Potpourri! Death, Doctors, Tinkle, Justice, and Energy

Brain full yet?

Holy buckets! I've got eight tabs open on my browser—time to clear the cache! Here's some brain potpourri:

1. Senator Gene Abdallah: before you stink up the airwaves again with your suggestion that we ought to expedite death penalty trials, read Bob Herbert's column about a Texas father put to death for killing his children by arson. 18 years after the fire, a scientist hired by the state of Texas finds the fire was an accident, and the father was innocent.
2. Bill Moyers is on a health care tear this summer. His latest Journal on PBS features American doctors destroying the myth that America has the best health care in the world.
3. But don't take Bill Moyers's word for it: run your own numbers on the really cool Death Risk Rankings calculator from Carnegie Mellon.
   
4. McCook Central School District is getting double the bang for its computer buck by using netbooks in its elementary classrooms. Now where'd they get that idea?
5. "City Commission Worried About Water Supply," but not enough to give first reading to its new proposed public urination ordinance. Says KJAM, Madison's leaders "wanted to take some time to change the original wording of the proposed ordinance." Now where'd they get that idea?
6. That Sioux Falls paper turns a couple quotes and now "No comment" from the White House into fodder for speculation that President Obama will give the Black Hills back to the Lakota. Hold your nose and gape in awe at the ignorance and racism in the Argus forum. Note also that Nixon gave federal land back to the Taos-Pueblo in New Mexico in 1970, and no social chaos ensued.
7. Hey Jason! Want to get us off oil? Why not do something simpler than building stills everywhere: just ban cars! Vauban, Germany, has!
8. Also on getting us off oil: individual homeowners may lead the way in creating more solar power-generating capacity. Now if we could just get the big power utility corporations out of our way....

Dang this Internet for giving us so much interesting stuff to read!