Sanity

I'm developing writer's cramp communicating with senators, congressmen, the President (and now a letter to Saddam Hussein) imploring the use of sanctions and avoidance of war. I've lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Panama and Grenada, plus Beirut, and after all the killing and mayhem, it turns out life goes on much as before--except for those touched by the killing. Today you write about "businessmen" readying themselves to do business with Iraq once the war is over!

Score this Secrecy 1, Transparency 0. Earlier this week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court stepped up and issued an indefinite stay of execution for convicted rapist-murderer Clayton Lockett, to provide time to review a lower court ruling that the state's law masking the supplier of execution drugs was unconstitutional. The issue comes down to transparency. With the growing shortage of execution drugs, driven by manufacturers' reluctance to provide them to prisons, states are having trouble buying what they need to kill inmates.

As a spate of spontaneous serial psychosis grips Victorian-era London, a theatrical classic lit mash-up pits the deductive reasoning of the world's most famous fictional detective against the nonsensical conundrums of a fictionalized Lewis Carroll in “Sherlock Through the Looking Glass,” from North Hollywood's Porters of Hellsgate. Despite a premise with intriguing possibilities, the play's thematic wedge between logic and rationality threatens the sanity of all concerned - including, unfortunately, the audience.

Defense attorneys for James E. Holmes, charged in the shooting rampage in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater that left 12 dead and dozens wounded, will appeal a court order requiring him to undergo a second evaluation of his sanity. His lawyers gave notice that they would appeal in a Tuesday court filing in the case before Arapahoe County District Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. The filing was released Wednesday . Holmes underwent a mandatory sanity evaluation last year, but Samour ruled that it was inadequate and ordered a second round of testing.

Defense attorneys for James E. Holmes, charged in the shooting rampage in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater that left 12 dead and dozens wounded, will appeal a court order requiring him to undergo a second evaluation of his sanity. His lawyers gave notice that they would appeal in a Tuesday court filing in the case before Arapahoe County District Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. The filing was released Wednesday . Holmes underwent a mandatory sanity evaluation last year, but Samour ruled that it was inadequate and ordered a second round of testing.

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. - Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales , accused of killing 16 villagers and wounding six more in Afghanistan , will undergo a government sanity review this weekend to determine his mental state, his attorneys said. Bales faces a military court-martial with the possibility of receiving the death penalty. His attorneys had previously opposed a sanity review, saying that the process was too favorable to military prosecutors, who also have opposed Bales' hopes for an insanity plea.

After weeks of analysis, praise and some backlash, singer Frank Ocean is opening up about his decision to reveal a past romance with another man.  Ocean took to his Tumblr blog July 3 to give, in straightforward detail , an account of his same-sex relationship, and the subsequent reaction has catapulted the 24-year-old to media stardom. The decision was not for album sales, he says, but for sanity.  Coming out was "about my own sanity and my ability to feel like I'm living a life where … I'm happy when I wake up in the morning, and not with this freakin' boulder on my chest," Ocean said in an interview with the Guardian.  PHOTOS: Gay celebrities: Who's out?

For Amy Lee and her friend Ashley Wright, the decision to organize the Los Angeles-based Rally to Restore Sanity was an easy one. All it took was the urging of Jon Stewart ? and tight finances. "We were having dinner together a few weeks ago, and we were talking about how we really wanted to go to the D.C. rally," said Lee, 38, who works in production and human resources. "But that's quite a trip. We couldn't afford to travel all that way. " Two weeks and a Facebook page later (with 3,100 followers to date)

"Edge of Sanity" (citywide) is an elegant, bloody new version of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," reworked by writers J.P. Felix and Ron Raley to turn Hyde into Jack the Ripper. Anthony Perkins brings just the right degree of tongue-in-cheekery to his dual role; would that director Gerard Kikoine had exercised the same restraint in showing the Ripper's victims and had left more to the imagination. The result is a stylish, imaginative picture too morbid and graphic for mainstream audiences in its sex-and-violence juxtapositions--but one that may have enough bizarre panache to become a cult film.

Two weeks after my double mastectomy, I lay on the exam table, slightly feverish from the plastic drains that attached beneath my skin and snaked silently under my shirt. Like a macabre version of speed dating, I had already met with five oncologists. My case was difficult and required the best of the best. Waiting for Dr. Linnea Chap to walk through the door, I closed my eyes in exhaustion and despair. Dr. Chap had an encyclopedic understanding of breast cancer, but she didn't overwhelm me with detailed explanations of tumor grade or cell replication.

