Right To An Attorney

It should be “the right to a competent attorney” but in this case  the attorney’s left the practice and the law firm never assigned any attorneys to continue the litigation.

The lede

The case of Corey Maples provides a disturbing look at the death penalty system in the United States and underscores how even people facing execution are often not represented by adequate counsel at any stage of the criminal process. In Maples’s case, the attorneys assigned to represent his appeals quit midway through the process, and yet the state of Alabama blamed Maples for his failure to comply with procedural requirements he had no way of fulfilling. Yesterday, the Supreme Court corrected this obvious mistake by ruling that Maples had a right to appeal in a 7-to-2 decision.

Later

Remarkably, the Court’s decision was not unanimous, with Justice Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissenting.

I offer this, attributed to Justice Scalia

What is important that it is necessary to give due process, but it is not necessary that you be guilty.

Apparently, it is not only more important, but paramount to have a process in place, to blindly follow a set of rules, than it is to arrive at justice.

I remember Troy Davis.

More on Repub Actions

This is a follow up on the post yesterday about James Lofgren’s thoughts on Republican strategy.

This by James Fallows at The Atlantic (I include the whole post)

Two days ago I mentioned the “Goodbye to All That” essay by Mike Lofgren, a respected (including by me) veteran Congressional staffer who had worked for Republican legislators on defense and budget issues for nearly 30 years.

If you have not read his essay yet, please read it now.  And then, please return!

Among the important aspects of his essay is that it goes beyond one now-conventional point of “the worse, the better” analysis: that the GOP’s main legislative goal is to thwart Obama, and if that includes blocking proposals that might revive the economy, so much the better for the Republicans next year.

More fundamentally, Lofgren argues that today’s Republicans believe they are better off ifgovernment as a whole is shown to fail, not just this Democratic Administration. Republican hard-liners might seem to have “lost” the debt-ceiling showdown, in that they wound up even less popular than the Democrats are. But in the long view, Lofgren says, unpopularity for anyone in Congress, including their party’s leaders, helps the Republicans: “Undermining Americans’ belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy,” because it buildings a nihilistic suspicion of any public effort, from road-building to Medicare to schools. (Except defense.) As I say, read it for yourself.

When you’re done, consider this message I received today, from another former Congressional staffer whose tenure overlapped almost exactly with Lofgren’s. This too is worth reading carefully, for it advances an important complementary point:

>>Like Mike Lofgren, I am a retired Congressional staffer who worked for a House Member from 1985 until January of this year. Unlike Lofgren, I did not retire voluntarily; my boss, a moderate Democrat, lost his race for re-election last November. I found myself agreeing with virtually everything in Mike’s article and immediately forwarded it to a bunch of my friends, some of whom remain working on the Hill.

Privately, many of us who have worked in Congress since before the Clinton Administration have been complaining about the loss of the respect for the institution by the Members who were elected to serve their constituents through the institution. I don’t think people realize how fragile democracy really is. The 2012 campaign is currently looking to be the final nail in the coffin unless people start to understand what is going on.

One thing that especially resonated with me about Mike’s piece is the importance of “low information” voters. The mainstream media absolutely fails to understand how little attention average Americans really pay to what goes on in all forms of government. During our 2008 race, our pollster taught me (hard to believe it took me 24 years to learn this) that the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress. All the millions of dollars of TV ads, all the thousands of robo-calls and door-knocks, and it all comes down to having a message that will stick in the voters’ minds during the 5 minutes before they walk into the voting booth.

The media likes to call this group “independents,” which implies that they think so long and deeply about issues that they refuse to be constrained by the philosophy of either party. There may be a couple of people out there who fit that definition, but those are not the persuadable voters campaigns are trying to capture. Every campaign is trying to develop its candidate into an easy-to-remember slogan that makes him or her more appealing than the other guy. Actually, because negative campaigning is so effective, they are more often trying to portray the opponent as more objectionable (“I guess I’ll vote for the crook because at least he won’t slash my Medicare”).

I’m writing because now that I have been out of the Beltway Bubble, I have gained a little more perspective on how real people see the work of Washington, and I am scared that they are close to revolt. The debt ceiling debate in particular had me screaming at the TV on more than one occasion because both sides botched it so badly. I would like to hope that news outlets like yours could play a positive role in helping to educate people. But I’m feeling pretty pessimistic at the moment.<<

Further on the implications of this soon.

I excerpt this sentence from above for a short comment

The 2012 campaign is currently looking to be the final nail in the coffin unless people start to understand what is going on.

People will not “start to understand.”  What type of magical thinking is required to think that now, all of a sudden, people will wake up and understand the criticalness of the November 2012 elections?  The Citizens United decision was the Final Nail, it has just taken the body a little longer than expected to expire.

 

A Test

This is an essay type test.  Take all the time you need.  Look up the answers or your supposed answers on the internet.

Leave you answers in comments.  I will grade later.

——————————————————–

1. Who was the POTUS when NAFTA was drafted?

2. Which party controlled congress when NAFTA was passed and sent to POTUS’s desk?

3. Who was the POTUS when CAFTA was drafted?

4. Which party controlled congress when CAFTA was passed and sent to POTUS’s desk?

Now, go read this long piece at TruthOut and thank Steve Benen for bringing it to your attention.

Steve says,

Before this morning, I’d never heard of Mike Lofgren. But James Fallows explained that Lofgren recently retired from a lengthy career as an esteemed Capitol Hill staffer. Fallows characterized him as a respected, knowledgeable figure.

And with this in mind, it was rather striking to read the lengthy piece Lofgren wrote for Truth Out, published yesterday with this headline: “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult.”

To be sure, this Republican aide is not at all a fan of Democrats. But he also believes “nothing … quite matches the modern GOP.”

Citizens United which led to the election debacle last November which led to the debt ceiling crisis of this summer are the latest incarnation of “the rich are not rich enough as long as you have something.”

Not A New Idea

Most people date this neo-conservative movement to the first Reagan administration.

I agree that it is about that time but I see the beginning (of the neo-con movement) being the people behind the U.S. going off the Bretton Woods agreement.  So, instead of governments setting monetary policy, the big banking houses did.

And, things slowly went down hill for the middle-class in the United States.

Then along comes NAFTA negotiated by George H. W. Bush’s administration.  Followed by CAFTA in 2004.  And the middle class got a little worse off.

But the accelerator, the gas on the fire as to how we got here was the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore.

If the recount in Florida was allowed to go on, some say Gore would have won and very possibly the wasteful decade of the oughts would have turned out differently.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

She shared some of her thoughts on the law at a symposium held in her honor at Moritz College of Law in Columbus, Ohio.

State Department’s Sean McCormack Defends Bush Administration’s Human Rights Record

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack extolled the human rights record of the Bush administration at a press briefing yesterday. McCormack’s statement came in response to a question about whether the United States would press Libya to release Fathi al-Jahmi, who has been imprisoned for four years without charges and whose health is so poor he could die if he continues to go without medical treatment [emphasis in original]: