I was reading a piece by Ezra Klein today, and he referred to a tweet by Glenn Greenwald, so I wanted to go see it. But apparently, we've been a little too hard-hitting on him.

Aww. I huwt baby Glenn's feewings! Oh noes!

Some people are upset White House is answering their critics on government spending by... setting the facts straight (quick, gasp loudly!). No, not talking about just the Republicans here. The facts also seem to be upsetting the elite Professional Lefties in media and the blogosphere.

But being the sucker that I am for facts, I'm going to go to them first. Under President Obama, federal spending has essentially flatlined, and the federal budget deficit is smaller now than it was when he took office. Marketwatch released the a graph to make the point, showing federal spending under Bush and Obama, while TPM modified another chart from Marketwatch to color-code them (I assume so that Republicans can better understand it - they do love their color codes).

Awesome, right? President Obama has pulled us out of the worst recession in history except for the Great Depression, and he did it without increasing overall federal spending, like, at all.

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Documenting Innocence: National Registry of Exoneration
by nancy a heitzeg

More than 2,000 people who were falsely convicted of serious crimes have been exonerated in America in the past 23 years. One of them was Timothy Cole.

In 1985 a white student was abducted and raped by an African American man at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Two weeks later the victim was shown six photographs of young African American men. Five were black and white side views; one was a color frontal shot of Timothy Cole, a 26 year old veteran who was studying at Texas Tech and who became a suspect because he talked to a detective near the scene of the abduction. The victim picked Cole’s picture, identified him at a live lineup the next day, and testified against him at trial. Cole’s brother and several friends also testified and swore that Cole was studying at home at the time of the crime. Cole was convicted in 1986 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. His appeal was denied.

In 1995, Jerry Wayne Johnson, a Texas prisoner serving a 99-year sentence for two rapes, wrote to Lubbock County police and prosecutors that he had committed the rape for which Cole had been convicted. His letters were ignored. In 1999 Cole, who was severely asthmatic, died in prison. In 2000 Johnson wrote another letter confessing to Cole’s crime to a supervising judge. It was summarily rejected. Eight years later, DNA tests obtained by the Innocence Project of Texas proved that Johnson was guilty of the rape and that Cole had been innocent. Cole was exonerated in an extraordinary posthumous court hearing in 2009, and pardoned by the governor of Texas in 2010.

The case of Timothy Cole is one of 873 exonerations outlined in a report from the National Registry of Exonerations, a new joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry will be updated on an ongoing basis. It is by far the largest collection of such cases ever assembled – and the most varied.

By now, everyone knows Mark Halperin of Time scored an interview with Mitt Romney. Reading the transcript, though, it was difficult to say whether it was a sit-down interview or a kiss-up. Not that I expect a whole heck of a lot from today's "journalists" - but if these 'journalists' are unwilling to challenge people running for the highest office in the land about obvious lies and falsehoods, why in the world are they there?

Where to begin. Well, let's start at the beginning.

So in the "progressive" Firedoglake we can find the horrifying, but expected news.

"Progressive News": "Pelosi Shifts the Goalposts – Now Draws Line on Bush Tax Cuts at $1 Million".

Ooh, a favorite story for the "progressives" and the GOP : Democratic Wimps Cave Again. Proof? 

Regressive "News": "House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi,[...] fired off a letter to the Speaker asking for immediate consideration of an extension of just the “low end” tax cuts – which include the Bush-era marginal rates for households making up to $1 million. This represents a shift in the dividing line for the Bush tax cuts, which has traditionally been at $250,000.

You see Democrats don't know how to negotiate as well as genius progressive bloggers who know that digging in always works - that's how Custer won at the Little Big Horn, after all.

Reality: [in 2010] "Senate Democrats offered to extend the tax cuts for income up to $1 million, not Mr. Obama’s proposal of  $250,000 per couple limit."

So Democrats have always set the line at $250K except when they didn't. And it couldn't be that Pelosi knows Boehner will never bring it up so she's trying to make the contrast of Democratic and GOP positions as stark as possible: she has to be "negotiating with herself".

