Marco Rubio To Introduce Abortion Bill In Senate: Report

By Mollie Reilly/Huffington Post

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) will introduce a bill in the Senate banning abortions 20 weeks after conception, the Weekly Standard reported Tuesday.

According to the Weekly Standard report, Rubio will announce his sponsorship of the measure after Congress returns from the July 4 recess.

A similar measure was passed by the House last month in a 228 to 196 vote. However, the 20-week abortion ban is unlikely to gain traction in the Democratic-controlled Senate. The White House also threatened to veto the bill.

"Forty years ago, the Supreme Court affirmed a woman's constitutional right to privacy, including the right to choose," the administration said in a statement. "This bill is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade and shows contempt for women's health and rights, the role doctors play in their patients' health care decisions, and the Constitution."

Another 20-week abortion bill is currently under consideration in Texas, where a filibuster by Democratic state Senator Wendy Davis thrust the issue into the limelight last week.

Rubio, a freshman Senator who is considered a likely contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, has previously been vocal about his pro-life stance.

"The people who are actually closed-minded in American politics are the people who love to preach about the certainty of science with regards to our climate but ignore the absolute fact that science has proven that life begins at conception," Rubio said during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, professing his belief in protecting life "at every stage of its development."

Earlier this year, the Senate rejected a budget amendment proposed by Rubio that would have imposed new penalties for abortions performed on minors outside of their home state.

"Under the Rubio amendment, a doctor and a grandmother would go to jail if the grandmother brought her grandchild across state lines, say, after she was raped," Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said of the measure.

Michigan case could invalidate states’ anti-same sex marriage laws

By David Ferguson/Raw Story

A Michigan federal judge has given the go-ahead for a case that could challenge state laws mandating that marriage be defined as being between a man and a woman. A Yahoo! News report said that the case could be the first to bring the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to bear on different states’ anti-LGBT marriage policies.

April DeBoer and Jayne Rouse are two female nurses who live together in Hazel Park, Michigan. The two women would like to jointly adopt their three children, but under the Michigan Marriage Amendment, passed by voter referendum in 2004, they cannot.

The couple took their fight to the Michigan government, which urged the state Supreme Court to dismiss the women’s case against the state, but on Monday, District Judge Bernard Friedmanruled that the case could go forward. The DOMA decision, he said, sheds new light on Michigan’s current jurisprudence on the topic of same sex marriage. Friedman, a Reagan appointee wrote:

Plaintiffs are prepared to claim Windsor as their own…And why shouldn’t they? The Supreme Court has just invalidated a federal statute on equal protection grounds because it “place[d] same-sex couples in an unstable position of being in a second-tier marriage.” Moreover, and of particular importance to this case, the justices expressed concern that the natural consequence of such discriminatory legislation would not only lead to the relegation of same-sex relationships to a form of second-tier status, but impair the rights of “tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples” as well. This is exactly the type of harm plaintiffs seek to remedy in this case.

However, the judge wrote, the state can use the Windsor ruling in its own defense. The Supreme Court ruled that states could have their own say in the matter and that the voter referendums passed in those states are not a federal issue.

Challenges are mounting in similar cases all over the country. Same sex couples are suing Nevada, Illinois, Hawaii and New Jersey for legal recognition of their marriages. Those states allow civil unions and domestic partnerships but not same sex marriage.

No date has been set for the opening of the Michigan hearings.

Republicans Attack Obama For Not Implementing Health Care Reform Quickly Enough

By Igor Volsky/Think Progress

Republicans’ response to the Department of Treasury’s announcement that it would delay enactment of the Affordable Care Act’s employer responsibility provision has put the party in the awkward position of attacking the administration for considering the objections and concerns of the business community and not proceeding with implementation quickly enough. This comes after years of Congressional maneuvers to defund the law and repeal it.

While administration officials argue that they’re postponing the provision — which requires employers with more than 50 employees to pay a fine if they don’t offer affordable quality coverage — to allow businesses more time to comply with the law and promise to “convene employers, insurers, and experts to propose a smarter system” for 2015, Republicans caution that the decision spells disaster.

“This further confirms that even the proponents of ObamaCare know it will hurt jobs, decrease economic growth and make it harder for families to have access to quality and affordable health care,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) said in a statement. “Delaying the employer mandate is a clear admission…that the health care law is unaffordable, unworkable and unpopular,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) agreed.

Objecting to a voluntary slowdown is unusual sentiment from men who accuse the administration of raming through a one-size-fits-all law before anyone has had a chance to read it — and it ignores the government’s past experiences with implementing complex legislation.

