Month: March 2012

Here’s the Senate roll call on the Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act. It got 51 votes. That’s a majority of the Senate. It’s nine votes short of passing under their screwed up rules. Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Begich of Alaska, and Ben Nelson of Nebraska voted against it. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine was the only Republican to vote for it. I wonder if any of you can find a voter in real life who thinks Big Oil companies need government subsidies.

Meanwhile, the House waited to the last minute to pass a 90-day highway bill. Funding runs out on Saturday. This leaves the Senate with an ultimatum to accept it because the House is going out on recess.

At another point, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) went on a rant for a full minute beyond his allotted speaking time, forcing presiding officer Rep. Charlie Bass (R-N.H.) to announce that he was no longer recognized.

“This kind of cold-blooded political calculation, to use the jobs of American working people as political cannon fodder for your agenda to defeat the Obama administration, is outrageous,” Miller said as Bass started to bang the gavel. “It should be rejected by your party, it should be rejected by my party.”

Good times. Meanwhile, Paul Ryan’s suicidal budget plan appears on track for passage.

In another humorous outbreak, Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma has introduced a bill that would make it illegal for the federal government to regulate fracking on federal land.

Pretty much everything George Zimmerman’s father says in this interview is demonstrable bullshit. All you need to do to prove this to yourself is to read the 911 call, look at Google Maps, and look at the video of Zimmerman arriving at the police station on the night of the incident. Here is Dad’s account:

Because there has been a lot of break-ins in the area, Robert said George thought it suspicious that someone would not be walking on the street or the sidewalk on a rainy night — that Martin would be walking between the town homes. He said after making those observations, his son decided to call the police.
“He called the non-emergency number first, and they asked him where he was, because he was at the rear of the town houses and there was no street sign,” said Robert.

Even though a dispatcher told George Zimmerman not to follow Martin, his father said his son continued his pursuit to locate an address to give to police.

“He lost sight of the individual, he continued to walk down the same sidewalk to the next street, so he could get an address for the police,” he said.

“He went to the next street, realized where he was and was walking to his vehicle. It’s my understanding, at that point, Trayvon Martin walked up to him and asked him, ‘Do you have a [expletive] problem?’ George said, ‘No, I don’t have a problem,’ and started to reach for his cell phone… at that point, he (Martin) was punching him in the nose, his nose was broken and he was knocked to the concrete.”

Robert said Trayvon, “continued to beat George, and at some point, George pulled his pistol and did what he did.”

The only time that Trayvon Martin was walking between the homes was when he took the sidewalk off of Twin Trees Road. And Zimmerman called 911 well before he ever got to that sidewalk. Prior to that, Martin was seeking shelter from the rain at the Clubhouse (which we know from his girlfriend who was talking to him on the phone). Zimmerman initially gave the Clubhouse as an address, but he made clear that Trayvon Martin was no longer at the Clubhouse:

911 dispatcher: OK, you said that’s 1111 Retreat View or 111?

Zimmerman: That’s the clubhouse.

911 dispatcher: He’s near the clubhouse now?

Zimmerman: Yeah, now he’s coming toward me. He’s got his hands in his waist band. And he’s a black male…

…

Zimmerman: OK. These assholes. They always get away.

When you come to the clubhouse, you come straight in and you go left. Actually, you would go past the clubhouse.

911 dispatcher: OK, so it’s on the left hand side of the clubhouse?

Zimmerman: Yeah. You go in straight through the entrance and then you would go left. You go straight in, don’t turn and make a left.

He’s running.

911 dispatcher: He’s running? Which way is he running?

Zimmerman: Down toward the other entrance of the neighborhood.

911 dispatcher: OK, which entrance is that he’s headed towards?

Zimmerman: The back entrance. Fucking coons. [or maybe “goons”].

