Legal v. moral: SCOTUS supports Troy Davis

For the nine justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the end of June, when their vacations begin, is almost as red-letter a day as the first Monday on October, when their caseload begins. Which is to say, when it usually begins.

But this lazy summer, the Supremes made an exception, with a rare summertime ruling that resets the countdown clock for a man convicted of a murder he may not have committed — and also begins, at the highest level, the judicial refutation of the idea that new evidence in a death-penalty case is an inconvenient thing.

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Almost 20 years to the day after the murder of which he was convicted, Troy Anthony Davis has earned a new opportunity to save his own life, again.

After years of nonstop exposure in the media, and, more recently, a relentless barrage of grassroots protests spearheaded by Amnesty International, the Supremes voted on Monday 6-2 (Justice Sonia Sotomayor hasn’t been seated yet), to order a Georgia federal district court to consider and rule on whether new evidence "that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes [Davis'] innocence."

“The petition for a writ of habeas corpus is transferred to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia for hearing and determination,” read the ruling.

The court agreed to remand the case despite the utterly predictable dissenting votes of two justices, Antonin Scalia (who wrote the dissenting opinion) and Clarence Thomas.

Years after Davis’ conviction, a Congress more enamored of efficiency than the truth passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). The AEDPA, which limited death-row prisoners to one bite of the appellate apple — one set of appeals in federal court — was, at the end of the day, meant to be the light-rail train that moved death-row inmates like Davis to their final destinations on the execution gurneys, and to do as quickly as possible.

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In their dissent, Scalia and Thomas stood hard by the principles of AEDPA, and seemed to suggest that, boiling it all down, hey, sometimes an innocent person has to be killed in the furtherance of orderly application of justice overall.

Scalia wrote, "This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

Scalia noted that the Supremes were ordering a district court judge to hold a hearing that, according to Congress, the judge is not allowed to convene.

But in a wonderfully articulated, mercifully brief majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens went upside Justice Scalia’s head, in the process smartly distilling the inescapable problem with capital punishment in the United States; its potential for error; and the likelihood for tragedy built into the judicial system’s insistence on finality over fairness:

“Justice Scalia’s dissent is wrong ... First, he assumes as a matter of fact that petitioner Davis is guilty of the murder of [off-duty Savannah police] Officer [Mark] MacPhail. He does this even though seven of the State’s key witnesses have recanted their trial testimony; several individuals have implicated the State’s principal witness [Sylvester “Red” Coles] as the shooter …

“Justice Scalia would pretermit all of these unresolved legal questions on the theory that we must treat even the most robust showing of actual innocence identically on habeas review to an accusation of minor procedural error. …

“But imagine a petitioner in Davis’s situation who possesses new evidence conclusively and definitively proving, beyond any scintilla of doubt, that he is an innocent man. The dissent’s reasoning would allow such a petitioner to be put to death nonetheless. The Court correctly refuses to endorse such reasoning.”

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In plain language, or plainer than Justice Stevens, the Supreme Court’s opinion effectively discounts the idea that a court’s punishment after a finding of guilt must be exercised no matter what; that the potential of new facts exonerating a defendant in a death-penalty case does, and should, automatically be ignored or invalidated by the drive for judicial closure.



As you might expect, the Supremes out-of-season decision has raised questions, many of them hinging on how far the courts should go to ensure that innocent people aren’t executed. There’s something intrinsically cynical about even asking that question. If the courts are, ultimately, the guardians of justice in our society, it makes sense that the proven potential for injustice by those same courts can’t be overlooked when it’s discovered.

Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University, told Time Magazine that “the way the court 'decided' the Troy Davis case … raises a lot more questions than it answers. It also probably ensures still more litigation in the future.”

And that’s no doubt true. As approved by Congress, the AEDPA specifically prohibits district judges from ruling further in the Davis case. What happens to future such cases in the face of AEDPA guidelines? It’s a thorny and potentially intractable issue.

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But we’re not frightened by the prospect of more litigation in such a case. The matter of Troy Davis may be legally known as Davis vs. the State of Georgia; what it’s becoming is a case of Spirit of Law vs. Letter of Law, and that’s a contest always worth debating. In the spirit of the law is the absolute pursuit of justice; we’re seeing how that pursuit may well be antagonistic to the letter of the law, the law as written.