Consider the Bush administration’s performance in implementing the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, the law which established the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. Republicans not only rammed the legislation through Congress, they ignored warnings about the complexities of the new system and installed the law without adequately educating seniors or pharmacists. What resulted was the very “train wreck” that the GOP is now predicting for Obamacare: tens of thousands of low-income seniors discovered that medications they had been taking for years were no longer covered, many went without needed prescriptions or paid high out-of pocket fees, and 36 states were forced to “provide emergency payments to frail citizens.

Here is just a sampling of newspaper clips from that period:

– “Low-income Medicare beneficiaries around the country were often overcharged, and some were turned away from pharmacies without getting their medications, in the first week of Medicare’s new drug benefit…[T]he Vermont Legislature passed a bill declaring, “There is a public health emergency due to the federal implementation of Medicare Part D, which has resulted in serious operational problems, causing Vermonters to be turned away at the pharmacy without the drugs they need.” [NYT, 1/8/2006]

– “When it began, some pharmacists and beneficiaries experienced hourlong waits on telephone lines to get help or verify information from Medicare or individual health plans offering the benefit. Many senior citizens and disabled residents were unable to get their prescriptions filled because pharmacists couldn’t verify insurance coverage.” [Boston Globe, 3/10/2006]

– “The problems are legion — inadequate coverage, computer glitches, inadequate training of pharmacists, long delays — and they fall most heavily on the poor and the mentally ill.” [Gotham Gazette, 1/26/2013]

– “The Bush Medicare prescription-drug program, now three weeks old, hasturned out so far to be a lobbyist’s dream and an aging American’s nightmare.” [Christian Science Monitor, 1/26/2006]

Delaying a provision that will affect a small number of employers — only about 10,000 employers with more than 50 employees don’t provide coverage or have inadequate insurance — but could, if improperly implemented, lead to confusion and loss of insurance, seems like smart policy in the context of Bush’s experiences.

UPDATE

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has launched an investigation into the delay and is seeking information about the conversations the Department has had with businesses: “As the Treasury Department statement makes clear, the administration has been ‘engaging in a dialogue with businesses’ and is pursuing changes in the law’s implementation and requirements based on their feedback. We note that these communications and the decision-making process related to the delay of certain aspects of the law have not been disclosed publicly. The acknowledgement that a delay in the law’s implementation is needed is completely at odds with previous statements made by administration officials.”

How Religious Conservatives Plan To Regroup After Losing Marriage Discrimination

By Ian Millhiser/Think Progress

Last week was not a good one for Team Anti-Gay. The Supreme Court struck the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act, and the nation’s largest state resumed marriages for same-sex couples. Nor is the future likely to be any better for opponents of equality. As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia complains in dissent, the Court’s opinion striking DOMA isriddled with language that can be used to attack anti-gay state laws. Moreover, two casessquarely presenting the issue of whether states must provide gay couples with the equal protection of the law are now ripe for review by the left-leaning United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The question of full, nationwide marriage equality could be before the justices in as little as two years.

And even if a majority of the Court does reject this final push for marriage equality, time is simply not on the side of discrimination. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans under 40 approve of the Supreme Court’s recent pro-marriage decision. The only age cohort where a majority oppose that decision are people over age 65. In twenty years, supporters of equality will run the country from top to bottom, and most opponents will be dead.

Religious conservatives, however, still have one more card to play in their efforts to deny equal rights to LGBT Americans. As the socially conservative writer Ross Douthat suggested shortly after the Court struck DOMA, the best way to continue to limit the rights of gay people is to “build in as many protections for religious liberty as possible along the way.”

It’s clear that anti-gay leaders are already executing this contingency plan. Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint claimed on Tuesday that marriage equality “means trampling First Amendment religious liberty protections along the way.” At least fifteen anti-gay individuals, ranging from wedding cake bakers to bed and breakfast owners to t-shirt makers, have claimed the right to discriminate against gay people — often in direct violation of the law — with many citing their religious beliefs as justification. The conservative U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops claimed in a brief they filed in the Supreme Court that treating anti-gay discrimination permissively “protects the religious liberty of those employers with a religious objection to providing” health coverage to same-sex partners.

