Friday Reads

Posted: March 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , | 64 Comments

Good Morning!

I have a few odds and ends to share with you this morning.  The first comes from Slate: How to kill an abortion bill
Step one: Wait for a politician to say something stupid. Repeat.

Activists in other states that have successfully beat back anti-reproductive rights laws have noticed a similar pattern: A legislator says something terrible and condescending; women use social media to stoke nationwide outrage about the comment; and the legislators, cowed by the unexpected attention, back down.

Yup.  It’s got all your favorite hits including the asshole that compared women giving birth to livestock.  There’s a few more too.

But antiabortion legislators are actually on the defensive against angry constituents for a change, which means they have to explain themselves. And that means they’re often getting themselves into trouble for being a little too honest about their misogyny, like the Alaska Republican state representative who said, “I thought that a man’s signature was required in order for a woman to have an abortion,” only then to see mockery of an “abortion permission slip” ricochet around the Internet. Or the Wisconsin senator who just said that all women who can’t afford contraception need to do is Google it.

“Every time a politician says something terrible, people respond emotionally to that,” says Luther. “It makes people in Florida care about what’s happening in Idaho.” It was harder, she adds, to get people fired up about Utah’s mandatory waiting period, maybe because there was no single tweetable moment.

A 27 year-old homeless woman who was arrested for trespassing at–of all things–a hospital later died in jail.  If this isn’t a parable for our time, I don’t know what is. This is from Raw Story.

A woman who was suspect of abusing drugs and arrested for refusing to leave a hospital died of a blood clot shortly after being put in jail, according to St. Louis Today.

Anna Brown, a 29-year-old homeless African American woman, had gone to St. Mary’s Health Center in Richmond Heights, Missouri complaining of leg pain after spraining her ankle. Doctors performed an x-ray of her knees and an ultrasound, but detected no blood clots. She was given pain medication and discharged.

About eight hours later she returned to the hospital by ambulance complaining of abdominal pain. The hospital told her she had already been treated and discharged her again, but Brown refused to leave. When police officers arrived on another call, the hospital told them that Brown was claiming she “did not receive adequate medical attention and did not have to leave.”

The officers said they waited about three hours before a doctor told them Brown was healthy enough to be arrested.

Brown told the officers she could not stand, so they carried her by her arms and legs. Police suspected Brown was on drugs and left her laying [sic] in her cell on the ground.

About fifteen minutes later, a jail worker found her dead. An autopsy did not find any drugs in her system.

Yup. Nothing like being young, homeless and a woman that spells drug abuse and not to be taken seriously.  Alternet has another cautionary tale that’s a bit more metaphorical.  It’s about the Horrors of an Ayn Rand World.

In an Objectivist world, the reset button would be pushed on government services that we take for granted. They would not be cut back, not reduced — they would vanish. In an Objectivist world, roads would go unplowed in the snows of winter, and bridges would fall as the government withdrew from the business of maintaining them — unless some private citizen would find it in his rational self-interest to voluntarily take up the slack by scraping off the rust and replacing frayed cables. Public parks and land, from the tiniest vest-pocket patch of green to vast expanses of the West, would be sold off to the newly liberated megacorporations. Airplane traffic would be grounded unless a profit-making capitalist found it in his own selfish interests to fund the air traffic control system. If it could be made profitable, fine. If not, tough luck. The market had spoken. The Coast Guard would stay in port while storm- tossed mariners drown lustily as they did in days of yore. Fires would rage in the remnants of silent forests, vegetation and wildlife no longer protected by rangers and coercive environmental laws, swept clean of timber, their streams polluted in a rational, self-interested manner by bold, imaginative entrepreneurs.

Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan publicly worship Ayn Rand.  So did Allan Greenspan and of course, the Pauls.  Here’s a little something on that from the Harvard Political Review.  Check out Down with Tryanny to see how icky Cantor looked in high school with his quote “I want it when I want it.

I really hope you don’t have a student loan with Sallie Mae.  This article basically reaffirms my experience with the loan shark company.  Also, rates are low for all the banksters but they want higher rates for students. This is from ProPublica.

