How the Republicans would spend your money...R.N.C. Spends Thousands on Jets, Limos and Clubs - NYTimes.com

The Republican National Committee spent about $30,000 in the month of February on private airplanes and limousines, not to mention the $1,946.25 charge at Voyeur West Hollywood, which was described by The Los Angeles Times last year as a “high-end nightclub” with an interior “reminiscent of the masked orgy scene” from the movie “Closer."

Scary New GOP Poll...

Harris Poll Findings...

57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was 'not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president'
38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is 'doing many of the things that Hitler did'
Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama 'may be the Antichrist.'

So is there hope for America or are we toast?

The End is Near...

Texas Conservatives Win Vote on Textbook Standards

Texas Wants to put the Moral Majority in Textbooks...

The Texas school board is holding hearings on changes to its social studies curriculum that would portray conservatives in a more positive light, emphasizing the role of Christianity in American history and include Republican political philosophies in textbooks.


Phyllis Schlafly in our Kid's Textbooks?

One guideline requires publishers to include a section on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association." Another states that the Civil Rights movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes” among minorities.

I don't even know what to do with this one.

Goofy but funny...

quo erat demonstratum

No Misconduct Found in Interrogation Memos

David Feige: My President's Day Message--An Open Letter to President Obama

Here on HuffPo

My President's Day Message--An Open Letter to Obama

Dear Mr. President,

Thank you for all your e-mails over the past few years. Energized by the spirit of tolerance and the promise of change, I have enjoyed signing petitions, opening my heart and my home to your events, and even sending in the occasional donation or two.

But I'm afraid you've lost me.

I have watched in horror as the sweeping mandate you so skillfully won has been squandered. You have failed at every turn to practice the politics necessary to change the course of this country, sacrificing health care reform, regulation of the financial system and greater freedom and equality for all Americans on the altar of a personal crusade for civility in a long-since broken institution. Your commitment to bipartisanship and compromise has resulted in neither. Your opponents have derailed every initiative and gutted every innovation, while you have continued to reach out, coaxing and pleading for a better day that simply will never come. Your opponents have won. Their obstructionism has prevailed. I understand that you expect me to blame them for their conduct. I do not. I blame you. Your desire to shift the glaciated culture of Washington elevates discourse over policy, and civility over action. That is not the change I voted for.

To imagine that we could not undo with 60 seats what George Bush accomplished with 53, is a profound statement about the utter ineffectiveness of your high road rhetoric. I have devoted my life to trying to make this country better, and I had pinned my hopes on our ability to do that. I no longer believe that either you or the democratic party will ever be up to that task.

My heart is broken, my wallet is closed. I am done.

E-mail me no more.

With deepest regrets,

David Feige.

Brilliant

Hat tip to the contrarian for this one.


Supreme Court Rules Death Penalty Is 'Totally Badass'

Sotomayor sees inexcusable lawyering as a "strategic choice"

I've been saying since the start that Sotomayor is going to be a terrible disappointment, and that we've squandered the chance to bring on a powerful voice for the disenfranchised.

So right here, in the wake of a Coakley loss, is the proof of concept:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the death sentence of a mentally impaired Alabama man who killed his former lover despite the fact that his lawyer, ( who lacked criminal law experience) failed to tell jurors that he had an IQ of less than 70 and had been classified as mentally retarded.

''Even if it is debatable, it is not unreasonable to conclude that ... counsel made a strategic decision not inquire further into the information contained in the report about Wood's mental deficiencies and not present to the jury such information,'' Justice Sonia Sotomayor said."

Really? Shame on you.

Gotta Love This...

Let's do the numbers...

Ever since the show was cancelled, I keep getting asked about our numbers. And thanks to the good folks over at The Futon Critic, I can provide them. Now one thing about numbers—there are lots of ways to slice them including important things like the demographics, the number of people who watch live vs. time shifted, and stickiness (how often a DVR viewer skips commercials). But partly because it’s self-serving, and partly because it’s easiest, I’m using what are called “Live + 7” numbers which reflect the total audience who watched live or engaged in DVR playback within 7 days of the original broadcast.

So with that in mind, for all my friends and interlocutors, here are the stats…

In our second season (2009) Raising the Bar averaged just under four million viewers a week (3,961,000).

That’s more than any show on A&E, ABC Family or AMC—and yes, that includes Mad Men which averaged about two and a half million a week (2,496,000) and Breaking Bad (1,628,000).

And the other shows I’m regularly asked about?

South Park (which I love) had 3,481,000 viewers (but kicked our asses in 18-49)

Damages had about a third as many viewers at 1,398,000

On HBO we were slaughtered by True Blood (5,003,000) but beat out every other series including Hung (3,617,000), Entourage (3,460,000), Big Love (2,320,000), Curb Your Enthusiasm (1,518,000) and Bored To Death which managed about a quarter as many viewers (948,000).