The Bishops’ brief may be the biggest window into how religious conservatives plan to construct a wall around their own right to discriminate. At the same time that the Bishops urged the justices to protect a special right to deny health care to gay people, numerous employers — with the enthusiastic backing of the Bishops themselves — are litigating the question of whether their religious objections to birth control give them the right to ignore a federal rule requiring them to include it in their employees’ health plans. Last week, a federal appeals court embraced a particularly aggressive reading of religious liberty that not only held that for profit companies may refuse to comply with the birth control rule, it also included language suggesting that a religious employer could refuse to comply with anti-discrimination law if they believed discrimination was compelled by their faith.

This, simply put, is the social conservative end game. They are not going to succeed in blocking marriage equality. But if they can exempt the very people who are most likely to engage in invidious discrimination against gay people from laws prohibiting such discrimination, then they can suck the life out of many pro-gay laws. Their exaggerated view of “religious liberty” can no more be squared with equality than it could when Bob Jones University claimed a similar religious right to engage in race discrimination.

Ultimately, social conservatives’ efforts to expand religious rights to the point where they devour other essential freedoms such as the right to be free from discrimination are likely to backfire. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court developed a workable framework for religious liberty. Such liberty is robust, but it does not include the right to engage in invidious discrimination, and it does not give businesses a right to “impose the employer’s religious faith on the employees.” Then, in 1990, Justice Scalia blew up this framework with his majority opinion in Employment Div. v. Smith. Smith shrunk religious liberty far more than many Americans were willing to tolerate; Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) to restore the religious liberties lost in Smith almost unanimously, and it was signed into law by President Clinton.

Now, however, religious conservatives want to go far beyond the 1980s framework that RFRA restored. They claim both the right to defy anti-discrimination law and the right to ignore the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Lee, which held that “[w]hen followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.” Religious liberties are rightfully enshrined in our Constitution, but they have not been understood as a sweeping right to deny equally important liberties to others. If religious conservatives insist upon the right to do so, the consensus that led to RFRA’s passage is likely to break down, and people of faith could ultimately wind up with fewer protections than they enjoyed before a small number of religious conservatives decided to overreach.

McCain Slams Efforts To Curb Rampant Campus Sexual Harassment As Violating Free Speech

By Kumar Ramanathan/Think Progress

Over the past month, conservatives and libertarians have criticized efforts to curb sexual harassment on college campuses as “de-eroticizing universities” and claimed they violate free speech. Now, Sen. John McCain has jumped on the bandwagon in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.

McCain’s letter, sent to Holder last Wednesday, accuses Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez and Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers of having “single-handedly redefined the meaning of sexual harassment at all universities and colleges across the country.” Endorsing claims made by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has led the attack on the DOJ and OCR, McCain suggests that guidelines set out by the DOJ and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) with one university in the wake of increasing student protest and complaint over the epidemic of rape culture across college campuseswould somehow restrict free speech.

As ThinkProgress reported in June, the agreement in question was reached by the DOJ and OCR with the University of Montana in May in an effort to prevent sexual harassment and assault following a string of high-profile cases and subsequent mishandling by campus authorities. Inone particularly notable case, a woman who reported her attempted rape was told “not to expect much” and told that half of all rape allegations were false. The final agreement is so measured that it has been met only with hopeful skepticism from campus activists.

Over the past two months, conservative and libertarian critics of the agreement have seized on one section of the lengthy agreement, which is intended to encourage students to feel more comfortable reporting conduct they feel harassed by, rather than be burdened with interpreting Title IX regulations themselves. In that vein, the section defines sexual harassment for the purpose of student reporting as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature.” Government officials have repeatedly reiterated that only conduct that meets the legal standard of being “severe or pervasive” and creating “a hostile environment” will be subject to enforcement, and that the guidelines merely try to “ensure students are not discouraged from reporting harassment.” But that has not stopped McCain and other conservatives from insisting that this section creates a new and expanded definition of sexual harassment, alleging that it could even encompass a student asking another on a date.

McCain’s letter includes several questions asking for clarification on the DOJ’s definition of sexual harassment and the implications of its agreement with the University of Montana, and requests a response by July 17. A DOJ representative said in a statement to the Huffington Post said that the Department was reviewing McCain’s letter.

Despite the controversy, University of Montana officials have said that they will go ahead with implementing the agreement and do not see it as unconstitutional. “I don’t believe we’ve been instructed to [create a new category for sexual harassment],” Lucy France, legal counsel for the University, told the Moussilian. “We’re working on a draft policy that’s consistent with the law, and not inconsistent with First Amendment rights and academic freedom. That’s what we agreed to do with the DOJ.”