So be it. The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday upholds a sound principle: that a good story, or a seemingly solid conviction, should never get in the way of the facts that may — or may not — support the validity of that story, or that conviction.

That responsibility to get it right in death-penalty cases shouldn't be superseded by a law passed by Congress, a law whose main intent is to speed people toward execution on an ASAP basis. It might satisfy the letter of the law, but it fails to uphold the spirit of the law. It might be legal, but it's not moral.

The case of Troy Anthony Davis returns to Georgia. As it makes its way through the system at the district-court level, we shouldn’t expect any less attention paid both to the case itself and what its outcome means for every American.

One nation, all mobbed up

President Obama’s town hall on Saturday in Grand Junction, Colo. — like the one on Friday in Belgrade, Mont., and the one on Tuesday in Portsmouth, N.H. — was his attempt to rescue, in the name of civility, a health-care debate whose tone owes more right now to the roll-the-tumbrels style of the French Revolution than to Roberts’ Rules of Order.

The right wing’s appeal to the mob is especially cynical this time, as well as ominous.

According to findings from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Department of Homeland Security, nativist right-wing extremists (and their enablers in various high places) are exploiting the health-care dilemma, and the bruised economy in general, to gain new and passionate adherents in numbers large enough to form the infrastructure of a national threat.

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The president explained the use of the Recovery Act money to help Americans who can’t afford health insurance:

“One third of the money in the Recovery Act … is for emergency relief for folks who've borne the brunt of this recession. We've extended unemployment benefits for more than 150,000 Coloradans. We've made health insurance 65 percent cheaper for families who rely on COBRA while they're looking for work.”



And he again explained the crucial elements of health-care reform for everyday working Americans (and those Americans who wish they were working every day):

“Insurance companies will also be stopped from cancelling coverage because you get sick or denying coverage because of your medical history. … And we will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies.

“At the same time, if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep seeing your doctor. I don't want government bureaucrats meddling in your health care. But the point is, I don't want insurance company bureaucrats meddling in your health care, either. So if you're one of the nearly 46 million people who don't have health insurance, you will finally have quality, affordable options. And if you do have health insurance, we will help make that insurance more affordable and more secure.”

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Using the bully pulpit of the presidency, Obama clearly understands what’s at stake in the health-care reform debate — he’s made the point more than once that an estimated 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day, a statistical time bomb waiting to go off.

But all of last week, the debate was hijacked by hordes of shit disturbers bussed into various locations by the coalition of Congressional conservatives and lobbyists for the insurance industry. Their objective has been plain and simple: sew discontent, shout down honest dissent, cultivate a climate of fear and rage.

This cheap bid for American ochlocracy would be disturbing enough if it originated solely as a result of Obama’s health-care policy; fact is, there are Democrats honestly opposed to it as well.

But there’s a lot that points to this being a purely personal bid for character assassination. Simply put, for many in this national discussion, this isn’t a debate about Obama’s health-care plans, it’s a debate about the president himself — and it’s one they’re framing in disturbing ways.

A healthy debate on the future of the nation’s health-care system, for example, shouldn’t have made it necessary for one Portsmouth protester, William Kostric, to show up outside the town-hall location openly carrying a loaded gun (albeit hours before Obama spoke there).

A robust debate wouldn’t have made it necessary for another extremist protester, in Hagerstown, Md., to brandish a sign saying “Death to Obama, Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids.”

Not much of a message there about concern over health insurance premiums.

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At times, though, it’s hard to separate the ad hominem attacks from a generalized rage against the machine.

Katherine Zaleski went to the Grand Junction event and reported for The Huffington Post:

“A number of people told us that this isn't just about President Obama. Some have been angry since the Bush administration, others don't trust government at all. A few people spewed out remarks against the president that were reminiscent of those seen at campaign rallies for [now former Alaska] Gov. Sarah Palin last year. We even met two Birthers -- obviously misinformation was strongly represented. When we asked people for evidence or to clarify their positions with the facts, they just continued with their talking points.”

But it’s more than talking points: Richard Terry Young was arrested by Portsmouth police on Aug. 11 for carrying a pocket knife into the school where Obama was to speak. A search of Young’s car on the school grounds found a loaded gun for which Young had no license.

