Only one response to this is possible:

From the Talking Heads Album Fear of Music — , “Animals”

They say they don’t need money

They’re living on nuts and berries

They say animals don’t worry

You know animals are hairy?

They think they know what’s best

They’re making a fool of us

They ought to be more careful

They’re setting a bad example…

Simply being poor is becoming, more and more, a criminal offense. This is not because people in power got together in smoked filled rooms and said, “Let’s implement policies that lock more and more people into poverty.” Nor did we we evolve into homo sapiens because a group of australopithicus africani decided they wanted smaller teeth and less prominent brow ridges. It’s because the current system of bullying low income Americans works out for the 1%.

So they support and implement laws guaranteed to make thousands of Americans even more insecure. A frightened workforce is a malleable workforce.

And an imprisoned workforce is even better.

Suppose your spouse died and you found yourself legally and personally treated as nothing more than a roommate?

As you can imagine, I get howls of protest about this question, mostly with the individual questioned claiming that an innocent person has never been executed.

Well, now it has been proven unequivocally that this is not true.

And where did this wrongful execution take place?

Where else, but Texas:

He was the spitting image of the killer, had the same first name and was near the scene of the crime at the fateful hour: Carlos DeLuna paid the ultimate price and was executed in place of someone else in Texas in 1989, a report out Tuesday found.

Even “all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them,” and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.

Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is “emblematic” of legal system failure.

DeLuna, 27, was put to death after “a very incomplete investigation. No question that the investigation is a failure,” Liebman said.

This is why you never trust eyewitnesses. In this case, the guys did look alike, but a tiny bit of real investigation would have turned up the error and the real killer.

The police, however, were busy covering their own negligence.

That night Lopez called police for help twice to protect her from an individual with a switchblade.

“They could have saved her, they said ‘we made this arrest immediately’ to overcome the embarrassment,” Liebman said.

The story lays it out. Contradictory evidence, official misconduct, incompetent representation, and even the real killer confessing to the crime.

There are so many rhetorical questions I could ask at this point, so I will skip it and just say:

Executions.Must.Stop.

So, in fact, they have not stopped abortions in the state of Mississippi. They’ve stopped safe abortions.

But hey, no biggie.

He also boasts about the level of intimidation abortion providers face in the glorious state of Mississippi:

Three doctors perform abortions in the state of Mississippi. They fly in from Birmingham. They’re wearing masks…They go in the back door in the parking garage

Gee, why do you think that is, Bubba?

It’s not because these doctors are ashamed. It’s because these doctors are brave, but not stupid enough to openly court being murdered – or having their families hurt or harassed.

Via Crooks and Liars

The last time, the target was black voters and the rationale for removing names was the voters were convicted felons. This time the target is Hispanic voters and the rationale offered that they are “illegal immigrants”:

The full universe of potentially ineligible voters that state elections officials plan to check for possible removal from the roles is about 180,000, a spokesman for the Division of Elections said Friday, reports David Royse of the News Service of Florida.

Elections spokesman Chris Cate told the News Service that in all, when matching voter rolls against newly available citizenship data from the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, officials found that number of possible matches, and began further investigating each one to see if they were likely to be wrongly registered to vote…

But earlier this week it wasn’t clear how many more names might eventually be checked. On Friday, Cate said the larger number was the total identified so far, but that it will take some time to further cull through that list to determine which names are most likely accurately identified as non-citizens.

(Emphasis added)

A list of “suspect voters?” Matching names to voter rolls? Anyone who remembers the 2000 presidential election, and is up on what happened in Florida is going to find this nastily familiar.

This news story was aired in Great Britain in the wake of the last election. It goes into devastating and well-documented detail about how the election was stolen in Florida. But one of the most telling moments, one that helps explain the mystifying inertia of Democratic leadership in the wake of that fiasco, comes near the end, at about the 11:35 mark, when reporter Greg Palast talks to Democrats at a $5,000 a plate fundraiser.

It’s back to champagne politics as usual. One Democrat, a big shot at the soiree, whispered they would have done the same as Katherine Harris [Florida Elections official who oversaw the purging of thousands of legal Democratic voters from the rolls] if they had the chance.

The Democratic Party Chairman, Bob Poe, who was apparently attending that fundraiser, does bitterly denounce the disenfranchisement of voters in this clip. But here in 2012, with our greater awareness of the divide between rich and poor, that unnamed Democratic fat cat whispering his contempt for the vote resonates painfully. For many Democrats back then, it was a shock to discover how little the integrity of the vote mattered to the people in power, Democrat or Republican. Those of us (like the Black Caucus) who objected too loudly and too persistently were essentially told to sit down and shut up. It was an sign of just how much big money had come to matter, and how little the rest of us did.

