Demand "Justice" But Beware The Rush To Judgment In The Trayvon Martin Case

There are many disturbing questions surrounding the shooting of Trayvon Martin, many of them outlined here.  A rigorous independent investigation geared towards answering these questions and determining the extent to which George Zimmerman committed criminal acts is essential.  But as rallies today by civil rights groups and others "demand justice" and call for Zimmerman's "immediate arrest," I want to urge caution.

The disparity in treatment between young African Americans suspected of criminal conduct and George Zimmerman, who we know shot and killed Trayvon Martin, is stark and I share the frustration and the outrage of the protesters.  But, I remain very uncomfortable with the demands and petition drives calling for Zimmerman's arrest and prosecution (not to mention the vigilante response) based only on the selected facts to which we, the public, have become privy. 

There are very good reasons to doubt the good faith of local law enforcement and the prosecuting agencies in this case, and we should certainly be demanding justice.  But we can't know yet what a just response is.  We should await the findings of the special prosecutor -- which may very well spur more legitimate questions and demands -- rather than rush to judgment now based on the limited information filtered down to us from the media.

Far more often than not, in the wake of a tragic death it is the suspicious-looking African American in the hoodie for whom there is this kind of clamor for "swift justice."  

[Stop Racism, Not Hoodies;  The Right Continues To Play To Stereotype]

Quote Of The Day

"The limit is the Constitution." 

Akhil Reed Amar, from Ezra Klein's Wonkblog

Amar, a Yale law professor, goes on to say:  "The most important limit, the one we fought the Revolutionary War for, is that the people doing this to you are the people you elect. That’s the main check. The broccoli argument is like something they said when we were debating the income tax: If they can tax me, they can tax me at 100 percent! And yes, they can. But they won’t. Because you could vote them out of office. They have the power to do all sorts of ridiculous things that they won’t do because you’d vote them out of office."

Justice Scalia Shills For The Tea Party

There has always appeared to be a consensus in mainstream circles, if not necessarily in the legal community, that whether you agreed with him or not, Justice Antonin Scalia possesses a great legal mind.  His performance during the arguments this week on the Affordable Care Act case was therefore striking for the way he often parroted Tea Party talking points.

Talking Points Memo provides the top five GOP Buzzwords echoed by the Supreme Court Justice:

‘Broccoli’

One of the GOP’s favorite talking points about the individual mandate, which a conservative lower court judge also invoked, is that it could open the door to Congress mandating that people eat broccoli.
“Could you define the market — everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food,” Scalia said, discussing a hypothetical. “Therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.”  He added, “Does that expand your ability to, to issue mandates to the people?”

‘Exercise’

On a similar note, Republicans have warned that letting Congress require an affirmative act could lead to forced exercise in order to keep people healthy. Scalia made that point, too.
“Everybody has to exercise, because there’s no doubt that lack of exercise causes illness, and that causes health care costs to go up,” he said. “So the Federal government says everybody has to join an exercise club.”

‘Cornhusker Kickback’

During Wednesday’s arguments about how closely linked all the provisions of the law are, Scalia twice echoed a catchphrase devised by Republicans to mock a special Medicaid deal Senate leaders offered Ben Nelson (D-NE) to win his vote.
“If we struck down nothing in this legislation but the — what’s it called, the Cornhusker kickback, okay, we find that to violate the constitutional proscription of venality, okay?” the justice said. “When we strike that down, it’s clear that Congress would not have passed it without that. It was the means of getting the last necessary vote in the Senate. And you are telling us that the whole statute would fall because the Cornhusker kickback is bad. That can’t be right.”
Obscured in Scalia’s remark is that the deal was stripped out of the statute around the time of enactment — a fact that hasn’t stopped Republicans from railing against it over the last two years.

‘2,700 Pages’

Discussing what parts of the bill could be “severed” from the mandate, Scalia said: “Mr. Kneedler, what happened to the 8th Amendment? You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?” There were laughs in the chamber. “Is this not totally unrealistic? That we are going to go through this enormous bill item by item and decide each one?”
The 8th Amendment is the part of the Constitution that prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment” — the length of the bill is a running joke among Republicans, who often invoke the 2,700 figure, to argue that nobody could reasonably be expected to read it.

‘10th Amendment’

“I mean, the 10th Amendment says the powers not given to the Federal Government are reserved, not just to the States, but to the States and the people,” Scalia said Tuesday, arguing that the court has held certain laws “reasonably adapted” but not “proper” because they “violated the sovereignty of the States, which was implicit in the constitutional structure.”
The 10th Amendment argument is a common line of attack by Republicans, including Mitt Romney, invoked to argue that ‘Obamacare’ tramples states rights. And though the states challenging the law claim the Medicaid expansion violates the 10th Amendment, Scalia cited it in reference to the individual mandate.
Scalia’s argument is particularly noteworthy because the justice greatly disappointed 10th Amendment advocates in his 2005 Gonzalez v. Raich decision, concurring with the court’s liberals to say Congress may override a state law permitting licensed medical marijuana patients to grow cannabis for personal, non-commercial use.

Road To Dystopia With The GOP

DonkeyHotey

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos wrote two pieces yesterday, one on the actions of the Republicans in the House and one on what they did in the Senate, that come pretty close to telling us all we need to know about what the GOP stands for.

First, the House Republicans passed Paul Ryan's budget resolution, the so-called "Path to Prosperity," which as McCarter explains, would among other things end Medicare as we know it:

The House Republicans made their ultimate dystopian statement today, in passing Rep. Paul Ryan's budget in a 228-191 vote. Ten Republicans voted against it, no Democrats voted for it and 13 members did not vote.

