Tuesday, December 08, 2009

What the hell, Massachusetts?

If you people wanted to elect Martha Coakley to statewide office and kiss your own civil rights goodbye, that's your business.

But I LIKE mine.

United States Senator Martha Coakley? Seriously?

Anyone who has ever used the words "my thorough review of all the evidence, including that which is often taken out of context and deemed 'exculpatory,”* is not someone I'm voting for, and I don't get why y'all did either.

CC
who is pleased that the parole board also deemed the evidence exculpatory in that particular case, but wants to know why y'all want to choose between someone like this and handing the Republicans more control in the Senate.

*This was in the case of a man who had already spent fifteen years in prison for Satanic Ritual Abuse. The entire case against him is widely believed to be a hoax.

6 comments:

PG said...

What has she done to civil rights in Massachusetts? I wouldn't have thought you would be opposed to buffer zones around reproductive health clinics.

Chalicechick said...

I edited to add one thing to post.

Further, she's the one who wanted to go all Patriot act on the people who put up the Aqua Teen Hunger Force LEDs a couple of years ago. Because she was sure that Comedy Central's goal was to induce public panic.

Also, she was the one who argued the Defendents shouldn't be able to cross examine their forensic techs side of that case. AND she has been a crusader against pain doctors who "over-prescribe" in her non-medically educated opinion.

Every popular but completely insane thing to come out of Massachusetts for awhile has had Martha Coakley all over it.

I've been trying to convince people not to vote for her for quite awhile, though I did that more on facebook than here.

CC

Desmond Ravenstone said...

I'm not only registered as unaffiliated, but I supported Mike Capuano.

That being said, there are some positives for Coakley. For one thing, she continued her predecessor's practice of not turning over trafficking victims to the immigration authorities, but working to get them help.

Still, I think we could do far better for a legislator. Come January 19th, I'll likely vote for a third-party candidate, or write somebody in.

Then again, I've done that a lot lately, LOL!

Elz said...

Sigh. What can I say -- she knows how to play the media. She's smart and she's tough, a really empathetic pissed-off woman with the skills to deal with the s***. Massachusetts has a lot of seriously bad crime. There are gangs, there are break-ins. And it is also one of the states that lost hundreds of beloved human beings on 9/11, since two of the planes took off from Logan.

That said, I do not like to see her in the Senate. Hopefully, there will be a series of highly-challenging Democratic primaries for awhile.

PG said...

Blaming the agents of TBS for TBS's dumb decision-making was a mistake on her part, I agree.

With regard to defendants' cross-examining forensic techs, I'm actually more troubled that she decided to argue the case herself before SCOTUS. A prosecutor is going to be trying to make life easy for the state; that's just a given. Assuming that she didn't need to get an accomplished appellate constitutional lawyer to argue the case, however, indicates a bit of arrogance, and I'm not sure I buy her claim that she did it to save the state money; Tom Goldstein built his reputation as a Supreme Court specialist partly by taking cases for free or at very low rates.

AND she has been a crusader against pain doctors who "over-prescribe" in her non-medically educated opinion.

I think there has been a real problem with dubious prescriptions of pain medication, as we saw with Rush Limbaugh's oxytocin issues and Michael Jackson's death. I don't know whether that has been a particular concern in Mass.

Chalicechick said...

My issue isn't so much blaming Comedy Central's agents, it's the idea that we should jump to a nonsensical conclusion that Comedy Cental was making fake bombs to terrify the public as an excuse to punish people as much as possible for Boston's overreaction to those cartoon characters.

(What terrorist bomb takes the form of a cartoon character made of flashing lights? What reasonable person looks at cartoon character made of flashing lights and jumps to the conclusion that it must be a bomb? What reasonable administration decides to call a cartoon character made of flashing lights a "fake bomb" so as to claim that a major corporation was trying to induce public panic so as to prosecute the flunkies who put up the cartoon characters to a more dramatic extent than would be possible under a more rational view of what they did?)

Those cartoon characters showed up in like ten cities. many of them several days to a week BEFORE Boston's version. Only Boston treated them as anything threatening at all.

Whatever happened to seeking a just result rather than seeking the most draconian punishment possible, and only possible if you stretch the bounds of reason to justify it?

(((I think there has been a real problem with dubious prescriptions of pain medication, as we saw with Rush Limbaugh's oxytocin issues and Michael Jackson's death. )))

Rush Limbaugh was getting his prescriptions by seeing half a dozen different doctors and telling none of them about the medication prescribed by the others. That's not the doctors' fault. It's Limbaugh's. I don't have a problem with putting people who are abusing drugs in jail, I just don't want to see doctors unable to prescribe the pain medications that their patients need.

As for Micheal Jackson, his case seems pretty unique to me. Is it possible for a doctor to prescribe too much medication? Yes. But we're also to the point that my aunt's best friend can't get the amount of oxycontin she needs to relieve her pain and even the amount she can get prescribed is hard to get out of the pharmacy.

IMHO, Martha Coakley's demonstrable zealous persuit of victory for her own side and lack of interest in a reasonable result makes her exactly the wrong person to be tackling this complex and subtle issue. Unfortunately, cases like Limbaugh's are famous, thus making it exactly the sort of issue she likes to dive into.

CC