A little less than a month ago the New Yorker published a major piece making a strong case that the state of Texas executed an indisputably innocent man in 2004.

Cameron Todd Willingham was killed by the state for killing his children in a fire. Yet the best scientific analysis conclusively establishes that the fire was accidental and not caused by arson.

Texas Governor Rick Perry, going into a heated primary campaign against Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, has now suddenly and summarily replaced three board members of the state agency investigating the controversial 2004 execution, indefinitely postponing a hearing into the case. The Burnt Orange Report has excellent coverage here and here.

The conservative editorial board of the Dallas Morning News outlines the case in very stark terms:

Gov. Rick Perry looks like a desperate man with his decision to jettison the chairman of the state's forensic science panel.

The panel's post-mortem look at the Cameron Todd Willingham arson-murder case goes to the heart of Texas justice - including the governor's role in it - and whether an innocent man was railroaded into the death chamber at Huntsville.

Since Perry signed off on the Willingham execution in 2004, his own accountability is at stake. So perhaps it's no surprise that two days before the Texas Forensic Science Commission was to proceed with the case this week, Perry replaced the chairman and set things back.

Glenn Smith argues that Perry is in violation of federal law:

He may have violated federal law,  U.S.C. 18.1001. This is no trivial matter. An innocent man was executed. Federal laws and guidelines are in place to keep that from happening. Perry may well have violated those laws and guidelines, for which there are criminal penalties.

Media Matters sums it up:

This is all, at the very least, quite fishy. It's also potentially earth-shaking -- never before has it been conclusively determined that someone in this country was wrongfully put to death. If Cameron Todd Willingham's innocence can be proven, it would upend the entire rationale behind our system of capital punishment. And yet there hasn't been a whole lot of media coverage - a Nexis search of all news sources for the past two days for (cameron w/2 willingham and perry) turned up seven results.

This could be the beginning of the end for not only one of the most reactionary governors in the country but for the death penalty itself.

Disclosure: I'm proud to be working with the American Association for Justice to protect patients' rights.

"Tort Reform" has long been a bugaboo of the right wing. A hugely successful one. More than 46 states have enacted some form of it -- every one seriously diminishing our legal rights to seek redress in a civil court. Now it's being thrown into the mix of the health care debate.

As a Texan, I fought the 2003 state constitutional amendment that gutted patients' rights. Now it's utterly evident that Texas "Tort Reform" did nothing to cut medical costs.

AAJ President Anthony Tarricone blogged yesterday on the Seminal:

As part of a "grand bargain" to create a bipartisan health care bill, some have said tort reform should be included. For most people, the term "tort reform" is empty and meaningless. But here's what it means: taking away the legal rights of patients, injured through no fault of their own, and preventing them from obtaining legal recourse. And it isn't fact-driven or grounded in reality; rather, it's just part of the Washington sideshow to distract from what really plagues our country's health care system.

Look at what the actual data says: 98,000 people dead every year from preventable medical errors, at a cost of $29 billion. Countless more are seriously injured with astronomical costs. The Congressional Budget Office and Government Accountability Office have looked at tort reform multiple times, and said it will save practically no money. They also found no evidence of so-called "defensive medicine," finding that doctors run more tests because of the fee-for-service structure, or because of the benefits extra tests have on patient care.

Additionally, a 2006 study from Harvard found that 97% of cases were meritorious, totally debunking the idea that frivolous lawsuits plague our courts. And while 46 states have enacted some kind of tort reform, health care costs have continued to skyrocket, while injured patients often can't seek justice.

The AAJ has launched a new web site: 98,000 Reasons which punches enough holes in the case for trading away patients' rights as part of the health care reform that anyone can see through the B.S.  

This is a new video by Mark Putnam and Phil de Vellis (you might remember Phil from this video from the Presidential primary). It commemorates the sad fact that disgraced and embattled South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford still has 500 Days left in office although it is reported that the S.C. GOP is looking to impeach him before his term is done.

Democratic candidate for S.C. Governor Dwight Drake is calling on state officials to use a little known state constitutional measure that could swiftly remove Sanford from office without a lengthy impeachment trial.