The Republicans plainly haven’t changed. Have the Democrats?

We’ll see.

A person selling gun range targets modeled after slain Florida teen Trayvon Martin says that their “main motivation was to make money off the controversy.”

WKMG’s Mike DeForest reported on Friday that the unidentified seller told him that the targets “sold out in 2 days.”

“The response is overwhelming,” the seller said.

And people ask me why I have a problem with capitalism.

Saying he had no discretion under state law, a judge sentenced a Jacksonville, Florida, woman to 20 years in prison Friday for firing a warning shot in an effort to scare off her abusive husband.

Marissa Alexander unsuccessfully tried to use Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law to derail the prosecution, but a jury in March convicted her of aggravated assault after just 12 minutes of deliberation.

The case, which was prosecuted by the same state attorney who is handling the Trayvon Martin case, has gained the attention of civil rights leaders who say the African-American woman was persecuted because of her race.

So, this means Zimmerman is going to get at LEAST 20 years for actually murdering some one, right?

She said she escaped and ran to the garage, intending to drive away. But, she said, she forgot her keys, so she picked up her gun and went back into the house. She said her husband threatened to kill her, so she fired one shot.

“I believe when he threatened to kill me, that’s what he was absolutely going to do,” she said. “That’s what he intended to do. Had I not discharged my weapon at that point, I would not be here.”

Alexander’s attorneys tried to use the state law that allows people to use potentially deadly force anywhere they feel reasonably threatened with serious harm or death.

But a previous judge in the case rejected the request, saying Alexander’s decision to go back into the house was not consistent with someone in fear for her safety, according to the Florida Times Union newspaper.

Uh huh. According to this logic, Zimmerman is guilty as sin.

Anybody want to bet Zimmerman skates with a lesser sentence?

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See, we non-millionaires need to recognize the fact that we’re losers and that wealthy folks like Romney are wiser and more competent and should be running things.

It’s an assumption endemic on the libertarian right. Free market conservatives apparently believe that everybody, deep down, wants to be rich — and if we don’t, there’s something wrong with us. Therefore, anyone who’s not fabulously wealthy has failed (i.e., “lost”) Never mind that there are countless people who decide to enter professions they know are unlikely to make them millionaires even if they’re very successful in their field, like social work, teaching, most artistic endeavors… In the mind of many conservatives, the very fact that someone made such a choice indicates a problem that renders him or her unfit as a decision maker.

It’s a pretty consistent theme when you listen to the GOP, who seem to be constantly talking over the heads of the 99% to… well, someone else. Mitt Romney, for instance, thinks that instead of getting student loans, or finding jobs in today’s high unemployment America, young folks should just borrow the money from their parents to pay their tuition or start their own business.

Romney: This kind of divisiveness, this attack of success, is very different than what we’ve seen in our country’s history. We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.

That’s right. All those young people now struggling with debt and unemployment are just too proud and pigheaded to hit up Pater for the scratch. Really, thats soooo silly! Bite the bullet and go to Mom and Dad. The guv’nor will fuss and grumble a bit, but in the end he can sell one of the paintings from his collection or something.

This is what happens when politicians get into the habit of speaking and acting with their biggest donors in mind. They forget that not everyone is an attendee at a $1,000 a head fundraiser, like this one:

Mitt Romney What a home this is! What grounds these are, the pool, the golf course. You know, if a Democrat were here, he’d look around and say ‘No one should live like this.’ Republicans come here and say, ‘Everyone should live like this!’ (‘Exactly,’ someone murmurs off-camera among the laughter and applause)

No doubt many people in that audience actually believe that Democrats are a bunch of wild-eyed radicals who want to take away everyone’s pools, golf courses, and private dachas and force them to live in public housing, but I think most of us in the 99% know better. What a Democrat like Barack Obama would likely say is, “Not everyone lives like this.” Something apparently lost on Romney and his fans.

The best response to the belief that income=competence and fulfillment can be found in Citizen Kane. It’s a quote from the most humane and canny character in the film, Mr. Bernstein. A reporter points out that someone Mr. Bernstein has dismissed as brainless made an awful lot of money. Bernstein replies:

Well, it’s no trick to make a lot of money – if all you want is to make a lot of money.