Random Acts of Chaos

Frederick Mardlin is a 32-year old married father of three who spent three years in jail for a crime that he did not commit. He was wrongfully convicted of burning down his house to collect the insurance. His court-appointed public defense attorney was unable to obtain the funds to retain an electrical expert to testify at his trial. That expert could have testified that the fire was not set intentionally but caused by faulty wiring.

So Fred sat in jail for three years before he was paroled. Because he insists on clearing his name, he is appealing his conviction. Although he is entitled as a matter of law to a court-appointed appellate attorney, the State of Michigan refuses to pay that attorney’s bills. Fortunately, the attorney has agreed to work on Fred’s case free of charge. The attorney has also located a pro-bono electrical expert who is willing to help Fred overturn his conviction.

Fred’s story illustrates how Michigan’s public defense system is often unable to effectively represent its clients and how, despite constitutional guarantees, a court hearing does not ensure a fair just decision. Too often, innocent people go to jail, those who have broken the law receive sentences that are harsher than the facts of their crime warrant.

Faces of Failing Public Defense Systems, a new report issued by the ACLU, ACLU of Michigan and the Campaign For Justice, shows how Michigan’s crumbling public defense system allows innocent individuals to become collateral damage as a result of inadequate legal representation. The report tells the stories of men who were charged with crimes, were inadequately represented by public defense attorneys and consequently incarcerated for years.

jonathan-cunningham:

The government gives patent monopolies to provide an incentive for drug companies to carry through research. This is an incredibly backward and inefficient way to pay for research. It leaves us paying huge amounts of money for cheap drugs. It also often leads to bad medicine.

We can do better – and Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a way. He has introduced a bill to create a prize fund that would buy up patents, so that drugs could then be sold at a free market price. Sanders’s bill would appropriate 0.55% of GDP (about $80bn a year, with the economy’s current size) for buying up patents, which would then be placed in the public domain so that any manufacturer could use them at no cost.

This money would come from a tax on public and private insurers. The savings from lower-cost drugs would immediately repay more than 100% of the tax.

Bernie Sanders is making the practical and realistic suggestion to stop the enforcement of patent monopolies that would pay for itself. It would allow increased competition among researchers, lower costs for the consumer and stop our skyrocketing medical costs. Of course, since all that would be at the cost of corporate exploitation of the sick, it’s a nonstarter in Congress.

azspot:

1. Poor people don’t pay taxes. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Chuck Marr and Brian Highsmith provide the definitive takedown of this myth.

2. The U.S. suffers from high taxes. As measured in terms of total tax revenue as a share of overall GDP the average tax burden for countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2008 was 44.8 percent. The U.S. — 26.1 percent. The U.S. pays less taxes, as a share of GDP, than Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Austria, France, Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, Switzerland and Japan.

3. U.S. corporations are over-taxed. Actually, as measured in terms of share of GDP, the U.S. has the lowest corporate tax burden of any OECD nation. While the official tax bracket may seems high — 35 percent — if one takes into account various loopholes and tax dodges, the effective tax rate is considerably lower, or around 27 percent, which comes in as slightly higher than average for OECD members. And according to ace tax report David Cay Johnston, the bigger you are, the less you pay — the effective tax rate for the biggest U.S. corporations is only about 15 percent.

Less than 18 months before the next presidential election, Republican-controlled statehouses around the country are rewriting voting laws to require photo identification at the polls, reduce the number of days of early voting or tighten registration rules.

Republican legislators say the new rules, which have advanced in 13 states in the past two months, offer a practical way to weed out fraudulent votes and preserve the integrity of the ballot box. Democrats say the changes have little to do with fraud prevention and more to do with placing obstacles in the way of possible Democratic voters, including young people and minorities.

stuffsickpeoplehavetoputupwith:

maritsa:

pantsless:

Just effing glorious. Link in title.

 I’m gasping for air, these reviews are hilarious.