House Speaker John Boehner called this plan "a real vision of what we were to do if we get more control here in this town. It's still a Democrat-run town."

Just a few reminders about the Ryan budget, and what the House Republicans put down as their political marker for 2012, their vision for a Republican-ruled America: It would give the wealthy a humongous tax break, the lowest tax rate since the Hoover administration; it would gut nutritional assistance, cutting it by 17 percent over the next decade; it would cut Medicare benefits and begin the process of killing the program; it would kill millions of jobs; it turns Medicaid into a block grant and deeply cuts federal spending for it, and for SCHIP, the children's health program; and it breaks the already agreed upon Budget Control Act of 2011, threatening, once again, a government shutdown.

This is also the budget endorsed by Mitt Romney. Today the Republicans made their most definitive statement for the America they envision. This is their platform for 2012, from the top down.

Not to outdone, the Senate Republicans filibustered a bill to repeal subsidies and tax breaks to Big Oil that had majority support.

 Another day in the Senate, another filibuster by Republicans on behalf of corporate America. The Senate voted on advancing a bill to repeal subsidies and tax breaks to Big Oil, and while the majority supported the bill, the filibuster held in the final 51-47 vote (Republicans Mark Kirk and Orrin Hatch were not present to vote).

Maine Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins voted with Democrats, while Democrats Mark Begich (AK), Mary Landrieu (LA), Jim Webb (VA) and Ben Nelson (NE) switched sides. Landrieu and Begich, being from oil producing states, were needlessly voting for self protection, since there wasn't a chance the filibuster could be broken. Webb and Nelson, both retiring, are completely inexcusable.
But this is the status quo that the Republicans voted to protect:

Just this past January the typical household paid about $290.76 for gasoline, up by $25 over the same one-month time span in January 2011. It looks like households will face a similar increase in gasoline expenditures in February with gas prices on the rise even though demand is the lowest it’s been since 1997. This especially affects the 82 million households that spend 6 percent or more of their annual household budgets on gasoline. High oil and gasoline prices in 2011 enabled the big five companies to rake in $137 billion in profits last year. These enormous earnings contributed to the $1 trillion in profits they earned from 2001 through 2011. Despite a profit figure with 12 zeroes—count them: $1,000,000,000,000—these oil giants are major players in the lobbying efforts to retain $4 billion in annual tax breaks for oil and gas companies that they clearly do not need. In the scheme of all things Big Oil, these tax breaks are small, particularly in relation to their profits and in light of the fact that in 2011 these companies also had a combined $58 billion in cash reserves, nearly 30 times more than they received in special tax breaks.

The American taxpayer is subsidizing those billions Big Oil is raking in, while we pay more and more at the pump every week. At least we know now, definitively, which side the Republicans are on.

Quote Of The Day

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through rages of fog
where we stood, saying I 

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

Do We Deserve To Kill?

Bryan Stevenson

I consider myself very fortunate to have met Bryan Stevenson up close and personal.  I have heard him speak countless times, and he never fails to inspire and educate.  No one speaks with more power, eloquence and compassion on the death penalty, on criminal justice, on race, and on how these issues intersect.

The Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Institute in Alabama, Bryan is a brilliant lawyer who recently argued in the United States Supreme Court on behalf of two defendants who were sentenced to life without parole for murders committed when they were fourteen.  He was a guest on Rachel Maddow's show last night, where he discussed the cases, which he described as "death in prison" for juveniles, and how the death penalty frequently "obscures such other issues of severe and excessive punishment."

Bryan explained how our political discourse around crime and punishment "has been corrupted by decades of politics of fear and anger" so that people believe that the fact that a terrible crime has been committed is the "end of the conversation."  But, he maintained, while the criminal justice system is designed to punish and protect public safety, "it also has to be just, to have integrity and to have credibility."

Finally, he talked about the death penalty:

Increasingly we have to confront the fact that the death penalty in this country isn't a question that has to be answered by simply asking, "do people deserve to die for the crimes they committed?"  I think we have to ask, "do we deserve to kill?"  And if our system is flawed, if our system is discriminatory, if our system is unequal as to class and economic status, if our system permits innocent people to be wrongfully convicted and condemned, then I think we will get to a different answer then we might otherwise get. 

Bryan Stevenson is a national treasure.  Here's the entire segment:.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

R.I.P. Jesse Hernandez

Roman Colosseum lit to protest an execution

On March 28, 2012, Texas executed Jesse Hernandez for the beating death of 10-month old Karlos Borjas in 2001.

Hernandez' current lawyers tried to establish that his trial lawyers and initial post-conviction lawyers were grossly ineffective -- unfortunately a far from unique claim in Texas. 

Neither trial counsel nor habeas counsel developed evidence which would have supported a claim that Hernandez did not directly cause the child's death.  Hernandez did not dispute that he beat Karlos, who was taken to the hospital, placed in a medically-induced coma and died after taken off life support.  New evidence based on expert review of the medical records suggests, however, that the hospital gave the child a lethal dose of the drug pentobarbital and that he was removed from life support prematurely.   Because the claim of trial counsel's unreasonable failure to obtain this evidence was not raised in the first instance by post-conviction counsel, current counsel has been precluded from having the evidence heard.

This is the 12th execution in the United States in 2012, the fourth in Texas.

Panetta, Polls, And The Afghan Quagmire

By Matthew Rothschild, cross-posted from Progressive.org

It’s disgusting to watch Defense Secretary Leon Panetta trying to justify the ongoing war in Afghanistan long after it’s proven unwinnable and now after the public has decisively moved against it.