On Showtime Dexter had about three fifths of our audience (2,166,000) Weeds less than half (1,524,000), Nurse Jackie about a third (1,314,000), Californication less than a quarter (981,000), and The Tudors (779,000) and The L Word (642,000) less than that.

And yes we beat everything on TBS and SyFy as well.

So who ate our lunch? USA. Basically everything they put on kicked our asses. Burn Notice, (7,677,000), Royal Pains, (7,474,000) Monk, (6,259,000) White Collar (6,080,000) and even Criminal Intent, (4,447,000) gave us a whupin. And of course TNT’s own The Closer (which was our lead-in) continued to post huge numbers.

Hope that answers the questions. And as we say in the biz "that's a wrap."

Episodes 13, 14 and 15...

For those of you wanting to know how RTB turns out, you can find the last three episodes onlinehere.

This from Simple Justice

Hat tip to Simple Justice who had this nice post on the recent decision in People v. Radcliffe More on this soon...

Britain to Tax Banker Bonuses

I love the way they're doing this. We won't of course, but we should--a windfall profits tax is perfectly appropriate here. At least as long as we're not going to just chuck the whole system and adopt an APT tax which is what we should do.

Thinking about time...

In the wake of yesterday's news that RTB had been cancelled, I found myself thinking a lot about the whole arc of my life, (leaving The Bronx Defenders, writing Indefensible, going back and forth to Hollywood etc) and more specifically about time and doing time. It turns out there's a handy website that calculates the number of days between dates, allowing me to easily determine that there were 1,259 days from the day I got a phone call from Steven Bochco and we agreed to do a show, until its cancellation two seasons later. In the spirit of idiotic RENT songs, the website also informs me that: 3 years, 5 months and 10 days also converts to:

108,777,600 seconds
1,812,960 minutes
30,216 hours
179 weeks (rounded down)



But put another way, it's almost exactly a four year prison sentence with good time, or what the feds would describe as a 48 month guideline sentence.

I am sad to see the show fall by the wayside. There was so much more I thought the show had to say, and I really felt we continued to improve from a story and character standpoint. I suppose I was even naive enough to think that a third season would have offered us a critical reappraisal. But, as a friend of mine use to say, "at least no one calls me "old peg leg".

TNT Cancels Mark-Paul Gosselaar's Raising the Bar - E! Online

Bummer

The gutsiest move by a politician in a long time

Gov. Ted Strickland grants clemency to 78 people and why? Rehabilitation! And not just your drug guys doing 100 years for possession either, he actually released people convicted of murder, and other serious crimes. Bravo Governor. I'm sending you a donation today, and I urge other readers to do the same or to at least write and express your approval:

You can do that HERE

Justice à Manhattan

I love the french Here's the awesome plot summary of one of my RTB episodes:

Jerry et Richard se battent pour des clients victimes de verdicts injustes. Richard doit affronter le juge Kessler, qui est davantage préoccupé par un rencard surprise que par le procès... Pendant ce temps, Bobbi lutte pour régler une situation bouleversante impliquant son ex-mari.

C'est bien.

Court officer steals documents from the defense file on videotape!

Now he has to apologize or go to jail.

Judge Donahoe held Deputy Adam Stoddard in contempt for the Oct. 19 incident in which he could be seen on a courtroom security video sneaking up behind attorney Joanne Cuccia in the middle of a hearing and taking a document from her file.

During several days of testimony following the incident, Stoddard said he happened to have glanced at the file and saw the words “going to,” “steal” and “money” grouped together in a sentence. It made him think a crime was taking place and gave him the authority to pull the document, he said.

But Donahoe rejected that story, saying there’s no way “a reasonable detention officer” would have thought a crime was taking place based on what he saw.

“There was no immediate or future security threat that would have justified a reasonable detention officer in DO Stoddard’s situation removing, seizing and coping a document from a defense attorney’s file,” Donahoe wrote in his ruling, which was made public today. “A reasonable detention officer would have recognized after spending approximately 37 seconds reading the paragraph in question, that the ‘key words’ had nothing to do with an immediate or future security threat to the jail or anyone else.”

Here's the video!

Alexander Cockburn quotes me...

how cool is this?!

"They will offer these and scores of other persuasive arguments, and it is impossible to imagine they will prevail. As David Feige, a public defender in the Bronx, presaged in a smart piece on the Slate site, these efforts by the defense team will fail and produce bad law."

Another little Slate piece...

The real price of trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. - By David Feige - Slate Magazine

Old Video From the TCA's

TNT's Raising the Bar
by tvguide

Makes me nostalgic.

Fernando Bermudez Declared Innocent of Murder

It's about time.

Congratulations to former colleague Michael Risinger and his wife who represented Fernando and were instrumental in his exoneration.