Mike D'Antoni thinks of it this way: don't make a bad situation worse. As the losses pile up at a record-setting rate, the Lakers coach often responds with humor while fielding reporters' questions. It's sometimes self-deprecating and usually followed by a laugh, his way of coping with a season to be remembered for two things: many injuries, many losses. "You've got to be careful because if you get in these situations it doesn't help to swing wildly and just take everybody down," D'Antoni said.

"Tort reform"--read that as "shutting the courthouse door to malpractice victims"--again is rearing its ugly head as a means to reduce healthcare costs, most recently as a plank in the recent GOP healthcare proposals . So it's refreshing to see the rationales for malpractice reforms authoritatively eviscerated, and even more refreshing to see that done by the heavily Republican Supreme Court of Florida. By a 5-2 vote, the court last week overturned Florida's 2003 cap on malpractice damages, calling it discriminatory and therefore in violation of the state constitution.

"A Journey to Planet Sanity," Blake Freeman's comedic documentary and purported quest for "truth," proves a tedious, half-baked outing. It mostly plays like a slapdash mockumentary crossed with a bad reality TV show. The engine here is director-star Freeman's mission to make things right for 69-year-old LeRoy Tessina, a food delivery man whose unfounded fear of aliens and ghosts has caused him emotional and financial distress (he's supposedly spent his life savings on psychic guidance, among other forms of "protection" from the paranormal)

As a spate of spontaneous serial psychosis grips Victorian-era London, a theatrical classic lit mash-up pits the deductive reasoning of the world's most famous fictional detective against the nonsensical conundrums of a fictionalized Lewis Carroll in “Sherlock Through the Looking Glass,” from North Hollywood's Porters of Hellsgate. Despite a premise with intriguing possibilities, the play's thematic wedge between logic and rationality threatens the sanity of all concerned - including, unfortunately, the audience.

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. - Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales , accused of killing 16 villagers and wounding six more in Afghanistan , will undergo a government sanity review this weekend to determine his mental state, his attorneys said. Bales faces a military court-martial with the possibility of receiving the death penalty. His attorneys had previously opposed a sanity review, saying that the process was too favorable to military prosecutors, who also have opposed Bales' hopes for an insanity plea.

On screen and off, Kerry Washington is a strong woman with strong convictions. Not only does she play the tough political crisis manager Olivia Pope on ABC's highly rated show "Scandal," she also commanded the national stage on the final night of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. So it's a bit incongruous to see Washington taking on a role like Broomhilda von Shaft - a plantation slave desperately in need of being rescued by her man - in "Django Unchained. " Washington, though, describes herself not just as a feminist but also a womanist - a term coined by Alice Walker to define black feminism.

David Stern, Commissioner National Basketball Assn. 475 Park Ave. New York, NY Dear David, I have a joke for you: What would you call you and the rest of your vast legal staff in the NBA office at the bottom of the sea? A good start. Just kidding, more or less. I actually have great respect for the way you've run this league, except for this one tiny little thing: Can you stop messing around with our playoffs? Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?

Mike Downey is a refreshing breath of compassion, taste and sanity amid a howling pack of media morons. BERENICE JOHNSON, Glendora

After weeks of analysis, praise and some backlash, singer Frank Ocean is opening up about his decision to reveal a past romance with another man.  Ocean took to his Tumblr blog July 3 to give, in straightforward detail , an account of his same-sex relationship, and the subsequent reaction has catapulted the 24-year-old to media stardom. The decision was not for album sales, he says, but for sanity.  Coming out was "about my own sanity and my ability to feel like I'm living a life where … I'm happy when I wake up in the morning, and not with this freakin' boulder on my chest," Ocean said in an interview with the Guardian.  PHOTOS: Gay celebrities: Who's out?

A former Westminster police detective convicted of raping a waitress in Fontana took the witness stand for the first time Tuesday in his attempt to persuade a San Bernardino County jury that the antidepressant Zoloft turned him insane at the time of the attack. A New York psychiatrist, a key witness for the defense, also testified that in the days before the rape, defendant Anthony Orban believed he was possessed by demons and thought of killing himself, his wife and their dog. Orban, dressed in a trim, dark suit with his hair neatly brushed, told the jury that he was "falling apart" in the months leading up to the attack.