alias Bruce.

There's a false rumor going around that the infamous Koch Bros are paying George Zimmerman's legal fees.

There are plenty of reasons to boycott Koch Industries, but not this bogus claim, which gives ammunition to those who want to trash liberal credibility. What is true is that Koch supported an organization that supported the creation of Stand Your Ground laws, although there is no direct link between Koch and the Florida law. See Snopes on this.

The fatal flaw in the Obama health care mandate is not its constitutionality.

Sure, one can argue that it is constitutional on the grounds that mandated health insurance, similarly to mandated car insurance, is necessary to avoid unfair distribution of the cost of illness. Or one can argue that the health mandate is unconstitutional in placing an undue burden on people to buy something, since one can choose not to drive but no one will be exempt from the health law.

But constitutionality is not the real problem.

The real problem is that the Obama health mandate forces people to buy from a completely unworkable private health care system – in a purported attempt to spare people the unworkability of the very same private health care system. It's absurd, of course. But that is how a corporate-financed electoral system works: only ideas considered tolerable by the corporate sector stay on the table. That is why Obama, after arguing eloquently for a public option during his presidential campaign, dropped it and fled the issue after taking office when he met resistance from his sponsors (and from the even more shameless corporate shills across the aisle).

And so our president, under the watchful eye of the health care industry, offers his version of health care reform: force Americans to buy it from the very mechanism that broke it. This at a time when so much of the industrialized world has evolved to the basic realization that public health care is the most economically logical and humanly fair approach.

Yes, there is good in the Affordable Care Act. Expanding eligibility for coverage is good. Forbidding the savage denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions is good.

But the entire Act is built upon a flagrant lie: the assumption that the American corporate health insurance system can deliver care affordably and efficiently to all Americans. This is a fantasy that only corporate-financed politicians – and some gullible citizens seduced by the hallucination of mega-corporate market "freedom" – can believe. It has forced Obama into a box where he is staking his claim of full access to health care on the pointless premise of forcing people to buy health coverage in a rapacious private-ruled market. And, ironically, even this laughable version of "reform" may very well be trashed by a Supreme Court that sometimes seems nostalgic for Dickensian capitalism.

So the grand question that the top court in the land will now decide for us is: Shall we remain free to suffer without health insurance, or shall we be required by law to suffer the cruel price of purchasing it from our masters?

Update on the Trayvon Martin killing:

CNN reports that George Zimmerman's attorney has now declared that the Florida stand your ground law doesn't figure in the case, and that his client will argue straight-up self-defense. The stand your ground law, the lawyer says, applies primarily to people being threatened in their homes, while Zimmerman, he claims, has a broader case for self-defense.

This seems a curious stance, since all the readings of the law I have seen, such as this one, clearly describe it as applying anywhere a person has a right to be, whether a public or private place. As such, stand your ground appears to offer Zimmerman's best chance at avoiding or beating prosecution. If a burly adult who actively chases a slender unarmed 17-year-old and then shoots him can't claim self-defense under the Swiss-cheese stand your ground law, how in the world is he going to make that claim under the traditionally more stringent standards of conventional self-defense?

It may be that Zimmerman's lawyer is retreating from the sheer public odiousness of a stand-your-ground defense, now that even the two Republican sponsors of the infamous Florida law are saying that the law doesn't protect Zimmerman and are calling for his arrest.

So, just as the law's authors are distancing themselves from him, perhaps Zimmerman's attorney is trying to distance his client from this now globally-detested law. Especially since Zimmerman is already a widely reviled figure, with public outrage spreading and unfavorable media coverage everywhere.

You could think of it as a lawyer in a rickety house hustling his client into the next room as the ceiling collapses.

At any rate, it looks like a desperate move by the attorney, and it may not be his last.

Not that there isn't a feasible chance that Zimmerman will get off, with or without a trial. But if he does, it may make the Rodney King riots look like a Sunday parade.

BTW, here is an interesting piece detailing a variety of cases in which Florida's stand your ground law has been used to fend off criminal charges for homicides in which the killers would otherwise likely have been indicted.

And here is a fact you personally need to know: although Florida was the first to enact a stand your ground law, similar laws have since been adopted by at least 25 states – that's half of America – including Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. Think about that the next time some stranger pushes a confrontation with you.

Update re: the case of Mark Byron, who a judge punished for bad-mouthing his estranged wife on Facebook:

Byron emailed me yesterday in response to my recent post, in which I criticized his judgment in trash-talking his soon-to-be ex-wife on his Facebook page while I also pointed to the real freedom-of-speech questions his case raises. His email to me was polite and reasonable, and so I am reprinting it here (minus his contact information), followed by my own take on what he says.

