Two Little Steps

American civilization is a little bit less of a contradiction in terms this morning. Late yesterday afternoon, Florida special prosecutor Angela Corey announced murder charges against George Zimmerman once she and her staffers apparently decided that the guy who most likely shot Trayvon Martin to death is more of a creep than a vigilante. Zimmerman himself was arrested and brought into custody. He's charged with second-degree murder, which is more serious than manslaughter but spares him the possibility of a death sentence.

Speaking of which, the Connecticut state legislature abolished the death penalty last night, and Governor Daniel Malloy says he will sign the bill. Fears of error in applying the death penalty, along with a DNA exoneration of one death row inmate in Connecticut, led many legislators in Hartford to support the abolition. However, with the memory of a man's wife and daughters being brutally murdered in the state in 2007 still fresh in people's minds, the law is likely to be unpopular - despite the fact that the law will not spare the two men who committed that heinous crime and nine others already on death row in Connecticut. Still, it's encouraging to know that Connecticut has become the seventeenth state to abolish the death penalty, a punishment that perversely suggests that we ought to kill people who kill to prove that killing is wrong. It means that the move to abolish capital punishment is slowly gaining momentum nationwide.

Exits

Two exits made the news. The first was that Rick Santorum ended is candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, effectively conceding the prize to Mitt Romney, who only has Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul left to ignore. With polls showing him losing in the presidential primary in his home state of Pennsylvania, Santorum decided to get out now and preserve his prospects for a future run in 2016 or 2020 rather than risk a repeat of the repudiation Pennsylvania voters gave him when he lost his Senate seat to Robert Casey, Jr. in 2006 by an eighteen-point margin. With Romney now the de facto Republican nominee, President Obama can now focus on how to, as Democrats always do, lose to most losable candidate the Republicans can possibly put up. No, I'm not confident in an Obama victory, largely because the economy hasn't fully rebounded, the European debt crisis could still affect us, and Romney likely has an array of slogans and sound bites to distract voters from the issues.

In fact, Republican economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin is convinced that Obama's endorsement of an unpassable bill to tax millionaires and billionaires at the same rate their own employees pay - the so-called "Buffett rule," after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who's appalled that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary - is politically motivated. (Really, Doug?) Holtz-Eakin is also certain that the Buffett rule wouldn't even make a dent in helping to balance the budget. He even thinks Obama's support of it will even hurt Obama in the election - because despite Obama's characterization of the Buffett rule as an act of fairness, Holtz-Eakin says independent voters are interested in jobs . . . and are not interested in fairness.

There's your take-away: Douglas Holtz-Eakin (who has opposed each and every one of Obama's economic initiatives) thinks independent voters are self-interested heartless bastards.

Meanwhile, George Zimmerman, the likely killer of Florida teen Trayvon Martin, has made an exit of his own even as his legal team made an exit from defending him. After Zimmerman contacted the special prosecutor in the case - something he ought not to have done - he pretty much disappeared, causing his lawyers to resign from the case in part because of their inability to communicate with him. Never arrested, he's now likely anywhere but Florida, laying low out of fear.

Zimmerman's ability to avoid arrest by claiming self-defense under Florida's "stand your ground law" - one of thirty such state laws in the nation and the kind of bill pushed nationwide in state legislatures by the reactionary American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - may be the reason why so many major corporations are deserting ALEC. They got in bed with that right-wing group to promote their business-friendly agenda, and they're dissociating themselves from ALEC now that it's become apparent that ALEC's support of "stand your ground" gun laws like the one in Florida presents a public relations problem.