By Lauren Mayer, on Tue Aug 20, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET
(That title makes more sense if you hum it to the tune of the line, “You say either, and I say either”)
Within moments of the Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act, it seemed like every solidly red state jumped at the chance to reinstate the kinds of laws that the invalidated section of the act had kept in check. Stringent ID requirements, cutting voting hours, eliminating polling places in predominantly Democrat-leaning neighborhoods, and refusing to let college students continue to vote in their state of residence. (Which, by the way, is unconstitutional – there’s nothing in the residency requirement that says an address doesn’t count if it’s a dorm, frat house, or off-campus house no matter how many empty pizza boxes are in the kitchen.) (Which, by the way, you’d think Tea Partiers would remember since they like to quote the constitution so often . . . but then again, homophobes who use the bible as their justification are good at conveniently forgetting the other things the bible forbids, such as mixing fabrics and getting tattoos, much less death penalty for cursing your parents or pulling out during intercourse . . . but I digress)
The speed with which southern states jumped into voter suppression after the decision prompted many people to use the analogy, ‘the body wasn’t even cold yet.’ It reminded me of the urban legend about savvy New Yorkers finding apartments by combing the obituaries. But I was less offended by the speed than by the overkill. There are a variety of studies of actual voter fraud, but the number of proven cases is between 10 and 15 – that’s from 2000 to 2010, with approximately 600 million votes cast during that time. Meanwhile, there are multiple cases of politically-appointed state election commissioners going to great lengths to ‘cleanse’ the voting rolls, harrassing tens of thousands of people and winding up not finding more than a couple of cases – not of voter fraud or dead people voting, but typos and other clerical errors. Changing voting requirements to prevent the rare case of fraud is like using a nuclear weapon to kill one cockroach in your kitchen. (Mind you, I lived in a few rundown apartments in New York for 5 years and would have considered it, especially the night I was awakened by a noise in the kitchen and saw a foot-long tail coming out of a box of Rice Krispies . . . .but I digress)
Since claims of voter fraud are either incredibly inflated or just plain fraudulent, I decided to fraudulently turn from a suburban Jewish mom into a blues singer to complain about it. (And as a result, I finally learned the word for that phenomenon when you say a somewhat unusual word over and over again, like ‘kidney’ or ‘detrimental,’ and it starts to sound weird and lose its meaning . . . check out the song to find out!)
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Aug 14, 2013 at 2:30 PM ET
MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” talks with Piper Kerman, the real-life inspiration behind the series, “Orange is the New Black”, and Jeff Smith, a former Missouri state
senator who read Kerman’s memoir while in prison on campaign finance violations, about the prison system in the U.S. and AG Holder’s recent remarks about mandatory prison minimums.
(Click here to read Jeff Smith’s body of work about his time behind bars.)
By Mark Nickolas, on Wed Aug 14, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET
From Pure Politics, CN2:
The revelations about the National Security Agency’s phone tracking programs are only the latest iteration of the lengths the government has gone to stretch the law in the name of national security, said a former Kentucky political consultant.
Mark Nickolas, now a film school graduate, was selected to film a documentary on Abdullah al-Kidd, who along with the ACLU, has sued the government after authorities detained Kidd in the wake of 9-11 under what’s called the federal material witness law. The film is called A Cloud of Suspicion.
Kidd, a Kansas-born college football player in Idaho who had only recently converted to Islam, was arrested in March 2003 at Dulles Airport and held under the material witness law under the guise of being called as a witness against a fellow Muslim and University of Idaho student. Kidd was held for 15 months and never called to testify.
The New York Times first reported on Kidd’s saga and has followed it as Kidd and the ACLU have taken it to court. Now the ACLU granted Nickolas access to some of its information and key players as Nickolas puts together the film, which he said will show how the Bush administration overreached, the Obama administration failed to correct it and the U.S. Supreme Court has failed to properly check the powers, including when it comes to “abuse” of the federal material witness law.
“You don’t have the same constitutional rights as a witness. You don’t have Miranda rights because you’re not being charged as a criminal,” Nickolas told Pure Politics (2:30 of the video). You’re being held as a witness. So it’s more insidious than what we had ever done before.
(2:30)
“From One Second to the Next,” the rather unlikely film below, came together when AT&T approached the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog and asked if he would direct a series of short films warning people about the dangers of texting while driving.
