alias Bruce.

Foamy the Squirrel on Gay Marriage

Foamy the Squirrel shows Barack "now that I've thought about it..." Obama how to grow some, uh, nuts on the issue of gay marriage.

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist for sharing Jack Cluth's video. 

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.

Memo to gay marriage opponents:

Go ahead and waste your precious years on this earth fighting gay marriage if you want to. Poison yourself with meanness. Suffer in fear. Bring discredit and shame upon the God you claim to follow. Bash your head against the thickening foundation of gay rights until you've beaten yourself senseless. It's your life to waste. 

Allowing gay marriage is going to be the law of the land. You cannot stop it, and you're in hysterics because you know you cannot stop it.

Last week my state, Maryland, became the eighth – with many more to follow – to legalize the right of gays to marry. The meanest of the mean, like you and the Cardinal of Baltimore, now promise to give voters the opportunity to re-lower themselves into the dark ages via a referendum on repeal. Ultimately it won't matter. No matter the number of state referenda to repeal or not, no matter the outcome of the inevitable ruling by the current Supreme Court, in the end, no matter how long it takes, as with slavery and denial of women's voting rights, the irrefutable movement for plain fairness in marriage will prevail, both in jurisprudence and in practice, in Washington and in your town.

There is not a damned thing you can do about this. So go ahead and choose to piss away the gift of your own humanity if you like. It's your life.

One of the most revealing results of the "Stop 'Stop & Frisk'" civil disobedience in NYC last Friday

was that Mayor Michael Bloomberg felt forced to publicly defend the New York Police Department's policy rather than blithely ignore the protest -- and that when pressed, he had no coherent defense to offer.

Stop & Frisk, as you may know, is the NYPD policy of stopping and frisking any person at any time without any probable cause except an officer's feeling that s/he wants to. It's a civil liberties and crime-fighting disaster as well as a human rights obscenity. As I've mentioned earlier in citing New York Civil Liberties Union and NYPD data, nearly 9 in 10 of the stopped and frisked persons are entirely innocent and are not arrested, more than 8 in 10 are black or Latino, and by the current trend more than 700,000 New Yorkers will be arbitrarily stopped and frisked in 2011.

In a protest against the Stop & Frisk policy last Friday in front of the 28th Police Precinct station in Harlem, Princeton professor Cornel West, Revolutionary Communist Party co-founder Carl Dix, Riverside Church Pastor Rev. Stephen Phelps, and dozens of others, including Occupy Wall Street participants from Zuccotti Park, either underwent or risked arrest. The march and standoff in front of the station received widespread media coverage, including stories in the New York Times, New York Daily News, Black Entertainment Television, New York Post, Daily Kos, and elsewhere.

All of this denied Mayor Bloomberg the luxury of ignoring the protest. And his response showed how little defense he could muster. This from an October 21 NYT story:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended the [stop & frisk] tactic on his Friday morning radio show on WOR.

“It’s used in communities where we have lots of guns and lots of murder victims,” he said. “And we’ve brought crime down 35 percent in the last 10 years. We have — I don’t know — I don’t think we’re going to set a record for low murders, but we’ll have the second best year in the history of the city this year, and there’s a reason for those things, and this is one of the tactics.

“People say, ‘Oh, you can do it without that’; well, you know you have — nobody is ever going to — some people don’t want you to do anything,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

The result of doing nothing, he said, would be “a society you can’t live in.”

So Hizzoner, caught embracing a policy that is 90% ineffective and 80% racially targeted, could come up with nothing better to say than, in effect, Well, an unconstitutional policy is better than nothing, especially if it saves lives. As if the only alternative to doing nothing is to create a police state in the City of New York. As if a street sweep with a 90% failure rate is any kind of step toward public safety. As if a viciously racist police protocol is the best we can ask of a city where the rich have more money than they can ever spend and the poor have nothing.