It’s easy to pinpoint Zimmerman and Martin’s location from this conversation. They are on Twin Trees Road which basically connects the front entrance to the rear entrance of the gated community. There is no place to be walking in between homes on Twin Trees Road because all the homes are connected. When you come to the bend in the road, however, there is a sidewalk that leads around to the backyards of the homes, and that is where Trayvon Martin ran. And that is where he died. So, Zimmerman’s father is wrong. His son did not observe Trayvon Martin walking between homes before he called 911. He also was not near the rear of the townhouses. He was either in or near to his SUV which was located on Twin Trees Road. He didn’t pursue Trayvon Martin in order to obtain an address to give to the police. He had already provided an address and specific details about the location. He had also arranged for the police to call him when they arrived. He didn’t go to the next street because there is no next street. There is a bend in the road, and he didn’t go down the bend in the road but onto the sidewalk. He wasn’t coming back to his vehicle either. He went down the sidewalk, around the back of the houses, and confronted Trayvon Martin who asked him why he was following him.

The next part of Zimmerman’s dad’s account is now in severe doubt because, despite the initial police report (pdf), the video of Zimmerman’s arrival at the police station shows that he has no visible wounds, no bandages, no cut on the back of his head, no swelling around the nose, no visible discomfort, and no grass or wetness apparent on his back. He doesn’t look like he was attacked at all.

This does not square at all with Officer Timothy Smith’s report that: “While I was in such close contact with Zimmerman, I could observe that his back appeared to be wet and was covered with grass, as if he had been laying on his back on the ground. He also was bleeding from his nose and back of his head…Zimmerman was placed in the rear of my police vehicle and given first aid by the SFD. “

While Zimmerman’s back could have dried off on the ride to the police station and someone could have brushed the grass off his jacket, the lack of any wounds or bandages calls Officer Smith’s entire report into question.

The fact that his father’s explanation doesn’t square with any of the known facts in the least is another damning blow. It now appears that the police covered up this incident and filed false police reports. A lot more people than Zimmerman could be going to jail.

As the massive (and massively profitable) media push-and-pull game plays out over the dead body of Trayvon Martin and the ruined life of George Zimmerman, it occurs to me that the cries of “RACISM!!!” that are fueling the ongoing fire…accusations like Booman’s classic “negro-harasser” comment that he aimed at George Zimmerman on my recent post Rush To Judgement II-The Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman Case…are themselves racist at their base.

Why? How?

Read on.
Like this:

Here’s this guy George Zimmerman. Some people consider him a good neighbor…usually people who know him and live near him, people of all races…while others (who have had absolutely no personal contact with him) consider him a bad, bad person. Like most of us, his true nature probably resides somewhere in between those two extremes. He’s had a little minor league trouble with the law…no convictions, no jail time, a couple of push-and-shove, he said/she said affairs…but he also has helped his neighbors when they were in trouble and seems to have been very involved in trying to lessen the number of burglaries in his neighborhood. At least eight burglaries were reported over the 14 months before the neighborhood watch of which Zimmerman was a part was initiated, including one that was a forced entry situation serious enough to cause a young woman and her son the move out of the area. By comparison, I live in a working class area of da big, bad Bronx and in my neighborhood there have been zero burglaries over the past few years. Come to think of it, there has only been one break-in over the last seven years on my street, and that was when no one was home.

Now this Zimmerman fella is himself of mixed-race parentry…European ancestry on his father’s side and Peruvian (which usually means native American as well as European and quite likely African) on his mother’s side. In most exclusively white neighborhoods (Yes, Virginia, they do exist.) he would be considered non-white based on his appearance, I believe.

One of the help, come to fix the lawn sprayer or the refrigerator.

Bet on it.

But in the mixed-race, working-class neighborhood in which he lives, he fits right in. (“Twin Lakes is almost 50 percent white, with Hispanic and African-American populations of about 20 percent each.”)

The two protagonists in this yet-to-be-fully-told tragedy met up one rainy night. One died and one survived. Over the ensuing months a gradually gathering media storm built around what happened that night, and when the storm finally reached full force last week almost all of the coverage was aimed at showing George Zimmerman to be a racist murderer.