S.C. progressive blog Indigo Journal has more:

Throw another way to rid ourselves of Mark Sanford into the mix.

Democratic gubanatorial candidate Dwight Drake just held a press call in which he called on the state's attorney general, treasurer, comptroller general and secretary of state to act on their own authority to remove the governor from office.

Article 4, Section 12.2 of the state constitution gives a majority of those officers the power to remove a governor from office should he be unable to perform the duties of the office. The lt. governor would assume office.

Should the governor object, the General Assembly must meet within 48 hours to decide the matter.

"It's time for bold leadership to end this nightmare and get back to creating jobs," Drake said.

The constitution does not specify what "unable" means. Drake, familiar with the provision from his work in the 1970's for Governor John West, said the language was deliberately left open to interpretation by legislators.

Asked if he believed Sanford might be mentally incapacitated, Drake said, "Whether it's spiritual, mental or whatever, this fellow is unable to do his job."

"Since July he's taken more vacations than Elizabeth Taylor at her best, and he's gone on an 'apology tour,'" Drake said. "But the number one job for a governor is jobs."

Drake said it's unlikely anyone with a major economic development prospect looking at the state would take that prospect to meet with Sanford.

Disclosure: I am a consultant for Dwight Drake.

Along with the 1996 Telecom Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was one of the worst legacies of the Clinton years. Unlike the Defense of Marriage Act or the faux Welfare Reform Act, both the Telecom Act and the DMCA pretended to be forward looking bills that would usher us into a more prosperous 21st Century.

Rotten at the root, the DMCA continues to bear poison fruit. The latest is the ruling by the infotainment industrial complex' favorite judge Marylin Patel (the judge who killed Napster and inadvertantly the music industry in 2000) to ban Real DVD -- an innocuous technology that allows consumers to make personal copies of the DVDs they have purchased.

From PC World:

RealNetworks' RealDVD was handed a devastating blow yesterday as U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel realdvd copyright in a case pitting the two against each other regarding the right to copy films onto one's hard drive. She granted a preliminary injunction against sale of RealDVD, pending a trial over copyright infringement. A cluster of Hollywood honchos, including Paramount, Sony, Universal Studios, and Walt Disney filed suit against RealDVD back in September. Now RealDVD's site is a headstone: "RealDVD is Currently Unavailable."
...

The argument stems from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998. Circumventing encryption technology on digital media was made illegal by the DMCA. According to Patel's decision, RealDVD broke through a DVD's Content Scramble System code in order to transfer movies onto hard drives.

But RealDVD was very stringent with its copying program. The basic package allowed for only a single digital copy to be placed on your hard drive. After paying extra licensing fees, you could transfer the digital copy onto as many as five other hard drives. Disc-based burning was never an option.

Meanwhile, programs such as the VLC Media Player flaunt the law and provide software that allows for real-time copying. So why is the MPAA hard up for RealDVD and not these other products? It seems to me that the MPAA has chosen a battle against RealDVD to set an example but is perhaps ignorant of the proliferation of DVD-ripping programs available.
...
It's sad that RealDVD, with its sophisticated and lawful approach to DVD-copying, had to swallow the wrath of the MPAA. It's also clear that the DMCA needs to be updated to reflect the changes in media distribution 11 years later. It's perfectly legal to rip music from a CD and upload it onto an iPod for personal use; why can't a person do the same with their own copies of movies? The assumption is that everyone using a program such as RealDVD is a criminal bent on ripping as many Netflix movies as possible, rather than a law-abiding citizen who simply wants to watch flicks on the go. For an organization that supposedly has its finger on the pulse of moviegoers, the MPAA strikes me as horribly distrustful and curmudgeonly in its approach to modern times.

You're probably going, so what? Let's talk about health care. Not so fast.

Dobbs on Howard Dean: "[H]e's a bloodsucking leftist -- I mean, you gotta put a stake through his heart to stop this guy"

From the August 10 broadcast of United Stations Radio Networks' The Lou Dobbs Show (via Media Matters):

Disclosure: I'm proud to be working with the The Ad Hoc Committee of Consumer Victims of GM & Chrysler.