A recent poll showed that 69 percent of the American people are against the war.

But Panetta doesn’t care. “We cannot fight wars by polls,” he said. “If we do that, we’re in deep trouble.”

But it’s the people who are supposed to decide whether we wage war or not. That’s why our Constitution requires Congress, the elected officials closest to the people, to make this fateful decision, not the President, nor the Secretary of Defense, nor the brass.

And the lesson of Vietnam, the lesson of Iraq, is that when the American public clearly doesn’t support the way anymore, the war can’t be won.

The pathetic and inexcusable thing is that Panetta must know that himself. The generals must know it. And Obama must know it.

But like Robert McNamara, and General Westmoreland, and Lyndon Johnson before them, they keep fighting the war because they are unwilling, for political reasons, to come clean to the American public that hired them.

It’s shameful that they keep sending our soldiers to fight and die in a useless cause.

And a government that continues to wage war without the support of its people forfeits the right to call itself a democracy.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine, which is one of the leading voices for peace and social justice in this country.  He is the host of "Progressive Radio," a syndicated half-hour weekly interview program, and does a two-minute daily radio commentary, entitled "Progressive Point of View," which is also syndicated around the country.  Rothschild is the author of You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression (New Press, 2007)

Quote Of The Day

"The frictionlessness and invisibility of modern warfare for the American public represents a drift off the course set for us by the Constitution. It has made wars easier to start but, perhaps more important for us now, has also made them harder to stop. It has almost normalized the condition of America being at war. But even an inured public has a limit, and maybe 4,000 days is it."

Rachel Maddow, 4,000 Days of War in Afghanistan

Let Political Ads Go The Way Of Cigarette Commercials

By Tina Dupuy, cross-posted from her website

When asked to report on the onslaught of political ads on television words like “flood,” “deluge,” and “torrent,” will suddenly pepper copy. A report from the Borrell Associates estimates $9.8 billion will be spent on political advertising this season. Nearly 60 percent of that will be on television. Phrases like “secret money” and “shadow funders” also pop up. Conservatives, traditionally, call for transparency when it comes to money in politics. Liberals will call for limits. Right now we have neither. And nowhere is that more apparent than on your teevee.

Ask anyone in even a slightly purple state or in an even slightly contested district: Political ads are a plague come election time. And what exactly are we getting for our (estimated) $42 per potential voter? Not much.

Ads are not transparent, not fact checked and in many cases not accountable. Voters get to feel like Alex DeLarge in “A Clockwork Orange” during his aversion therapy (eye drops, anyone?) without knowing who’s footing the bill.

A way to combat this Stanley Kubrick-esque torment is just ban all political advertisements on television.

“That’s an assault on free speech.”

First off television is not an unregulated utopia of free speech – that’s the Internet (for now, anyway). Television, like it or not, doesn’t allow everything to be broadcast. There are standards on television. Our mores may have changed over time but generally we’re still okay with decency standards for television. Speaking is speech. Broadcast is regulated.

And it’s worth noting, 99 percent of Americans have televisions in their homes. It’s still the broadest, most viewed medium we have. Which is why candidates and advocates for candidates invest billions into blanketing it.

We don’t allow tobacco companies, for example, to advertise on television. Why? Because their products are poisonous and harmful to our citizenry. The same could be said for Swift Boating, Demon Sheeping and whatever Herman Cain is doing.

These ads are supposed to sway public opinion. But these aren’t actually opinions being targeted – they’re emotions. Most Americans have less of an opinion when it comes to politics and more of a visceral reaction to issues. Which explains why your “political debate” over Thanksgiving dinner ended up with you being pummeled with green bean casserole.

And there’s no better example of where to start hysteria than in 30-second fear and loathing campaign spots. Does this elevate political discourse? Civic engagement? Sound policy? Hardly. These ads are doing what tobacco does: producing a carcinogenic cloud.

The Supreme Court Trauma Center

By DonkeyHotey

Climate Change Disappears From Keystone XL Pipeline Debate

Mining and using tar sands oil creates more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil. But that's rarely mentioned anymore. 




By Lisa Song, originally published at InsideClimate News

When President Obama traveled to Cushing, Okla. last week to declare his support for building the southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline, he stressed that the pipeline and other oil infrastructure projects would be done "in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people."

But missing from the speech—and from most recent discussions of the controversial project—was any mention of climate change or the greenhouse gas emissions associated with mining Canadian tar sands.
Climate change was once front and center in the pipeline debate, with federal agencies as well as environmentalists weighing in with their concerns.

In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency noted in its analysis of the State Department's draft environmental review of the Keystone XL that a comprehensive evaluation would have to consider the tar sands industry's greenhouse gas emissions, which the EPA calculated on a well-to-tank basis to be 82 percent greater than conventional crude oil.

"Alongside the national security benefits of importing crude oil from a stable trading partner, we believe the national security implications of expanding the nation's long-term commitment to a relatively high carbon source of oil should also be considered," the EPA wrote.

A year later, the EPA wrote in comments on the State Department's second draft that it was "concerned about levels of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions associated with the proposed project, and whether appropriate mitigation measures to reduce these emissions are being considered."

The EPA asked the State Department "to identify practicable mitigation measures" for the "entire suite" of greenhouse gases associated with operation of the Keystone XL.

In a statement issued in November, the State Department said that any decision on whether the pipeline is in the national interest should consider "all of the relevant issues," such as "environmental concerns (including climate change), energy security, economic impacts, and foreign policy."