Why?

Because he was out trying to stop his neighborhood from being preyed upon by thieves.

And right here is where the unexamined “racism” of this little morality tale steps in and effectively smacks one upside the head. (Provided of course that said head is not already so full of media-induced outrage that it can’t feel anything other than what it has been ordered to feel.)

Almost the entire country…people of all races and political persuasions…has assumed that Mr. Zimmerman was looking for black people to blame for the trouble in his community.

Hmmmmmmm…

If this is not proof positive of the ultimately racist attitude of this country, I do not know what is.

This idea…and its subset, blaming Hispanics…has been presented with such force by the media of this nation that it has become assumed fact. A meme so powerful, so all-enveloping that it is not even examined by most people. Of all races.

Long ago and far away (2006) I wrote a piece called Racism. America’s Original Sin. In it I wrote:

Racism is America’s Original Sin.

The one that really dare not speak its name. Not its full name, anyway.

As in Niggerkikespicwopmickgookchinkjapragheadhunkyhonkywog.

With a further and equally criminal subdivision called BitchWhore.

And until it is fully expiated…and I mean fully, as in the universal and unremarkable recognition that indeed all men and women ARE born equal in terms of innate possibility across and throughout all races AND THE UNIVERSAL, REAL-TIME SOCIAL RECOGNITION OF SAID CONCEPT INCLUDING THE AVAILABILITY OF EQUAL HOUSING, EMPLOYMENT AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL…until that happens (And I do not presently see even the REMOTEST of possibilities that something like that is in the works here. Precisely the opposite, truth be told. We are going BACKWARDS.), then all the rest of what we say and do is the sheerest bullshit.

—snip—

Need I say more?

I think not.

Ask not for whom the sky darkens.

It darkens for thee.

And let he who is without Original Sin throw the first stone.

Later…

AG

There it is, alla you goodfellas and nicegals.

Deal wid it.

Internally.

Or…as is most likely on all available evidence…don’t deal wid it.

Your choice, if “choice” is even an applicable word for most of us.

Y’either do it or y’don’t.

And it will play out the way it must, this story.

My own prediction?

It’s going to throw at least a small monkeywrench in the Obama re-election plans of the PermaGov. Not enough to change the result, but enough to nudge things in another set of directions.

Watch.

One thing I know for sure is this. It ain’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

Bet on that as well.

Later…

AG

.

Billionair and Newt Gingrich funder living by Natanyahu’s creed of Islamophobia

“I like people who make decisions. He (Newt) makes decisions. You don’t have to worry about using the word Islamofascism or Islamoterrorist when that’s what they are. Not all Islamists are terrorists, but all the terrorists are Islamists.”  

Yair Netanyahu: Like Father, Like Son!

An Israeli newspaper reported that one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sons had posted anti-Islamic remarks on his Facebook page: “Terror has a religion and it is Islam.” Haaretz said the posts were deleted after it inquired about them and were no longer visible on Yair Netanyahu’s page. Yair serves as a soldier in the IDF, Israel’s army.

 « click for story

David Shimron, a lawyer for the Netanyahu family, did not deny the report but called it a “ridiculous and cynical use of a teenager’s comments.” Shimron also said the younger Netanyahu had “expressed himself in an informal virtual forum” and that he “respects all people and is ready to live in peace in Israel with people of all identities.”