I love this more than words can express. (My review is under “Xenu L.”)

technipol:

From The Atlantic Wire:

She also made a slight dig at President Obama for saying Monday at Arlington National Cemetery that his “most solemn responsibility as president [is] to serve as commander in chief of one of the finest fighting forces in the world.” Answering a question about Memorial Day, Palin said, “This is the greatest fighting force in the world, the U.S. military. It’s not just one of the greatest fighting forces. And I sure hope our president recognizes that. We’re not just one of many. We are the best.”

I swear she’s just a middle-schooler playing dress-up as an adult.

In 2008, a liberal Democrat was elected president. Landslide votes gave Democrats huge congressional majorities. Eight years of war and scandal and George W. Bush had stigmatized the Republican Party almost beyond redemption. A global financial crisis had discredited the disciples of free-market fundamentalism, and Americans were ready for serious change.

Or so it seemed. But two years later, Wall Street is back to earning record profits, and conservatives are triumphant. To understand why this happened, it’s not enough to examine polls and tea parties and the makeup of Barack Obama’s economic team. You have to understand how we fell so short, and what we rightfully should have expected from Obama’s election. And you have to understand two crucial things about American politics.

The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-’70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.

Second, American politicians don’t care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early ’90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that’s not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don’t respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that’s not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don’t respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.

In light of ongoing efforts to restrict women’s access to abortion in health care reform, it is sometimes easy to forget that many women already face nearly insurmountable obstacles to obtaining abortion care. This is particularly true for the more than 200,000 servicewomen currently serving in the armed forces, as well as military dependents. These women face not only a funding ban, which prohibits military insurance from covering the cost of any abortion, except for those necessary to save a woman’s life, but a ban on using military facilities, as well: Even if they pay with their own money, and no federal funds are used, servicewomen and dependents cannot obtain abortions in military treatment facilities, unless they disclose that the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest.

A recent article by Kathryn Joyce, Military Abortion Ban: Female Soldiers Not Protected by Constitution They Defend, which tells the story of a marine named Amy*, puts the plight of military women into stunning focus. Amy was stationed in Fallujah when she realized she was pregnant. Fearful of being ostracized by her male comrades, Amy did not report that her pregnancy was the result of rape. But after her attempt at a self-abortion, using herbs she purchased over the Internet and a sanitized cleaning rod for her rifle, went horribly wrong, she finally went to a military hospital. Shortly thereafter, she was charged under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for having violated the prohibition on having sex in a war zone. She was fined $500 and given a suspended rank reduction.

Most of us think that unsafe and illegal abortions, at least for American women, have been relegated to the pre-Roe era. But this is not so for the hundreds of thousands of women who have volunteered to serve in our military, and for the wives and daughters of soldiers stationed abroad. As the debates over health care continue, we will likely hear about lawmakers’ efforts to maintain the “status quo” when it comes to abortion funding. We would do well to remember what this “status quo” all-too often looks like.

*not her real name

stuffsickpeoplehavetoputupwith:

As Gov. Peter Shumlin took his spot on the granite steps of the Vermont State House, a row of people fanned out behind him wearing bright red t-shirts proclaiming, “Health care is a human right.” The slogan sounded noble, and wildly unrealistic. Until the governor spoke.

“We gather here today to launch the first single-payer health care system in America,” began Shumlin, a Democrat who has been governor barely four months. “To do in Vermont what has taken too long: have a health care system, the best in the world, that treats health care as a right, and not a privilege.”

Moments later, the governor made history, signing a law that sets Vermont on a course to provide health care for all of its 620,000 citizens through a European-style single payer system called Green Mountain Care. Key components include containing costs by setting reimbursement rates for health care providers and streamlining administration into a single, state-managed system. The federal health care reform law would not allow Vermont to enact single payer until 2017; Vermont is asking the administration to grant it a waiver so that it can get there even faster, by 2014.

If you support Vermont and want them to succeed, please sign this petition asking that the government grant the waivers the state will need to actually implement universal health care. Thank you.