Rectal Myopia

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Greg Sargent:

How did legal observers and Obamacare backers get it so wrong?

Many people have blamed Obama Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s poor defense of the law for the sudden jeopardy Obamacare finds itself in, and there’s no denying he was unprepared to answer questions that we’ve known for months would be central to the case.

But there’s another explanation for the botched prediction: Simply put, legal observers of all stripes, and Obamacare’s proponents, including those in the administration, badly misjudged, and were too overconfident about, the tone, attitude and approach that the court’s conservative bloc, particularly Justice Scalia, would take towards the administration’s arguments.

Keep in mind: Many observers, Obama officials included, spent weeks treating Scalia like a potential swing vote on the case. Lawyers defending the law wrote some of their briefs and opinions with an eye towards persuading Scalia. They consciously invoked Scalia’s own words from a 2005 opinion affirming Congress’s power to control local medical marijuana in hopes it signaled he might be open to the administration’s defense of the individual mandate.

This now looks like a terrible misjudgment. During oral arguments this week, Scalia invoked the broccoli argument to question the goverment’s case. He mocked the government’s position with a reference to the “cornhusker kickback,” even though that’s not in the law. As Fried notes, this language is straight out of the Tea Party guerrilla manual that was written during the battle to prevent Obamacare from becoming law in the first place.

All of which is to say that the law’s proponents were badly caught off guard by the depth of the conservative bloc’s apparent hostility towards the law and its willingness to embrace the hard right’s arguments against its constitutionality. They didn’t anticipate that this could shape up as an ideological death struggle over the heart and soul of the Obama presidency, which, as E.J. Dionne notes today, is exactly what it has become.

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Gee Greg, I saw this trainwreck coming a long time ago. Some of us didn’t have our heads up our own asses. This is what happens when you get high on your own Koolaid.

Let’s forget for a minute that Obamacare is a bad law. It’s already unpopular and it hasn’t even taken effect. Let’s look at the constitutional argument.

The U.S. Constitution created a government with enumerated powers. Any powers not enumerated in the document are reserved to the states or the people.

Obamacare is an unprecedented expansion of congressional power through the Commerce Clause. It requires people to purchase health care insurance from private companies. Supporters of Obamacare think the Necessary and Proper Clause allows congress to make people buy health insurance whether they want to or not.

If they can do that, what is the outer limit of congressional power? Can they order you to buy broccoli too?

Maybe you Journolistas should have fought for Single Payer instead of selling us out for the Public Option that we never got anyway.

Asshats.

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One of these things is not like the others

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Just the facts

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Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has a post discussing the sourcing of some of the “facts” in the Trayvon Martin case. In that vein, here is the Orlando Sentinel:

Trayvon rumors abound, but here are facts

The Trayvon Martin case has generated thousands of news stories and scores of speeches and public proclamations. Sometimes the facts get confused. Here are a few examples:

The Volusia County Medical Examiner refused to release Trayvon’s body to his family for three days, an unusually long wait.

Not true, according to the medical examiner. It picked up the body at the scene just after 10 p.m. Feb. 26 and notified a Fort Lauderdale funeral home 39 hours later that the body was ready. The funeral home, Roy Mizell and Kurtz, did not pick up the body for an additional 24 hours, the medical examiner reported.

Volusia County spokesman David Byron said it would be impossible to find out the average length of time the medical examiner there keeps bodies, but said it can vary by several days, depending on circumstances — for example, if there’s a dispute among family members about what to do.

Dr. Jan Garavaglia, medical examiner for Orange and Osceola Counties, said her office generally releases bodies in 24 to 36 hours.

The Medical Examiner’s Office in Monroe County — the Florida Keys — said the average there is five days.

Sanford police failed to collect key evidence in the case: the clothing of George Zimmerman, the gunman who killed Trayvon.

Not true, police said. They took his clothing as well as Trayvon’s and packaged it for crime-lab analysis. A spokeswoman for Special Prosecutor Angela Corey would not disclose Tuesday where the clothing is now, but she wrote in an email that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement “is assisting with the processing of physical evidence.”

Typically, evidence from Seminole County crime scenes is analyzed at the FDLE lab in Orlando.

Looks like some of my educated guesses were pretty good in regards to the timing of the investigation and evidence processing. I have never been involved in a murder case but I have a pretty good idea how things get done in the real world.

I am amazed as some of the assumptions people have made about this case. Some of those assumptions are based on fact and some are based wild conjecture. Some people can’t seem to see the obvious. At one blog it was suggested that the police station surveillance video doesn’t show blood on Zimmerman’s clothes because the cops seized his original clothes.

Another person responded by asking “Where did he get the clean clothes?” Uh, howbout from his home? He lived in that condo park and even if his wife wasn’t home he could have let the cops take his keys and enter his condo. The police would want to seize his clothes as evidence as soon as possible and he was being cooperative. That is an obvious and simple way to get him some clean clothes to change into.

Is that what happened? I don’t know. In any event I would be surprised if the police didn’t make contact with his wife at some point. They would want to verify his story about being on a trip to the store when the incident occurred. And they would want to do it before he had a chance to talk to her.

