It’s the Police Inaction, Stupid, Pt. II

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Shelby Steele criticizes the exploitation of Trayvon Martin because, you know, there’s nothing to see here.

Two tragedies are apparent in the Trayvon Martin case. The first is obvious: A teenager—unarmed and committing no crime—was shot dead. Dressed in a “hoodie,” a costume of menace, he crossed paths with a man on the hunt for precisely such clichés of menace. Added to this—and here is the rub—was the fact of his dark skin.

Maybe it was more the hood than the dark skin, but who could argue that the skin did not enhance the menace of the hood at night and in the eyes of someone watching for crime. (Fifty-five percent of all federal prisoners are black though we are only 12% of the population.) Would Trayvon be alive today had he been walking home—Skittles and ice tea in hand—wearing a polo shirt with an alligator logo? Possibly. And does this make the ugly point that dark skin late at night needs to have its menace softened by some show of Waspy Americana? Possibly.

I still don’t get the thing with hoodies. As a woman, I am uncomfortable with being followed on a dark night by a man of any color, and I don’t much care what he is wearing. Especially when it’s raining, seeing someone with a hood over his head doesn’t in itself bother me.

What is fundamentally tragic here is that these two young males first encountered each other as provocations. Males are males, and threat often evokes a narcissistic anger that skips right past reason and into a will to annihilate: “I will take you out!”

And this is precisely why indiscriminately handing out carry permits to everybody and his uncle is a bad idea.

There was a terrible fight. Trayvon apparently got the drop on George Zimmerman, but ultimately the man with the gun prevailed. Annihilation was achieved.

We still don’t know for sure who got the drop on whom, but it’s a safe bet that had Zimmerman not been armed, both Martin and Zimmerman would be alive and healthy now. But no sensible person, according to Steel, would have made a racial issue out of this —

The absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

Sorry, I didn’t see the poll numbers telling us what black teenagers are afraid of. But, once again, a right-wing writer misses the point.

Whether Zimmerman racially profiled Martin is a matter that has bearing on what crime Zimmerman might eventually be charged with, but — one more time — if the Sanford police hadn’t attempted to sweep the matter under the rug and pretend it never happened, we wouldn’t be talking about it now.

Wingnuts, I will spell it out for you one more time: The central issue is not that a white guy shot a black guy. The central issue is that a white guy shot a black guy and the police were not pursuing a criminal case against the shooter.

And, sorry, but that isn’t that much of an anomaly. There’s a similar case now near where I live. The perps in this case were the police, and apparently the victim’s family has had to go to great lengths to get the shooting investigated and charges filed.

And there is a long history of violent white-on-black crime going unpunished, especially in the South. It may not be nearly as common as it used to be back in Jim Crow days, but it’s way too soon to call police inaction like this an “anomaly.”

And yes, black-on-black violence is much more common, but nobody seems to be finding examples of a black man shooting another black man and the police not bothering to prosecute.

Eric Boehlert:

It’s telling what Steele did not consider to be a tragedy in the Martin case – the fact that the man who admitted shooting the unarmed teen, George Zimmerman, hasn’t been arrested or charged with a crime. Indeed, the lack of an arrest is the central reason why the Martin story erupted into national headlines in recent weeks. And yet Steele, busy bashing Martin’s advocates as well as the press, raced right past that salient fact.

Steele is not alone. Within the conservative media, it’s now become commonplace to pontificate about the Martin story (while often condemning civil rights activists as “race hustlers”) without ever mentioning why the story became such a blockbuster; without ever mentioning that the man who shot Martin has not been charged.

That’s kind of a crucial fact. Yet conservative pundits seem eager to brush it aside. That amount of obfuscation raises doubts whether they even understand the fundamentals of the Martin story, or whether they are just choosing to ignore them because they raise difficult questions about the law and race in America.

And, you know, they will not see it no matter how many times you show it to them. I can promise you as surely as the night follows the day that this post will attract commenters who will refuse to believe that the controversy is over anything else but that a white guy shot a black guy.

This refusal goes beyond simple stupidity and strikes to the heart of what bigotry is about. It’s more about a kind of psychological block than an inability to reason. Of course, the block causes an inability to reason; but otherwise anyone bright enough to tie his shoes ought to be able to see that the central issue of the Martin case is the police inaction.

Boehlert again —

The conservative press has now spent weeks, in full force, trying to spin away the Martin controversy. The fact that so many far-right players won’t even acknowledge a key facet of the case suggests it’s a story they cannot deal with honestly.