The regressive analysis: "When the dividing line was $250,000 a year, the revenue was around $800 billion over a ten-year period. I don’t have a strong grasp of what the numbers would be at $1 million, but my guess would be half that, if not more. So from a deficit reduction standpoint, this makes pretty much no sense."

"Guess"?  Where oh where  could we find an actual analysis of how much is saved?

"let me just say about these high-end tax cuts:  80 percent of the tax cuts go to people making over $1 million a year — people making over $1 million a year." - Nancy Pelosi in 2010.

UPDATE: Poor thin skinned Mr. Dayen responds by calling me a "professional troll" and explaining the the marginal tax rate. The problem is that when you insist that the goalposts have moved and 10 seconds of google work shows that Democrats have proposed both the $250K and $1M figure in the past, you cannot justify your shoddy work by changing the subject (and getting that wrong too).

President Obama's stand in favor of marriage equality may not have given him much of a boost in the polls, but it certainly gave marriage equality a boost in public support. As noted on Colorline, The new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows continued if slow growth of support for same sex marriage, but what it really shows is a big uptick in support for marriage equality by people of color. 59% of African Americans, and 61% of minorities overall say that marriage should be available to all loving couples, gay or straight, compared to just 50% of white voters.

After this Sunday's "flap" on Meet the Press by Mayor Cory Booker, they went out to celebrate, popping open the champagne. "Have you had enough of President Obama's attack on free enterprise?" asks a Romney campaign video in defense of Bain that quotes Mayor Booker, among a couple of other Democrats. Priorities USA Action has just released their response, flanked with prominent Republicans - including Mr. Romney's primary rivals and the GOP's 2008 vice presidential nominee - taking on Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital.

On this Sunday's Meet the Press, Newark mayor Cory Booker went "off-message" and took a GOP talking point bait - defending private equity firms and their business, in light of the Obama campaign going straight at Mitt Romney's business record at Bain Capital. I say he took a Republican talking point bait because he fell into the trap of the Republican party attempting to define the president's campaign anti-business, or even anti-private equity terms.

As Mayor Booker clarified later in a video message, however, this isn't about private equity in general, or about business. It is about Mitt Romney's claim that his particular business experience prepares him to do a better job at creating jobs at a faster rate in this country. As the president himself explained, this is about the difference between profit maximization for wealthy investors (the job of a corporate buyout specialist) vs. ensuring jobs for the middle class and the poor (the job of the President of the United States).

One of the first non-LGBT organizations to come out in opposition to Prop 8 was the California chapter of the NAACP.  Today, the national NAACP has endorsed full marriage equality. The NAACP Board of Directors passed the following resolution in Miami, FL:

The NAACP Constitution affirmatively states our objective to ensure the “political, educational, social and economic equality” of all people. Therefore, the NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.  Further, we strongly affirm the religious freedoms of all people as protected by the First Amendment.

This is a really, really big deal. No group speaks with more clarity on matters of civil rights - whether contemporarily popular or not - than the NAACP. NAACP's endorsement adds new wind to the sail of marriage equality. It, more than almost any other argument, confirms what the LGBT rights movement has sought to affirm: the right to civil marriage - a contract commonly available to all other couples - is a matter of civil rights. The fourteenth amendment requires equal protection (and application) of the laws - including laws regarding marriage - to all people.

Yesterday, the New York Times exposed an undercover plan submitted to a conservative super PAC funded by Joe Ricketts (owner of TD Ameritrade and the Chicago Cubs) to attack President Obama's character by invoking Rev. Wright, and its revelation quickly forced Mitt Romney to repudiate it as well as the super PAC - Ending Spending Action Fund (catchy!) - to shelve it. The super PAC's head has been doing the rounds on media this morning, strenuously asserting that it is "deeply unfair" to associate the plan with the billionaire Mr. Ricketts, saying that the PAC asked for proposals from many strategists, and this plan was but one to be submitted.

But then, there's this quote, from Joe Ricketts, staring at you in the face, right in the proposal:

Joe Ricketts said it himself...

