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Fatal Shootings By L.A. County Police Officers Jump By Nearly 70 Percent | Fifty four people were fatally shot by Los Angeles County police officers during 2011, a nearly 70 percent increase from the number of law enforcement killings in the county during the previous year. However, the rise in fatal shootings by police coincides with historically low rates of overall homicides in the area. The Los Angeles Times reports that out of the 612 people killed in the county last year, “nearly 1 in every 10 such deaths occurred at the hands of law enforcement officers.”

Politics

Republican Congressman Attacks Commerce Secretary, Doubts He Actually Suffered From Seizure

By Ali Gharib on Jun 12, 2012 at 5:50 pm

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX)

More than a day after Karl Rove’s Super PAC had to apologize for suggesting alcohol was involved in Commerce Secretary John Bryson’s seizure-induced car accident, a far right-wing Republican Congressman is casting doubt on the reported cause of the crash this weekend in California.

Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald reports that, during an appearance on American Family Association Radio, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) mocked Bryson’s accident, wondered if a seizure had indeed caused the crash, and suggested Bryson was unfit for his position in government. Launching an attack on President Obama’s cabinet — “These are not the kind of people that you want heading up the country; they’re not honorable, honest people” — he said:

You got Bryson out in California. It’s really unusual to have a seizure cause you to have one wreck and then cause you to put your car in gear and keep going until you have another wreck. That kind of seizure is really unusual, y’know?…

That’s who’s in charge of keeping businesses going — a guy that crashes his car from car to car.

Watch the video posted by Salon:

There’s an entirely plausible situation that could have led to the multiple crashes and obviates Gohmert’s theorizing about a conspiracy: Automatic transmission cars, by far more common today, stay in gear unless they are taken out of gear. When the brakes are not depressed, idling cars move forward at low speeds. Though all the details of Bryson’s crash are unknown, this likely scenario could have caused his car to keep moving and striking other vehicles.

During Gohmert’s remarks, one of the hosts of the right-wing Christian radio show can be seen and heard laughing.

Justice

BREAKING: Johnson & Johnson Drops ALEC

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jun 12, 2012 at 5:43 pm

Pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson announced today that they are dropping their membership from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Johnson and Johnson has been facing mounting pressure following a push from Color of Change and other progressive groups to leave the conservative agenda-setting group.

ALEC is responsible for crafting voter suppression legislation that has been used in state houses across the country, and the “Stand Your Ground” law that originally protected Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. Johnson and Johnson is the latest in a huge wave of groups leaving ALEC.

Other groups that have dropped ALEC include: Walmart, Amazon.com, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft, Wendy’s, Mars, Inc., Arizona Public Service, the National Board for Professional Teaching StandardsScantron, The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Kaplan, Procter & Gamble, Yum! Brands, five Pennsylvania legislators, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Reed Elsevier, American Traffic Solutions, Intuit, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

NEWS FLASH

Gohmert: ENDA Is Part Of Obama’s ‘War On Religion’ | Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) lashed out at the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) today while speaking on the radio with two hate groups. He told Tony Perkins that protecting LGBT people from unfair treatment is “part of this administration’s ongoing war on religion, on particularly Judeo-Christian values.” Gohmert also made the false claim that Christian schools will be forced to hire gay teachers, even though religious schools are specifically exempt under ENDA. Listen to it:

(HT: RightWingWatch.)

NEWS FLASH

U.N. Calls Syria Conflict ‘Civil War’ For The First Time | For the first time since the Arab Spring uprising began against Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, a senior United Nations official referred to the conflict as a full-blown “civil war.” U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Herve Ladsous responded in the affirmative when asked if that’s how he classified the conflict. “Clearly what is happening is that the government of Syria lost some large chunks of territory in several cities to the opposition and wants to retake control of these areas,” he said, according to Reuters. “This is really becoming large scale,” he said, citing recent reports that government forces used helicopters to fire indiscriminately on Syrians. The U.N. estimates that more than 9,000 have died in the fighting.

By Ali Gharib on Jun 12, 2012 at 5:26 pm

Economy

VICTORY: Occupy Protesters Save Top Activists’ Home From Foreclosure

By Travis Waldron on Jun 12, 2012 at 5:15 pm

Colleen McKee Espinosa & Nick Espinosa

Nick Espinosa has fought foreclosures in the greater Minneapolis area for more than six months as an activist with Occupy Homes MN. Now, in a city that has some of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates, he and his fellow activists have saved another home: this time, it’s his own.