Years ago someone I know coined the phrase “premeditated incompetence” to describe the phenomenon of a college-educated husband who could not figure out how to run a vacuum cleaner or use a dishwasher. The right-wing reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin is more like premeditated blindness, or an inability to see even the plainest and starkest facts if they contradict their biases — in this case, that racism isn’t real but is just something minorities complain about because they enjoy being victims.

Note: Anyone who wants to argue with me that I don’t understand what happened is encouraged to read the Mahablog archives of posts on the Martin shooting. If I can tell by what you write that you haven’t read any of it, your comment will not be approved. See also the Mahablog comment policy.

Update: I see also that people are still spinning their wheels over whether Zimmerman used a racial slur while on the phone to the 911 operator. I’ve listened to the recording and, frankly, can’t tell what he said, which is why I haven’t brought this point up before. But iMO it’s unimportant to the central issue of the case, which is about the non-response of the police.

The alleged racial slur may be important when (or if) they get around to deciding what crime Zimmerman may have committed, but that depends on Florida’s hate crime laws, with which I am not familiar. Otherwise, I don’t see why it makes a dadblamed bit of difference whether Zimmerman said “effing coon” or “claire de lune.”

This Wacky World

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It’s a good news/bad news sort of day. For example, the Connecticut Senate voted to abolish the death penalty. Score one for civilization. On the other hand, the Arizona Senate is considering a bill that would eliminate programs that promote energy efficiency. Why? Because “clean energy programs in Arizona are a plot by the United Nations to create a single world government in order to control people’s lives.”

Maybe we could just sell Arizona to some other country. I’m thinking China would take it if Mexico won’t.

Coca-Cola announced it is withdrawing support from ALEC in the face of a threatened progressive boycott. I’m starting to think that if we’d had social media 30 years ago the right-wing coup would never have gotten off the ground.

On the other hand, Krugman sees ALEC influence in New Jersey.

John Cole has a long and thoughtful post about why he switched from being a wingnut to being a sane person. As he explains why he used to support the Bush Administration, key part to me is “I believed it. I identified with it. It was part of who I was for years. It was my deference to authoritarianism after years in the military. It was tribalism.”

This is why reason doesn’t work on wingnuts. They are a tribe, and wingnuttiness is part of their tribal, and hence personal, identity. Any disagreement with the tribe, any attempt to show that everything they stand for is nonsense and lies, is an existential threat that must be stamped out by any means necessary.

So no matter how patiently one might try to show them that whatever they believe is irrational and a pack of lies, they will simply retreat further into la-la land and retort with whatever non sequiturs and ad hominems they find handy.

Cole says that what finally got to him was the sheer meanness of the Right.

And while Republicans may very well have been crazy for decades, the outright ugliness, I think, has escalated beyond measure. The hideous treatment of Graeme Frost was the final straw, I guess. It was just the last, final, “WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?” moment. You see the same thing from the same folks as they viciously attack Trayvon Martin for his horrible sin of being gunned down in cold blood.

Something like that seems to have happened to Charles Johnson back in 2009, which in many ways was a more remarkable conversion. I don’t remember that Balloon Juice was ever as hard, screaming, foaming-at-the-mouth Right as Little Green Footballs used to be. It’s like Johnson woke up from a bad dream.

Speaking of bad dreams — Item One —

A top adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned the Bush administration that its use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” interrogation techniques like waterboarding were “a felony war crime.”

What’s more, newly obtained documents reveal that State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under U.S. law — “even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them.”

Item two — Curveball goes public —

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, who openly admitted to fabricating intelligence about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is breaking his silence with appearances in a BBC documentary that began airing this past Sunday and will conclude next Sunday.

Not that I expect many people to notice …

They Were Against Judicial Activism Before They Were For It

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

A federal appeals judge has ordered the Department of Justice to clarify whether the President thinks the courts have a right to strike down a federal law, and to do so in writing by Thursday. Apparently our President was being uppity again in offering the opinion that finding the ACA unconstitutional would be unprecedented. And it would be, in the sense that to do so the justices would have to reverse some of their own precedents on points of law. But the mouth-breathers on the Right have decided the President doesn’t know that justices may find laws unconstitutional and are now defending Marbury v. Madision as the cornerstone of liberty.