"If the nation had seen that ad, they'd never have elected Barack Obama."

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Birthing Behind Bars: Fighting for Reproductive Justice for Women in Prison
By Tina Reynolds and Victoria Law

"I never thought of advocating outside of prison. I just wanted to have some semblance of a normal life once I was released," stated Tina Reynolds, a mother and formerly incarcerated woman. Then she gave birth to her son while in prison for a parole violation:

"When I went into labor, my water broke. The van came to pick me up, I was shackled. Once I was in the van, I was handcuffed. I was taken to the hospital. The handcuffs were taken off, but the shackles weren’t. I walked to the wheelchair that they brought over to me and I sat in the wheelchair with shackles on me. They re-handcuffed me once I was in the wheelchair and took me up to the floor where women had their children.

"When I got there, I was handcuffed with one hand. At the last minute, before I gave birth, I was unshackled so that my feet were free. Then after I gave birth to him, the shackles went back on and the handcuffs stayed on while I held my son on my chest."

That treatment, she recalled later, was "the most egregious, dehumanizing, oppressive practice that I ever experienced while in prison." Her experience is standard procedure for the hundreds of women who enter jail or prison while pregnant each year.

Upon her release, Reynolds started Women on the Rise Telling Her Story (WORTH), an organization of currently and formerly incarcerated women based in New York City, to give currently and formerly incarcerated women both a voice and a support system.

Today, House Democrats did something really important. Something fundamental to our democracy. Today, House Democrats unveiled the Voter Empowerment Act - a legislation that would roll back many GOP state-sponsored efforts and laws to suppress the vote.

The bill will protect voters from restrictive voting measures that have been enacted in states across the country over the last year. These measures make it harder for millions of eligible voters to register or vote, and disproportionally affect our service members, the disabled, minorities, young people, seniors, and low-income Americans. 

The Voter Empowerment Act would use Congress' power to enforce the 19th, 24th and 26th amendments to the Constitution by instituting a few simple things: easy access to registration (including online registration) and voting for everyone who is eligible - including same day registration, prohibiting the practice of targeting military personnel's right to vote on the basis of returned mail when they are deployed overseas (voter caging), and protecting the integrity of the voting process by properly training poll workers and protecting against voter intimidation.

At the head of the push for this bill is the legendary American hero Rep. John Lewis.

“The ability to vote should be easy, accessible and simple. Yet there are practices and laws in place that make it harder to vote today than it was even one year ago. ... We should be moving toward a more inclusive democracy, not one that locks people out,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), one of the bill’s sponsors and a 1960s civil rights icon.

In August of last year, Speaker John Boehner put himself into a bind as the debt limit deal brought down the hammer on defense spending (and other Republican crony priorities) should a balanced approach to deficit reduction not be reached by Congress. Of course, Republicans wouldn't agree to any balanced approach that asks the wealthiest to pay a dime more. And just as we told you here at TPV, the President is standing by the deal and refusing to accept Republican attempts to upend it by severe cuts to assistance for the most vulnerable and the middle class.

But the debt limit deal of August 2011 raised the debt limit just enough to get us through the 2012 elections. So after that, there is going to be another big fight over the debt limit. And John Boehner is about to walk into another disaster for himself and his party. He is now threatening to let the United States default should the president be re-elected (and he will be) and remain opposed to European-style Romney-Ryan austerity measures. Boehner wants Tea-party size cuts in domestic programs plus huge tax cuts for the super rich by keeping the Bush tax cuts permanently.

John Boehner is bad at his job. Even the political side of it. By bringing this up, not only is he convincing the American people that his party has nothing to offer, he is handing President Obama something he's wanted: the ability to run against an extreme ideologue Congress that is hell bent on hurting people rather than compromising and signing on to a proposal for the greater good.

Well, no, I don't believe that December 2012 will mark the Earth's demise. If I had a nickel for every prophet of doom, I could pay off my credit card debt.

But, this caught my attention:

Greek left-wing leader Alexis Tsipras has accused the EU and German Chancellor Angela Merkel of "playing poker with European people's lives" by insisting on austerity measures.