Amongst other comments Netanyahu was said to have posted were that Palestinians “have no land, this is part of Israel, never in history was there a Palestinian state.”He also said that “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”

Prime Minister’s son caught going AWOL to have Shabbat dinner with family

“I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.”
Newt Gingrich TCJ interview Dec. 2011

Islamophobia and the Atlantic Alliance …

Geert Wilders’ Islamophobia funded by America’s far right lobby groups with Israel in mind

The Islamophobic crusade was launched in earnest at the peak of George W. Bush’s prestige when the neoconservatives and their allies were riding high. In 2003, three years after the collapse of President Bill Clinton’s attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue and in the immediate wake of the invasion of Iraq, a network of Jewish groups, ranging from ADL and the American Jewish Committee to AIPAC, gathered to address what they saw as a sudden rise in pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses nationwide. That meeting gave birth to the David Project, a campus advocacy group led by Charles Jacobs, who had co-founded CAMERA, one of the many outfits bankrolled by Chernick. With the help of public relations professionals, Jacobs conceived a plan to “take back the campus by influencing public opinion through lectures, the Internet, and coalitions.”

Inspiration from Israel

It was evident from the involvement of figures like Gravers that the Islamophobic network in the United States represented a trans-Atlantic expansion of simmering resentment in Europe. There, the far-right was storming to victories in parliamentary elections across the continent in part by appealing to the simmering anti-Muslim sentiments of voters in rural and working-class communities. The extent of the collaboration between European and American Islamophobes has only continued to grow with Geller, Spencer, and even Gingrich standing beside Europe’s most prominent anti-Muslim figure, Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, at a rally against Cordoba House. In the meantime, Geller was issuing statements of support for the English Defense League, a band of unreconstructed neo-Nazis and former members of the whites-only British National Party who intimidate Muslims in the streets of cities like Birmingham and London.

In addition, the trans-Atlantic Islamophobic crusade has stretched into Israel, a country that has come to symbolize the network’s fight against the Muslim menace. As Geller told the New York Times` Alan Feuer, Israel is “a very good guide because, like I said, in the war between the civilized man and the savage, you side with the civilized man.”

Support for Geert Wilders’ “Freedom Party” Drops Over Financial Crisis

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

I’m going to talk about something I care a lot about. Bear with me.

In February, the Supreme Court of the United States blocked a ruling of the Montana Supreme Court. The case concerned a state law called the Corrupt Practices Act of 1912 that forbade corporate spending on Montana elections. An organization named Western Tradition Partnership had brought the case to argue that the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court ruling had invalidated the ban on corporate spending. A lower state court judge had agreed, but the Montana Supreme Court was defiant. In a 5-2 decision, they literally argued that their state’s history and demographics were so distinct that they should be exempted from the Citizens United ruling. It was a bold move that earned them admiration but ultimate condemnation from the folks over at Think Progress.

It is wrong when Newt Gingrich plots a campaign of massive resistance against judges he disagrees with, and Montana’s justices act no less illegitimately when they fail to follow a binding Supreme Court precedent. There is no reason to doubt that every word of the Montana Supreme Court’s decision — which explains in great detail how corporate money corrupts a state’s politics — is accurate, except for the part when they say that Citizens United does not force them to allow corporations to corrupt Montana.

Though the Montana Supreme Court was on shaky ground, even one of the two dissenters blasted the Citizens United ruling.

While, as a member of this Court, I am bound to follow Citizens United, I do not have to agree with the Supreme Court’s decision. And, to be absolutely clear, I do not agree with it. For starters, the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans. The truth is that corporations wield inordinate power in Congress and in state legislatures. It is hard to tell where government ends and corporate America begins; the transition is seamless and overlapping. In my view, Citizens United has turned the First Amendment’s “open marketplace” of ideas into an auction house for Friedmanian corporatists. Freedom of speech is now synonymous with freedom to spend. Speech equals money; money equals democracy.

Montana likes its anti-corruption law and wants to keep it. As their Attorney General Steve Bullock told NPR, the state passed the law in 1912 for a reason:

“Our legislature, our judges, down to the local county assessors, were almost bought and paid for. Mark Twain even said that, you know, the amount of money coming in in Montana makes the smell of corruption almost sweet.”

