Month: April 2015

Remember: CSI is a fictional television series

by digby

For anyone who cares about criminal justice issues, this piece by Radley Balko on the history of forensic science and the shocking lack of scientific basis for much of what currently rely upon is a must read. With the exception of DNA matching, which was developed in scientific circles rather than criminal justice labs, they really aren’t especially reliable. There’s no doubt that people are in prison today based on junk science and the odds that we haven’t executed an innocent person based on this flawed “expert testimony” are astronomical.

His article comes on the heels of this piece from the over the week-end which I meant to flag:

Justice Department officials now concede that “an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.”

It doesn’t mean that all the defendants were innocent of course. But it probably means a few of them were. I guess that most people don’t care about that until they find themselves in the crosshairs of a powerful state police apparatus. It could happen.

Balko reports that there is some movement afoot to create and independent scientific board to evaluate these forensic techniques since judges are in no position to evaluate their scientific merit and neither are juries. (Or prosecutors, for that matter.) All the incentives in our system tilt toward prosecutors and professional government experts creating a sense of scientific consensus when none actually exists because expert scientists outside of law enforcement have never tested the theories. Balko reports on dozens of so-called scientific tests that have been debunked, including blood-spatter and bite-mark analysis. Even fingerprints are being looked at with a jaundiced eye these days.

.

The nativists are restless

by digby

Xenophobes take no prisoners:

A new video posted online shows a Republican congressman threatening an immigration protester during a heated exchange over President Barack Obama‘s executive orders.

“If you touch me again, I’ll drop your ass,” Rep. Stephen Knight (R-CA) told a man whom he called “Mike.” The video was posted by We the People Rising, a group that, according to its website, is a grassroots organization that opposes illegal immigration.

In the video, Mike and his fellow protesters repeatedly accuse Knight of having voted for President Obama’s “amnesty.” Knight claimed he “never voted for amnesty” — a claim the protesters scoffed at.

“Oh, come on!” one said. “We’re gonna vote you out in two years when your term’s over!” another said. Protesters were holding signs that read, “Stop Illegal Immigration” and “Secure The Border.”

What did he do?

The argument hinged on whether or not Knight’s vote to fund the Department of Homeland Society, in spite of the fact that the bill did not make funding contingent on President Obama undoing his November 2014 executive action on immigration, constituted tacit support of “amnesty.”

Knight was one of 75 House Republicans to support the final bill that would continue funding the department without concessions from the president.

That’s right. He agreed to fund the Department of Homeland Security which in the minds of these bozos means he voted for amnesty.

It’s not easy being a California Republican politician these days, that’s for sure.The only people who vote for the GOP here are the most far right, xenophobic lunatics the party produces anywhere. Every last normal person has disavowed their membership. These are your people congressman. Does it make you proud?

.

A rapist’s “parental rights” really shouldn’t be all that complicated

by digby

So as far as conservatives are concerned, it’s not enough that women should be forced to bear their rapists’s children against their will. They must also share parental rights with their rapist after they give birth:

Iowa Republican has held up legislation that would prevent convicted rapists from claiming parental rights to children conceived during the assault, dismissing the bill as “feel-good” legislation.

As reported by the Globe Gazette, State Rep. Chip Baltimore has bottled up the proposed bill in committee, infuriating women’s advocates who want to protect rape survivors from having to endure future court battles with their assailants.

According to Jennifer Carlson, executive director of the University of Iowa’s Rape Victim Advocacy Program, “We see this as a huge struggle for those victims as they are worried for the safety of their child as well as seeing their offender on a regular basis.”

Baltimore, who is chairman of the Iowa House’s Judiciary Committee, feels the law is unnecessary and lacks nuance.

“It’s a feel-good piece of legislation that quite honestly is dissociated with reality in the real world with the way the criminal justice system and the judicial system work,” Baltimore said. “It’s a far more complicated situation, honestly, than most people acknowledge. I get the general concept. I understand the general concept. But it’s a concept that needs a lot more work.”