Bloomberg reported this week that some federally contracted debt collection agencies have been playing hardball with borrowers who are behind, insisting on payments the borrowers can’t afford — even when federal student-loan rules allow more leniency.

The debt collectors have an incentive to be tough.  As Bloomberg explains:

Under Education Department contracts, collection companies “rehabilitate” a defaulted loan by getting a borrower to make nine payments in 10 months. If they succeed, they reap a jackpot: a commission equal to as much as 16 percent of the entire loan amount, or $3,200 on a $20,000 loan.

These companies receive that fee only if borrowers make a minimum payment of 0.75 percent to 1.25 percent of the loan each month, depending on its size. For example, a $20,000 loan would require payments of about $200 a month. If the payment falls below that figure, the collector receives an administrative fee of $150.

The Department of Education is trying to balance its interest in helping struggling borrowers and stewarding taxpayer dollars, department spokesman Justin Hamilton told Bloomberg.

Striking that balance, it seems, hasn’t been easy. Consumer advocates chafed when President Obama, as part of a deficit-reduction plan promoted last fall, recommended allowing debt collectors to robo-call the cell phones of borrowers who fell behind on federal student loans and other debts to the government.

I’m trying to get mine consolidated over to the Department of Education.

One last story that just won’t go away. The Guardian reports that Apple factories in China are still unhealthy and ignoring labor laws.  Enjoy those Ipads and Ipods!

An audit of Apple’s Chinese factories details “serious and pressing” concerns over excessive working hours, unpaid overtime, health and safety failings, and management interference in trade unions.

In the most detailed public investigation yet into conditions at Foxconn factories in China, which assemble millions of iPhones and iPads each year, the independent Fair Labor Association found that more than half of employees had worked 11 days or more without rest.

More than 43% of workers reported experiencing or witnessing an accident at the three plants audited. Foxconn is China’s largest private-sector employer, and its activities have turned the coastal town of Shenzhen into the electronics workshop of the world.

Health and safety breaches found by auditors and published on Thursday included blocked exits, lack of or faulty personal protective equipment and missing permits, which the FLA said was remedied when discovered.

Despite several suicides, which raised the alarm two years ago, and an explosion that killed three workers last year, Foxconn still failed to consult workers on safety, with the committees “failing to monitor conditions in a robust manner”, the report found.

So, that’s what I’ve got for you this morning.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Judicial Restraint My Old Lady A$$

Posted: March 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable Care Act, SCOTUS | Tags: , , , | 20 Comments

Methinks these Justices protest too much.  It’s actually pretty telling too.  Scalia seems to be getting his questions from old Fox News shows and Thomas has once again proven that no questions are necessary when you know exactly how you’re expected to vote to keep the perks pouring in.  It makes one wonder if Roberts is the least bit concerned about how “his” court will go down in history. If comparing the health care market to broccoli is a sign of great intellect, please, buy my a ticket to Palookaville.  Here’s how Charlie Pierce puts it.

It is plain now that Scalia simply doesn’t like the Affordable Care Act on its face. It has nothing to do with “originalism,” or the Commerce Clause, or anything else. He doesn’t think that the people who would benefit from the law deserve to have a law that benefits them. On Tuesday, he pursued the absurd “broccoli” analogy to the point where he sounded like a micro-rated evening-drive talk-show host from a dust-clotted station in southern Oklahoma. And today, apparently, he ran through every twist and turn in the act’s baroque political history in an attempt to discredit the law politically, rather than as a challenge to its constitutionality. (What in hell does the “Cornhusker Kickback” — yet another term of art that the Justice borrowed from the AM radio dial — have to do with the severability argument? Is Scalia seriously making the case that a banal political compromise within the negotiations from which bill eventually is produced can affect its ultimate constitutionality? Good luck ever getting anything passed if that’s the standard.) He’s really just a heckler at this point. If he can’t do any better than that, he’s right. Being on the court is a waste of his time.

