OK, what's happening to Arizona?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The following links are all behind a cut for the link-phobic:


( cut for link-phobic )

And then there's this one:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/20/abortion-bill-arizona-terri-proud-witness-email_n_1368386.html

So.......can someone explain to me why the Tennessee and Arizona state GOPs seem to have a bigger collection of dumbass trolls than elsewhere? I realize that people might be offended at calling people trolls, but honestly if your idea of "pro-life" is making people witness abortions, my idea of making people carnivores would be to take them to see how those cows get turned into that meat on their plates. that kind of idea is creepy, counterproductive, and frankly seems more the politics of high school than what's theoretically supposed to be something run by people who left high school behind decades ago.

These days if an idea is offensive, reactionary, or frankly put too savage for Genghis Khan to think of it, it comes from these states. Why is that? Did South Carolina spread the whole too small to be a country and too large to be an insane asylum virus elsewhere?

Edit-to be fair, there are actually state GOPs whose leaders have some integrity and courage, and they should be given full credit for it. And from the state that brought us a con man arrested for defrauding the government as a state governor, that says a lot:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trayvon-martin-case-sponsors-florida-stand-ground-law-george-zimmerman-arrested-article-1.1048164?localLinksEnabled=false

Who shall bear us forward?

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

A few weeks back, This American Life had an episode that actually asked a question that I don't think gets addressed all that often: what kind of country do we want? In typical public-radio fashion, it skewed liberal, but it's an interesting story nonetheless (the parts where Norquist explains how screwed up the pension system is for states are particularly interesting, even if the host tries to push the conversation in a rather unnecessary direction). ( Read more... )

Trayvon Martin and the real issues it exposes

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Although I'm loathe to take up even more time on this story for all sorts of reasons, I've been trying to read up on this story over the last few days, and tripped up on this Slate piece. Before I dive into that piece, reading it crystallized what my struggle with this story has been up to this point. While there are a lot of problems with this case, the broader national problem is that this, frankly, local story has largely become an issue of people's top issues rather than one about the specifics of this case and the implications of it. The "anti-racists" have taken this up as the latest piece of evidence in their assertion that the US is highly racist, the anti-police people are using Martin as evidence of police corruption, gun control advocates are using this as evidence of a problem with the armed society, etc etc. This is one of those rare stories that, as it gains prominence, it becomes a mirror for whatever issue people care about the most, and thus becomes less about the facts of the case and more about confirming existing narratives. When a 911 call is released and an unintelligible phrase becomes a racial slur, we start seeing evidence become secondary.

The Slate piece linked above really, I believe, hits to the heart of the problems with this case in particular, and has actually really changed my mind quite a bit on the idea of stand your ground laws in the last few days. The article gives a very interesting history of the Castle Doctrine, which is the root of stand your ground laws, and how stand your ground laws have some basis in, surprisingly, domestic violence cases, specifically for wives who have just as much right as a husband under so-called castle doctrine laws:

Then in 1999, the Florida Supreme Court said a woman who shot and killed her husband during a violent fight at home could successfully call on the Castle Doctrine to argue self-defense. “It is now widely recognized that domestic violence attacks are often repeated over time, and escape from the home is rarely possible without the threat of great personal violence or death,” the court wrote.

Suk calls this revision of the true-man rule to encompass domestic violence transformative, and you can see why. The new rules made for more shooting and less retreating. And they set the stage for Florida to ditch the duty to retreat entirely, which the legislature did in passing the nation’s first Stand Your Ground law in 2005.

The idea behind a stand your ground law is incredibly sound - if you're going to be attacked, you have a right to defend yourself. If you fear for your life or worse, you have the right to stop that from happening. The law of unintended consequences, however, has reared its ugly head, and Trayvon Martin is the latest casualty in this affair:

Prosecutors opposed the Stand Your Ground law, and they still complain about it. "It is an abomination," former Broward County Prosecutor David Frankel told the Sun Sentinel in January. "The ultimate intent might be good, but in practice, people take the opportunity to shoot first and say later they had a justification. It almost gives them a free pass to shoot." The quote comes from a story about a former sheriff’s deputy, Maury Hernandez, who killed an unarmed homeless man in a Haagen-Dazs shop on a Saturday afternoon. Hernandez, who was with his children, said the man aggressively asked for money and then tried to assault him. Witnesses said Hernandez warned the man several times before taking out his gun and firing multiple times. The police said they wouldn’t charge Hernandez for the shooting because he claimed he was under attack.