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that Montana’s top cop is named Bullock. That’s because the sheriff on HBO’s Deadwood was from Montana and also named Bullock. And the America portrayed in Deadwood is about exactly what Montana was dealing with when they created the Corrupt Practices Act of 1912. Hell, even some of the characters are the same (e.g., George Hearst). But to understand that, you have to know about the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. People found gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In Montana, they found copper:

Anaconda Copper Mining Company started in 1881 when Marcus Daly bought a small silver mine called Anaconda near Butte, Montana. (Anaconda would eventually own all the mines on Butte Hill.) He asked George Hearst (father of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst) for additional support, who agreed to buy one-fourth of the new company’s stock without visiting the site. Huge deposits of another mineral, copper, were discovered soon and Daly became a copper magnate. Daly quietly bought up neighboring mines forming a mining company. He then built a smelter at Anaconda which he connected to Butte by a railway.

Butte, a small and poor town, became one of the most prosperous cities in the country, often called “the Richest Hill on Earth.” From 1892 through 1903, the Anaconda mine was the largest copper-producing mine in the world. It produced more than $300 billion worth of metal in its lifetime.

Nothing quite like discovering a mountain full of copper at the exact moment that the country was building its electric system. It gave rise to the Copper Kings, a rivalry among three fabulously wealthy men and their organizations.

The Copper Kings, industrialists William Andrews Clark, Marcus Daly, and F. Augustus Heinze, were collectively known for the epic battles they fought in Butte, Montana and the surrounding region during the Gilded Age over the control of the local copper mining industry, a fight which had ramifications for not only Montana, but the United States as a whole.

The battles between Clark, Daly and Heinze, and later between just Heinze and industrialist financiers William Rockefeller and Henry H. Rogers are a large chapter in Montana history. Eventually, a company known as Anaconda Copper emerged as a monopoly, expanding into the fourth largest company in the world by the late 1920s.

These three industrialists duked it out in legendary “Old West” style. Anyone who watched Deadwood will recognize the following description:

Those who controlled the copper mines stood to make millions of dollars, the prize sought by the three men who fought for Butte’s mineral wealth with greed and generosity, cruelty and compassion, cowardice and courage. They used their fabulous wealth to buy courts, newspapers, politicians, banks, police, and anything and anyone that could help them or hinder their opponents. To get what they wanted, their money flowed like snowmelt throughout the mile-high city and eventually reached the nation’s capital. All the while the miners toiled thousands of feet below ground in tunnels dug with blasting powder, picks, and shovels. And sometimes, backed by rival copper kings, they also battled, with fists and dynamite, either on the streets of Butte or far below the surface.

It wasn’t long before Butte began to pay a price for the riches. The air filled with toxic sulfurous smoke.

Flash forward seventy years and Anaconda Mining had created the largest SUPERFUND site in the country.

The area of Butte, Montana, Anaconda, Montana, and the Clark Fork River were highly contaminated. Milling and smelting produced wastes with high concentrations of arsenic, as well as copper, cadmium, lead, zinc, and other heavy metals. That’s why, beginning in 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency designated the Upper Clark Fork river basin and many associated areas as Superfund sites – the nation’s largest.

So, that’s a bit of Montana’s history. Even with their anti-corruption law, their politics have been dominated by mining interests. You can read more about the period leading up the passage of the Corrupt Practices Act of 1912 here, and I encourage you to do so.

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has ordered a stay of the ruling of Montana’s Supreme Court, but may hear the case sometime soon. Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock is preparing an amicus curiae brief for that case.

An amicus curiae educates the court on points of law that are in doubt, gathers or organizes information, or raises awareness about some aspect of the case that the court might otherwise miss. The person is usually, but not necessarily, an attorney, and is usually not paid for her or his expertise. An amicus curiae must not be a party to the case, nor an attorney in the case, but must have some knowledge or perspective that makes her or his views valuable to the court.

And the goal is to get the other nineteen Democratic state attorneys general to join Bullock in his submission to the Court.