Over the past year, the pipeline's opponents have focused their campaign on protecting the fragile Nebraska Sandhills, and climate change has taken a back seat in the debate. But environmentalists have long warned that the pipeline would lock in the United States to a particularly dirty form of oil that would further exacerbate global warming.

One of the most-quoted lines has come from climate scientist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who calls the tar sands a "fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet."
Bill McKibben, founder of the climate action group 350.org, said the Keystone protest has always been driven by "the fear that the tar sands will help destabilize the climate."

"Our colleagues in Nebraska did a great job of highlighting their concerns about the Ogallala aquifer and the Sandhills, but for those of us in the other 49 states, global warming was the single biggest reason for this fight," McKibben told InsideClimate News in an email on Friday. "Which is why it would have been nice for the president to say something about it [in Cushing], considering he was standing in the state that just went through the warmest summer any American state has ever recorded."

President Obama gave his speech against a backdrop of steel pipes at the Stillwater Pipe Yard, which is owned by TransCanada, the Alberta-based company that wants to build the pipeline. The president's stop in Cushing was part of a nationwide tour to publicize his administration's "all of the above" energy strategy.

Republished with permission of InsideClimate News, a non-profit, non-partisan news organization that covers energy and climate change—plus the territory in between where law, policy and public opinion are shaped.

Quote Of The Day

"Thanks to [Paul] Ryan, we now know that this election is not about deficits at all. It is about whether we will respond to growing inequalities of wealth and income by creating even larger inequalities of wealth and income."

E.J. Dionne, The Right's Etch-A-Sketch Imperative

The Right Continues To Play To Stereotype

The Republicans are on a roll.

They continue to vilify Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, displaying not just their mean-spiritedness, but their remarkable misunderstanding of how birth control works and how health care operates.

They continue to blame and smear Trayvon Martin, showing their cold-heartedness while avoiding serious debate about gun control, misguided stand-your-ground laws and racism.

They tout the new budget unveiled by Congressman Paul Ryan which will not only increase the deficit, cut taxes for the wealthy, gut the social safety net, and end Medicare as we know it but, as E.J. Dionne notes, would "produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent time."

I hate to perpetuate a stereotype but this sure seems ignorant, misogynistic, racist and greedy to me.

Health Care Jujitsu

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

Not surprisingly, today’s debut Supreme Court argument over the so-called “individual mandate” requiring everyone to buy health insurance revolved around epistemological niceties such as the meaning of a “tax,” and the question of whether the issue is ripe for review.

Behind this judicial foreplay is the brute political fact that if the Court decides the individual mandate is an unconstitutional extension of federal authority, the entire law starts unraveling.

But with a bit of political jujitsu, the President could turn any such defeat into a victory for a single-payer healthcare system – Medicare for all.

Here’s how.

The dilemma at the heart of the new law is that it continues to depend on private health insurers, who have to make a profit or at least pay all their costs including marketing and advertising.

Yet the only way private insurers can afford to cover everyone with pre-existing health problems, as the new law requires, is to have every American buy health insurance – including young and healthier people who are unlikely to rack up large healthcare costs.

This dilemma is the product of political compromise. You’ll remember the Administration couldn’t get the votes for a single-payer system such as Medicare for all. It hardly tried. Not a single Republican would even agree to a bill giving Americans the option of buying into it.

But don’t expect the Supreme Court to address this dilemma. It lies buried under an avalanche of constitutional argument.

Those who are defending the law in Court say the federal government has authority to compel Americans to buy health insurance under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which gives Washington the power to regulate interstate commerce. They argue our sprawling health insurance system surely extends beyond an individual state.

Those who are opposing the law say a requirement that individuals contract with private insurance companies isn’t regulation of interstate commerce. It’s coercion of individuals.

Unhappily for Obama and the Democrats, most Americans don’t seem to like the individual mandate very much anyway. Many on the political right believe it a threat to individual liberty. Many on the left object to being required to buy something from a private company.

The President and the Democrats could have avoided this dilemma in the first place if they’d insisted on Medicare for all, or at least a public option.

Quote Of The Day

"[A]ll this emphasis on clothing as a motive for murder is just a smokescreen for sidestepping the real issue, which is that bigots shouldn’t be allowed to have hand guns."

Juan Cole, Basic Facts on Clothing and Murder for American Bigots.

Cole continues:  "In fact, since you can’t hunt deer with a hand gun and most owners of a hand gun are not reservists in the National Guard of their state, it is unclear why the US tolerates so many hand guns. In countries like Britain, which do not, the murder rate by gun is vanishingly small compared to the annual carnage in the US."

A Progressive Budget Or The Ryan Plan: American Dream Or American Nightmare

 Who Pays The Bill For Wall Street's Mess?

By Robert Borosage, cross-posted from Campaign For America's Future

DonkeyHotey

Yesterday, House Republicans rolled out their budget plan in the Washington version of a Hollywood movie opening. There was a star turn for Budget Chair Paul Ryan at a conservative think tank. Gaseous rhetoric -- "liberties endangered, time to choose" -- fouled the air. There were dueling videos, and furious salvos of partisan messaging. And a backup document -- the "Path to Prosperity" -- festooned with tables for wonks to wallow in.

Today, with fewer trumpets and less fanfare, the Congressional Progressive Caucus releases its budget plan -- A Budget for All.

Each of the two documents is designed to define a message. Their contrasts help clarify the real choices the country faces. Federal deficits exploded after Wall Street's excesses blew up the economy. The questions now are who gets the bill and when does the payment start? Ryan's Republican budget and the CPC's offer starkly different answers that would take the country in starkly different directions.

The Bathtub Fantasy

"My goal is to cut government... to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Grover Norquist.