Beth Barnhill, executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault, disagrees.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I do not have trust in the system. There are many, many ways it fails,” she explained.

According to the University of Iowa’s Carlson, too many victims are maliciously dragged through the legal system as they try to rebuild their lives.

“Often, we see this desire for custody or involvement in the child’s life as nothing more than an extension of the power and control and an element in which (the attacker) can continue to have an impression and a domination of their victim,” Carlson said.

It seems to me that if your child is the result of your rape of his mother you are probably not the kind of role model from which your child would benefit. Waiting until he’s 18 to establish a relationship is probably the best you should hope for. Using the legal system to harass your victim after the fact should not be permissible in a civilized society. Or America either, for that matter.

.

Jim Crow by other means

by digby

I’ve often wondered why we are so complacent about our enormous prison population and reluctantly concluded some time ago that it was likely influenced by the fact that the face of the American prisoner in many people’s mind is black, and therefore this is just our modern way of accomplishing the goals of Jim Crow now that we can’t do it through apartheid. Obviously, that’s a pretty broad conclusion and I have nothing other than my intuition telling me this but it makes some sense to me.

Today’s New York Times article about the “missing black men” doesn’t make that conclusion and in some respects refutes it by pointing out that there is no regional consistency among those jurisdictions in which there are so many fewer black men than black women. So maybe my intuition is off.  Still, it is a striking piece about a very weird phenomenon that cannot be explained away by sheer coincidence:

The roughly “L-shaped” relationship [see chart at link] suggests two distinct observations. First, in counties where African-Americans make up less than around 5 or 6 percent of the population, prime-age black men may outnumber their female counterparts, and in some areas, they do so to a striking degree. And second, in those counties with substantial African-American populations, prime-age black men are systematically outnumbered by black women, again, to a striking degree.

This pattern holds within every major region of the country, and not just in the South, the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest.

None of this answers the question as to why some areas — like Ferguson, Mo. — have larger numbers of missing black men relative to the nation as a whole. This is a purely descriptive analysis, trying to show where demographic imbalances are most acute. Correlation should not be interpreted as causation, and this applies particularly in this case, given that areas with more missing black men are strikingly different in many dimensions. They not only have larger black populations, but also different criminal justice systems, different social and economic conditions and a very different history of race relations.

In the course of the analysis, we also looked at another potential correlation: Are the places in which the black population is heavily female also places in which the nonblack population is also heavily female? To put it another way, is gender driving these patterns as much as race?

For sure, there are mining-dependent areas in Alaska, Wyoming and North Dakota that attract more men of all races. But these are the exception, and overall, there is little correlation between the gender breakdown of an area’s black population and the gender breakdown of its nonblack population.

All of which suggests that race is the driving factor. In the parts of the country with large African-American populations, thousands upon thousands of men are missing, with many of them deceased or in prison.

It’s always something isn’t it?

And of course it’s race.

.

The Village’s garden path is littered with journalistic sins

by digby

I wrote a piece for Salon today about the right wing’s latest coup, the publishing of a book called “Clinton Cash” by a far-right GOP operative and the mainstream media’s eager excitement at partnering with them.  Let’s just say it’s not the first time:

The fact that a right-wing propagandist would publish an “exposé” on Hillary Clinton is as unsurprising as Bill O’Reilly proclaiming himself to be a war hero. This is just how the right rolls. You’ll undoubtedly recall the work of fiction called “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry” by another far right operative by the name of Jerome Corsi which, when it was published in 2004 took the election by storm. It was an audacious move and it paid off. One can certainly understand why they’d try it again.

