April 2012

by Jeremy Leaming

While a Florida special prosecutor has finally lodged a second-degree murder charge against George Zimmerman, the so-called neighborhood watchman, who killed an unarmed Florida youngster Trayvon Martin, a public interest group is having success at pulling corporate support from the right-wing organization that has played a major role in the proliferation of the troubling Stand Your Ground laws.

Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law provides significant legal protections to those who kill others outside their homes, claiming they used lethal force in self-defense. Traditionally the law has provided some protection to those who use lethal means to protect themselves while in their homes. The Stand Your Ground laws go much farther and have been described as cowboy-esque.

As The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently noted “it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.”

Krugman was referring to the right-wing group ALEC, which has the backing of the Koch brothers, “Exxon Mobile, and so on.” As noted in this ACSblog post, ALEC essentially wrote the law for Florida, and likely provided the model for the twenty-some other states that have similarly ridiculous laws, which promote “vigilante (in)justice,” as Krugman put it.

The public interest group, ColorOfChange has launched a campaign to urge corporate sponsors to stop supporting the work of ALEC. In an April 11 blog post, the group notes that Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, McDonald’s and Wendy’s have all “parted ways with ALEC since ColorOfChange launched its effort late last year.”

by Jeremy Leaming

A Washington Post front-page headline declares that the Affordable Care Act “will add $340 billion to deficit, new study finds.” It’s an eye-catching title, especially in light of the Congressional Budget Office’s assessment that the law would lead to a decline in the deficit.

Jonathan Chait writing for Daily Intel says The Post’s article is hardly the blockbuster story it is dressed up to be.

For starters there is no such study. Instead, Chait points out that The Post is actually talking about a partisan paper “published by the Mercatus Center, a Koch-funded organization that produces some quality work as well as a fair amount of schlock that does not meet the standards of your typical university economics paper. This paper is an example of the latter.”

The paper, by Charles Blahous, a research fellow at the Koch-funded organization and former Bush administration official, relies, Chait writes, on a simplistic conceptual trick producing a “bizarre assumption” that the new health care form law can only add to the deficit because of new spending.

The White House has also weighed in on The Post’s coverage of the Blahous paper. Writing for The White House Blog, Jeanne Lambrew blasts the paper for promoting a false claim, and cites the work of the CBO and the Office of Management and Budget, which projects “lower Federal budget deficits as a result of the law.”