Ryan's Republican budget, like a speedo bathing suit on a corpulent geezer, is revealing, but not flattering. Even by Washington standards, this is a remarkably dishonest document. It claims to be serious, but offers targets that are simply preposterous. It calls for leveling with the American people, but cravenly ducks laying out who will pay for top end tax cuts. It calls itself a "blueprint for American renewal" while systematically trampling the American dream.

Republicans have lined up like lemmings to sign Grover Norquist's infamous pledge never to raise taxes on anyone at any time. But turns out they even treat the quips of the conservative gadfly as gospel. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, the Ryan budget, by its own numbers, assiduously pursues Grover's bathtub fantasy.

The Congressional Budget Office reports that under the Ryan budget, by 2050 most of the federal government would simply cease to exist. Ryan's budget would shrink all federal expenditures outside of interest payments, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and children's health to 3.75 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

To translate that arcane measure, CBO notes that "spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year [since World War II]. " Ryan and Republicans call for increasing defense spending -- so the rest of the government would have to be cut to bathtub size. Ryan argues that the "challenges this nation faces are among the largest in its history," but the budget target he offers is, well, goofy.

Stop Racism, Not Hoodies -- A Message To Geraldo Rivera

By Bilen Mesfin, originally published at Dominion of New York

The Real Trouble with Black Boys

Amid the furor surrounding the tragic death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of self-styled neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, we find this slice of dubious wisdom from Geraldo Rivera: “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.”

 
“When you see a black or Latino youngster, particularly on the street, you walk to the other side of the street,” Mr. Rivera goes on to say, “You try to avoid that confrontation. … I’ll bet you money, if he didn’t have that hoodie on, that — that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn’t have responded in that violent and aggressive way.”

Mr. Rivera, before you decide to launch a misguided #stophoodie2012 campaign a la Kony, let me posit a different theory. Could it be that the problem wasn’t Trayvon or his hoodie? Could it be that part of the problem is you? Because by making such ridiculous, tone-deaf statements, you’re simply exacerbating the bias that’s at the heart of this issue. You see, what you say and do matters, Mr. Rivera — not because you are Geraldo Rivera, the individual, but because you are Geraldo Rivera, a member of the media establishment, and media is one of the most powerful ways that such stereotypes and biases get spread and reinforced in the first place.

Consider a recently released research report titled “Opportunity for Black Men and Boys:  Public Opinion, Media Depictions and Media Consumption.” The report highlights some troubling points, which those of us who are concerned about equality, fairness and justice in this country intrinsically know: “Among the many factors that influence the opportunities and achievements of black men and boys are public perceptions and attitudes toward them as a group, and their own self-perception. Research and experience show that expectations and biases on the part of potential employers, teachers, health care providers, police officers, and other stakeholders influence the life outcomes of millions of black males, just as their own self-esteem, identity, and sense of empowerment affect their ability to achieve under difficult circumstances. In turn, one of the most important avenues for maintaining (or changing) these perceptions is the mass media, with its significant power to shape popular ideas and attitudes.”

When it come to mass media, the report details, black men and boys are:

- Vastly underrepresented: They are all too rarely visible across multiple mediums, whether as characters in TV shows, in advertisements,  or – as my partner often points out – in video games. They are also underrepresented as “talking heads” or experts on the news.

 - Negatively depicted: When they do appear in media, they are depicted in a negative light.  Rather than as “relatable characters with well-developed personal lives (i.e. fathers)…black males are overrepresented when the media touch on certain negative topics, such as criminality, unemployment, and poverty,” the report says.

- Narrowly portrayed: Any “positive images and attributes with which black males are associated tend to be constrained to a small, stereotypic set which includes sports, physical achievement in general, aggressiveness, and musicality, to the exclusion of other everyday virtues.

Simply put: the media to a large extent ignores the fullness, richness and complexity of black men and boys’ lives.

The result? According to the report: “Distorted media representations can be expected to create attitudinal effects ranging from general antagonism toward black men and boys, to higher tolerance for race-based socio-economic disparities, reduced attention to structural and other big-picture factors, and public support for punitive approaches to problems.”

In turn — and pay extra close attention to this part Mr. RIvera — these perceptions could mean trouble “any time a black man or boy is in a position where his fate depends on how he is perceived by others.” The impact can range from less attention from doctors, and harsher sentencing by judges to lower likelihood of being hired or admitted to school.  The impact can also include a beautiful young boy being shot for no discernible reason and the institutions sworn to protect and serve him failing to even detain his killer a month after his death.

In a sense you are right, Mr. Rivera. Bias against black men and boys does lead to negative and sad outcomes. It can make us, as you say, walk to the other side of the street when we see them coming our way. It can make us see a weapon when there is only candy. It can make police officers see dangerous thugs rather than fathers, brothers or sons. It can make  teachers and school administrators see future criminals that deserve harsh  punishment rather than scared or troubled little boys needing help and comfort.

But, if you really care for our youth, Mr. Rivera, why don’t you use your considerable platform to change the way black men and boys are depicted and represented in your  chosen career field — news, specifically, or mass media, broadly? Instead of asking parents not to let their kids wear hoodies, why don’t you push  for diversity in TV, print or online news, at all levels, as subjects, reporters and executives? Or advocate for more training so reporters don’t reinforce problematic frames when they cover communities of color? Or call for multi-dimensional representations of black men and boys in books, on reality TV, on talk shows, in sitcoms and in movies? Maybe then you can help us begin to change how we as a society perceive black and brown men and boys. Maybe then, Mr. Rivera, you can actually help save people’s lives, rather than simply perpetuating stereotypes.