I've been covering the rulings in the GM bankruptcy that set the "new GM" free from any liability for harm already caused to consumers by defective GM cars. Chrysler got an even more awful deal that lets them avoid any responsibility caused by defective old Chryslers, even harm that is yet to be caused.

Now consumer groups are fighting back:

A group of five consumer groups is calling for window stickers warning potential buyers of Chrysler vehicles built before the carmaker's May 30th bankruptcy. The sticker would point out that the company will not be liable if passengers are injured or killed in an accident caused by safety or manufacturing defects. Consumer Action, Center for Auto Safety, Center for Justice and Democracy, Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, and National Consumers League sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission petitioning for this disclosure.

Under the bankruptcy agreement, the new Chrysler was absolved of any responsibility for vehicles built before the government-aided restructuring. An estimated 30 million such vehicles are still on the road. The consumer groups claim thousands of injuries will likely be caused by defective models. Chrysler opposes the stickers.

Also see this petition that the cleverly named CARS (Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety) is sending to the FTC.

This story from today's LA Times hints at the human carnage caused by defective cars and what it means for the automakers to walk away from the consequences of their actions:

Kimberly Young has recurring nightmares. She is rolling over and over and over, helpless, pinned inside a car.

Outside Manteca, Calif., last August, the 43-year-old accountant was driving to dinner with her daughter to celebrate a promotion. Her memory of the accident is fuzzy, but she believes she swerved to avoid something, then tried to correct. She remembers hearing a horn.

Her 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled over three times. The roof caved in, and her neck snapped. The accident left Young a quadriplegic. By the time she got out of the hospital, the home she had owned for 11 years was in foreclosure, and she needed round-the-clock care.

And let's not pretend like the defects were unavoidable accidents that the car companies did everything in their power to prevent. This quote from the movie Fight Club by way of Car Gurus is the best summary of the calculus involved in auto quality control:

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Powerful video from Physicians for Human Rights discussing the appalling massacres in Afghanistan in 2002 that have been systematically covered up by both the Bush and now the Obama administrations.

From the NYT

After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation -- sought by officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, the Red Cross and other human rights groups -- because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported Karzai government, in which General Dostum has served as a defense official.

"At the White House, nobody said `no' to an investigation, but nobody ever said `yes,' either," said Pierre Prosper, the former war crimes ambassador for the United States. "The first reaction of everybody there was `Oh, this is a sensitive issue. This is a touchy issue politically.' "

It is not clear how -- or if -- the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum's reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration may not be hostile to an inquiry.

The Obama administration responded in the way we've gotten used to, defending the actions of the Bush administration and being reluctant to investigate.

Physicians for Human Rights responded:

Nice Q&A with Howard Dean and his new book, Dr. Dean's Prescription for Health Care Reform in this weekend's NYT Magazine:

As a former practicing physician, governor of Vermont and head of the Democratic National Committee, did you write your new book, "Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform," to appoint yourself as the go-to person on health care policy? What, exactly, is your role in all this?
My role is to try to get the Democratic Party to do the right thing. I believe that if we don't pass the health care plan with the public option, it won't be health care reform, and we'll lose a tremendous number of seats in 2010.

By "public option," you refer to a plan that would give most Americans a choice between their current health insurance and a new Medicare-style public plan. Which is very different from the sort of comprehensive single-payer plan the Canadians have.
You've got to start from where you are, not from where you wish you were. The Europeans have much more comprehensive and cheaper health care plans than we have, but they got there because their health care systems were essentially destroyed during World War II. We grew our private health care system around World War II -- the only way that American employers could give their employees a raise was to enhance health-insurance benefits -- so to change it to a totally public plan is crazy.

Jerome and I are helping Chelsea Green promote Dr. Dean's book. Its critical that progressives seize these opportunities to drive the debate by propelling our books onto the best seller lists which then dramatically increases their exposure in book stores, airports and in the media. Howard Dean is far and away the best and most progressive spokesman we have for health care reform and this book is a key part of keeping him in the forefront of the discussion. He's touring the country doing book signings so see him if you have the chance.