Herald reports that though the state spent over fifty thousand dollars on the drugs, the FDA questions whether the importation is legal.
In Cook v. FDA, a federal court ordered the FDA to prohibit the importation of lethal injection drugs that fail to meet the agency’s standards. The part of the ruling on the FDA’s role in lethal injection drugs was upheld by the District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
Attorney General Doug Peterson has said the 2013 ruling does not apply to Nebraska because the state was not party to a case that involved death row inmates in Arizona, California and Tennessee.
Doug Baich, assistant federal public defender in Arizona who represented inmates in the Cook case, called the attorney general’s conclusion “ridiculous.”
“If the drug is not FDA approved, it cannot be imported to the United States,” Baich said, explaining that the court ordered the agency to regulate importation of all lethal injection drugs.
The governor announced the purchase of the drugs on May 14. His office has not directly answered whether the drugs had met FDA approval. Rather, the governor’s spokesman has said that the drugs would be tested for purity by an independent laboratory after their arrival.
Our "pro-life" state governor, who claims his understanding of the Catholic catechism permits the death penalty, even though the Roman Catholic Church's catechism says exactly opposite that, is still bent on executing these men, despite the FDA or his own church.
Previously, Mr. Ricketts claimed that a repeal of the death penalty would be dangerous for Nebraska, that the state is not serious about holding murderers accountable for their actions. (I cannot see people pouring over the borders from the states that surround Nebraska to commit murders just because Nebraska repealed the death penalty. I don't think a potential murderer wakes up and says "I am going to travel to a state where I will only get life imprisonment and go kill someone." The whole argument is ludicrous.)
In the meantime, my wife and I are now in Regina, Saskatchewan, on our way to Germany and Poland. More below the orange barbed wire border fence. . . .
My wife and I went by the Crazy Horse monument in South Dakota.
I have a photo we took. I uploaded it to my wife's Flickr account (where we are posting our vacation photos). If you want to see it, the URL is:
https://www.flickr.com/...
I am still stuck on how to post photos directly to Daily Kos.
There is a description attached to the photo.
As we take photos on our trip, we will add photos to that account.
To get an idea of the scale of the Crazy Horse monument, if you put Mount Rushmore against it, it would only take up the back of Crazy Horse's head. (If you see both, you should really see Rushmore first; seeing it afterwards made it somewhat of a disappointment.)
Snidley Whiplash at Wikipedia.
We drove through eastern Montana this morning, and arrived at a very lonely border station. The customs official asked for ID of course, then questioned us about having a car with a Nebraska registration of “87” – I pointed out that low numbers in Nebraska are reserved for Gold Star Family licence plates. (Hence, the red border and the gold star on the left of the plate.) He actually asked if there are really only 87 cars in Nebraska.
We spent quite a bit of time cooling our heels waiting for him. I suspect he was running our passport numbers to ensure they weren’t stolen, and our licence plate number to ensure we weren’t some sovereign citizen wingnuts (due to the unusual licence plate number - at least unusual to someone in Saskatchewan). He might have also been checking up on the drugs (since they are a controlled substance in Canada as well as the USA).
Interestingly, he didn't ask for my registration, my driver's licence, nor my Canadian proof-of-insurance. (I did have them.)
He also wanted to know how we got enough luggage for a trip to Europe in a Smart. We assured him that you can get a lot of luggage in one. That, and we really can’t carry three weeks of clothing with us anyway; we will have to depend on laundry service overseas.
That has to be one of the loneliest border stations in the world, except perhaps the DMZ between North and South Korea.
He told us to pull over to the inspection area while he checked our passports. I expected he was going to toss our car. I’d admitted to possessing a controlled substance (Phenobarbital) for my epilepsy under prescription – he wanted to know what the street name for the drug is. (I have no idea. Downers, I suggested helpfully.) He scrutinised a letter from the Veterans Administration authorising me to have the drug, then disappeared (presumably to make some phone calls).
On to Regina, after about a thirty minute delay (in which no one else came through the border). You know all the nonsense you hear about “securing the borders” (allegedly from Ebola or terrorists or whatnot)?
The US customs house looked much like an abandoned home from the Thirties in Morrill County, Nebraska, and there was no US official on duty. (We know whom they are talking about when the Republican Party calls for “securing the border,” and it isn’t terrorists. Dogwhistle politics: All the times I have been over Canada’s border without ever being searched or even questioned by US Customs sort of shows the GOP isn’t interested in secure borders. "Those people, ya know.")
My wife let out a hoot of laughter at a sight on the highway north of the border: six cattle with heads fully buried in a haystack (perhaps a secret conference). Just bodies and tails sticking out. We should have gotten a photo of it, to show they have cattle here as well. The only difference is the cattle here say, “Moo, eh” and wear tuques.
We arrived in Regina a day ahead of schedule. Unlike Lakes Texas and Oklahoma, and the Western Nebraska Mudflats, Saskatchewan is in a drought. Even electronic signboards on the highway urge drivers to conserve water, though I am unsure how you would do that whilst driving.
On the schedule for this weekend, two visits: The Royal Saskatchewan Museum and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Heritage Centre.
On the latter, I told my wife if she asked the curator of the RCMP museum if they’d caught Snidley Whiplash yet, I would claim not to know her.
The RCMP museum has displays of the history of the organisation, and on how forensic police work is accomplished.
It is very cool here, close to 0C (32F) at night right now, and only edging a bit above 13C (55F). It snowed in Manitoba.
My birthday is on Sunday (ugh, fifty-five years young). Monday we are off to Germany. We are still trying to figure out how to get from Stuttgart to Schwäbisch Gmünd (perhaps a train?) for the start of the conference we are attending there. It’s a bit too far to walk.