Citibank foreclosed on Colleen McKee Espinosa, Nick’s mother, who fell behind on her mortgage after she stopped receiving child support payments. She attempted to make two past-due payments to Citibank to catch up on the mortgage, but was instead notified that the home was already in foreclosure. Despite assurances that the bank wanted to work with her, it denied her a mortgage modification and was set to auction the home at a sheriff’s sale tomorrow.

Instead, under pressure from Occupy Homes MN and other activists, the bank announced today that it approved a modification that will keep the family in its home:

An official with CitiMortgage’s Executive Response Unit contacted the Espinosa family with news that Citibank had approved a loan modification that would keep the family in their home and reduce their payments by one-third on a 7.5 year payment plan. The dramatic news came less than 24 hours before the house was to be sold at auction on Wednesday, June 13.

“I’m so relieved that my family’s home of 16 years will not be on the auction block tomorrow,” said Colleen McKee Espinosa, a nurse and single mother who received widespread support after she pledged not to leave her home without a good faith negotiation. “We are grateful that Citibank has decided to accept my payments, and we look forward to signing the final paperwork.”

Despite Occupy Homes MN’s success at preventing evictions and foreclosures — it has already saved two previous homeowners — McKee Espinosa did not originally want to be a part of the Occupy movement. “Nick tried to drag me to homeowners meetings,” she told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “I had heard their stories and thought they were naive idealists. I supported Nick, but thought that you couldn’t fight the banks.”

After seeing the movement’s success, however, she changed her mind. “This negotiation represents a victory not just for our family, but for millions of families facing foreclosures across the country,” Nick Espinosa said today. “Countless families could stay in their homes if banks simply modified their loans based on the actual market value and reduced their principal, instead of the price to which banks inflated them before they crashed our economy. … If they can fix it for our family, they can fix it for millions of others.”

Health

Insurers Continuing Obamacare Provisions Does Not Replace The Need For The Health Care Reform Law

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Jun 12, 2012 at 5:10 pm

Now that three of the nation’s largest health insurance companies have promised to preserve key parts of Obamacare regardless of what the Supreme Court decides, Republicans are using it as an opportunity to show why the U.S. does not need the Affordable Care Act:

“Today’s announcement is a reminder that sensible health care reform does not require the massive government takeover in Washington Democrats’ law, which is hurting our economy by driving up costs and making it harder for small businesses to hire,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. Steel added that the private insurers’ action “reinforces our commitment” to repeal any portion of the law that the court leaves standing.

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) offered a similar view. “There is plenty of room for solutions in the private market, and a primary objection to the ACA remains the heavy-handed, bureaucratic approach, which necessarily compels millions of employers and beneficiaries to leave private insurance in favor of a public option,’” she said in an email.

But it is short-sighted to promote a few companies continuing a few provisions, like allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26, as a replacement for the comprehensive health care reform law. For one, the insurers who will keep some parts of the health care reform law will likely not preserve guaranteed coverage for children with pre-existing conditions. And it is not clear that other companies will follow UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, and Humana and continue certain Obamacare regulations.

Most importantly, as the New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn points out, these insurance companies also won’t be adding more Obamacare reforms that would have kicked in by 2014: federal subsidies to help people buy insurance, expanded Medicaid eligibility, minimum benefit standards, among other regulations. “They aren’t doing any of these things because, as a practical matter, they can’t. All of them require fundamental, structural changes to the insurance market, along with government subsidies,” Cohn writes. And only a law like the Affordable Care Act can do all of the above to help expand health care access and guarantee better coverage for millions of Americans.

Alyssa

Aubrey Plaza As Icon of Generational Disillusionment

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 12, 2012 at 5:06 pm

I like this idea from Colin Trevorrow, the director of Aubrey Plaza’s new movie Safety Not Guaranteed, about why the actress plays the kind of sweet-and-sour slacker she does both in that movie and on Parks and Recreation:

There’s a reason Aubrey Plaza keeps getting cast as interns — as eyerolling Pawnee Parks Department lackey April Ludgate on NBC’s Parks and Recreation and as the defeatist, toilet-scrubbing Seattle Magazine intern in the upcoming Safety Not Guaranteed, and in real life as well, in NBC’s famed page program. According to Safety director Colin Trevorrow, the 27-year-old actress is an everygirl, a face for the masses of underpaid, overeducated young workers of the world.

“Aubrey represents a whole generation of young women who are very disaffected,” Trevorrow said. “Not just women, a whole generation. And disaffected for a reason. They don’t see anything out there for them, and this is not a world for them, and they have every reason to want to go back to a time when everything was a little bit easier and there were more opportunities and they weren’t treated like shit as an intern somewhere.”