And when some anonymous nutjob someone feels free to exercise his First Amendment right at a malign level — painting a swastika on the office sign of Rep. David Scott, a Georgia congressman — there’s something deeper and more dangerous at work.

Just like during the French Revolution, when mob passions were tragically exploited in the furtherance of political objective, there’s a grim menace in the making here in the United States — something less about talking points and, ominously, more about hollow points.

It’s the quietly building sense that for many impoverished, resentful Americans, intolerance has acquired a cachet, a certain element of cool that’s proving to be irresistible. That’s a prescription for nothing less than a national disaster.
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Image credits: Obama: Image from pool. William Kostric: Still from MSNBC's "Hardball." Scott sign swastika: The Associated Press.

Woodstock: It was 40 years ago today

“Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there,” Michael Herr told us in “Dispatches.” His point, found at the end of his luminous, correspondent’s-eye view of one tour of duty in the Vietnam War, is one that students of war and of media have come back to time and time again: Ferried into peoples’ homes night after night via the evening news; the subject of studies and subcommittees; the flashpoint of protests and policies, the Vietnam War was such a total national experience as to be ubiquitous and utterly inescapable. You were “in country” whether you were physically “in country” or not.

Not for nothing was Vietnam called America’s rock and roll war: the war gained its foothold in the national experience about the same time that rock music was gaining prominence and legitimacy in the lives of everyday people; the war’s climax in the years 1968 and 1969 roughly dovetailed with the creative high point of rock’s visionaries. After 1969, rock underwent serious renovation.

But not before Woodstock went down.

It was 40 years ago today when thousands converged on a field at a dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y., for an event modestly billed as “3 days of peace & music.” What took place from Aug. 15-18, 1969, was a watershed for the culture, the best sort of watershed: the accidental kind, with no deep-pocketed corporate tie-ins, no booths for cellular phone companies, no noisy warnings about coolers and alcohol not being permitted.

Woodstock was an impromptu experiment in social engineering that succeeded beyond expectation. They anticipated maybe 100,000 people would show up; they ultimately got at least 400,000. Joni Mitchell’s poignant tribute to the event said the number of concertgoers those three days came to “half a million strong.”



And Woodstock disproved the prevailing notion that those unwashed masses breathing free couldn't act responsibly, even charitably, as an instant society. Woodstock proved that things didn’t have to fall apart, that the violence that visited so much of the nation in those turbulent days and years didn’t have to happen everywhere. That rage, that violence could be postponed, at least three and a half months. At least until the deal went down at Altamont.

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Today on Sirius XM’s Woodstock Channel, created by Sirius to mark the 40th anniversary of that gathering of the tribes, a voice on one of the on-air promos said “you didn’t have to be at Woodstock to be at Woodstock.” And it’s true.

Like any enriching experience, there’s something to be imparted beyond the actual, literal experience itself. If it’s anything important, with residual social value, it’s possible to learn from the experience and from the things outside the experience that reflect on it.

You don’t have to watch the rock falling into the water to recognize its after-effects; the ripples from that stone’s splash will last longer than the splash itself, and be observed by more people than the ones who watched the rock originally.

Woodstock was the splash that’s still sending ripples across the water of our culture. Forty years after the event, a flurry of new albums are out with remastered updates of the original music. Ang Lee’s new film “Taking Woodstock” looks at the genesis of the festival from different perspectives.

And bet your mortgage: the good burghers of Bethel will be besieged all weekend long by visitors from around the country and the world hoping to brush up against the magic of that summer, sniffing the air in that open field for just a hint of the patchouli and pot smoke that wafted into the American air, and stayed there for forty years.

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Woodstock was the bomb and everybody knew it. Even a skinny, nappy-headed 14-year-old black boy in Denver, a kid desperate to gain some sense of himself and his world, knew it when he read about it in The Denver Post the day after it started. Woodstock was the place to be.

The old man, of course, wouldn’t hear of it. Not for a minute. Out of the Army less than two years, the major was still very much in military mode, right down to the way his three children were raised. Woodstock? Too many un-American hippies there to be anything good. Out of the question.


And ultimately, it didn’t matter. The skinny kid in Denver didn’t make it to the mud flats at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm 3,000 miles away. But Woodstock the Experience came to him: less than a year later, when he heard the movie soundtrack for the first time; four years later, when he moved to Boulder, Colorado’s counterculture ground zero, to start college and pursue a parallel career in psychoactive discovery; forty years later, when he attended the final Oracle Gathering, three days of peace & music, environmental awareness and multicultural embrace, in a field in Randle, Wash.