Fox Nation Highlights Calls For Revolution Ahead Of July 4

BRIAN THORN/Media Matters For America

Fox Nation highlighted a PJ Media post that suggested America may be "headed for a Tahrir Square of our own" under the headline "Is America In A Pre-Revolutionary State This July 4?"

Fox Nation republished July 2 article by Roger L. Simon of PJ Media article that described the Affordable Care Act as "the monster of all monsters" and called the IRS "a kind of post-modern American Gestapo."

The PJ Media article went on to ask if America and wondered if the United States is "headed for a Tahrir Square of our own with the attendant mammoth social turmoil, possibly even violence":

As we approach July 4, 2013, is America in a pre-revolutionary state? Are we headed for a Tahrir Square of our own with the attendant mammoth social turmoil, possibly even violence.

Could it happen here?

We are two-thirds of the way into the most incompetent presidency in our history. People everywhere are fed up. Even many of the so-called liberals who propelled Barack Obama into office have stopped defending him in the face of an unprecedented number of scandals coming at us one after the other like hideous monsters in some non-stop computer game.

And now looming is the monster of monsters, ObamaCare, the healthcare reform almost no one wanted and fewer understood.

It will be administered by the Internal Revenue Service, an organization that has been revealed to be a kind of post-modern American Gestapo, asking not just to examine our accounting books but the books we read. What could be more totalitarian than that?

[...]

In fact, everywhere we look on this July Fourth sees a great civilization in decline. And much of that decline can be laid at the foot of the incumbent. Especially his own people, African Americans, have suffered.  Their unemployment numbers are catastrophic, their real needs ignored while hustlers like Sharpton, Jackson, and, sadly, even the president fan the flames of non-existent racism.

Tahrir Square anyone?

Fox News has warned of violent uprisings as a response to Obama's policies before. Fox host Bill O'Reilly claimed Obama could choose "to be a good president or whether he just wants to have blood in the streets." At a conservative banquet in January, Fox contributor Pat Caddell claimed the country was in a "pre-revolutionary condition" and "on the verge of an explosion."

NC Senator Nesbitt busts GOP for sneak attack in war on women

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How the Professional Left's Blind Obama Hatred Got them Played by a Far-Right Nutjob

by Spandan C/The People's View

Some outlets reported last week that NSA leaker and fugitive Edward Snowden was caught into a bit of hypocrisy: public chat records indicate that back in the ancient times of 2009, he wanted leakers "shot in the balls." Yeah, he said that. But that's not all he said. Oh, no. The Technology site Ars Technica posted extensive public chat logs from Snowden, then using the monkier TheTrueHOOHA, that confirms what I had suspected since finding his campaign contributions to Glenn Greenwald's straight crush Ron Paul. 

So let's talk about this man that has been granted hero status by the Left's loudest prognosticators and provocateurs. The transcripts released by Ars Technica are about a lot more than Snowden's previous contempt for leakers. He hated social security, loved Ron Paul and his ideas, and peddled the NRA's garbage about fighting the government with guns. He suggested punishing both leakers and publications that publish the leaks. All in all, Edward Snowden is a right wing, anti-government nutjob who has managed to become the hero of so many on the reactionary Left.

Ars Technica reports that Ed Snowden is not much more than your typical, teabagging, cookie-cutter right wing nutjob who hates Obama. He complained about everything from the president's appointment to the CIA to gun control to how Social Security has turned old people into lazy moochers.

 Once Obama took office, Snowden groaned about his policies with increasing frequency. Fears that Obama might revive an assault weapons ban didn't sit well with him as a defender of the Second Amendment. Another sticking point was social security. Snowden was an individualist, even when it was unpopular; he saw little need for a safety net.

Here are just some of the choice quotes from the freakout Left's new hero. I have modified the transcripts only to change "TheTrueHOOHA" to "SNOWDEN" (for ease of following), and to highlight through formatting.

Gun-nut:

 User: the restrictions were made to appease the conservatives to get another bill passed. fucking cons.

SNOWDEN: See, that's why I'm goddamned glad for the second amendment. Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.

Something tells me Edward Snowden is more fit to be a Tea Party candidate for office in the mold of Sharron Angle (of the infamous "Second Amendment remedies") than a liberal icon - if the screaming "progressives" on the Internet were still capable of having a value system other than "we hate Obama," that is.