MARK BYRON'S EMAIL:

Bruce,

Thanks for taking the time to write about me on your blog.  I'd like to encourage you to take a second look at my story, along with the facts of my case.  You make some great points-  that this is in fact a very interesting case to everyone.  Some of your statements about me are a little unfair, though.  I encourage you to take a look at the now public posts on my Facebook wall, for starters.  www.facebook.com/byronphoto - there, you'll see the confession email from the fellow who 'gave' my soon-to-be ex-wife his login credentials to Facebook which allowed her to see my private posting.  I agree with you that the site is not as public as some think that it is - however, I have more than 12 years in IT background.  I am an MCSE for example - and understand a great deal about privacy and security on computers as well as on Facebook.  I utilize groups on Facebook and used every bit of available security that Facebook has to offer.  Please consider writing a follow up once you've had a chance to take a closer look at my story.  Feel free to call me or write me with any questions you may have.

Sincerely,

Mark Byron

MY TAKE:

Byron, a New York photographer, is clearly staying on top of his story online, and I commend him for that. As I wrote previously, there is no way for we bystanders to know how right Byron may or may not be in having called his wife evil and vindictive, or how right she may or may not be in having filed for a protective order and claimed that the comments on his Facebook page frightened her. That is between the two of them and the court. What is clear, though, is that Byron badly overestimated the privacy that Facebook allegedly affords him and his FB "friends." Whatever his IT background, it appears that he still holds this mistaken belief, as shown in his statement in his email about "the fellow who 'gave' my soon-to-be ex-wife his login credentials to Facebook which allowed her to see my private posting." Truth is, in real terms there is no such thing as a "private posting" on Facebook. Facebook is so hackable that, with or without someone's willingly handing over a person's login info, anything posted there is at the mercy of anyone who has sufficient skills and ill intent. Posting anything on Facebook in the belief that it will be seen "only" by your "friends" is excruciatingly naive at best. It is a mistake that I hope and trust Byron will not repeat. Meanwhile, the issue of what a person has the free-speech right to say and not say on Facebook remains a legal football. With users' erratic learning curve on the limitations of social media privacy, the technical reality that all Facebook speech is de facto public doesn't necessarily mean that FB users who post provocative things intend for them to have meaning beyond their "friends" circle. But right now judges have tons of room to interpret, and make, law on this. Which is why the smart thing for we users to do is to treat such media as if they are entirely public.

So what does Tuesday's court ban of Occupy Wall Street camping in Zuccotti Park

really mean for OWS?

The short answer is that we don't know. The eviction could mean that occupiers will insistently return to Zuccotti with tents, and risk almost sure arrest to dramatize the repression of the occupation by the city and its monied sponsors (read: banks and others spooked by the newly unrestful peasantry). It could mean that the park will remain a site for (carefully police-controlled and -monitored) protest without further attempts at overnight stays. It could mean that former park occupiers will take residency in other public NYC spaces, or move cleverly and strategically from one site to another. It could mean that OWS in NYC will graduate to overtly political organizing that is not dependent on specific spaces. It could mean that the NYC occupation, already facing the question of what was to happen as winter descended, will be unintentionally strengthened and pushed to the next level of practical function by the city's forced eviction and the attention and outrage it has garnered. It could mean that OWS will accelerate toward a splintering into factions with differing agendas for what is wrong with American capitalism and what is to be done about it. Or it could mean any combination of these things, along with things not yet envisioned. OWS is a nationwide and international phenomenon, and the lessons of Oakland and Portland and many other cities, in addition to New York, are neither coalesced nor completed.

There is one clear thing, however, that the eviction does not mean. It does not mean the end of what OWS represents, which is a broad anger with the corruption and unfairness of the American (and global) economy and a fierce desire for remedies. That anger and hunger -- reflected not only in the shared actions and declarations of occupiers but in national opinion polls about taxes on millionaires and reining in the rule of the rich -- is still here because the conditions that create and sustain it are still here. So, like mercury in a maze, the anger will flow from one closed channel to the next open one. And the next. The richest of the rich, who like all ruling classes lack the ability to save themselves from themselves, will ensure through their reflexive greed and ironclad hubris that the anger and hunger of the rest of us is steadily nurtured via a regime of obscene unfairness and economic and ecological unsustainability. 

The funny thing about repression and injustice is that its inability to stop itself also makes for unstoppable and ever-shifting resistance.