But there’s another twist with this particular book. As Dylan Byers at Politico reported:

The New York Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have made exclusive agreements with a conservative author for early access to his opposition research on Hillary Clinton, a move that has confounded members of the Clinton campaign and some reporters, the On Media blog has confirmed. […] 

Fox News’ use of Schweizer’s book has surprised no one. The bulk of the network’s programming is conservative, and the book’s publisher, HarperCollins, is owned by News Corporation. But the Times and Post’s decision to partner with a partisan researcher has raised a few eyebrows. Some Times reporters view the agreement as unusual, sources there said. Still others defended the agreement, noting that it was no different from using a campaign’s opposition research to inform one’s reporting — so long as that research is fact-checked and vetted. A spokesperson for the Times did not provide comment by press time.

It’s also no different than the way the press took every little tidbit of Whitewater gossip and ran with it back in the 1990s. And the reporting from the Times and Washington Post pretty much across the board was found to be sloppy gossip and unproven innuendo. This year they may be using what the publisher calls a “meticulously researched” investigation into the Clinton Foundation while in the past they relied upon a little known group called — wait for it — Citizens United.

(Yes, that Citizens United.)

As early as 1994, responsible journalists were questioning the major media’s use of the material provided by the group and its leader, a young man named David Bossie and his partner, a longtime conservative operative named Floyd Brown, known at the time for his role in making the notorious “Willie Horton” ad in the 1988 campaign.

Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review wrote one of the earliest pieces about this Citizens United campaign called “Churning Whitewater”.

There’s lots more at the link. I know that journalists are all insisting that they will follow up and ensure that the facts are correct. I don’t believe them. As Lieberman showed back in 1994, they promised then that they would do that and they didn’t, and once something was published by the papers of record it became “established” and that was the end of it, true or not. As I point out in the piece, it’s not as if their work was never checked elsewhere. We had the Department of Justice, the US Congress and the Office of Independent Counsel all running limitless investigations for years and the only thing anyone came up with that ever remotely matched the press’s breathless insinuations of corruption was the president’s alleged lies in one deposition about some furtive fellatio in a hallway.

But that hasn’t stopped the “narrative” of wrongdoing from being taken as an article of faith by the media. Indeed, one gets the idea from the reactions of some to this latest Clinton book that they see it as a challenge — no, the press couldn’t “get them” the last time and neither could the FBI, the US Congress and Ken Starr. But, by God, they’re going to succeed this time out because everybody just “knows” that there must be something to these corruption charges since everybody’s always talking about it, right?

The saddest thing about all this is that there’s plenty to criticize both Bill and Hillary Clinton for on legitimate political and ideological grounds. There may even be some other scandals that are legit for all we know. But they just can’t quit these wingnut psuedo-corruption scandals despite their failure to prove them over the course of decades. It’s Village catnip.

.

Too soon for Jeb

by digby

Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review writes down what every right winger is thinking and doesn’t want to admit.

However one cuts it, the last 15 years have been peculiar and they have been confusing. Economically, culturally, and spiritually, America is not where it was during its brief “holiday from history.” Rather, it is divided, under-confident, and lost. If the Right is looking for something to push against — and if its candidates are seeking an anxiety that it can promise to fix — it should be that general sense of malaise. Simply promising to replace Barack Obama is not going to cut it. There are Republican candidates who can do this and there are candidates who cannot, and, worryingly for the GOP, the primary among those “cannots” is the front-runner.  

Sure, Jeb Bush is an impressive man. But to nominate him at this moment would be to push Republicans in the wrong direction and to force them into doing something that they should really not want to do: namely, re-litigating – and perhaps even defending – the political decisions that were made between 2000 and 2008. Contrary to the myopic claims that popped up around the time of Barack Obama’s reelection, progressivism has not in fact taken hold of the American imagination. Despite his early wins, moreover, both Barack Obama and his agenda have descended into unpopularity and into fatigue. But it would be a considerable mistake to conclude from this that there is any great yearning to return to 2005. If they are offered a choice between “Clinton” — a name that evokes peace and prosperity — and “Bush” – a name that has been rather run through the mud – they will almost certainly choose the former.  

