Leonard Pitts Jr. at The Miami Herald deplores a continuing injustice in Right to counsel? It’s stacked against the poor. The Supreme Court's unanimous landmark ruling a half-century ago in Gideon v. Wainwright declared that, no matter what the charge, everyone has a right to legal counsel, appointed by the court and paid for by the state in cases when the defendant cannot afford one:
It turns out there is a gulf between the 1963 promise and the 2013 reality. It turns out one lawyer can be expected to try 400, 500, 600 cases a year. It turns out public defenders are so underfunded and overwhelmed it is not uncommon for a defendant to meet his attorney for the first time in court. It turns out the situation is so dire that in at least one jurisdiction a judge pressed tax attorneys and property lawyers into service in criminal court. It turns out poor people’s justice is to justice as monkey business is to business.
Ask Clarence Jones, who spent over a year in prison just waiting for an attorney — and was still there as the book went to press — on a charge of burglary.
Paul Butler at
The New York Times takes a similar tack in
Gideon’s Muted Trumpet:
A poor person has a much greater chance of being incarcerated now than when Gideon was decided, 50 years ago today. This is not because of increased criminality — violent crime has plunged from its peak in the early 1990s — but because of prosecutorial policies that essentially target the poor and relegate their lawyers to negotiating guilty pleas, rather than mounting a defense.
Stephen B. Bright and Sia Sanneh at the
Los Angeles Times do likewise in
Violating the right to a lawyer:
Guilty pleas account for about 95% of all criminal convictions. In many courts, poor people are processed through the courts without lawyers or moments after speaking for a few minutes with lawyers they just met and will never see again. This is called "meet 'em and plead 'em" or "McJustice."
More punditry can be found below the fold.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times busts some people who seriously need to be busted in Marches of Folly:
The really striking thing, during the run-up to the war, was the illusion of consensus. To this day, pundits who got it wrong excuse themselves on the grounds that “everyone” thought that there was a solid case for war. Of course, they acknowledge, there were war opponents — but they were out of the mainstream.
The trouble with this argument is that it was and is circular: support for the war became part of the definition of what it meant to hold a mainstream opinion. Anyone who dissented, no matter how qualified, was ipso facto labeled as unworthy of consideration.
Doyle McManus at the
Los Angeles Times answers his own question in the
Iraq war: Lessons learned? with a don't count on it:
The debate over what went wrong — which is also a debate over who deserves blame — is still under way. Was it bad intelligence? Bad policymaking? A spineless Congress? Insufficiently skeptical media? Or, most likely, all of the above?
But the more important question for the future is this: Have we learned enough from the experience to make a difference the next time? It would be nice if the question were hypothetical, but it's not. The U.S. conflict with Iran is different from the confrontation with Iraq in many ways, but it's the same intelligence services gathering information and the same political system that will make the calls.
Joel Bleifuss at
In These Times writes
Tea Party Coup D’état:
Democratic political operatives believe Tea Party purges weaken the G.O.P.’s electoral prospects. They point to the hard-right congressional candidates who lost last November.
But these liberal strategists fail to appreciate that the Tea Party’s ideological discipline, nurtured by Republican incumbents’ fear of being “primaried,” has turned the Boehner House into a formidable and effective obstacle to Democratic initiatives. Republican intransigence may disaffect some voters, but it excites both the Tea Party faithful and the wingnut donor class.
Brent Budowsky at
The Hill has some terrific advice for the Supreme Court's champion clown in
Scalia: Recuse or Resign:
Scalia’s conduct destroys any appearance of impartiality or judicial temperament. He makes comments offensive to gays while gay rights are pending before the court. He makes racially insensitive comments about voting rights while voting rights are pending. He makes constitutionally ignorant comments about legislative intent.
Scalia has a right to believe voting rights are a “perpetuation of racial entitlement” for blacks and Hispanics, but should promote this repellent and biased view on conservative talk radio, not the court. [...]
Scalia should recuse himself from cases in which his appearance of impartiality is fatally compromised or he should resign from the court.
Bradley Burston Haaretz warns
Obama visit marks a choice for Israel: Grow up or grow old:
The silent killer, the serious, potentially fatal threat to the health and longevity of this aging Israel, is the idea that we can pay feeble lip service to the concept of two states, while fostering risk factors potentially lethal to a peaceful solution. We can tell ourselves that forgoing the idea of two states is the mature, the realistic, the truly Jewish thing to do.
Or we can grow up.
Robert Dreyfuss at
The Nation writes about
Obama's Iran Missteps Before Israel Visit:
Speaking to Israeli reporters, Obama broke little new ground in addressing the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, but curiously—and widely trumpeted by both American and Israeli media covering his remarks—the president chose a weird formulation, namely, that Iran can make a bomb within one year. As quoted by CNN from Israel’s Channel 2 TV, Obama said: “Right now, we think that it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon.”
According to some readings, Obama’s statement was designed to mollify Israeli fears that Iran is getting close to a bomb. But really, the impact of the statement is the opposite, because a year seems like a pretty short time to most people. And, in reality, Iran has taken no steps toward any militarization of its nuclear research. Quite the opposite, Tehran has countered the overblown rhetoric of American and Israeli hawks by changing much of its 20 percent–enriched uranium into fuel for its research reactor, in a manner that guarantees that it can’t be easily converted into material for a weapon.
Heidi Moore at
The Guardian writes
The JP Morgan debacle was not a momentary lapse. It was an issue of culture:
Dimon – and JP Morgan – have shown a lot of compunction. It's clear they are embarrassed by the London Whale debacle. But it is embarrassed for the wrong reasons. JP Morgan has indicated that it believes it got the facts wrong, that a group of people screwed up and those people are gone, and now the bank can go about its moral, principled way. The bank has repeatedly made it clear that a big loss – even of $6.2bn – cannot take down a bank with the size and strength of JP Morgan – a bank that has, in its own favorite phrase, "a fortress balance sheet".
But this is not a math problem. This is an issue of culture. It's an issue of hubris, and lack of humility. What happened in the London Whale debacle was not an oversight of a single moment. It was days, weeks, and months of bad, entitled behavior.
Stanley Crouch at the
New York Daily News writes
Speaking truth to the big banks :
[Sen. Elizabeth] Warren has not lost her form. She expresses her charismatic intelligence by castigating Democrats and Republicans alike for having let the robbers who run the banks get away with too much and grow more bloated in the process, like swollen serpents wrapped in silk pinstripes.
To fully realize what might yet happen, we need to take the long view. The banks that were too big to fail in 2008 remain so because both parties have decided to keep it that way. Nothing has changed that — neither the housing crash nor Occupy Wall Street.
E.J. Dionne at the
Washington Post asks a serious question in
Conservatives’ contradictions on American power:
Do conservatives still believe in American greatness? [...]
And do conservatives who say they favor American greatness think they are strengthening our nation and its ability to shape events abroad with an ongoing budget stalemate created by their refusal to reach agreement with President Obama on a deal that combines spending cuts and new taxes? Would they rather waste the next three years than make any further concessions to a president the voters just reelected?