When the Court issued its stay, it came with the following interesting comment attached:

Statement of Justice Ginsburg, with whom Justice Breyer joins, respecting the grant of the application for stay. Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, 558 U. S. ___ (2010), make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 42). A petition for certiorari will give the Court an opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway. Because lower courts are bound to follow this Court’s decisions until they are withdrawn or modified, however, Rodriguez de Quijas v. Shearson/American Express, Inc., 490 U. S. 477, 484 (1989), I vote to grant the stay.

So, at a minimum, Justices Ginsburg and Breyer want to have a new scrap about Citizens United, and they want to use the Montana case to do it. What I want to do is encourage all 20 Democratic Attorneys General to join that fight and provide some ammunition. So, in the next few days I am going to provide you with some information you can use to lend your hand to this effort.

Because, while I like the show, I don’t want to live in Deadwood.

[In the interests of full disclosure, I am consulting with Democracy for America on issues that may be mentioned on this blog. While I will continue to express my own views and opinions, any articles that may present a conflict of interest will contain this disclosure.]

“Come ye lads scurry thee below, the ship she is a’ shaking and the wild wind is start’n a blow!!”

Last week Bo Morrison a 20 year old Wisconsin man became the latest victim of the Self Defense Immunity law. Morrison had attended a rather wild late night drinking party and ran and hid on a neighbor’s porch when the policed showed up to break up the party. The owner of the house claims he heard a noise on the porch and investigated in the dark with a 45 pistol in his hand. Minutes later Bo was dead with a hole blown through his chest and the bullet lodged in the wall between two appliances on the porch where Bo was hiding. The DA has determined that the home owner is immune from prosecution by Wisconsin’s new “Castle Doctrine” law.
This new ALEC/NRA “Castle Doctrine law” a.k.a. the “Stand your Ground Law” is already allowing cold blooded murderers to start their hunt for people to shoot. Note, in the interest of the many possible names that will eventually be given to this ALEC/NRA legislative model, I will simply call their model the “Self Defense Immunity Shield Law”.  

This is the third murder of an unarmed young man since the murder of Trayvon Martin, wherein no arrests have been made with the police or DA citing their respective legislative version of the Self Defense Immunity Shield Law enacted in their state.

It should be strongly emphasized here that the shooters thus far have been lucky as their victims have been just run of the mill young men with no extensive family connections capable of retaliating with an onslaught of passion driven vengeance. However, with this new ALEC/NRA law on the books in 24 states (and counting) some trigger happy gun toting jock will stumble into the laws of probability and murder someone who has a family, group, or gang that are ready to exact their revenge against anyone who murders their cherished one and then is allowed to walk free. Just take the combined population totals of these 24 states and the numerical probability of revenge initiatives occurring reduces such a scenario to a fact, and it’s just question of when and how often.

We have a potential “Turf War” situation that has the capacity to make the legendary story of the feuding Hatfields and McCoys seem insignificant. It is still early in the blossoming of this ALEC/NRA pernicious legislative tool designed to destroy every shred of civil order in this country. However, I am certain the murder rate is poised to explode as these blood thirsty gun jocks observe just how easy it is to kill and escape without spending a minute in jail. The real question is what happens to law and order when people start shooting back, or revenge seekers decide to personally administer justice.

It took Congress very little time to pass an Amendment repealing prohibition and to get it ratified through all of the states. In my estimation the United States, through the passage of this ALEC/NRA law, is facing the most serious national emergency situation that ever existed in American history. IMO the first step must be to keep a state by state count of the number of people killed and the number of killers granted immunity under the ALEC/NRA Self Defense Immunity Shield legislative model in each state. These statistics will be necessary to convince Congress of the urgent need to address this situation. Some callous individuals have already joked about this law as making it open season on two legged animals, but I doubt these characters will find much humor in their “jokes” if someone that they love is murdered and the killer is walks free under this law.