Instead, the conservative play should be to put up an attractive newcomer and to hope that he can persuade the electorate to turn its back on the established machine. Who should that be? Well, that depends primarily on aesthetics rather than policy. I take no pleasure in writing this: In an ideal world, our elections would be held on paper, our candidates would be expected to eschew the superficial, and the president would be heard from only if there were a war or a tsunami. Policy, and not television commercials, would rule the political roost. In the real world, however, messaging matters a great, great deal. If they are serious about winning in 2016, conservatives should make sure that they pick a candidate who is capable not only of tapping into the contemporary dissatisfaction, but of breaking with his own party’s past, too. Bush cannot do that. Few can.

His subsequent rundown of who in the field might be able to play that role is unintentionally hilarious for its tepid endorsements of their relative talents. But he’s right in his diagnosis. Jeb’s a reminder of Junior. He just won’t be able to get away from that. It’s too soon. And too late.

.

Feminist is a dirty word

by dig by

It’s hard to believe that such an anodyne concept is perceived as controversial in 2015. But it is:

At the request of her Ohio middle school principal, Sophie Thomas’ ‘Feminist’ shirt was digitally edited to appear all black, reportedly to avoid controversy. (Photo: WXIX)

One middle school class photo is getting a lot of attention — because of what it doesn’t include.

Eighth grader Sophie Thomas wore a black t-shirt emblazoned with the word “Feminist” in silver for a recent picture day at Clermont Northeastern Middle School in Batavia, Ohio. Yet when the teen — sitting in the front row of assembled students — saw a copy of the photo last week, she was floored to find that “feminist” had been digitally removed.

“I was insanely upset,” the teen told FOX19 of the airbrushed edit. “I was just showing everybody that this is me, and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to be my friend.”

According to Thomas, Clermont Northeastern’s Principal Kendra Young insisted that a class photo is no place for a statement that she deemed controversial. The student said that the administrator declared, ‘It was mine and the photographer’s decision to photoshop your shirt because some people might find it offensive.’” (Young did not immediately respond to Yahoo Parenting’s requests for comment).

Yet Thomas says she wasn’t intent on making a school-wide statement with the shirt. She just wore it that day to assert herself after a high school student made a sexist comment to her. “I’m going to stand up for what I believe in,” says the teen, who, with her parents, has since met with school officials about the incident. (Thomas insists that she wasn’t given any notice about the shirt being censored but the school’s superintendent, Ralph Shell, told Today, “The parents were contacted, the young lady was contacted…They said it was OK to remove it.”)

Now the middle school will reportedly be holding group discussions and welcoming guest speakers to address the issue.

All this drama is clearly a teachable moment, however it went down, says Jennifer Baumgardener, executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press at The City University of New York. “If this incident’s smoke can be separated from the flame of insight, it could be really cool opportunity for the students and teachers to talk about feminism and freedom of speech,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “’Feminist’ is an identity that people have a strong reaction to, both positive and negative.”

A recent poll, in fact, found that despite 85 percent of respondents agreeing that they believe in “equality for women,” just 18 percent identify themselves as feminist.

Why is the term such a hot button topic? “People used to think that it meant something queer, like associating with being a lesbian,” says Baumgardener. “Now it’s possibly associated for some with abortion. I’m not sure exactly why it’s so polarizing, but it’s not surprising to me that something labeled ‘feminist,’ is threatening. What it represents, on the deepest level, is the fact that women have all this power to make or not make life. For girls and women it can be hard to make friends with that power.”

Thomas, for one, has no such difficulty being a feminist and identifying herself as one. “People around here misconstrue the word,” she told Today. “Like, ‘Oh, you’re a feminist so you hate men.’ I just want to spread equality, and a lot of people here don’t agree with me.”

Having an 8th grader wear that word on her shirt “is like opening up a Pandora’s Box,” admits Baumgardener. “But if the school wantedto avoid controversy, though, they made the wrong move by editing her speech on her shirt.”

Why in the world should such a thing be opening Pandora’s Box? Yes, it’s a matter of free speech, but we already know that kids don’t have any. The real question is why the word “feminism” in 2015, a word that simply says one believes in equality for women is in any way controversial much less offensive.