I know some folks have been disconcerted by April’s slow evolution on Parks and Recreation from someone who essentially hated everything, to someone who loved Andy, and is now exploring the possibility that she might like some thing or some idea enough to work for it enthusiastically. But I think that it would be a violation of the show’s core ethic if April stayed static and didn’t find an opportunity to succeed and enjoy it. If Ron Swanson can be shaken from his libertarianism by the sheer force of Leslie Knope’s enthusiasm, and if Leslie can win an election against stiff odds, April would inevitably be affected. There’s a really interesting story to be told about someone who is terrified of disappointment facing even a small opportunity. I hope now that April’s come up with an idea for Andy to move forward, she comes up with something she’s willing to try herself.

Justice

Architect of Anti-Health Care Lawsuit Admits To His Broader Agenda — No National Child Labor Laws, No Minimum Wage

By Ian Millhiser on Jun 12, 2012 at 5:00 pm

Tenther Law Professor Randy Barnett

The framers of our Constitution met in 1787 because the weak national governance adopted by the Articles of Confederation utterly failed. Their goal, in their own words, was to ensure that the federal government had the power to “legislate in all cases for the general interests of the Union, and also in those to which the States are separately incompetent.” National leaders must have the ability to address national problems, and this is especially true with respect to the national economy. As the Supreme Court explained very early in American history, there is “no sort of trade” that our national leaders cannot regulate, and the the power to regulate something “implies in its nature full power over the thing to be regulated,” so long as Congress does not trample the individual protected elsewhere in the Constitution.

Few living Americans have done more to undermine this vision than Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor and one of the leading architects of the lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act. In an interview with NPR yesterday, Barnett admitted just how far he’d like to go in reimagining the Constitution if his attack on health reform succeeds:

Now comes the Obama health care overhaul, known as the ACA, the Affordable Care Act, a law under full assault by the modern conservative movement. Some, like Georgetown Law Center professor Randy Barnett, the architect of the challenge, say openly that they believe many of the New Deal cases were wrongly decided.

“They are well-settled precedents and are not likely to be revisited in my lifetime,” Barnett says. “But I do think that according to the original meaning of the Constitution, they were wrongly decided.“

To translate this a bit, in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries the Supreme Court abandoned the framers’ objective of ensuring that national problems can be addressed by our national democracy to impose unprecedented new limits on Congress’ authority. The “New Deal cases” Barnett objects to rejected the fake constitution that dominated the pre-New Deal era. If Barnett succeeds in restoring this fake constitution, he would usher in a far meaner and less prosperous America:

  • Child Labor: One of the seminal cases from this discredited era is Hammer v. Dagenhardt, which struck down a national child labor law. If the New Deal cases Barnett despises were overruled, the longstanding federal protections against exploiting child workers would cease to exist.
  • No Minimum Wage: A key New Deal case, United States v. Darby, upheld a national minimum wage and overtime laws. If Darby were overruled, these and other basic labor protections would also cease to exist.
  • Whites-Only Lunch Counters: The Court also relied on cases like Darby in upholding basic civil rights protections, including the ban on whites-only lunch counters. Barnett’s fake constitution would almost certainly eliminate most of the legislative progress of the Civil Rights Era.
  • The Right to Organize: The pre-New Deal justices also struck down laws ensuring workers’ right to organize into labor unions. Restoring their fake constitution would bring this decision back to life.

In other words, the fake constitution espoused by the anti-health reform case’s chief architect would roll back nearly one hundred years of progress — leaving poor children, minorities, workers and women out in the cold. If he wins in the Supreme Court next month, any of the great legislative victories of the New Deal and Civil Rights Eras could be next on the chopping block.

Economy

NOTE TO ROMNEY: The Federal Government Does Fund Teachers, Firefighters, And Police

By Josh Israel on Jun 12, 2012 at 4:30 pm

Mitt Romney dismissed criticisms that he does not want to hire more teachers, firefighters, and police officers as “absurd” on Tuesday morning, telling Fox News Channel that if elected president, he would not have the ability to control the hiring decisions of local governments:

ROMNEY: Of course, teachers and firemen and policemen are hired at the local level and also by states. The federal government doesn’t pay for teachers, firefighters or policemen. So obviously that’s completely absurd.

But Romney’s comment demonstrates a disturbing lack of understanding of both federal funding and his own published plans. While it is true that teachers, firefighters, and police are hired at the local level, a significant portion of their funding, recruiting, and training comes from the federal government.

Here are just some of the ways the federal government funds:

Teachers

Firefighters

Police

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