Better yet, check out Jonathan Chait’s piece on Conservative Judicial Activists Run Amok.  It reintroduces an essay by Jeffrey Rosen from 2005 on how the court was undergoing some fairly radical changes.  The Rosen essay specifically references a Thomas decision written with an amazing amount of paraphrasing from a libertarian kook named  Richard Epstein who is obsessed with protecting property at all costs; including human ones.

 As Epstein sees it, all individuals have certain inherent rights and liberties, including ”economic” liberties, like the right to property and, more crucially, the right to part with it only voluntarily. These rights are violated any time an individual is deprived of his property without compensation — when it is stolen, for example, but also when it is subjected to governmental regulation that reduces its value or when a government fails to provide greater security in exchange for the property it seizes. In Epstein’s view, these libertarian freedoms are not only defensible as a matter of political philosophy but are also protected by the United States Constitution. Any government that violates them is, by his lights, repressive. One such government, in Epstein’s worldview, is our government. When Epstein gazes across America, he sees a nation in the chains of minimum-wage laws and zoning regulations. His theory calls for the country to be deregulated in a manner not seen since before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

After Thomas joined the Supreme Court, Biden’s warnings seemed prescient. In 1995, echoes of Epstein’s ideas could be clearly heard in one of Thomas’s opinions. By a 5-4 majority in United States v. Lopez, the court struck down a federal law banning guns in school zones, arguing that the law fell outside Congress’s constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. Lopez was a judicial landmark: it was the first time since the New Deal that the court had limited the power of the federal government on those grounds. Thomas, who sided with the majority, chose to write a separate opinion in which he suggested that even his conservative colleagues had not gone far enough. The real problem, he wrote, was not just with the law at hand but with the larger decision of the court during the New Deal to abandon the judicial doctrines of the 19th century that established severe limits on the government’s power. He assailed his liberal colleagues for characterizing ”the first 150 years of this Court’s case law as a ‘wrong turn.”’ He continued, ”If anything, the ‘wrong turn’ was the Court’s dramatic departure in the 1930’s from a century and a half of precedent.”

Thomas did not cite Epstein directly in his opinion. But to anyone familiar with Epstein’s writings, the similarities were striking. Indeed, Thomas’s argument closely resembled one Epstein had made eight years earlier in ”The Proper Scope of the Commerce Power” in the Virginia Law Review — so closely, in fact, that Sanford Levinson, a liberal law professor at the University of Texas, accused Thomas of outright intellectual theft. (”The ordinary standards governing attribution of sources — the violation of which constitutes plagiarism — seem not to apply in Justice Thomas’s chambers,” Levinson wrote in the Texas Law Review.) Biden’s fear that Epstein’s ideas might be written into law had apparently been realized. And the fear would continue to be realized in other courts throughout the 90’s as a small but energetic set of lower-court judges, sympathetic to libertarian arguments, tried to strike down aspects of the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and other laws, challenging powers of the federal government that had come to be widely accepted during the second half of the 20th century.

Chait takes this essay into the present and the analysis presents a chilling future of judicial activism unlike anything we’ve seen before.  The hearings this week on the ACA imply a SCOTUS willing to rewrite legislation in the name of ideology.  The so-called swing vote, Justice Kennedy, has created loopholes in cases before that have allowed state legislatures to drive huge right-depriving laws through constitutional rights.  By introducing the factually inaccurate, unscientific idea of “fetal pain” in  Gonzales V Carhart, Kennedy opened a can of whoop ass based on religious propaganda on American Women.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said:

“States . . . have an interest in forbidding medical procedures which, in the State’s reasonable determination, might cause the medical profession or society as a whole to become insensitive, even disdainful, to life, including life in the human fetus . . . A State may take measures to ensure the medical profession and its members are viewed as healers, sustained by a compassionate and rigorous ethic and cognizant of the dignity and value of human life, even life which cannot survive without the assistance of others.”

The National Right to Life Committee thinks that Kennedy’s directive, particularly the bit at the end —”even life which cannot survive without the assistance of others”—leaves open the possibility of revising the viability standard. As Olivia Gans, an NRLC spokesperson, told me a few weeks ago, before the law had passed, “What Kennedy was saying was that states can and should look at other variables to figure out what’s in the best interest of the state.”