I realize the word has been turned into an epithet and so a lot of women perversely say “I’m not a feminist but I believe in equal rights” but that doesn’t alter the fact that the real problem here is that we still have to have a word for something that should self-evidently be unnecessary. I guess it’s good that this is a “teachable moment” and all, but honestly it’s long past time that we should have to be teaching this. Wearing a t-shirt that says “feminist” on it should be no more controversial than wearing a t-shirt that says “human.”

.

Rapturous Bachmann
by Tom Sullivan

Go ahead, Michele Bachmann. Break out your “THE END IS NEAR” sign. You know you want to. She came close in a radio interview:

Michele Bachmann says the rapture is coming, thanks to President Barack Obama’s policies on Iran’s nuclear program and marriage equality.

In a radio interview last week, Bachmann, the former Minnesota Republican congresswoman, told “End Times” host Jan Markell, “We need to realize how close this clock is getting to the midnight hour.”

“We in our lifetimes potentially could see Jesus Christ returning to earth and the rapture of the church,” Bachmann said. “We see the destruction, but this was a destruction that was foretold.”

Yes, she’s serious. In the westernmost mountains of North Carolina, for example, one of the most frequent questions congressional candidates will be asked is what version of the Bible they read.

Eschatology has been quite the rage among Bachmann-like believers pretty much forever. They take Revelation very seriously. Especially the “Rapture,” a word that appears nowhere in the New Testament. They’ll even argue over whether the Rapture comes before, during, or after the Great Tribulation that precedes the Second Coming and the Millennium. A preacher I knew was once asked whether he believed in a pre-Trib, mid-Trib, or post-Trib Rapture. He answered that he was a pan-Millennialist. He figured it would all pan out in the end.

I’m not sure Michele Bachmann would get the joke.

Walker comes out against legal immigration. Seriously

by digby

So the big news is that the Kochs are backing the Great Whitebread Hope, Scott walker. Say hallelujah!

Breitbart News is certainly excited. Especially since Walker has now come out not just against illegal immigration but legal immigration as well.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a likely 2016 GOP presidential candidate, pledged to protect American workers from the economic effects, not only of illegal immigration but also of a massive increase in legal immigration.

During an interview with Glenn Beck, Walker became the first declared or potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate to stake out a position on immigration fully in line with that of Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest chairman Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL). He also noted that he has been working with Chairman Sessions on the issue to learn more about it.

Walker is now the only potential or declared GOP presidential candidate to discuss the negative effects of a massive increase in legal immigration on American workers:

In terms of legal immigration, how we need to approach that going forward is saying—the next president and the next congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages, because the more I’ve talked to folks, I’ve talked to Senator Sessions and others out there—but it is a fundamentally lost issue by many in elected positions today—is what is this doing for American workers looking for jobs, what is this doing to wages, and we need to have that be at the forefront of our discussion going forward.

Walker discussed how in the past he did support amnesty, but says he doesn’t anymore, because he has learned more about the issue. That shows him to be one of the most open-minded GOP candidates on such matters. Walker went on to say:

As I said, I think when Chris Wallace a few weeks back, when I was on Fox News Sunday, asked me about this, he said. ‘did you change your position at least from some of these views from a decade ago’ and I said, ‘yeah.’ I think the American people not only want people who stand firm on issues, but people who listen to folks who have got rational thoughts and for me a lot of it was talking not just to citizens all across the country but to governors in border states who face real serious concerns about what’s happening on our border and elsewhere.

Walker says he discussed immigration policy in depth with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott when he visited the border a few weeks ago. He said that he doesn’t think he was “directly wrong” before but didn’t have a “full appreciation for what is the risk along our border.” He continued:

I knew there were people traveling, coming across the border, but really what you have is much greater than that. What you have is international criminal organizations, the drug cartels aren’t just smuggling drugs—they’re smuggling firearms and smuggling not only humans but trafficking and horrific situations. It’s an issue that’s not just about safety or about national security, it’s about sovereignty. If we had this kind of assault along our water based ports, the federal government would be sending in the navy. And yet there is a very minimal force along our land-based borders, be it New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, or California, and so to me it was clearly far bigger than immigration. 

