About 30 minutes ago, I was listening to the immortal Gloria Gaynor sing "I Will Survive," and dancing around the office. And I don't mean my personal office, I mean the whole building. You see, this is kind of a victory ritual for me, here in the TCASK office.

What was the cause for celebration today? Well, when I checked our web traffic today, I found that we had a visitor to the blog from the search engine metacrawler. And what led this person to the TCASK blog? Well they searched for "Al Schmutzer" and the second link that came up was the one below: http://tcask.blogspot.com/2006/01/institutions-and-district-attorneys.html

You see, D.A. Schmutzer had spoken at UT Knoxville a few weeks ago and claimed that the death penalty was not racially skewed in its application, but wait, our blog responded, of course it is.

On Monday of this week, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, speaking at Vanderbilt University, claimed that the death penalty functioned as a deterrent. You can read the TCASK response in the entry below this one. Now we at TCASK are all in favor of serious discussion about a complex issue, but our government officials owe us honesty, and they should not come onto college campuses, where we should be looking for truth and fact and make statements that all factual analyses prove to be erroneous. So never fear, seekers of truth and justice, the TCASK blog is here. We will not allow these sorts of comments to go unchallenged. Someone looking for information on Al Schmutzer has already found this out, and I hope that a search for John Ashcroft and Vanderbilt will yield us a result as well.

So you keep reading and we'll keep holding our government accountable on the facts! Thanks to all.