The Slate piece ends with a quote from the Sun Sentinel that really ties all this together: "Out of six men killed and four more wounded in the cases, only one was armed. Some Orlando-area police agencies simply stopped investigating shootings involving self-defense claims and referred them directly to state prosecutors to decide."

Trayvon Martin may have been murdered in cold blood. George Zimmerman may be a horrible racist. The police might be among the most corrupt in Florida. We, unfortunately, lack the evidence to prove any of those thing true, and the way the stand your ground law in Florida is set up, we might never get any answers to the questions people have about them. I spend a lot of time talking about the government doing too much, the government being too strict - this appears to be one of the cases people always ask me for, where a government is being too lax. If a law is actively preventing state and local law enforcement from even making worthwhile calls on cases like this one, the law is bad and needs to be changed. Trayvon Martin is not special in this case, and that's what truly makes this case sad and unfortunate.

Edit: a_new_machine offers up the relevant text of the law: "c. 776.032: "A person who uses force as permitted in s. 776.012, s. 776.013, or s. 776.031 is justified in using such force and is immune from criminal prosecution and civil action for the use of such force." Emphasis mine. That's pretty cut and dry as to why Zimmerman isn't really being touched and is a pretty key problem with this law. I get why it's vague in a sense - the entire idea is to put the burden of proof on prosecutors and the police. That doesn't mean it's working.

God Bless America

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

tl;dw student goes in attack of white instructor and whites in class. Classs responds by whupping out their sidearms video cameras.

General question for the group: WTF is wrong with people today? And I'll throw a shoe at the first person who intones 'internet magnifies incidents that are more common that thought'.

Seriously, here is a double-strike citizen according to those who espouse the Myth of White Privilege, technically a triple-strike (black, female, in the Southern US) with EVERYTHING to gain, and she gets all 'ghetto' in college class. (ETA: or would it be better to sooth furrowed brows if I had typed "Rambo" instead?)

Should this person go to jail when she threatened to kill the instructor (ETA: she threatened blacks, too!!!!!!!) in front of 50 witnesses and 20 video cams?

Controversial question: are blacks too 'damaged' by 'white privilege' to ever be anything equal to whites? What can we do?

ETA: from the poster of the video an explanation:

( It started with peacocks, then goes rapidly downhill )

 ETA2: DON'T TAZE ME, BRO!

Edited for some valid points by those closely analyzing the dialog. Good catch, heathens!

What are the advantages of a third-party political system?

[dreamsofpaprika.livejournal.com]

As more Americans identify themselves as 'Independents' , a derangement is taking place away from the major parties.  Now, the three-party system takes on new significance. What are two advantages that 3 political parties create for the political system? 

While presidential candidates of third parties have little chance of being elected, members of third parties have established many significant moves in our political social lives. Women's Right to Vote is just one of them, as well as Child Labor Laws, Reduction of Working Hours, Income Tax, and Social Security.


So do you think there are advantages with a third party?

The First Stages of Collapse

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

This current economic crisis has indeed claimed its first casualties. Millions out of work, houses too expensive to occupy but worth nothing since they're underwater on the debt that financed them and the banks in too precarious a position to forgive the loans (or so they claim). Without incurring further debt, we will continue to have a stalled or broken economy; but since the current raft of leading economists fail to see debt as it is and chose to see it as an inconsequential element, no one is talking about these factors.

In fact, I'm not going to talk about these factors today either. I'm going to rant about what people blame are the factors to our economic funk but actually aren't: Taxes. Fact: We in the United States today pay very little in taxes compared to past years of prosperity, especially those of us who make what most would technically refer to a shitload of cash. Follow-up fact: All many of us can do is bitch about how are taxes are not historically low, but too high.

When the so-called media joins in the chorus of hallucination and mendacity, though, ( I have to take exception. )