This is to medical science as the broccoli argument is to economics.  It’s clear that the justices are venturing into something beyond judging constitutionality.  Consider this thought offered by Chait.

The spectacle before the Supreme Court this week is Republican justices seizing the chance to overturn the decisions of democratically-elected bodies. At times the deliberations of the Republican justices are impossible to distinguish from the deliberations of Republican senators. They are litigating the problem of adverse selection, and doing it very poorly. (Here are health economists Henry Aaron and Kevin Outterson tearing their hair out over the justices’ bungled attempts to describe the economic dynamics at work.)

Scalia himself offers the most blatant case. His famed thunderings against meddlesome judges are nowhere to be found. He is gleefully reversing his previous interpretation of the Commerce Clause, now that it is being deployed against big government liberals rather than pot smokers. He is railing against Obamacare like an angry Fox News-watching grandfather:

In the morning session — in which the court weighed how much of the law should stand if the mandate is ruled unconstitutional — Scalia cited the horsetrading required to pass the bill — including the politically embarrassing, and failed, Cornhusker Kickback. He also admitted that he’d like to see the whole law fall if the mandate is ruled out of bounds.

In the afternoon, he took pains to remind the court of the unpopularity of the individual mandate.

The exchange occurred when Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. rejected a hypothetical that relied on the notion of Congress passing a massive new tax. This, he argued, would have to overcome massive political constraints.

At that point Scalia chimed in: He would’ve thought the individual mandate would also be too much of a political liability to ever pass Congress.

In fact, the “Cornhusker Kickback” was stripped out before the final bill, but Scalia seems not to know that.

Just two years ago, the idea that conservatives might win the health-care fight in Court rather than the Senate seemed absurd. Just seven years ago, the notion that Republican jurisprudence would be defined by aggressive economic judicial activism seemed even more fantastical. But just as there are few atheists in foxholes, there aren’t a lot of justices of any persuasion willing to walk away from a chance to overturn a duly-passed law that they personally detest.

Whatever issue you may have with the ACA, it was passed by an overwhelming number of Senators and Representatives after a year of hearings, testimony, and rewrites. It deserves a fair hearing before something other than a Kangaroo Court.

Thursday Reads

Posted: March 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, Health care reform, legislation, racism, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 50 Comments

Good Morning!!

Most of the commentators seem to think it doesn’t look good for the health care bill. At SCOTUS Blog, there’s an index of yesterday’s coverage.

The New York Times editorial addresses the “test” the Supreme Court faces in their decision on this case.

In ruling on the constitutionality of requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance, the Supreme Court faces a central test: whether it will recognize limits on its own authority to overturn well-founded acts of Congress.

The skepticism in the questions from the conservative justices suggests that they have adopted the language and approach of the insurance mandate’s challengers. But the arguments against the mandate, the core of the health care reform law, willfully reject both the reality of the national health care market and established constitutional principles that have been upheld for generations.

The Obama administration persuasively argues that the mandate is central to solving the crisis in America’s health care system, which leaves 50 million people uninsured and accounts for 17.6 percent of the national economy. The challengers contend that the law is an unlimited — and, therefore, unconstitutional — use of federal authority to force individuals to buy insurance, or pay a penalty.

That view wrongly frames the mechanism created by this law. The insurance mandate is nothing like requiring people to buy broccoli — a comparison Justice Antonin Scalia suggested in his exasperated questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. Congress has no interest in requiring broccoli purchases because the failure to buy broccoli does not push that cost onto others in the system.

It’s really frightening to think of the possible implications of the justices overturning this law. Will the right wingers challenge Medicare and Social Security next? Dahlia Lithwick says the right wingers on the Court seem to want to return the country to “freedom” circa 1804.