Choice words for Social Security and the New Deal:

 SNOWDEN: save money? cut this social security bullshit
User11: hahahayes
User18: Yeah! Fuck old people!
User11: social security is bullshit
User11: let's just toss old people out in the street
User18: Old people could move in with [User11].
User11: NOOO
User11: they smell funny
SNOWDEN: Somehow, our society managed to make it hundreds of years without social security just fine
SNOWDEN: you fucking retards
SNOWDEN: Magically the world changed after the new deal, and old people became made of glass
SNOWDEN: yeah, that makes sense
User11: wow
User11: you are just so fucking stupid
SNOWDEN: yeah, [User11]. and you're quite a gem
User19: and magically, life expectancy has doubled in the last 100 years.funny how that works.
SNOWDEN: [User19], you don't think modern medicine has something to do with that? no? it's social security? wow. I guess I missed that.
User11: hurr wait a second, life expectancy has shot up in recent times along with the dissolution of the communal family unit in exchange for the nuclear family
User11: gee i guess we might need to create a safety net for the sudden glut of helpless elderly????
SNOWDEN: they wouldn't be fucking helpless if you weren't sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day
User11: you are so goddamned stupd*pid
User11: PUT OLD PEOPLE TO WORK IN THE FIELDS
SNOWDEN: my grandmother is eighty fucking three this year, and you know what? she still supports herself working as a goddamned hairdresser

 His grandmother would be so proud, who he also claims doesn't support Social Security.

And his opinion on the racist, wingbat Ron Paul? "Dreamy."

But but but, I can already hear the screamers, you're distracting from the point! It's about government secrecy! I wonder how Snowden felt about that? In January 2009, less than two weeks before Obama took office, the New York Times reported on a leak that President Bush had rejected Israel's request for bunker-busters to hit Iran's nuclear facility. Pointing to that story, Snowden not only advocated for the leakers to be "shot in the balls," but also for the reporting organization (in this case the NY Times) to go out of business.

 SNOWDEN: HOLY SHIT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/washington/11iran.html?_r=1&hp
SNOWDEN: WTF NYTIMES
SNOWDEN: Are they TRYING to start a war?
Jesus christ
they're like wikileaks
User19: they're just reporting, dude.
SNOWDEN: They're reporting classified shit
User19: shrugs
SNOWDEN:
User19: meh
SNOWDEN: moreover, who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this?
SNOWDEN: those people should be shot in the balls.

Rather lovely sentiments, don't you think? I wonder when Snowden and Wikileaks will explain why he doesn't think he deserves the same punishment he himself prescribed for leakers. That's not all, of course. He lashed out at the New York Times for "blowing" the illegal Bush administration program to warrantlessly wiretap Americans, referring to the Times reporting on the matter in 2006.

 SNOWDEN: these are the same people who blew the whole "we could listen to osama's cell phone" thing the same people who screwed us on wiretapping over and over and over again [sic] Thank god they're going out of business.
User19: the NYT?
SNOWDEN: Hopefully they'll finally go bankrupt this year.
yeah.

So Snowden was a man all for illegally spying on Americans when Bush was in office, but suddenly when Obama takes office and brings the programs under legal cover and gets a court involved, Saint Snowden can stand it no more. Shocked, shocked I tell you to hear there's gambling in Casa Blanca.

Come to think of it, the Professional Left unites with Edward Snowden on that point exactly - the blind, likely racist, pure demonization of this president. After all, this really isn't about privacy or security, is it? If it were, we would be seeing mobilizations and hearing calls to change the law rather than screams of 'scandals' about a program which even the toughest critic admits is perfectly legal under the law as it stands today. We would be seeing a laser focus not on obtaining the freedom of a criminal but on a vigorous debate about the merits of the law itself. Yet, rarely do we hear those calls on "liberal" sites like Daily Kos or on "liberal" shows coughing up a spleen defending Ed Snowden (I'm talking to you, Chris Hayes). What we hear far more often is the lashing out, the "free Snowden" cheerleading, and the unadulterated contempt for the president as well as rule of law. No, it's not about concerns about privacy. This is about concern-trolling about privacy.

Edward Snowden is a pathetic excuse for a hero or a whistleblower. He is a lunatic libertarian far-right nutjob that compromised national security for his personal fame. He has no values, no ethics, no moral core. He is a right wing blowhard that is playing the Professional Left for everything they are worth (which, thankfully, is not much). He is using their Blind hatred of a black president named Barack Obama to make them do the bidding of his own agenda which has nothing to do with transparency nor democracy. And the Professional Left is running right along, singing the praises of this ring-wing nutjob, licking this traitor's boots.

George Zimmerman’s injuries were ‘insignificant,’ medical examiner testifies

By Reuters via Raw Story

SANFORD, Florida (Reuters) – Volunteer watchman George Zimmerman suffered “insignificant” injuries in the fight in which he shot and killed unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin, a medical examiner testified on Tuesday, as prosecutors attempted to undermine Zimmerman’s claim he feared for his life.