Bilen Mesfin is a former journalist and a strategic communications consultant for social change leaders and organizations.

Two Years Of Obamacare

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law two years ago.  Although it was the product of painful negotiations and compromises, and many of the benefits do not kick in until 2014, the infographic below (courtesy of ThinkProgress) shows "what has already changed for the better and what the Republicans want to repeal":

Quote Of The Day

"Letterman landed a new dog joke just this week. (“It was such a beautiful day today, Mitt Romney was riding on the roof of his car.”) Comedy is the only business we can be certain that a Romney presidency would grow."

Frank Rich, New York Magazine, Why Romney Is So Ripe For Parody

Monsanto's Endless Pipeline Of Bad Ideas

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

As if the disaster of RoundUp resistant superweeds sweeping our farmland weren’t enough, Monsanto is now preparing to launch an even greater disaster: a new soybean engineered to be resistant to the older, more toxic weedkiller, dicamba. The seed — which Monsanto plans to market in 2014 if approved — will also come stacked with the company’s RoundUp Ready gene, and is designed to be used with Monsanto’s proprietary herbicide “premix” of dicamba and glyphosate.

More dicamba-tolerant crops (corn, cotton, canola) are all waiting in the wings. If this new generation of GE crops is approved, then dicamba use will surge, just as it did with RoundUp. And we all know how well that didn't work out. To the giant pesticide company, this chemical arms race is all part of the plan.

If you’re thinking that pouring more chemicals onto already devastated farmland sounds a bit like pouring gasoline on a fire, I’d have to agree with you. So do some hefty farm businesses, as it turns out.

Farm business rejects Monsanto’s answer

 The Big 6 pesticide companies' pipeline of new herbicide-tolerant crops poses a serious risk to farmers’ livelihood and rural economies. Weedkillers like dicamba and 2,4-D drift far and can easily destroy other farmers’ crops of tomatoes, grapes, beans, cotton, non-GE soy — just about any broadleaf plant. That’s why farmers and some large ag companies are getting worried. As Steve Smith, Director of Agriculture for Red Gold, the largest canned tomato processor in the United States, testified before Congress in 2010:

I am convinced that in all of my years serving the agriculture industry, the widespread use of dicamba herbicide [poses] the single most serious threat to the future of the specialty crop industry in the Midwest.

Smith warns of the damaging surge in dicamba use that would accompany introduction of dicamba-tolerant GE crops — both over more acreage and throughout the season. He predicts widespread crop damage, harm to non-target plants that would result from spray and volatilization drift, and financial loss — not only to growers but also to processing companies like his that would suffer major supply disruption, even conflicts erupting between neighbors eroding the social fabric of rural community life. His testimony concluded:

The introduction of dicamba tolerant soybeans is a classic case of short-sighted enthusiasm over a new technology, blinding us to the reality that is sure to come. Increased dicamba usage, made possible through the introduction of dicamba tolerant soybeans, is poor public policy and should not be allowed.

We can choose to get off the pesticide treadmill

We’ve just witnessed an incredible victory with the removal of the infamous cancer-causing pesticide methyl iodide from the entire U.S. marketplace. So we know that we can win. And we know that the threat that pesticides pose to farm sustainability, our water and air quality, our communities’ and our children’s health can be blocked. But we have to be dedicated and smart.

Right now, companies like Monsanto, BASF and Dow are planning to drive up their pesticide sales by introducing a new generation of herbicide-tolerant crops, designed to be used with their proprietary weedkillers. The test case before us —the first of this new generation up for review and currently awaiting USDA approval — is Dow’s 2,4-D GE corn (“a very bad idea” as my colleague Margaret Reeves explains). The most effective thing we can do to protect farmers and consumers from dicamba-tolerant crops is to shut down the pipeline of herbicide-tolerant crops — beginning with 2,4-D-resistant corn.

Take Action » Tell USDA that we want off the GE-pesticide treadmill! This dangerous and antiquated herbicide shouldn’t be on the market, and we certainly should not be giving Dow license to profit from driving up use. Sign our petition to USDA.

R.I.P. William "Jerry" Mitchell

Roman Colosseum lit to protest an execution

Mississippi executed William Mitchell on March 22, 2012, for the murder of Patty Milliken. 

Mississippi is notorious for appointing unqualified attorneys to represent capital defendants at trial and on appeal, and for failing to provide them with adequate funding.  Mitchell's case was no different.  His long history of mental illness was not investigated by either his trial lawyer or his post-conviction lawyer.   At no time  did his counsel try to establish his "intellectual disability" despite the availability of such evidence.  The Mississippi state courts subsequently rejected requests for a hearing -- or even funding for an expert -- to prove that he indeed suffered from an "intellectual disability."

This is the eleventh execution in the United States in 2012, the third in Mississippi, and the second in Mississippi this week.

Quote Of The Day

"America has always been the kind of place where people can reinvent themselves, escaping from their pasts by turning the knobs on their own virtual Etch-A-Sketch identities. But the ubiquity of video technology has made this much, much harder to do. Videos have a way of reminding everyone who you are — and were."

Robert Reich

Voters Get It, Elites Not So Much

By Mike Lux, cross-posted from Crooks and Liars

Throughout American history, some of our greatest political thinkers have understood that at the end of the day, democracy works better when average Americans rather than elites run things, because regular people instinctively get the truth of what is going on in the real world — on Main Street — more than out-of-touch elites. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine got this; as did Abe Lincoln, who believed in a government of, by, and for the people. So did the reformers and organizers of the 20th Century like Saul Alinsky and Walter Reuther. They all knew that the people might get things wrong some of the time, but that ultimately it was better to trust and empower regular folks because the elites generally messed up a lot more of the time than democracy did.