Mr Tsipras' Syriza bloc is predicted to come first in new elections called for 17 June. Syriza wants to renegotiate Greece's international bailout....

In a BBC interview, Mr Tsipras said if the "disease of austerity destroys Greece, it will spread to the rest of Europe".

Banks were profiting at the expense of thousands of Europeans - in Spain and Italy, as well as Greece - left in poverty and hardship, he said.

"Therefore the European leadership and especially Mrs Merkel need to stop playing poker with the lives of people," Mr Tsipras said.

Years ago, I attended campaign training sessions. One of those sessions focused on a campaign's need for media and how to meet that need. It was divided into two categories: earned media and paid media. Earned media are interviews, news reports, letters to the editor - things that mention your candidate in the media that you don't have to pay for. The other is of course paid for - i.e. campaign ads. By bringing the hammer down on Romney's Bain record, Barack Obama's campaign just multiplied its investment in paid media several times over through earned media.

The Obama campaign says the full two-minute spot — dubbed “Steel” — will air just once in targeted markets during the evening news on Wednesday.

Independent media trackers tell ABC News the buy is roughly $83,000 — a tiny amount compared to the multimillion dollar recent ad buys by pro-GOP super PACs and the Obama campaign’s $25 million blitz initiated last week.

That's right. An $83,00 ad buy has everyone in the political world buzzing about it, and the Republican machine and right wing media completely spooked and beside themselves. And that's before it airs even once; it's scheduled to air in battleground states, once, tonight.

I hate to use a Gingrich term, and I don't care much for religion in political commentary, but I've had it. Cardinal  Donald Wuerl, Washington's archbishop for the Catholic Church, is very upset that Georgetown University would invite Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to speak at its graduation ceremonies.

[Georgetown President] DeGioia “does not address the real issue for concern — the selection of a featured speaker whose actions as a public official present the most direct challenge to religious liberty in recent history,” reads the statement from the archdiocese, which covers the District and suburban Maryland.

Yes, we're supposed to learn about religious liberty from the people who think women should not have the religious and moral freedom to choose whether or not they want to use birth control. We're supposed to take religious liberty lessons from archbishops who think that their views on religion and morality should be forced down the throat of everyone - Catholic or not - through the raw power of the state, whether it be the right of women over their own health care decisions or that of everyone to marry the person they love.

We're supposed to take religious liberty lessons from people who think healing the sick and making health care affordable and accessible to all - which is what Sebelius is implementing - should take a back seat to some invented right of a Church to control the health care decisions of women.

I have had it with the pious baloney.

WTF, CNN? The "news" channel's Ashleigh Banfield today had Ben LaBolt from the Obama campaign on her show. She apparently decided that President Obama's ad about Mitt Romney's Bain Capital profiting off of the misery of bankrupt businesses and laid off workers was a little too potent for her corporate overlords to swallow. Watch:



Here are just a few of the baffling things from Banfield's questions:

First, Banfield astonishingly did not seem to know that she was hosting a political show, and kept complaining that LaBolt's response was nothing more than the official Obama campaign line. Uhh, lady! You put on the Press Secretary of a political campaign to answer questions about a political ad being run by that campaign. Were you under the impression that you were about to enter a confessional?

That's the Romney campaign defense against charges that Bain Capital is a vulture company that moves in and takes advantage of companies with cash flow problems, turns their equity into debt, and walks away with a fat profit regardless of what happens to the company they took over. Here's what Romney surrogate and potential VP candidate Sen. Rob Portman had to say:

Still, Portman, 56, defended Romney’s business record, dismissing an advertising offensive by President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign that highlights job losses at a steel mill that was taken over in 1993 by Bain Capital LLC, the Boston- based private-equity firm Romney co-founded and led. The mill, GST Steel, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001.

“You know, that is capitalism,” Portman said. “There are not different kinds of capitalism; there’s the free market, and he can show where his efforts, net, created 100,000-plus jobs -- that’s pretty good,” Portman said of Romney.