What country do you live in?

Are you okay with this?

This was posted on the American Progressive Party's Facebook page here.

Thanks to Sandy.

Two more questions to ask about Justice Clarence Thomas.

The first and less interesting (if more judicially pressing) question is why Thomas has so far refused to recuse himself from an upcoming Supreme Court argument regarding the constitutionality of health care reform in which he has a clear conflict of interest, since his family has financial connections to organizations lobbying against the reform legislation. The answer to that question is obvious: Thomas, judging from his history, is a boorishly cynical and self-interested man.

The second question, though, is more provocative. This excerpt from a February 13 New York Times story sets the stage:

A week from Tuesday, when the Supreme Court returns from its midwinter break and hears arguments in two criminal cases, it will have been five years since Justice Clarence Thomas has spoken during a court argument.

If he is true to form, Justice Thomas will spend the arguments as he always does: leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, rubbing his eyes, whispering to Justice Stephen G. Breyer, consulting papers and looking a little irritated and a little bored. He will ask no questions.

In the past 40 years, no other justice has gone an entire term, much less five, without speaking at least once during arguments, according to Timothy R. Johnson, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. Justice Thomas’s epic silence on the bench is just one part of his enigmatic and contradictory persona. He is guarded in public but gregarious in private. He avoids elite universities but speaks frequently to students at regional and religious schools. In those settings, he rarely dwells on legal topics but is happy to discuss a favorite movie, like “Saving Private Ryan.”

The Times piece goes to say that Thomas's only utterances on the bench are when he announces majority opinions rote from written text, relying on Latin and formal legal terms and, unlike most of the other justices, providing no explanations for laypersons in the courtroom. The article also cites the reasons Thomas has given for his silence on the bench: he is self-conscious about his country Georgia accent; he is being polite to petitioners; he thinks the justices talk too much.

So what gives with The Justice Who Has Nothing To Say?

I have never met Clarence Thomas. But it seems to me that all of his explanations for his behavior make a sad kind of sense. Everything I have seen of Thomas from the Anita Hill hearings onward is consistent with his being insecure, uncomfortable with his origins, and intimidated by his peers – and therefore overly formal, pompous, and defiantly reticent in a sneering, adolescent kind of way. That is the way people act when they feel they don't belong where they are. And if we know one thing, it is that Clarence Thomas has never belonged on the Supreme Court.

Clarence Thomas is the rare African-American man who is over- instead of under-employed. He is under-prepared and under-qualified for the position he holds. He was shoehorned into his job – in one of President George H.W. Bush's cannier political moves – in a Faustian bargain that gave Thomas an undeserved appointment in exchange for Thomas's shilling for right-wing ideology and using his blackness as a defense against opponents of his confirmation. I remember those hearings well: how Thomas called criticism of his qualifications and well-founded accusations of sexual harassment against him a "high-tech lynching;" how senators folded rather than reject an unqualified Supreme Court nominee who happened to be black.

Justice Clarence Thomas is the Republican Party's robed whore. And I believe he knows it. And having that self-knowledge has really got to suck.

It's enough to make any man surly, self-loathing, defensive, and uncommunicative.

The costs of torture,

which some news outlets (including NPR) still coyly call "harsh interrogation," continue to mount. The latest consequence is a judge's ruling that a key witness cannot testify in the trial of an accused terrorist bomber because the witness's name was obtained by torture (the judge didn't use the word but it's clear it's what he meant). The defendant, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was held for years in a secret CIA prison overseas and at Guantanamo.

Thank God for what remains of an independent judiciary. Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan spoke for the missing conscience of national security when he declared in his ruling, "the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests. We must follow it not only when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction. To do less would diminish us and undermine the foundation upon which we stand."

The torture issue is, of course, about far more than the vanity of our moral self-esteem. It is, first and foremost, about the fact that torture is wrong. Torture is wicked. Torture is evil.

The fact that we are even discussing these things -- waterboarding and other U.S. torture methods, secret U.S. prisons abroad -- pretty much screams an indictment of the contemporary United States of America.

So now California's Proposition 8 and much of Arizona's immigration law

have been blocked by federal judges, which is good news. This is the Judicial Branch at its best: defending fairness even when hordes of voters are okay with bigotry. We saw this with the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, and it's good to see it now. Of course, neither of these two vile laws has yet reached the Supreme Court, although they likely will. Meanwhile, the more momentum built by lower-court victories, the better.

New Robes for the Supreme Court Following Its Corporate Contributions Decision.

Thanks to  Laurie.