Zimmerman has pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree murder, saying he shot Martin in self-defense during their confrontation inside a gated community in the central Florida town of Sanford on February 26, 2012.

Testifying for the prosecution at Zimmerman’s trial, Medical Examiner Valerie Rao said she reviewed Zimmerman’s medical records and 36 pictures of his injuries taken at the police station after the fight.

“They were not life-threatening. They were very insignificant,” Rao told the Seminole County criminal court jury.

Zimmerman, 29, has said Martin, 17, punched him in the face and repeatedly slammed his head into a concrete walkway. Zimmerman, who is white and Hispanic, could face life in prison if convicted.

The racially charged case captivated much of the United States in 2012. Police initially declined to arrest Zimmerman, accepting his story of self-defense and sparking protests.

A special prosecutor later brought the murder charge. The prosecutor accused Zimmerman of profiling Martin and chasing him vigilante-style rather than waiting for police to arrive.

In court on Tuesday, medical examiner Rao said Zimmerman’s injuries did not involve great force and were consistent with one blow to the face and one impact with the concrete. He had a broken nose and two small cuts on the back of his head.

But later under questioning by one of Zimmerman’s lawyers, Rao said Zimmerman could have been hit more than once.

SELF-DEFENSE LAWS

David Weinstein, a former prosecutor and Miami-area defense lawyer, cautioned against reading too much into Rao’s testimony in a case that centers on Florida’s self-defense laws and the justified use of deadly force.

“There is no requirement that you prove that you were injured to any particular degree. Only that you believed that deadly force was necessary to defend yourself from ‘imminent death or great bodily harm,’” said Weinstein, who is not involved in the case.

Martin was a student at a Miami-area high school and a guest of one of the housing development’s homeowners. He was walking back to the home in the rain from a convenience store when Zimmerman spotted him and called police, saying Martin looked suspicious. There was a confrontation between the two in which Zimmerman shot Martin through the heart with a handgun he was licensed to carry.

TESTIMONY STRICKEN

Earlier on Tuesday, the judge ordered jurors to ignore part of the testimony they heard the day before, when the police officer who initially led the investigation in the case said he believed Zimmerman’s account of the killing was truthful.

Sanford Police Officer Chris Serino said he falsely told Zimmerman the entire encounter had been videotaped in a bluff to see if he would stick to his story of shooting in self-defense after Martin attacked him. Zimmerman seemed “very elated” at the prospect of a video record, Serino said, leading him to conclude the defendant was either telling the truth or was a pathological liar.

“Do you think he was telling the truth?” asked one of Zimmerman’s lawyers, Mark O’Mara.

“Yes,” Serino replied.

Judge Debra Nelson said witnesses were not supposed to comment on the credibility of other witnesses or defendants because it was the jury’s job to decide who to believe.

She ordered the six-women jury to ignore that exchange, highlighting one of the pitfalls of a trial: improper evidence sometimes falls on the jury’s ears.

Like many of the witnesses so far, Serino seemed to bolster both prosecutors’ and defense attorneys’ interpretation of events, depending on who was questioning him.

He said he questioned Zimmerman’s claim that he got out of his vehicle to look for a street address to give to the police dispatcher, noting Zimmerman had parked on a road near the neighborhood’s entrance, in front of a home with a clearly posted street number.

“It did raise flags and concerns,” Serino said.

In order to win a second-degree murder conviction, prosecutors would have to convince the jury that Zimmerman acted with “ill will” or “hatred” and “an indifference to human life.”

Prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda asked Serino about vulgar language Zimmerman used to describe Martin during his call to police just before the fatal scuffle.

“That is ill will and spite,” Serino said.

Asked whether Zimmerman had profiled Martin as a criminal when he repeatedly referred to him as “the suspect,” Serino replied, “It could be construed as such.”

Serino also said he thought Zimmerman had exaggerated his description of the blows that he claims Martin inflicted on him.

Despite Zimmerman’s claim that Martin had put his hands over his mouth and nose to smother him, prosecutors have said there was no blood and none of Zimmerman’s DNA on Martin’s hands or clothing.

Ohio budget bill loaded with controversy

From cincinnati.com editorial

It looks like the bill that will lay out Ohio’s spending and tax priorities for the next two years will go to the governor laden with stuff that has nothing to do with the budget.