By itself we might dismiss this as the Usual Clown Show. But Paul Campos writes at Lawyers, Guns & Money —

A very distinguished professor of constitutional law — a man widely viewed as a conservative at least in legal academic circles — was asked recently to write an essay for a prominent conservative opinion magazine on some current legal controversies, including Citizens United decision and the ongoing litigation over same-sex marriage rights. He used the essay as an occasion to reiterate certain fundamental criticisms of the culture of judicial review, and in particular the mental habits that culture inculcates in judges.

The essay had gone through the editorial process and was in press when the Editor in Chief of the publication decided not to run the piece. Needless to say the author was both surprised and annoyed by this reversal, and had several conversations with the EIC about it. In sum, the EIC explained that it was now the policy — or what I believe in another time and place would have been referred to as “the line” — of the publication that it should not be encouraging basic criticisms of judicial review as a legal practice and cultural phenomenon “at this time.” In the course of these conversations it became very clear to the author that “at this time” meant “when this practice has once again become on the whole beneficial to the political goals of American conservatives.”

Now, add to this the influence of hard-right Super PACs. Thanks to Citizens United, the same puppet masters who gave us ALEC are using their money to elect right-wing judges at state level. Example —

Like judges elsewhere, those in Florida remain rattled by what happened two years ago in Iowa, where three state Supreme Court justices who had upheld a ruling in favor of same-sex marriage lost their jobs after a vitriolic million-dollar campaign to unseat them — money coming almost entirely from outside the state. In the preceding decade, not a single dollar had reportedly been spent on Iowa’s high court elections.

So in order to keep their seats, judges up for re-election have to kiss right-wing ass. The Washington Post article linked in the paragraph above documents unprecedented amounts of out-of-state money being used to pick off state judges that conservatives don’t like.

And now the “line” is that maybe judicial activism isn’t such a bad thing after all. Stack enough courts with the “right” judges, and they can throw case law out the window and rule however they want.

James Fallows writes that people around the world are getting nervous about U.S. Courts. A reader from The Netherlands wrote,

And the reporting from the Supreme Court has been profoundly shocking – with conservative justices spouting tea party/talk radio talking points about broccoli and cell-phone mandates, and non-existent Cornhusker Kickbacks. Scalia’s ‘originalism’ is being demonstrated to be fundamentally hollow and partisan.

I am not an American and do not live in the US. But what is happening in the world’s most important and powerful democracy is shocking and frightening in the absolute, and does concern the rest of the world.

Fallows goes on to review recent cases, starting with Bush v. Gore, that showed the Court in bare-knuckles partisan mode. What the recent ACA hearing shows us is that at least some of the justices, Scalia especially, don’t even feel a need to pretend to be nonpartisan.

Certainly, past Courts have issued rulings with profound political implications; Dred Scott comes to mind. But for most of the 20th century the Court was a bulwark against the nation’s worst impulses. No more.

Update: See also Steve Benen writes about the federal judge’s demand from the DOJ:

This is not only ridiculous, it’s also an embarrassment to the federal judiciary at a time when the institution can least afford another setback in its credibility.

No matter what you think of president or this case, when powerful judges start acting like childish politicians, it’s cause for genuine concern about the integrity of our courts.

… and Kevin Drum:

Despite the fact that Kaersvang immediately acknowledged that courts can indeed strike down laws, the panel ordered her to “submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power.”

Seriously? These judges are acting like a middle school teacher handing out punishment to a student because of something her father said at a city council meeting the night before. I’m a little hard pressed to finish up this post on quite the right note of jaw-droppitude, but luckily an attorney friend from the South just emailed me about this. Here’s his take:

This is meant to embarrass the President. Full stop. Jesus, this is getting scary. It just seems like all out partisan war brought by the Republicans from all corners of the Government. They want to push it as far as they can. And then further. It’s incredibly destructive.

IOKIYAR on Steroids

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The wingnut echo chamber has decided that judicial activism is ordained by the Constitution, and if President Muslim Pretender doesn’t like it when SCOTUS ignores its own precedents and overturns a law for the benefit of Team Republican, he must not understand Marbury v. Madison. Seriously.

That said — here is the text of the President’s speech today, and I have no doubt he is laying out the theme for his re-election campaign here. The “social Darwinism” remark may have been one of the nicer things he said about the other party.

Big Gubmint Is Coming for Your Women

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Joan Walsh has a fascinating column out about why right wingers chose to declare war on women, right now, in 2012, even as it clearly is working against them politically. She presents the argument that on some probably unconscious level they fear that Big Gumbint is trying to steal their womenfolk.