And Woodstock the Experience came to him whenever he heard the music from that moment in American time, and he knew the lyrics and the melodies and even the guitar riffs like he knew his own name.

For him and for millions of others, it was true then and now and forever:

Woodstock, Woodstock, Woodstock, we’ve all been there.
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Image credit: Woodstock poster: © 1969 Arnold Skolnick. "Taking Woodstock" poster: © 2009 Focus Features.

Dr. Obama on the offensive

President Obama landed in Montana today for a town hall meeting on health-care reform. But relax: this town hall wasn’t an occasion to call out the state militia or screen everybody for weapons at the door.

The president came to the friendly territory of Big Sky Country to discuss the loaded topic, and began the process of taking back the debate over health insurance from the screamers and yahoos loose at other town halls, where various Democrats from Congress were all but assaulted over the issue.

Montana (whose Sen. Max Baucus is one of the president’s water carriers on health-care reform, on the Senate Finance Committee) went for Obama in the 2009 election. The 1,300 or so supporters who turned up today at an aircraft hangar in Belgrade, Mont., weren’t screened or vetted. They’re everyday people.

One of their number, cancer survivor Katie Gibson, symbolized the catch-22 of people repeatedly denied health coverage because of her pre-existing condition.



These Big Sky souls were able surrogates for average Americans facing a health-care crisis of unprecedented scope. The numbers help put things into perspective: there were about 1,300 people at today’s event. About ten times that number — an estimated 14,000 Americans — lose their health insurance coverage every day. Obama made the point tellingly: for them, the dreaded C word isn’t necessarily “cancer.” It might well be the word “cancellation.”

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After Gibson’s introduction, President Obama tapped his rhetorical resources, the way he did during the campaign, and broke the issue down for average citizens.

“Katie’s story is the kind of story that I’ve read in letters all throughout the campaign and every day when I’m president. I hear about them in town halls all across America, the stories of hard-working people who are doing the right thing. They’re acting responsibility, only to find out that they’re penalized because others aren’t doing the right thing, because others aren’t acting responsibly. …”

“We’re no different from Katie and other ordinary Americans, no different from anybody else,” the president said. Obama made plain his objection to the current system. “It’s wrong … and we are going to fix it when we pass health insurance reform this year.”



Obama took a well-needed shot at some of the news coverage that’s followed the brawling at other town hall events. Referencing his own town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., on Tuesday, the president said the Portsmouth town hall (and by inference the one in Belgrade) was symbolic of what was needed: “people who are coming together and having a civil, honest, often difficult conversation about how we can improve the system. That’s how democracy’s supposed to work.

“I was glad that people were not there to shout; they were there to listen," he said. "That reflects America a lot more than what we've seen covered on television the last few days."

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Obama’s homeboy homespun rhetorical flourishes were on display today, but his greatest effectiveness may have happened when he got up close and personal in the discussion.

It’s the sense of personal experience with the system he’s seeking to overhaul that gives Barack Obama more than the usual presidential leverage, makes the podium he speaks behind more than a conventional bully pulpit.

His own personal history is his secret weapon. In the health-care debate, Barack Obama has skin in the game.

The story of the death of his mother, Anne Dunham, from ovarian and uterine cancer in 1995 after battles with insurers — and the more recent passing, weeks after the November election, of Madelyn Dunham, his grandmother and the woman who raised him in his mother’s stead — give Obama’s call for health reform a personal urgency that’s easily transferrable to Americans of all economic stripes.

“I’ll never forget my own mother as she fought cancer in her final months, having to worry about whether the insurance company would refuse to pay for her treatment. The insurance company was arguing that she should have known that she had cancer when she took her new job, even though it hadn’t been diagnosed yet. If it could happen to her, it could happen to any one of us.

“It’s wrong. And when we pass health insurance reform, we’re going to put a stop to it once and for all. …”

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Today at an aircraft hangar in Montana, President Obama returned fire against the climate of intolerance that’s lately taken the high ground in the health-care debate. As only he can, Obama made the theoretical, procedural aspects of health care reform a dilemma with a human face. He spoke in recognition of how, for all of us, in all of us, no matter how healthy we are today, there is the genetic chronicle of a death or disability foretold.