The fight over Obamacare is about freedom. That’s what we’ve been told since these lawsuits were filed two years ago and that’s what we heard both inside and outside the Supreme Court this morning. That’s what Michele Bachmann* and Rick Santorum have been saying for months. Even people who support President Obama’s signature legislative achievement would agree that this debate is all about freedom—the freedom to never be one medical emergency away from economic ruin. What we have been waiting to hear is how members of the Supreme Court—especially the conservative majority—define that freedom. This morning as the justices pondered whether the individual mandate—that part of the Affordable Care Act that requires most Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty—is constitutional, we got a window into the freedom some of the justices long for. And it is a dark, dark place.

But the “conservative” justices, who are covered by government subsidized health insurance appear to think freedom means the right to let people die if they can’t pay for health care.

[Sonia] Sotomayor…pondering whether hospitals could simply turn away the uninsured, finally asks: “What percentage of the American people who took their son or daughter to an emergency room and that child was turned away because the parent didn’t have insurance—do you think there’s a large percentage of the American population who would stand for the death of that child if they had an allergic reaction and a simple shot would have saved the child?”

But we seem to want to be free from that obligation as well. This morning in America’s highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don’t want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old. Until today, I couldn’t really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of “liberty.” This case isn’t so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It’s about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It’s about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that’s been inspected. It’s about the freedom to be left alone. And now we know the court is worried about freedom: the freedom to live like it’s 1804.

The quotes from Scalia and Kennedy in Lithwick’s piece are unbelievable. Please go read the rest at the link.

There were some bombshells in the Trayvon Martin case last night. ABC news obtained video of George Zimmerman arriving at the police station after he shot Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman had no visual signs of injury, no bandages, no sign of grass stains on the back of his jacket, no sign of a broken nose, no blood on his nose or the back of his head.

Last night on MSNBC’s The Last Word, Lawrence O’Donnell spoke to the funeral director who prepared Martin’s body for burial. The funeral director saw no sign of damage to Martin’s knuckles or any other part of his body that would indicate he had been in a fight. The only damage this man observed was a gunshot wound to Martin’s chest.

O’Donnell also had as a guest Cheryl Brown, the mother of a 13-year-old boy who witnessed the shooting. He couldn’t see much, because it was getting dark, but the boy told the 911 dispatcher that he saw a man lying on the ground and another man standing over him. One of the men was crying out for help, and then there was a gunshot and the crying stopped.

Another issue that arose last night on both MSNBC’s The Ed Show was that the police report on the incident listed Trayvon Martin’s full name and address; yet police listed him as a John Doe for three days. When Sanford police finally informed Trayvon’s father that his son was dead, the man who came to the house was Chris Serino, the investigator whom we recently learned wanted to charge George Zimmerman with manslaughter on February 26, the night of the shooting. Serino told Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father, that he (Serino) didn’t believe Zimmerman’s story.

I don’t have any links, as I write this late on Wednesday night. I will try to add them in the morning when news articles become available.

The autopsy on Trayvon Martin’s body will obviously be key in determining what happened that night, but the autopsy is currently under seal.

The autopsy on Trayvon Martin was performed by a medical examiner who works for the Volusia County government, and therefore Byron has been in the loop regarding the autopsy, which has not yet been released as the investigation into the killing is ongoing.

“In Florida when a death is being actively investigated by any agency … the autopsy information is shielded under the Florida public records law until the investigation becomes un-active, or inactive,” Byron told the IBTimes via phone Wednesday morning. “So in this case I think we can all agree this is an active death investigation, so what I need to do is refer all calls to the State Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville.”

The LA Times reported yesterday that: Black residents in Sanford, FL say they’re often harassed by police. Here’s one example from the article:

To many black residents of Sanford, the escalating national anger over how local police have handled the [Trayvon Martin] case reflects years of tension and frustration over their treatment by authorities.

Murray Jess, for one, can’t shake the memory of an evening two years ago, as he drove through Sanford at dusk, heading home after attending an art show with his fiance and his 14-year-old nephew.

A police cruiser began following Jess’ silver-gray 1996 Mercedes. Two unmarked police cars blocked the road in front of him, forcing Jess into a Pizza Hut parking lot. An officer got out of a van and pointed a video camera at the bewildered Jess as another officer, his hand on his gun, approached the car.