Someone knows how to spell schadenfreude

OOPS!:

A man blamed a low-flying pelican and a dropped cell phone for his veering his million-dollar sports car off a road and into a salt marsh near Galveston. The accident happened about 3 p.m. Wednesday on the frontage road of Interstate 45 northbound in La Marque, about 35 miles southeast of Houston.

The Lufkin, Texas, man told of driving his luxury, French-built Bugatti Veyron when the bird distracted him, said La Marque police Lt. Greg Gilchrist. The motorist dropped his cell phone, reached to pick it up and veered off the road and into the salt marsh. The car was half-submerged in the brine about 20 feet from the road when police arrived."

Facebook update saves teen from jail

Hat tip to Joel...

Memories...

Makes me nostalgic...

Republicans and Democrats like us...

Ok, dear readers, I'd love your analysis of this one:

Want to grab a Republican and not in the usual TV places? Try "Wipeout" on ABC. A Democrat? How about TNT's "Saving Grace"?

In July, TiVo used Power||WatchTM ratings service -- one that surveys its DVR users -- to examine party affiliations concerning TV programming. It didn't just measure the seemingly obvious TV news show category, but monitored general entertainment programming, as well.

The highest-rated show for those who identify themselves as Republicans was Discovery Channel's "Deadliest Catch," a show about real-life lobster fishermen in the rough and cold waters of Alaska. The show grabbed a 4.9 rating among Republican viewers, with an index of 130.2, which equates to some 30% over the average.

The second-best show was ABC's special "J.K. Rowling: A Year in the Life," which took in a 3.8 Republican rating and a 125.2 index. ABC's "Wipeout," the reality athletic competition show, was in third with a 6.6 rating and a 116.2 index.

For those identified as Democrats, the best-rated show was TNT's "Saving Grace," a drama about an Oklahoma City detective who deals with crime and her guardian angel. It scored a 5.3 rating among Democrats and a 153.6 index -- the highest index for either party affiliation.

Almost as high for the Democrats was Bravo's "Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List," which took in a 6.4 rating and a 151.2 index. "The Closer," another TNT show, was in third place with a 9.6 rating and a 138 index. The best-rated broadcast network show was NBC's "The Philanthropist," with a 5.8 rating and a 137.2 index.

Where did Democrats and Republicans meet? TNT's "Raising The Bar," about young public defender lawyers and young DAs in New York City, which scored well on both lists. For Republicans, this pulled in a 4.2 rating and a 112.9 index; for Democrats, the show earned a 4.8 rating and a 128.8 index.

Among TV news shows, Republicans and Democrats split along party lines, according to what critics believe are their affiliations. Eight of the top 10 shows for Republicans were on the Fox News Channel, while eight of the top 10 show shows for Democrats were either MSNBC or CNN.


So: Is this a good metric of the Political Engagement of Viewers? If so, is there a correlation between political engagement and purchasing?

Hmmm.....

Weird NYT goof...

This looks to me like an e-mail from the writer to the assignment editor.

Just once and for all, can we get this straight?

Ok, I'm sick and tired of hearing about how you can't release pedophiles and rapists because they all re-offend.
Let's once and for all understand what our ownBureau of Justice Statistics says:

THESE ARE THE MOST RECENT LONG-TERM STUDY NUMBERS:

Of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 States in 1994, an estimated 67.5% were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9% were reconvicted, and 25.4% resentenced to prison for a new crime.

Within 3 years of release, 2.5% of released rapists were rearrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for a new homicide.

Sex offenders were less likely than non-sex offenders to be rearrested for any offense –– 43 percent of sex offenders versus 68 percent of non-sex offenders.

Sex offenders were about four times more likely than non-sex offenders to be arrested for another sex crime after their discharge from prison –– 5.3 percent of sex offenders versus 1.3 percent of non-sex offenders.

On a given day in 1994 there were approximately 234,000 offenders convicted of rape or sexual assault under the care, custody, or control of corrections agencies; nearly 60% of these sex offenders are under conditional supervision in the community.

Of the 9,691 male sex offenders released from prisons in 15 States in 1994, 5.3% were rearrested for a new sex crime within 3 years of release.

Approximately 4,300 child molesters were released from prisons in 15 States in 1994. An estimated 3.3% of these 4,300 were rearrested for another sex crime against a child within 3 years of release from prison.

JUST TO BE CLEAR:

Released prisoners with the HIGHEST rearrest rates were robbers (70.2%), burglars (74.0%), larcenists (74.6%), motor vehicle thieves (78.8%), those in prison for possessing or selling stolen property (77.4%), and those in prison for possessing, using, or selling illegal weapons (70.2%).

Released prisoners with the LOWEST rearrest rates were those in prison for homicide (40.7%), rape (46.0%), other sexual assault (41.4%), and driving under the influence (51.5%).

Within 3 years, 2.5% of released rapists were arrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for homicide.

Ok, can we all please stop echoing the bullshit now?