Att some time in our lives, our cells will betray us; our delicate physical balance will go awry; we will be subject to a cascade of physiological events we can neither predict nor prevent.

“We are closer to achieving health insurance reform than we’ve ever been in history,” President Obama said, calling for a change in the debate over health care, one that seeks change from insurers and doctors, one that finally recognizes the power and inescapability of that pre-existing condition called life.
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Image credits: Obama: Image from Aug. 14 pool feed. Anne Dunham: Mercer Island (WA) High School yearbook photo.

American made, world played: Les Paul (1915-2009)

The new musical documentary “It Might Get Loud” examines the history and evolution of the electric guitar from the viewpoints of three of rock music’s best guitarists.

But while Jimmy Page, Jack White and The Edge will have a lot to say about the origins of the instrument that defines the modern rock sound, what they bring to any discussion of that history pales next to that of Les Paul, the man, the guitar legend who mastered the lost chord on Thursday, at a hospital in White Plains, N.Y., from complications of pneumonia, at the age of 94.

You’re entitled to suspect it’s hyperbole or bad marketing when someone’s referred to as “the father of” just about anything. But in the case of Lester William Polsfuss, it’s accurate to call him indisputably one of the fathers of rock and roll.

Having pioneered or assisted in such critical developments as overdubbing, multitrack recording and tape delay techniques, Les Paul made most of the sonic innovations we take for granted in rock music possible. He helped develop the design of the guitar that bears his name, one of rock music's three defining instruments (the Fender Stratocaster and the Rickenbacker being the others).

And Paul, being more than a gifted proto-geek behind the scenes, actually brought the passion as a guitar player, perfecting trills and various chord shadings that still give rock the letters of its language.

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If you want a taste of rock and roll’s future, do yourself a favor: Listen to the version of “How High the Moon,” the one that Paul and his first wife, Mary Ford, recorded in January 1951. Paul's guitar scats in and out and around Mary Ford’s equally athletic vocals … for a while.

Then Paul breaks away to fly solo – finger-picking already like nobody’s business, … laying down the dissonant chords that helped form the semiotic backdrop of our cold-warring, tail-finned, mid 20th-century American lives.

In that song’s two minutes and change, you can hear it: Years before Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry or Bill Haley, the musician and tinkerer from Waukesha, Wisc., had effectively created the electric guitar’s harmonic template, its sonic swagger and dissonance, the brisk but improvisational infrastructure of rock musical style.

On these foundations, every memorable rock and roll record in history would ultimately be built.

But Les Paul also appreciated the ways in which the absence of music forms its own musical statement. "I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it's the right one," he told CNN in 2002, "and it will probably whip the guy with 20 notes." Lesson to wannabe shredmeisters and six-string heroes everywhere: Some of the greatest notes ever played are never played.


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It’s a tribute to how widely his contributions were appreciated that, within a day of his passing, guitarists from Trey Anastasio to B.B. King, Ace Frehley to Keith Richards had all weighed in with something to say. More will follow in the days to come, and later, when they have the absolutely inevitable tribute concert somewhere in America … with every one on that stage playing a Gibson Les Paul, no doubt.

But more importantly, it’s the best tribute to Les Paul himself, his sense of invention and an irrepressible passion for the future, that he kept working virtually all his life. If you want proof of this, look at the picture of him, an image taken last year by Thomas Faivre-Duboz at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City, where Paul played until fairly recently with a small combo every Monday night.

Marvel at a man past the age of 90 but still swingin’, still active, still present in the world he helped to create.

Go play some rock and roll. Any rock and roll. Doesn’t matter what. He’s in there, in every trick and technique of the guitars you hear, in every tweak and effect of the studio that recorded the guitars you hear. He’s in there.

Les Paul didn’t create the sound of rock and roll. But it’s a certainty that without him, rock and roll wouldn’t have much of a sound at all.
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Image credits: Gibson Les Paul: Zeppelin4life. Les Paul, 2008: Thomas Faivre-Duboz, republished under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Glenn Beck and the wages of hate

The two-minute hate George Orwell novelistically documented in “1984” has expanded in 2009 (courtesy of the fractious health-care debate) to the length of a town hall meeting. The once-civilized gathering, where neighbors could meet and discuss their differences (the better to dissolve them), has lately resembled a political rugby scrum. The conservatives have mightily attempted to disown these hapless yahoos — the same malcontents who animated the weak Tea Party movement, complaining about their taxes being too high weeks after their own taxes went down. But these are their people.