I want to emphasize that this is probably subconscious. But what we’re looking at are deeply insecure men (and some women) who resent, even fear, anything that helps women be less dependent on men. Their nonsensical rhetoric about how “government dependency” is tearing families apart actually makes some sense if you understand that somewhere in their heads, “tearing families apart” translates into “independent women will reject me”

Be sure to read Walsh’s whole column for the argument.

Obama to Supremes: Make My Day

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Don't Mess With the Broccoli

In what’s being called a shot across the bow, yesterday President Obama sent a message to the Supreme Court that overturning the Affordable Care Act would be an “unprecedented, extraordinary step.”

“Ultimately I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” he said.

In other words, he’s telling the justices that if they mess with the ACA they’re going to destroy their own credibility and forever be considered a bunch of radical judicial activists. And yesterday’s ruling about strip searches helps his case.

Darrell West of the Brookings Institution said,

I don’t think President Obama has much in common with Franklin Roosevelt, but the Supreme Court is on the verge of turning Obama into FDR. By authorizing strip searches for minor offenses and signaling that it may overturn major legislation supported by large majorities in the House and Senate, the Court is giving Obama a big campaign issue to run against unelected justices engaging in judicial activism.

In one case, justices ignore questions of personal liberty, while in the other they cite liberty as the reason for overturning an activist federal government seeking to provide health coverage for uninsured Americans. Most Americans see strip searches in minor cases as more intrusive to their personal liberty. Now Obama can run against an obstructionist Congress and a tone deaf Supreme Court couching political arguments as legal principle.

Yeah, pretty much. Precedent and law mean nothing to them; they just rule as they feel like ruling.

The President also is using some strong language about the Republican budget passed in the House last week.

“It’s a Trojan horse. Disguised as deficit reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country,” Obama said in excerpts of his speech released Tuesday. “It’s nothing but thinly veiled social Darwinism.”

PS — Note to wingnuts — the armed broccoli is a metaphor offered as humor. I am not seriously suggesting that vegetables take up arms. Well, except in Florida.

Thank You for Not Shooting

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Via Betty Cracker: According to Tampa Bay Online, during the Republican National Convention this July —

Hoping to head off violent protesters during the Republican National Convention, Mayor Bob Buckhorn has proposed a litany of items that will be considered security threats during the week-long event.

The list runs from air pistols to water pistols and also includes items such as masks, plastic or metal pipe and string more than six inches long.

Conspicuously absent from the list of potential weapons: Firearms.

That’s because state law bans local governments from placing any restrictions on the carrying of guns in public spaces.

The state motto really ought to be “Thank you for not shooting.” It should be on their bleeping license plates.

Guns will be banned from the security zone the Secret Service will set up around the convention site, Shimberg said.

But outside that perimeter, in the area Buckhorn as labeled “the clean zone,” state gun laws will prevail.

State law bans civilians from openly carrying handguns. But anyone – even protesters banned by the proposed city ordinance from wielding a piece of wood larger than a ruler – may carry a concealed handgun if they’re licensed to do so.

Are you taking note of this, Florida? Feeling any safer, are we?

The Right-Wing Coup Continues

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E.J. Dionne calls the right-wing takeover of America a stealthy coup, which is what a lot of us have been saying for years. It has been a slow motion coup. I had hope that the elections of 2006 and 2008 were the beginning of a turn-around. However, last week’s shocking performance by the Supreme Court tells us that SCOTUS has effectively been taken over.

Dionne:

Last week’s Supreme Court oral arguments on health care were the most dramatic example of how radical tea partyism has displaced mainstream conservative thinking. It’s not just that the law’s individual mandate was, until very recently, a conservative idea. Even conservative legal analysts were insisting it was impossible to imagine the court declaring the health-care mandate unconstitutional, given its past decisions.

So imagine the shock when conservative justices repeatedly spouted views closely resembling the tweets and talking points issued by organizations of the sort funded by the Koch brothers. Don’t take it from me. Charles Fried, solicitor general for Ronald Reagan, told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein that it was absurd for conservatives to pretend that the mandate created a market in health care. “The whole thing is just a canard that’s been invented by the tea party .?.?.,” Fried said, “and I was astonished to hear it coming out of the mouths of the people on that bench.”