For some reason, the Republicans in the GOP-controlled General Assembly think the state budget is the appropriate vehicle to inflame the culture wars anew with a series of restrictions on abortion. The most egregious is a last-minute amendment to require doctors to perform ultrasounds to detect a fetal heartbeat. This is a back-door effort to avoid public debate on a highly controversial issue. It is a watered-down version of last year’s heartbeat bill, which GOP leaders took off the table. Now it’s back, tacked onto the budget bill. It deserves to be deleted or vetoed. Politicians don’t need to meddle in the doctor-patient relationship and legislate medicine.

Republicans also kept in the budget bill a provision that would ban abortion clinics from entering into transfer agreements with public hospitals. This is an unnecessary threat to the health of women. By potentially banning a transfer to a public hospital, precisely at the time when women may need advanced medical care, Republicans are putting women at risk. This should be taken out.

The bill also contains a ban on expanding Medicaid. Gov. John Kasich, himself a conservative Republican, has proposed expanding the Medicaid program using federal dollars. It would mean health insurance, and better health care, for hundreds of thousands of Ohioans who don’t have it. The governor should veto this ban, which unnecessarily ties the legislature’s hands.

A new exemption to Ohio’s open meetings law would let city councils, county boards and other public bodies keep the public out of meetings where economic development agreements are discussed. Local and state governments don’t need any more secrecy, especially when it comes to giving tax dollars and tax breaks to businesses. This, too, should go.

A little-known provision would change the make-up of the boards of vocational schools such as Great Oaks. The boards are now made up of elected school board members. The change would result in business executives being appointed to the vocational boards. It would be a big change in governance, and Great Oaks, the largest career-technical district in the state, and other vocational schools oppose it.

The budget itself appears less controversial, but that’s because the taxing and spending issues have been overshadowed by the irrelevant amendments.

This budget would raise taxes on consumers, through an expansion of the state sales tax, and lower them significantly on businesses. It would raise property taxes in the future by doing away with the long-time homestead exemption. Income taxes would be cut by 10 percent, a cut that is a bigger benefit to high wage earners.

Legislators are passing up an opportunity to raise taxes on the energy companies that are rapidly expanding their drilling operations in eastern Ohio. Ohio’s tax on oil and gas extraction, the severance tax, is one of the lowest in the nation.

Kasich proposed raising it, but the Big Oil companies appear to be winning this round.

The budget process also spotlighted the one-party system that Ohio has turned into. With solid majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans were able to exclude Democrats from any serious budget negotiations.

Legislators should keep the budget bill for budget matters so Ohioans can have the benefit of full, open debate on how their dollars are spent.

North Carolina Prepares To Suppress Black Voters, Now That The Voting Rights Act Lost Its Teeth

By Aviva Shen/Think Progress

Just days after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina is moving forward with a host of bills to roll back voting rights. Republican lawmakers are accelerating a new agenda to eliminate early voting, Sunday voting hours, and same-day registration provisions. GOP leaders also vowed to move quickly to pass a controversial voter ID law that would make it much harder for minorities, seniors, students, and low-income voters to cast their ballots.

The court’s conservative majority decreed last Tuesday that the formula used to identify states with a history of using election law to discriminate against minorities has “no logical relationship to the present day.” Many of the covered jurisdictions celebrated the decision by promptlyadvancing voting restrictions that disproportionately target minorities and low-income voters. Texas enacted their previously blocked voter ID law mere hours after the ruling.

North Carolina’s newly unfettered attack on voting rights has three main prongs:

• Require ID at the polls. North Carolina’s voter ID bill could pose problems for 1 in 10 voters, according to an analysis by the State Board of Elections. About 613,000 North Carolinians lack the required government-issued ID. Nearly a third of these voters are black, while over half are registered Democrats.
• Penalize college students for voting. Republicans are also pushing a bill to raise taxes on families with college students who choose to vote at school rather than at home, effectively discouraging college students from voting.
• End early voting and same-day registration. Other states that restricted early voting, like Ohio and Florida, needlessly created mammoth lines on Election Day, forcing some voters to wait until 1 a.m. to cast a ballot. The backlash in Florida has been especially strong, prompting Gov. Rick Scott (R) to reverse his own voter suppression laws. In North Carolina, black voters make up 29 percent of early voters and 34 percent of voters who took advantage of same-day voter registration at the polls.

The Republican-dominated legislature and new Republican governor will likely do all they can to speed along these restrictions. However, polls show that North Carolinians overwhelmingly oppose these new voter suppression measures. “Moral Monday” protests are cropping up all over the state to challenge these bills and a slew of other draconian policies targeting the poor, women, minorities, and seniors.