When I read the great memos and reams of data that Stan Greenberg and James Carville at Democracy Corps put out, and read focus group and polling reports from other pollsters I respect, I am reminded of that truth once again. It is striking how much better regular folks understand, than most of the elites in this country, what is really going on with this economy. They aren’t following the moment-to-moment blips in the job or GDP numbers so much as they know deep in their guts that the American middle class is in real danger, that it is on a long downhill decline, and that there needs to be big fundamental changes. This has big implications for the 2012 election.

The swing voters swing because they go back and forth on whom to blame more — Wall Street and big business or the government — and what then to do about it. They think both sides of that equation are bad: that Wall Street screwed up the economy, and that government can’t succeed because it is bought off by Wall Street and other wealthy special interests. They think both political parties are bad. And they for the most part aren’t feeling like the economy is getting much better, or that, as President Obama put it in his State of the Union address, “America is back!” They are pessimists (at least in the short term), populists, alienated from the establishment. That is why I continue to fear a more upbeat message on how the economy really is getting better from the Obama team will cause him to lose. Stan and James reminded me recently of the last ad we ran in the 1992 Clinton campaign, the single most effective ad we ran that fall. I wish I could find the video for you, but I haven’t been able to. It was a 15-second ad that had a clip of George Bush talking about how the economy really was getting better and jobs were starting to pick up again (both of which were technically true), and then the screen just cut to lettering and a voice saying “How ya doing?” People responded strongly to it, feeling in their gut that the economy the last four years had not been getting better, and that Bush was out of touch for saying so. It turned a race that had been tightening into an easy six-point win.

My concern isn’t just, as I have written about before, that the Obama team doesn’t brag too much about economic improvements that most voters aren’t feeling yet. My bigger worry is that Obama, other Democrats, and the broad progressive movement will just miss the moment we are in: middle-class voters have a deep understanding that something is profoundly wrong with the direction our economy has been heading for the last 30 years. They understand, far better than most elites, the underlying trends that are grinding middle-class families into the dirt, and are making it harder and harder for poor people and young people to climb the ladder into the middle class. They are cynical about politicians bragging about job growth because they know that most new jobs don’t pay what the ones that were lost used to, or are temp jobs that will be gone all too fast. They know that wage growth is flat, housing prices are down, and the costs of necessities — gas, groceries, health care — keep going up. They worry about being able to retire with enough money to live on, about taking care of their elderly parents and grandparents, and about sending their kids to college with tuition rates skyrocketing.

This kind of frame of mind for voters makes things challenging for an incumbent President trying to win re-election, but it also presents an opportunity. The Osawatomie, Kansas speech, where Obama cast himself as the fighter for the middle class in tough times, is a part of the answer, and I am glad he has taken on that mantle. But I think he needs to be more explicit and more expansive in creating the narrative, telling the story, of how we got here. The 30-year frame is helpful in part because that is clearly where voters are — that our problems started quite a while back and we have been in decline too long — and in part because it doesn’t make it seem like Obama is just trying to blame Bush, which feels too partisan and blame-gamy. (I also like the fact that it is true. It was Reagan’s policies 30 years ago which decimated our manufacturing base, started us on our current path of massive trade deficits year after year, began the massive deregulation of the financial sector, and embraced supply side economics that first led to massive tax cuts for the wealthy, big budget deficits, and a concentration of both income at the top and industry concentration in one sector of the economy after another.)

Mr. Etch-A-Sketch

DonkeyHotey

Candidate Romney has taken outrageously extreme positions on contraception, immigration, the environment, and a host of other issues in order to appeal to the Republican base, described so vividly by Hendrick Hertzberg as "an excitable, overlapping assortment of Fox News friends, Limbaugh dittoheads, Tea Party animals, war whoopers, nativists, Christianist fundamentalists, à la carte Catholics (anti-abortion, yes; anti-torture, no), anti-Rooseveltians (Franklin and Theodore), global-warming denialists, post-Confederate white Southrons, creationists, birthers, market idolaters, Europe demonizers, and gun fetishists."  But what will he do after securing the nomination when he must attract a saner, more moderate electorate?

That's easy.  He will just stand on his head, shake, and try something new.  Don't believe me?  Here's what Eric Fehrnstrom, his campaign spokesperson said in response to a question on whether there was concern that Santorum and Gingrich might force Romney to tack too far to the right:

"Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again." 

Jed Lewison at Daily Kos notes that the only thing remarkable about this statement is that "Mitt Romney's campaign is admitting ahead of time what we already knew: that Romney doesn't have any real core principles and will say whatever he thinks it will take to win the election."

Steve Benen describes the earlier incarnations of Mr. Etch-A-Sketch:

Romney 1.0 was an independent who distanced himself from Reagan; Romney 2.0 was a moderate Republican with self-described "progressive" views on social issues and health care; Romney 3.0 was a social conservative who cared deeply about the culture war; and Romney 4.0 is a far-right businessman who represents the GOP establishment and the top 1%.

What will the post-primary Romney look like?  We'll have to see how it shakes out.

Afghanistan: The New Endgame

The alarming pace of events in Afghanistan is forcing United States and NATO strategists to adjust their strategy and timetable to end the war. But they cannot acknowledge the flaw at the heart of their efforts.

By Paul Rogers, cross-posted from openDemocracy

A number of recent columns in this series has reflected on the interplay of military and political dynamics in the "greater middle east", from Iran to Afghanistan. to Syria. Several have examined the possibility that a process of crisis escalation involving "accidents, incidents or mavericks" - a combination summarised in the acronym "AIM" - would trigger war over Iran (see "America, Israel, Iran: mediation vs war", 16 February 2012).