If this case went to trial each and every fact would have to be sourced. Take the part about Trayvon going to the neighborhood 7-11 and having some Skittles and a can of iced tea on him when the incident took place. Where did that information come from?

How do we know this is true? Did he tell someone that’s where he was going? Did he actually go there? Did he make those purchases? Did he still have them in his possession when he was killed? Here’s the kicker – is any of that the least bit relevant to the guilt or innocence of George Zimmerman? If it’s irrelevant the jury will probably never hear any of it.

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Later on I’ll do a post discussing what a trial in this case would probably look like. Maybe I’ll do it from the perspective of Zimmerman’s defense attorney.

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Neighborhood Watch Captain

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Occupy Co-opt Everything

We are Occupy. You will be assimilated. All your causes will be added to our own. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

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Over at Corrente danps has been running a great series of posts on the Occupy movement, the Black Bloc and violence. The most recent post discusses how disorganization and the lack of transparency is damaging what’s left of the Occupy movement:

One of the, ahem, benefits of shutting down efforts at openness is that those who are calling the shots can hide in a cloak of anonymity and make decisions from behind the scenes. Occupations that have shut down what began with a robust culture of openness have constructed a neatly self-contained universe – one that permits them to wield substantial authority but disclaim ownership of anything produced by it. (It also tends to create its own self-reinforcing structures.) Decision making done by a few, responsibility shared by all.

[...]

Those who want to constructively criticize that dynamic are then left grasping at straws: with no transparency, there is no way to know who in particular is driving these unhealthy developments.

If it seems that, say, facilitation has turned into a power center where much of the direction is set, but there is no way to see or read exactly what is going on, how does one even begin to offer a critique? Those who are happy as clams with this state of affairs can simply demand to know who in particular is the source of the problem. With no transparency into the process, this is unknowable from the outside. So those who wish to be insulated from accountability get a free ride. A nice arrangement, if you can manage it.

Perhaps not coincidentally, opacity tends to work well in conjunction with violence advocacy. A culture of repression is very congenial to chaotic notions of autonomy, “no snitching” orders3, and an apocalyptic mindset that insists if revolution does not happen immediately then all is lost.

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I told you so!

I told you so a long time ago. For the crime of being prematurely correct I have been accused of being a wingnut.

But at the end of the post danps dropped this interesting link:

How Occupy Wall Street Co-Opted The Million Hoodie March

I participated in the #MillionHoodies march in New York City’s Union Square this past Wednesday, March 21st. When I arrived I noticed a lot less hoodies than I thought I was going to see. I assumed this was simply because of the warm weather. There was still an enormous crowd of people there to deal with the tragedy that was Trayvon Martin.

With chants of “We are the 99%” and signage to that effect as well, I was a little thrown off. I thought the purpose of this march was to bring awareness to the death of a young boy. Soon after the march started confusion was all around. Which way were we marching? Who was leading the charge? After we walked a few blocks members of the Occupy section of the march started running down the street knocking down trash cans. I was told later that some attempted to knock down police barricades and police scooters used to guide the marchers. I immediately became uncomfortable because that’s not what I signed up for. I wanted to speak out against injustice—just causing general destruction wasn’t on my agenda. Soon some Occupiers started chanting “F**k the POLICE,” one young white male wearing skinny jeans and a Justin Bieber haircut started yelling “THIS IS WAR, WE WANT WAR!” To which a hoodie-clad young black adult said “Hey, uh we don’t really want war, why don’t you tone that down. I’m about to graduate college in a few months.” The white male kind of laughed and kept moving forward yelling something else.

At various points in the march, as organizers tried to make statements, they were drowned out by Occupiers chanting whatever they saw fit at the time. It didn’t matter if there was a full-on people’s mic happening, they would attempt to push things their way. I asked Daniel Maree, one of the organizers of the #millionhoodies march what he thought of the co-option by Occupy and their actions.”Honestly,” Maree replied “I feel like this is what happens when these emotions build up and they go unchecked and you know, injustice continues, you get it boiling over like this. I’m just happy nobody got hurt.” And while Occupy did help swell the ranks of marchers, I found their actions unacceptable.

This isn’t simply about emotions. This is a consistent streak within certain sections of Occupy. Their goal isn’t a specific action within our current system. Often they want to make a point, show that they’re movement is doing things. In DC, their goal was to get arrested. In NYC, they seemed less concerned with marching for Trayvon and more concerned with occupying as much space as possible with whatever issue that would gather folks to their cause. Occupying.

When Occupy Wall Street first got the national spotlight they were so worried about the co-option of their message, yet they have no problem co-opting others. A couple of Occupiers recognized me and asked if I noticed some of the nonsense that was happening. I said yes and one of them explained that after this march and two months of working with Occupy, she and her friends no longer wanted to be associated with them.

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I guess if you can’t get people to come to your party the next best thing is to crash theirs and try to take it over. Of course they may not appreciate you crapping on their rugs.

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