One of the interesting things about the NYT story is that reader comments showed an overwhelming outrage about the injustice of Stop & Frisk. I've said it before and I'm going to keep saying it: We are entering a moment of critical mass in which the dishonest bleatings of corporate politicians and the evasive narratives of corporate journalists are, for most Americans, butting up against the inescapably brutal realities of plutocracy. This is why more than 70% of Americans favor a Millionaires Tax; why the Occupy Wall Street movement has caught fire; and why most Americans mistrust their government, not because they dislike government per se but because they viscerally understand that this government works for the rich and not for us. This raw reality, in spite of the contrived wedges of Tea Party racism and Educated Liberal contempt for "rednecks," is the thread that connects the American left with the right. And with the innately deaf and blind hubris of Washington's monied masters, it is a thread of awareness that will only strengthen with time.

So let's conclude with a comment posted to the NYT story on Friday by "Jrcnyc," whose only error is in thinking that Cornel West is "leading" a movement when, in fact, West simply enjoys the conspicuousness of celebrity in expressing this collaborative (and widely-shared) train of thought. Jrcncy writes:

The mayor's defense of Stop and Frisk is so muddled and unclear that it's almost laughable - except for the fact that hundreds of thousands of New York citizens have their civil rights violated every year because of it. The fact that he's so off-message on such a divisive and unconstitutional policy reveals an underlying fact: that his administration is racist.

If the police were frisking and stopping white, wealthy New Yorkers for any reason -- any reason -- his office would have to regularly justify that policy with coordinated PR campaigns, with press conferences, and with sound-bytes purchased from high-price consultants. The fact that they can evade an obviously common-sense protest by Dr. West with stuttering reasons and no hard evidence is extremely revealing. For an office obsessed with proving all matters of policy with numbers, the only ones he points to are murder numbers. Murders? This policy isn't preventing murders. Prove it.

The anti-stop and frisk chants and signs hovering within the Occupy Wall Street movement are part of a new trend that holds people in power accountable for their abuses. Dr. West is leading a spear of logic and passion that's going to blow a hole open in this issue, and more people will pour through it. For people living in stop and frisk communities, this issue has festered long enough on the margins of public discourse. It's time to act.

Let the Mayor be warned: the protest is a warm-up exercise. If the policy isn't changed, the London-style riots Bloomberg evoked are going to get set off soon enough. The NYPD has no more symbolic good-will left after 9-11. It's a different country and a different city now. His third term will either be marked by a legacy of justice or one of social explosion. So far, he's chosen to bury his head in the sand, muttering about policies he can't explain.

It's never too late to look in the mirror. New York needs to do so tonight.

Another interesting piece, this one by a Yale law professor, on "3 ways Obama could bypass Congress."

Yale constitutional law professor Jack M. Balkin makes an eyebrow-raising argument for three tactics -- one of them bizarre but all of them in Balkin's mind arguably constitutional and doable -- that President Obama can use to get around the debt ceiling crisis if Congress fails to act.

I won't try to restate Balkin's suggestions here -- the guy teaches constitutional law, after all -- but I assure you that his piece is accessible, fascinating, and worth a read. The gist of it is that if Congress's inaction puts Obama in a position of forgoing his constitutional obligation as president to protect the good standing of the U.S. debt, Obama has legal standing to employ some very creative ways to get around Congress.

The White House has publicly insisted that Obama's doing any kind of procedural end-run around Congress is completely off the table. But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that Obama is privately considering such a nuclear option as a last-ditch measure if all else fails. If in fact Obama were to hold such a drastic maneuver in reserve, the smart tack for him to take right now would be to vehemently and convincingly deny it. This would prevent the opposition from preparing for all-out political and legal war against such a move, which is certainly what would happen if Obama were to telegraph these intentions. But if President Polite, consistent with his familiar political persona, were to soundly dismiss going nuclear but then, moments before the August 2 deadline, suddenly whirl and push the red button, it would catch his adversaries off-guard, denying them the benefit of a screaming public campaign to try to head him off. Further, Obama could easily square his sudden turnaround with his prior denials. All he'd have to say is that he had remained privately certain that a deal would be reached, rendering the nuclear option a non-issue, but that when it became imminently clear that Congress was about to carry the country over the cliff, he was constitutionally obligated -- and empowered -- to prevent it.

Hmm -- what was it that Obama taught as a professor? Oh yeah: constitutional law.

Just saying.

I still think, from both my cynical and naive sides, that the clowns in this circus will find a way to bounce a ball on a seal's nose and appear before the cameras to congratulate themselves on averting catastrophe.

But we won't know until we know.