Jess asked the officer why he had been stopped. “He said, ‘We’ve had a lot of reports of these kinds of cars being stolen lately,’ ” said Jess, a black Sanford resident and business owner whose voice still shakes with rage.

I have several other news links for you on a variety of subjects that I’ll give you in what Minkoff Minx and Wonk the Vote call a “link dump.”

On Tuesday, Minx reported that a group led by Magic Johnson has purchased the LA Dodgers. The team has been in limbo for the past couple of years after the former owner, Frank McCourt went through an expensive divorce that drained his funds. Actually, McCourt really never had enough money to be the owner of an MLB team. The LA Times reports on Dodger fans’ reactions.

The Pope visited Cuba and met with Fidel Castro.

Pope Benedict called for an end to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and met with revolutionary icon Fidel Castro on Wednesday as he ended a trip in which he urged the communist island to change.

He also spoke at a public Mass in Havana’s sprawling Revolution Square where the Vatican said 300,000 people gathered to hear the 84-year-old pontiff.

In a trip laced with calls for change in Cuba, his last message was aimed at the United States, its longtime ideological foe, which for 50 years has imposed a trade embargo trying to topple the Caribbean island’s communist government.

Speaking in a departure ceremony at a rainy Havana airport, Benedict said Cuba could build “a society of broad vision, renewed and reconciled,” but it was more difficult “when restrictive economic measures, imposed from outside the country, unfairly burden its people.”

A terrible wildfire has been burning in Colorado. Authorities believe the fire was started by a “controlled burn.”

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper suspended prescribed burns used to mitigate fire danger on Wednesday after a controlled blaze apparently ignited a wildfire west of Denver that killed an elderly couple and destroyed some two dozen homes.

“Through this suspension, we intend to make sure that we have the procedures and protocols in place so that prescribed fire conditions and management requirements are understood and strictly followed,” Hickenlooper said in a statement.

Although the origins of the so-called Lower North Fork Fire are officially under investigation, the Colorado State Forest Service has said that a controlled burn it conducted was the likely source of the fire.

A Jet Blue pilot who apparently had a psychotic break during a flight has been charged with a crime.

U.S. authorities filed criminal charges on Wednesday against a JetBlue Airways pilot who yelled incoherently about religion and the 2001 hijack attacks and pounded on a locked cockpit door before passengers subdued him in a midair uproar.

Flight 191 was diverted to Amarillo, Texas, on Tuesday, following what authorities described as erratic behavior by Capt. Clayton Frederick Osbon, who allegedly ran through the cabin before passengers tackled him in the galley….

The Justice Department filed a complaint charging Osbon with interfering with the crew. It is unusual for a commercial airline pilot to be charged in this way, and a U.S. official said he could not recall a similar case in recent years.

Osbon, 49, remains in a guarded facility at a hospital in Amarillo, and U.S. Attorney Sarah Saldana said he faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

The man sounds mentally ill to me. I’ll be interested to learn more about what happened.

If you’re interested in some juicy gossip from Arlen Specter’s new book, you can find it at The Washington Post and Huffpo. There appears to be quite a bit in the book about naked Senators–including Ted Kennedy. I think I’m going to pass on reading this book.

Sooooo… what are you reading and blogging about today?

George Zimmerman Showed No Signs of Blood or Bruises Immediately After the Shooting

Posted: March 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, racism | Tags: , , , , , | 27 Comments

ABC News has obtained surveillance footage of George Zimmerman arriving at the Sanford police station in handcuffs, standing for some time with his back to the camera, and then walking down the hallway to the interrogation room where he is shown from the front. 

There is no visible blood on the back of Zimmerman’s head and no visible cuts.  The back of his jacket does not look wet. His nose does not look bloody. If Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin point blank, he should have blood on his clothing, but I can’t see any in the video. Zimmerman does not look fat or out of shape in the video either. From the ABC article:

A still from the video

The surveillance video, which was obtained exclusively by ABC News, shows Zimmerman arriving in a police cruiser. As he exits the car, his hands are cuffed behind his back. Zimmerman is frisked and then led down a series of hallways, still cuffed.