A lot of liberals — see, for instance, Josh Marshall — think the appropriate response to a Supreme Court rejection of the individual mandate would be for progressives to pursue single-payer health care. Jonathan Bernstein and Jamelle Bouie think that’s silly, because, in their view, if this Court can find a heretofore unexpected rationale for invalidating the Obama health care law, the Court will find a way to invalidate single payer as well.

But I don’t think we’re ever going to find out whether that’s true, at least not for decades. Why? This is why:

In U.S., Fear of Big Government at Near-Record Level

Americans’ concerns about the threat of big government continue to dwarf those about big business and big labor, and by an even larger margin now than in March 2009. The 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high, while the 26% who say big business is down from the 32% recorded during the recession….

(Click chart to enlarge.)

Notice the trend. We always fear “big government” the most.

We’re Americans. We love the government programs we’ve grown accustomed to — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and so on — but we hate government. And we have no idea that that makes no sense.

The corpocracy and the right-wiong noise machine are hell-bent on keeping us this way (and would love to get us to reject even the government programs we like). Meanwhile, Democratic politicians won’t make an affirmative case for government, and often don’t work very hard (especially at the state and local level) to make sure government programs work well.

And I wouldn’t count on future support for large government programs like single payer, either. Think about it: Who’s the one politician now generating excitement among Americans under thirty? Ron Paul.

We have to make average Americans believe government is the solution in this case, and we have to fight vested interests to the death. In theory, it could be done. In practice, I don’t believe it’s possible anytime soon. If you disagree, start working on changing ordinary Americans’ minds about government now. It’s the necessary first step.

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

I don’t mean to pick on Kathleen Parker but I can’t help myself. She attempts to engage us with logical reasoning and utterly fails. Her main point today is that it is inappropriate and misleading to compare the passage of the Affordable Care Act to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that desegregated the South. There’s plenty to work with here if you’re inclined to pursue the argument. But Parker goes about it like this:

On “Hardball” this week, as Chris Matthews was cross-examining a guest about the constitutionality of the insurance mandate — the main issue before the Supreme Court — he asked whether she thought the Civil Rights Act was constitutional. After all, that piece of legislation (correctly) forced businesses to sell goods and services to people they otherwise might have chosen to deny access.

This would be a dandy argument if the two issues were remotely related. Yes, they are similar inasmuch as the federal government imposed laws on individuals related to personal decision-making. And yes, those decisions revolved around commerce. But zebras and dogs are also similar — they both have four legs and a tail — and yet we know they are not the same animal.

The health-care mandate forces business and individuals to buy something against their will. The mandate facilitates access to health care the same way being pushed off a diving board facilitates swimming.

She starts out well enough by noting that compelling someone to sell something is not the same as compelling someone to buy something. But then she says that the forcing people to be insured is like pushing them off a diving board.

Let’s be clear about a couple of things. First, the mandate is an option. You can choose to pay the tax if you don’t want the insurance. If you refuse to pay the tax, no criminal charges will be brought against you and there will be no liens against your property. Second, the mandate asks you to buy insurance, not health care. The analogy to swimming doesn’t work on any level. A better analogy would be to say that the mandate is the fee you pay to access the pool. You might argue that you don’t want to go swimming. But how would it work out if you showed up next week with your flip-flops and a towel and demanded free entry? You’d be laughed out of town.

Imagine that you live in a condominium with dozens of other households. Your little community has a pool as well as a clubhouse, tennis courts, and a contract with a local landscaper. You pay a fee for the pool even if you don’t know how to swim and will never use it. No one is forcing you to go swimming. Likewise, the mandate doesn’t force you to go to the doctor. What it does is say that all your medical care must be paid for with insurance. You can’t opt out of your obligation to pay for the upkeep of the system until the moment you want to use it. Just like you can’t opt out of your community fees and pay cash if and when you ever learn to swim.

Except, you actually can opt out if you’re willing to be a deadbeat. It’s not like anything will actually happen to you if you refuse to either get insurance or pay the tax.