Paul Krugman —

The big bad event of last week was, of course, the Supreme Court hearing on health reform. In the course of that hearing it became clear that several of the justices, and possibly a majority, are political creatures pure and simple, willing to embrace any argument, no matter how absurd, that serves the interests of Team Republican.

Krugman goes on to explain why the budget passed by the House last week is a fraud. Not just a bad budget or a stupid budget, but a fraud.

Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.

To be sure, we’ve had irresponsible and/or deceptive budgets in the past. Ronald Reagan’s budgets relied on voodoo, on the claim that cutting taxes on the rich would somehow lead to an explosion of economic growth. George W. Bush’s budget officials liked to play bait and switch, low-balling the cost of tax cuts by pretending that they were only temporary, then demanding that they be made permanent. But has any major political figure ever premised his entire fiscal platform not just on totally implausible spending projections but on claims that he has a secret plan to raise trillions of dollars in revenue, a plan that he refuses to share with the public?

I plan to write more about this as the week goes on, but apparently they’ve been pulling a “fast and loose” scam by showing the public, and the Congressional Budget Office, Ryan’s budget without the tax cuts.

Going back to Dionne, who wrote (among other things) that last week the House teabaggers forced a vote on the Simpson-Bowles recommendations, except with the tax increase recommendations cut in half. That last part you weren’t likely to learn from news stories.

Note how many deficit hawks regularly trash President Obama for not endorsing Simpson-Bowles while they continue to praise Ryan — even though Ryan voted to kill the initiative when he was a member of the commission. Here again is the double standard that benefits conservatives, proving that, contrary to establishment opinion, Obama was absolutely right not to embrace the Simpson-Bowles framework. If he had, a moderately conservative proposal would suddenly have defined the “left wing” of the debate, just because Obama endorsed it.

This is nuts. Yet mainstream journalism and mainstream moderates play right along.

And to get a little closer to the bottom of this — read “How Billionaires Destroy Democracy.”

If SCOTUS really does nix the entire ACA — and I keep reading there is little hope that they won’t — we may be coming to the time when the mechanisms of representative government are too compromised to stop the coup.

Another Piece of the Zimmerman Puzzle

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There’s a pretty decent description of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin at the Seattle Times that adds a little detail I hadn’t noticed elsewhere. Maybe you’ve seen it, but I missed it.

Apparently on the call Zimmerman made to report a suspicious person, at 7:13 or just after there’s a beeping sound indicating a car door is opening. That’s likely when Zimmerman got out of his truck. Here’s the newspaper account —

“When he say this man behind him again, he come and say, this look like he about to do something to him,” the girl told ABC News. “And then Trayvon come and said the man was still behind him, and then I come and say, ‘Run!’ ”

Trayvon did just that.

At 7:13, two minutes into Zimmerman’s call, he tells the police operator: “S — , he’s running.”

A beeping sound is heard, indicating that he has opened his car door. Zimmerman went after Trayvon and, out of breath, muttered profanities. He lost sight of him.

“Are you following him?” the operator asked.

“Yeah.”

“OK, we don’t need you to do that.”

Zimmerman spent almost two more minutes offering directions to the operator. He said he’d meet police by the mailboxes and then, just before hanging up, apparently thought better of it. “Actually, could you have him call me, and I’ll tell him where I’m at?” he said three minutes and 50 seconds into the call. At 7:15, he hung up.

According to CNN, Martin was shot and killed at 7:25. At that point, Zimmerman had been out of his truck for about 12 minutes, and part of that time he was running after Martin. The confrontation between the two took place in a a common backyard area in between two rows of houses, not on the street where a truck might have been parked. The original story, that Zimmerman had just gotten out of his truck briefly to check the address, and that Martin had jumped him as he returned to his truck, is obviously bogus.

The bigger issue here is the “stand your ground” law, and ALEC. To my mind Zimmerman is a victim too, of bad law. As I wrote a few days ago, I have big issues with the idea that anybody should be able to carry a firearm anywhere he wants. And my issue is that a big chunk of humanity doesn’t have the sense God gave mushrooms.

Zimmerman may actually have meant well by his zealous amateur policing of his neighborhood, but it’s obvious he lacked sensible judgment and was not someone the world needed to be carrying a firearm everywhere he went. And I suspect that is true of a large portion of the yahoos carrying guns in America right now. Add to that a law that makes self-defense so ambiguous as to be just about whatever the shooter says it is, and you can pretty much count on there being more stupid, senseless shootings that should never have happened.