And after many days of noisy badgering and threats at the town hall brawls that have accompanied the health-care debate, progressives and the reasonable people of any political persuasion are starting to push back.

Glenn Beck is discovering that hard lesson where it counts. And where it hurts.



Some weeks ago, ColorOfChange.org, an Internet-based advocacy organization addressing issues important to black and minority Americans, put out notice of its intent to call Bullshit on Glenn Beck, the oleaginous Fox News prime-time windbag who moved to Fox from CNN early this year. This is the mouthbreather who recently called President Obama "a racist” on the air during the “Fox and Friends” program.

“This president has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture, I don’t know what it is... this guy is, I believe, a racist,” Beck said on July 28, discussing the president's role in the Henry Louis Gates incident. It was part of a long diatribe that evening that Beck continued with other half-truths, untruths, innuendo and character assassination. It was part of the ongoing wingnut jihad that Beck and his Fox confrere Bill O’Reilly (among others) have been waging for far too long now, against Democrats, people of color, progressives and other living things.

And the folks at ColorOfChange had had enough.

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On July 30 the brain trust at ColorOfChange threw down the gauntlet, at Glenn Beck’s bread and butter: the advertisers that keep his show alive.

The CoC strategy was simple enough, and announced online:

“Together we can stop Glenn Beck. Starting today we're calling Beck's advertisers, asking them if they want to be associated with this kind of racist hate and fear-mongering. When they see tens of thousands of people signing on behind that question, we believe they'll move their advertising dollars elsewhere, damaging the viability of his show and possibly putting him out of business. …

“All major media is funded by advertising. And advertisers, more than anything, care what consumers think. If we want to change what's happening and put an end to folks like Glenn Beck having a platform, we can do it.”

Thus began an online petition drive that has netted thousands of responses; Olbermann on MSNBC said tonight that Color of Change had so far garnered about 75,000 signatures supporting holding advertisers feet to the fire.

And something's happening. Gawker reported back on Aug. 6 that “some of [Beck’s] advertisers decided that bottomless white rage is off-brand: Lawyers.com, Procter & Gamble and Progressive Insurance ads no longer appear during his show.”

Olbermann added to that list tonight. Apparently the folks at the Men’s Wearhouse clothing store chain could no longer guarantee they like the way Glenn Beck sounds. The folks behind image-conscious GEICO Insurance decided they didn’t want their genial Brit spokesgekko anywhere near Beck’s “Program.” Sargento Cheese, S.C. Johnson (“A Family Company”) and State Farm Insurance felt the same way.

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Looking to salvage some cheap triumph out of all this, a Fox News spokeswoman told TVNewser that the companies simply moved their spots to other Fox News shows, “so there has been no revenue lost” as a result of Beck's whacked-out meltdown. Which tidily misses the point.

Fox can’t juggle advertisers like that indefinitely, and they know it. Color of Change did what screaming and yelling and indignant op-eds apparently couldn’t do: with nothing more or less than principles, this plucky grassroots org drove a wedge between a network and its advertisers, a wedge based on nothing more than a call to morality and the importance of community standards of acceptable behavior.

Only this time the community was probably a national one; this time the community was too potentially deep and wide for those risk-allergic advertisers to ignore.

And let’s look at some of those advertisers. As the battle over health insurance (and insurance generally) heats up in the heartland, it can’t have escaped the attention of the Fox beancounters that three insurance companies have vacated some prime ad real estate on Fox News. Think others won’t get that message?

Glenn Beck’s gotten some strange but real traction out of doing his Howard Beale-on-meds act — for two networks, no less.

ColorOfChange’s calling Glenn Beck out — and taking its place in a slowly building pushback against an ugly, jingoistic intolerance we can’t get rid of fast enough. Bill, Lou, Rush … you been warned.
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Image credits: Beck: glennbeck.com. Color of Change logo: colorofchange.org. Logos of Procter & Gamble, S.C. Johnson are properties of the respective companies.