The truth is, in this analogy, we all wind up in the pool. The only question is whether we helped pay for the pool before we used it. And if you can’t afford to pay for the upkeep of the pool, you can get some help with that.

I don’t like being told that I have to buy for-profit insurance. I’d prefer a public option. But let’s not pretend this is tyranny. It’s a half-ass compromise that turned out to be the best we could do.

Jonah Goldberg wonders if there is a bubble surrounding elite blacks that leads them to be more concerned about white racism than black-on-black crime. It’s a potentially interesting question, but before we can get to that we have to pause and ponder why Goldberg is posing the question in the first place. The answer is that the right-wing is responding to the uproar over the Trayvon Martin case with confusion about why it is being treated as such a big deal. In their view, black kids are being murdered all over this country every day, largely by other black kids, and we rarely if ever see any stories about those victims. In their view, this indicates that the only thing driving the Trayvon Martin controversy is that the shooter was initially reported to be white, even though he is half-Peruvian.

This is the wrong way to think about this controversy. This case involves several layers of injustice. Most obviously, we know who pulled the trigger. Find me a case of black-on-black crime where the shooter has been identified and confessed but has not been arrested. If you find a case like that, then we can talk about why that case is not receiving any attention. But in the absence of such a case, black-on-black crimes are oranges to Trayvon Martin’s apple. Beyond the lack of an arrest, we have the way the police treated the investigation. They appear to have engaged in some witness tampering. They drug tested the corpse, but not the shooter. They made no effort to learn whether the victim lived in the neighborhood or to locate his parents. They didn’t use his cell phone to aid them. They didn’t collect key evidence, like the shooter’s clothing. They defended their decision not to prosecute by referencing the Stand Your Ground law that doesn’t seem to apply. They overruled the lead investigator who doubted the veracity of the shooter’s account and wanted to charge him with manslaughter. And they leaked damaging information about the victim that has no relevancy to the case. I probably haven’t covered every way in which this investigation was screwed up, but I think I’ve covered the biggest issues.

No one has suggested that Trayvon Martin was doing anything wrong. And he’s dead. Can a black boy be killed with impunity in this country?

Finally, this case is important because of how it happened and how the circumstances make black people feel about their level of security in our country. The boy was identified as suspicious on the basis of his race. The shooter had a pattern of asking people to look out for black boys. He referred to Martin as “these assholes” and as a “fucking goon” or “fucking coon.” Perhaps because Martin was talking on a cell phone through an ear piece he appeared to be acting peculiarly, but considering the racial animus of the shooter’s comments on the 911 call, it’s clear that his main suspicion was based on Martin’s appearance alone. People in the black community are accustomed to being treated with suspicion, but that doesn’t make it okay to assume every black kid you see is an asshole and a goon. For a man to make that determination and then go confront a black kid and wind up shooting and killing him, and then to face no legal consequences…?

Are we supposed to just shrug that off?

And, you know, it’s possible that the shooter started a fight that he wound up losing. Maybe he was getting his ass kicked. Maybe his head was being pounded into the sidewalk. Maybe he felt like his life was in danger. Maybe Trayvon was reaching for his gun. It’s possible that he really acted in self-defense in order to save his own life.

It would have been helpful if the police had treated the case as a homicide investigation instead of leaving evidence uncollected and cherry-picking statements from the witnesses. It would have been helpful if they had treated Trayvon Martin as a victim of homicide, looked at his phone and called his parents. But they didn’t do any of that.

What Goldberg is missing is that the outrage in this case has as much to do with how the police behaved as it does with the death of Trayvon Martin.

As for his larger question about black elites, he may very well be right that black teenagers in our ghettoes are more concerned about being the victim of black-on-black crime than they are with white racism, while black columnists for the New York Times have the opposite priority of fears. The problem with that observation is that it explains very little and it has absolutely nothing to do with the Trayvon Martin case.