Why, Against Long Odds, Pro-Choice Protesters Continue To Fight In Texas

By Scott Keyes/Think Progress
AUSTIN, Texas — With the entire month of July available for Texas Republicans to pass the stringent new abortion restrictions that Democrats successfully blocked last month, most analysts assume passage is a foregone conclusion.

“With 30 days and the majority of state lawmakers on their side, Republicans are almost assured success this time around,”writes Becca Aaronson in the Texas Tribune about legislation that would criminalize abortion after 20 weeks and force most of the state’s abortion clinics to shut down.

And yet, despite the odds stacked against them, more than 5,000 Texans took time off on midday Monday to come down to the State Capitol and protest as the legislature opened its second special legislative session.

ThinkProgress spoke with many of the individuals who showed up at the rally to ask what’s motivating them to keep protesting, even if their chances of stopping Republican lawmakers from passing new abortion restrictions are slim. Some held out hope to defeat the legislation, others took a long-term approach, and still others said it was important to set an example for the next generation.

Here’s what they told us, in their own words:

SUSIE MILAM: “I don’t see any reason to assume the bill will definitely pass. I think the gathering here today shows there’s a lot of disfavor with this bill. I think the legislators might just get a message that this is not what the people of Texas want. I’m sick and tired of people acting like if you just make abortion illegal again, there won’t be any. There certainly were plenty of abortions before it was legal, and there will be abortions again.”

SARA LEVINE: “I hope that this shows support and will change the tide of Texas politics and get us on our way to a more women-friendly, minority-friendly place. I’m wearing this shirt because she’s going to be a sixth-generation Texan and she has every right to her constitutional rights and I’ll make sure she gets them.”

GOLIA STARGHILL HOWARD: “I am out here to stand with Texas women. I believe that we should have the right to choose. Also, I’m a retired Texas teacher so I have the means and the time to participate in this activity, and shame on me if I didn’t do it. I think there’s enough women in Texas to make a difference on this bill.”

TASCA SHADIX & JIM BEDNAR: “I want to teach these two little ones [her children] right here. I told them it’s very likely it’s going to pass anyway, but we go, we have our say, we make our voice heard anyway.”

BEYRL ARMSTRONG: “I don’t know if we have the votes to defeat it, but I want there to be a line in the sand. I want there to be a notice that we noticed. That what we have to do is change the makeup of the Senate and change the makeup of the House. If we get the right people out to vote, we can do that.”

KATHY MCCAFFERTY: “When I was young I didn’t pay attention. Things like this happened because I wasn’t paying attention. I have the time and the resources now, and I belong here, and I’ll be here.”

LYNN SCHLUNS: “I had wanted to go to the Million Mom March that was in DC however many years ago and I really regretted not going. So when I heard about this I was like, I have to be there. I’m from Dallas so we drove down.”

REPORT: Corporations Pay Lower Tax Rates Than The Middle Class

By Alan Pyke/Think Progress

Large, profitable U.S. corporations actually paid just a 12.6 percent effective tax rate in 2010. That’s barely a third of the 35 percent corporate rate on the books, and it’s actually lower than the median effective tax rate for middle-class Americans. The number comes from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study intended to clarify the terms of debate as lawmakers weigh changes to the business tax code.

Most analyses of the gap between the tax rate on the books and the “effective rate” companies actually pay rely upon company financial statements, but the GAO’s work is based on actual corporate tax returns for 2010. The researchers found that large companies – those “with assets of $10 million or more” – that are profitable paid about 12.6 percent of their global income in U.S. taxes. The figure rises to 16.9 percent of global income if all foreign, state, and local taxes are factored in. Companies that took a loss for the year actually paid a higher rate than the profitable ones.

In the spring, Apple CEO Tim Cook defended his company’s entirely legal tax avoidance strategies before a Senate committee. Apple used Ireland-based subsidiaries to pay almost zero tax on tens of billions in income from international sales, and other massive firms like Google and Microsoft use similar corporate structures and accounting strategies to avoid billions in taxes.

The new numbers are inconvenient for the ongoing business community’s push to slash corporate tax rates. A group called the Alliance for Competitive Taxation (ACT) was launched in June by 40 major corporate brands and cites multiple studies using different methodologies to claim that U.S. companies pay among the highest effective tax rates in the world, but this new data would appear to refute those studies. Recent work from the Economic Policy Institute has also shown no correlation between corporate tax rates and economic growth.