Hell Today

Sasha Abramsky of The American Prospect interviews Bill Kurtis of Cold Case Files about his change of heart on the death penalty:

Explain to me where you were, intellectually, on the death penalty when you really started looking at the issue in detail.

I believed in it, being a lawyer and trained in the system; but that meant I was really on the edge, as most people are. I just assumed it worked, that the guilty were punished and the innocent went free. When I began looking into it and seeing the shocking numbers [of wrongfully convicted individuals] coming out, I changed. Not overnight. We started doing a two-hour special, “Death Penalty on Trial,” and I came upon two things. One was a quote by [Supreme Court Justice] Thurgood Marshall, in which he said, “If people knew what went on in death penalty trials, they’d be against it.” And the second was James Liebman’s study. [Professor Liebman, of Columbia University, headed a study looking at the number of death penalty cases identified as having serious flaws over the decades.]

Former Illinois governor George Ryan, like Kurtis, was a supporter of capital punishment until he dug a bit deeper into how the legal system works for people accused of capital crimes. His last days in office, during which he had to make a decision about whether or not to grant clemency to death row prisoners, are documented in the excellent Deadline, directed by Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson and now out on video. Check it out.

Scott Ritter says US attack on Iran planned for June

A quick note. Leina's surgery went well and she's doing fine. We had 5 days together, which was quite lovely. Now I'm back in L.A. and have much to catch up on, so this is probably it until sometime next week.

Hey, did you go to the calendar page and hear "Bella Ciao"? I had never heard the song before a couple of weeks ago, but now I'm all driving around singing it. Then it's Kortatu with "Xu Atrapatu Arte" (sp?) and other stuff from bad, bad boy Fermin Muguruza. And anything I can find from Troika.

See, when you get all pissed off at really, truly bad things going on, you start feeling emotionally drawn to the people who are siding with you, against the people doing the evil, and then you become not quite so critical of extreme positions taken by your allies. For example: I like The Unseen. No, I love The Unseen. I love their sound, their energy, their shows. As to their politics, I think they're shaky, and I'm drawn to the band more by their emotion and anger than by their "anarchist" politics. But when Bush got sworn into office, I found myself not quite so offended by their lyrics, "Goodbye America, fuck you America," as I normally would have been. I find myself understanding how "America," as defined by its current insane "leaders," might not quite apply to, or appeal to, or be understood by or followed by people who thought they were Americans but who are completely left out of this "America."

What is America now? What is it to the people who live within its borders? Do ya'll care about America beyond its mountains and beaches and forests and fruited plains, all of those pretty tourist points, to the point of caring about the *freedom* [and I might add *freedom from religious monarchy*] that created us as a nation?

Years ago, I worked for about a year and a half for a law firm that handled insurance defense cases. From that short job experience, I can tell you this: yes, oh hell yes, there are some stupid, frivolous, idiotic lawsuits, and they waste everybody's time, energy, and money. But will putting a cap on awards put a stop to frivolous lawsuits? I don't think so.

First, at least here in California, the courts have a process to weed out multiple violators, individuals who file lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit, and I'm going to tell you what the Clerk's Office word for those lawsuits is as soon as it gets from the tip of my tongue to my brain ["nuisance"? "annoyance"? "pernicious"? "pesky"?(?!)]. Well, the tip-of-tongue-to-brain connection seems to be a bit rusty. Anyway, the extremely frivolous are sometimes halted in their tracks by being required to prove before a judge that they have a prima facie case before they even get to the next step of bugging the crap out of the lawyers for the people they are suing.

Second, caps on awards aren't going to stop anyone from filing lawsuits. Many cases are filed which have absolutely no chance of ever going to trial, of which the public is never even aware, and which have relatively small payouts. Let me give you a hypothetical case based on a composite of real cases that I observed, and please bear in mind that it's not even close to being as f*ing ridiculous as the real ones were:

Suppose I go to my local gas station and I park at a gas pump where the person's car before me had a tiny, tiny oil leak and left a tiny, tiny bit of oil behind. I see that teeny, tiny drop of oil. I say to myself, "Hey, baby, let's get rich on this!" I stagger into the gas station, hand on "injured" back, screaming for an ambulance because I slipped on the drop of oil and fell and injured my back and can never work again. I sue the gas station because they didn't clean up the oil left behind by the car in front of me. It's ridiculous, because the gas station attendants can't clean things up instantaneously and are not at fault, and also I'm lying about the whole thing anyway. But the people I'm suing are going to pay a couple thousand dollars to settle the lawsuit, because if they took it to trial it would cost 5 times that amount. Way more. Not in damages, but in the cost of the trial itself.

Is a cap on jury-awarded damages going to put an end to this kind of crap? Use your head. Use your calculator.

Third, most damage awards are overturned anyway and do not end up costing the insured/insurers as much as the jury awarded to the plaintiff. So if you're counting jury awards as a cost of insurance, don't look at the award; look at what actually gets paid out.

Fourth: read this article, which is what got me onto this subject in the first place. Look, when you hear insurers complaining about having to pay out large awards, could you maybe ask them to take a little responsibility for allowing practitioners like this to keep practicing in the first place? Like, could somebody have said, "Gee, Dr. Scheffey, you've been sued 59 times. FIFTY. NINE. TIMES. That's so far beyond the average that I'm afraid we just can't cover someone with a risk like yours"? Well, no. We'd rather keep insuring Dr. Scheffey and then complain when we have a lot of lawsuits. But hey, if Our Dear Leader promises that we can keep insuring Dr. Scheffey, and not have to pay out too much money even when lots of people die and lots of people sue, then let's go for it! Go Bush! Tort reform now! Who cares who dies and who pays? The Far Right Credo: "I've Got Mine, To Hell With You."

Well, I had meant to try to tie in the previous little bit with a discussion about political labeling, but I'm not quite that adept at organizing my thoughts into coherent speech. So I'll limit this one to a short comment.

Most of us who are anywhere to the left of Limbaugh are alarmed, dismayed, distressed, angered, sickened, enraged, and just plain pissed off by the actions of the Bush administration, and so it's tempting to label the president and his rightwing supporters with the most insulting, unpleasant word we can think of: "fascist." This label may fit somewhat, but I'm convinced that the ultimate goal of Bush and Cohorts is something that goes further back in time than fascism. What these evil people are planning on, and will possibly achieve if certain dumbass Democrats don't wake up and really start fighting, is religious monarchy. This is why I sometimes refer to Bush as "Charlemagne." He's not trying to be Hitler, but only because Hitler failed. Bush wants to be Emperor Of The World.

Serfdom, anyone? Holy wars? "Holy American Empire"?

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Update: Matt Stoller is getting there.

Leina and I went out on Wednesday for a late birthday dinner and night out. She has her hair in a red mohawk. My hair is currently blue. So the waitress at Black Angus goes, "Are you guys mods or rockers?" That cracked me up. I told her I don't have enough fashion sense to ever be a mod. The waitress goes, "I don't, either. I buy my clothes at Costco." Which is thumbs up for her.

Later, we went to the local drag king show (which was really entertaining and fun and not campy as I had expected), and again we got labeled. One of the performers was doing a Marilyn Manson lip sync, and he told us beforehand that he was glad to have some "rockers" in the audience.

That's fine. I don't mind the label. But labels can also be limiting and lead to not being able to see and understand anything without filtering it through our small, narrow screen of what we already know of the world. We all have this problem. Being human means having a brain that helps us organize incoming data by automatically attempting to put things into categories. I think it's good to challenge that brain once in a while and step outside the line, enlarge the schema, enlarge your world.

So go to a drag king show.