It's the End of Unicam Season in Lincoln

This combined with summer for the U leaves us as the overgrown small town we are at heart.  But hey, Micheal Buble is coming. 

  Mr. Senator  Chambers move' to abolish the death penalty went much further than the quixotic moral protest it has been in years past.  If not for a filibuster it would have fact have gotten majority passage in the leg.  It was Chambers opponents who acted out of pure symbolic defiance this time around.  The bust served no strategic purpose whatsoever.  Our provincial chipmunk of a governor had already said that he would veto any DP ban that came his way and overcoming this would have required precisely the same super-majority as shutting down a talk-off. 

It was pointless, like I said, inspired so far as I can tell by the fear that even almost banning the death penalty would get us laughed at by Texas in the showers after gym class.  More than that though I'd say the ability to kill the debate was exactly that, an attempt to will the existence of this debate out of existence.  There's a strong need among the right-wing to see themselves as the embodiment and definers of what is true, natural, and normal.  Support for the death penalty is central to that because it helps them to believe that their society is intrinsically good, that solving social problems is a matter of having the courage and vital strength to punish  evil that exists completely outside oneself instead of the painful vulnerable vertigo of self-examination.  'Eye for an eye' is in no sense the instinctively known true penalty for murder or any other outrage.  It has only ever been a means of asserting superior worldly status; the paternal right to inflict suffering on others for everyone's own good. 

But conceding for the moment that everything I just said is nonsense; it isn't, but just go with me here.  Even if opposition to the death penalty is wrong it has still become permanently established as at least a strong minority position.  Those who support the death penalty are of course entitled to believe that they do but they will never be able to dismiss disagreement on this matter as alien or beyond the pale.  We are here to stay, and the day will come when your chivalric fantasies of  true justice are taken by the mainstream for the poisonous claptrap they are.  You will be the strangers living outside the normative values.