We need to have a much bigger investment from the federal government to secure the border, through not only infrastructure but personnel and certainly technology to do that and to make a major shift. If you don’t do that, there’s much greater issues than just immigration. Folks coming in from potentially ISIS-related elements and others around the world, there’s safety issues from the drugs and drug trafficking and gun trafficking and gun things with regard—but to get to immigration you have got to secure the border, because nothing you do on immigration fundamentally works if you don’t secure that border.

Walker also discussed the need for interior enforcement:

Then I think you need to enforce the law and the way you effectively do that is to require every employer in America to use an effective E-Verify system and by effective I mean you need to require particularly small businesses and farmers and ranchers. We got to have a system that works, but then the onus is on the employers and the penalties have to be steep that they’re only hiring people who are here, who are legal to be here. No amnesty, if someone wants to be a citizen, they have to go back to their country of origin and get in line behind everybody else who’s waiting.

This development, perhaps one of if not the biggest of the 2016 presidential campaign so far, comes as Walker has taken a commanding lead in polls in all three of the first GOP primary states: Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

The reason why this development is so significant is that the two establishment-backed candidates, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, both have an in-depth understanding of the immigration issue and come down on the side that supports special interests’ desire for a massive increase in legal immigration that hurts American workers.

Don’t tell the Kochs about this:

“The fundamental challenge for my side is the seemingly inexorable change in the composition of presidential electorates,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres, whose clients include Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), said during a panel discussing the report. “And there’s no reason to believe that that’s going to stop magically.”

The demographic change poses little problem for the GOP in midterm elections, when young and minority voters are far more likely than older, white voters to stay home. But in the run-up to 2016, the demographic trend has some Republicans citing a need for change.

In 2004, Republicans’ most recent presidential victory, George W. Bush won 58 percent of the white vote, and 26 percent of the non-white vote — numbers that would lose him the White House today, Ayres said.

‘”That’s the stunning part for me in running these numbers — to realize that the last Republican to win a presidential election, who reached out very aggressively to minorities, and did better than any Republican nominee before or since among minorities, still didn’t achieve enough of both of those groups in order to put together a winning percentage” for 2016, Ayres said.

Maybe Ayres is blowing smoke for Rubio. Maybe he isn’t. But you have to give Walker props for coming out against legal immigration. Remember all that handwringing about the people who’ve waited in line and how they should be given the first slot> Well, Walker just told them to go pound sand too.

.

Christie’s epitaph

by digby

Is there anyone in the GOP race who is poor enough to hang this around his neck?

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and his wife Mary Pat are not wealthy, according to them and them only. Never mind that their $700,000 income last year puts them easily in the top one percent of earners. That’s not how Christie defines wealth. “Wealth is defined a whole bunch of ways,” Christie said in an interview with the editorial board of the Manchester Union-Leader. Wealth is a feeling, and he just does not have that feeling.

The reason Christie does not feel wealthy is that he has four children, he said, and that he has worked “really hard.” Also, other people don’t think of him as wealthy, he argues, and therefore, he is not wealthy.

The subject came up because the Christies, along with the rest of America, filed taxes last week. But Christie, unlike the rest of America, reported earnings of $700,000, a figure that puts him pretty solidly in one percent land.

“The fact that my wife and I, who are not wealthy by current standards, that we have to file a tax return that’s that thick … is insane,” Christie told the editorial board. “We don’t have nearly that much money.”

He doesn’t “feel” wealthy making only 700k a year. Just like the average All-American Joe he is.

Now New Jersey does boast the second highest median income in the country. It’s 71,000 a year. So, except for that one little zero, Christie right in line with his constituents. Or, you could say that except for the extra 630,000 he makes he’s right in line with his constituents.

But he deserves it. Because he works that much harder.

.