Zimmerman, 28, is wearing a red and black fleece and his face and head are cleanly shaven. He appears well built, hardly the portly young man depicted in a 2005 mug shot that until a two days ago was the single image the media had of Zimmerman….

In the video an officer is seen pausing to look at the back of Zimmerman’s head, but no abrasions or blood can be seen in the video and he did not check into the emergency room following the police questioning.

Last night we learned that the lead investigator the night of the shooting wanted to arrest Zimmerman that night. But Zimmerman was not arrested, because the state Attorney General Norman Wolfinger said there was not enough evidence to convict him.

One more bit of news: this evening a woman whose 13-year-old son witnessed the shooting appeared on CNN Headline News and said that the lead investigator told her that night that he did not believe Zimmerman shot Martin in self-defense and that there was some profiling going on.

Please watch the video at the link. I’d like to know what other people think. My eyes aren’t the greatest.

“Women Deserve an Apology” and an “American Tragedy”

Posted: March 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Healthcare | 32 Comments

Carolyn Maloney asked for and received an apology from Derrald Issa who accused her of lying. Maloney and colleagues used a question of personal privilege to ask for the apology.  The House recognized the reason as valid.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Tuesday apologized to committee member Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) for accusing her of stating an “outright lie” during a February hearing about federal policy on contraception coverage.

The now-famous February hearing is the one where the first panel on the issue of contraception included no women, prompting Maloney to ask, “Where are the women?”

In a March 21 story published in the Rancho Santa Fe Review, Issa said, “Carolyn Maloney then made the famous statement, where are the women? That was an outright lie, and she knew it when she said it.”

Republicans have argued that Democrats had their chance to invite women to the first panel, that there were women on the second panel, and that Democrats have been overplaying the idea that Republicans purposefully sought to block women from testifying.

Issa’s committee held the Feb. 16 hearing to discuss possible violations of First Amendment freedom of religion by way of the Obama administration rule that employee insurance plans carry contraception coverage even when the employer is a religious organization that does not believe in birth control. Maloney and other Democratic lawmakers had invited Georgetown University student Sandra Fluke to testify on the benefits of contraception coverage, but Issa did not allow her on the panel.

Issa’s hearing launched a number of personal attacks on Sandra Fluke–notably by radio jerk Rush Limbaugh–and has lead to a number of protests to stop the Republican Assault on individual rights of women to access both birth control and abortion.

In an action today, Bobby Rush was given an escort off the floor of Congress for removing his suit jacket to show that hoodies are worn by many people.  Boehner has a strict dress code so Rush–while citing Bible verses–was hammered down by the acting speaker.

Rush was escorted off the floor for “wearing a hat” in violation of the decorum rule.

At this point in his remarks, Rush took off his jacket to reveal that he was wearing a hoodie underneath it. He covered his head with the hood, violating a rule in Congress that prohibits wearing hats on the House floor.

“Racial profiling has to stop, Mr. Speaker. Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum,” Rush added, swapping his spectacles for a pair of sunglasses.

At this point, Rep. Gregg Harper, a Republican congressman from Mississippi who was serving as the presiding speaker of the chamber, called Rush out of order. Rush continued reading a passage from the Bible before being escorted out of the chamber.

The hoodie has become something of a symbol during the national outcry which has followed Martin’s death, especially among those who think the killing was racially tinged. Since then, protesters across the nation have joined in various so-called “Million Hoodie Marches” calling for justice for Martin’s death and decrying racial profiling in America. Several members of the Miami Heat NBA basketball team also recently posed for a photo in hoodies, heads bowed, in tribute to Martin.

I’m bringing both of these incidents up in one post with the hope that we’re beginning to see some protests about the way the House of Representatives has been handled recently.  Majority parties go out of their way to quash dissent.  Perhaps this signals that the minority party is beginning to find a voice and their backbone.  It also seems to indicate that Boehner enforces dress codes better than he enforces committee rules.

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