A subsequent column assessing the conflict in Afghanistan concluded that United States policy there is unlikely to change much even if Mitt Romney defeats Barack Obama in the presidential election in November 2012 (see "Afghanistan: the endgame drama", 1 March 2012). But in Afghanistan as in Iran, the AIM effect may now be having an impact in a way that has implications for the future of western military power.

A political retreat 

The argument for continuity in Afghanistan draws on evidence that President Obama has decided on a timetable ^↑ for withdrawal of American troops there, hoping both that Afghan government forces can assume responsibility for security and that any Taliban role in a post-withdrawal government would be very limited. Romney's election rhetoric (and that of any plausible Republican rival) might scorn Obama's approach as "defeatism" or worse, but the next US president would follow a similar course - precisely because the western ^↑ predicament in Afghanistan is now becoming unsustainable.

The response to such acts ^↑ by American soldiers as urinating on dead Afghans and burning ^↑ copies of the Qur'an (both of which led to widespread fury and retaliatory attacks ^↑ on American targets) strengthen ^↑ the case that strategic reality in Afghanistan is becoming inexorable.

The massacre of sixteen Afghan civilians on 11 March by (it seems) a lone American soldier ^↑  confirms in bleak fashion that the "AIM" concept can shed light on the Afghan endgame as much as it does the twisting Iranian crisis. This might yet be attributed to a "maverick", but it is certainly also an "incident" in the tripartite schema - and its sheer horror, especially the killing of children, makes it one of special extremity that also betrays a deep problem within the US military.

But in combination with the earlier outrages, the massacre may come ^↑ to acquire importance as a rare example of an AIM element that will - by clarifying options on both sides - have the effect of ratcheting a conflict down rather than up. Its impact is already significant. In Afghanistan it has intensified antagonism ^↑ to the foreign military presence, as evidenced ^↑ on 15 March both in the Taliban's statement that it is suspending ^↑ preliminary talks with the US and in the demand of Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, that American forces retreat to their bases from villages and patrols.

Quotes Of The Day

The Trayvon Martin case "is obviously about race, and is important on those grounds. Race relations are after all the original and ongoing tension in U.S. history. But it is also about self-government, rule of law, equality before the law, accountability of power, and every other value that we contend is integral to the American ideal." James Fallows, The Atlantic

"I just want to echo this sentiment and expand on it a bit. The approach here is not 'either it's about race or it isn't.'  It's 'this is about race along with. . .'  . . . Moreover, it's worth understanding that this movement toward an absurdly low threshold for self-defense claims is a national one, which is making headway in states where very few black people live. As is often the case, black people bear a spectacular burden for bad public policy. But the burden is never solely--and rarely even mostly--born by black people."

Ta Na-Hesi Coates, The Atlantic

What Republicans Argue When They Have Nothing Left To Say

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

DonkeyHotey

Republicans are desperate. They can’t attack Obama on jobs because the jobs picture is improving.

Their attack on the Administration’s rule requiring insurers to cover contraception has backfired, raising hackles even among many Republican women.

Their attack on Obama for raising gas prices has elicited scorn from economists of all persuasions who know oil prices are set in global markets and that demand in the United States has actually fallen.

Their presidential ambitions are being trampled in a furious fraternal war among Republican candidates.

Their Tea Party wing wants to reopen the budget deal forged with Democrats after Republicans got bloodied by threatening to block an increase in the debt limit.

So what are Republicans to do now? What they always do when they have nothing else to say.
Call for a tax cut, of course.

It doesn’t matter that their new “tax reform” plan (leaked to the Wall Street Journal late Monday, to be released Tuesday morning) has as much chance of being enacted as Herman Cain has of being elected president.

It doesn’t matter than the plan doesn’t detail how they plan to pay for the tax cuts. Or whether an even bigger whack would have to be taken out of Medicare than Paul Ryan’s original voucher plan – which would drowned many elderly under rising medical costs.

It doesn’t even matter that the plan would probably raise taxes on many lower-income Americans,
All that matters is the headlines.

“House Republican Budget to Propose Lower Income Tax Rates,” says Bloomberg Businessweek. “Republican Budget Plan Seeks to Play Up Tax Reform,” says Reuters. “GOP’s Budget Targets Taxes,” blares the Wall Street Journal.

Presto. Republicans have gotten what they wanted on the basis of saying absolutely nothing.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Aftershock.

R.I.P. Larry Puckett

Roman Colosseum lit to protest an execution

Mississippi executed Larry Puckett on March 20, 2012, for the murder of Rhonda Hatten Griffis in 1995.  Puckett, who was 18 at the time, admitted to being at the victim's home to burglarize it but insisted that it was Griffis' husband, for whom he was formerly employed, who committed the murder.

In the most recent legal challenge, Puckett's lawyers argued that the execution should be blocked because prosecutors kept African Americans off the jury and Puckett's former lawyers unreasonably failed to challenge his conviction on this ground.

Over five thousand people signed an online petition in support of  Puckett, and many gathered at the state Capitol on Monday to protest Puckett's execution and the execution of William Mitchell, which is scheduled for March 22nd. 

Jim Craig of the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, criticized Mississippi's legal system, which makes it impossible to fairly apply the death penalty:  "Even though these cases have been going on for a long time, they really have not had their day in court. Neither of these two men have had their day in court. And it is time for people to stand up and say so and demand real justice according to law."

This is the tenth execution in the United States in 2012, the second in Mississippi.