The result is haunting. It focuses on four accidents, some of them fatal, and Herzog aims his camera squarely at the faces of both victims and perpetrators, asking them to describe in detail what happened and the aftermath. Herzog emphasizes the change in civilization he perceives in part by examining an accident in which an Amish family was killed and another in which a horse-shoer’s truck was involved.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Jul 16, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
Let’s start with what did not happen in a Sanford, Florida courtroom this past weekend. No, Trayvon Martin is not Emmett Till. Not unless you believe that a jury that deliberated for 67 minutes before acquitting Till’s killers is comparable to the panel that slogged for 12 consecutive hours, 16 hours total, to weigh George Zimmerman’s fate. Not unless you equate a travesty in Mississippi that allowed the victim’s mother to be quizzed about whether she had a burial policy on her child, that permitted defense lawyers to argue that acquittal would make the jurors’ white forefathers turn in their grave, with the universally applauded professionalism of the trial judge in Sanford, and an evidentiary playing field that seemed if anything tilted toward the prosecution. (Pre-trial rulings shielded the jury from ever hearing unflattering details that Trayvon sought to purchase a gun and had a poor disciplinary history in school).
No, the Zimmerman trial and the consternation in many quarters over the verdict is not responsible for reigniting racial tensions in America. To the contrary, it only laid bare what we already know too well—that too many blacks and whites circle each other in exaggerated fear, through lenses so fractured that a black child out of place can look like a menace, while a nervous, plodding white man can seem an affront to a young black man’s dignity and manhood.
And no, some of George Zimmerman’s defenders aren’t playing some vicious race card by pointing out the slew of teenaged black on black deaths in the inner city, and wondering why the outrage is more muted. To the contrary, they are speaking a truth that more black politicians and activists ought to be galvanized about: that the young, African American and poor are most at risk from each other.
I wish I could say with more confidence what actually did happen. Three weeks of obsessive trial watching did not resolve for me the question of which unwise act was more meaningful legally: one man recklessly following another and then confronting him without the license that a badge confers, or another young man landing blows and running the risk that the guy he struck might be bringing a gun to a fistfight. Forensic testimony didn’t shed light on whether Zimmerman pulled a trigger because he was enraged or because he was taking a pounding that had him thinking worse was coming. I still don’t know whether the prosecution’s failure to put on testimony from people in his church or community who knew the innocent, sunny side of Trayvon Martin was the product of overly cautious trial tactics or a result of looking and finding the cupboard bare.
And I wish, against all odds, that the millions of Americans who share those uncertainties won’t do the easiest thing. That would be to let the ambiguities of this case merge with disdain at the demagoguery over the result to create the moral dodge of wishing it would all fade away. The people who are about to overplay their outrage aren’t all wrong, not by any stretch. They are right to wonder how long it will take for the wrong interpretation of this trial to spin off a tragic imitation. They are right to remind us that Zimmerman’s defense looks nothing like the advocacy most defendants of any color receive when their freedom is imperiled: the lure of publicity and the money raised from the backlash at the media’s rush to judgment made Zimmerman a magnet for a high quality lawyering that is rare in criminal courtrooms. And they are right when they remind us that one’s view of the justice system correlates much too much with race and status. When the demonstrations and sensational tweets are done, all of the above will remain the same.
They call themselves “recovering politicians”—political figures whose careers and dreams have come crashing down because of scandals. Two of them are Missourians.
State Senator Jeff Smith was a rising star in the Democratic Party when he went to federal prison for a year for lying to federal investigators about a minor campaign finance law violation. Former Speaker of the House Rod Jetton was looking at a lucrative career as a political consultant when he became entangled in a one-night stand of rough sex. He avoided prison by pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge. But his political career, like Smith’s, was ruined.
Smith knew as soon as he heard that an associate had been charged with a series of non-campaign crimes that he was political toast. “In just a few moments of weakness in that first campaign, I now realized that I’d thrown away everything that I’d worked for all my life,” he told county officials last November.
And Jetton realized as soon as his incident became public that he could not avoid admitting what he’d done—to his father, a Baptist minister. “That pretty much strips your pride away,” he has told us.
Their book is called “The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis.” Smith and Jetton are two of about a dozen former office-holders whose lives have taken new directions since their falls from grace. Jetton now is in private business and is president of a political newspaper that covers the Capitol. Smith now is a political science college teacher in New York and has written several political articles for national magazines.
The book: The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis, …
AUDIO: Jetton interview 14:34
AUDIO: Smith speech to Mo. Assn. of Counties 1:05:00
