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For many years the district attorney's office in New Orleans has been a cesspool of constitutional violations, consistently disregarding defendants' rights in order to secure convictions. The misconduct has been so egregious that the New York Times wrote an editorial about it in October, asking, "How many constitutional violations will it take before the New Orleans district attorney’s office is held to account for the culture of negligence and outright dishonesty that has pervaded it for decades?"

Change in New Orleans was supposed to come in the form of current Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, who “promised that he is working to uncover and remedy the unjust convictions won over the years by his predecessors." Last year, he and the Innocence Project New Orleans even worked together to create the Conviction Integrity Project, which brought together attorneys and investigators from both offices to examine "questionable convictions" from years past. The goal wasn't only to ensure justice, but to do so without the years-long fights in court, which are expensive and contentious. 

While conviction review units are not new, they are usually internal units of the district attorney’s office, making their objectivity and motivations questionable at best. But this project’s inclusion of the Innocence Project made it unusual and more promising. The Advocate likened the partnership to "Muhammad Ali taking tea with Joe Frazier."

But little more than a year after it was announced and just six months after it was funded, the Conviction Integrity Project is over.

Is Chris Christie lying now, or was he lying in 1994? It’s got to be one or the other, because, asked by CBS Face the Nation host John Dickerson about Marco Rubio’s attacks on him as a past Planned Parenthood donor, the New Jersey governor said "Well I never donated to Planned Parenthood, so that's wrong." 

Ahem. 

However, the governor's statement doesn't fit with what he had to say in 1994 while a candidate for county office.

"I support Planned Parenthood privately with my personal contribution and that should be the goal of any such agency, to find private donations," Christie was quoted saying in The Star-Ledger on Sept. 30, 1994. "It's also no secret that I am pro-choice. ... But you have to examine all the agencies needing county donations and prioritize them. I would consider all groups looking for funding, but there is a limit and we have to pick and choose."

His campaign followed up with another denial that Christie had ever befouled himself by supporting women’s health care.

Wouldn’t it be beautiful if Planned Parenthood could come up with a record of a Christie contribution? It’s equally likely, though, that Christie was lying in 1994 as he is now. But either way, we know he’s willing to lie to get where he wants to go. Not that it’s any surprise. 

Screw paid parental leave. Republican presidential candidate (yes, still) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich thinks new mothers and fathers should rely on their employers to “try to be creative” instead of being required to offer paid leave. And if the extent of their employers’ creativity is “come to work or you’re fired,” as it is for so many Americans, oh well.

“The one thing we need to do for working women is to give them the flexibility to be able to work at home online,” Kasich told the man who asked the question. “The reason why that’s important is, when women take maternity leave or time to be with the children, then what happens is they fall behind on the experience level, which means that the pay becomes a differential.

It’s not clear how you run a cash register or take care of patients while sitting at your computer at home, but Kasich must have a way, right? Because otherwise he wouldn’t be claiming that working online was “the one thing we need to do for working women.” Also, how easy must he think it is to care for a newborn if you could apparently do it while also getting in a full day’s work online?

Kasich is also flat-out wrong on the effects of maternity leave, as Bryce Covert points out:

Kasich is right that the fact that women are more likely than men to interrupt their careers to care for family is part of it, explaining about 10 percent of the overall gap. But paid leave actually helps mitigate that problem. A woman who gets 30 or more days of paid family leave isover 50 percent more likely to see her wages increase than a woman who got no paid time off. Women who take unpaid leave, meanwhile, are more likely to wind up in a different job and often end up with lower pay than their previous one.

Flat-out wrong and not a little offensive:

“And we need to accommodate women who want to be at home, having a healthy baby and in fact being involved, however many years they want to take care of the family.”

So women who work aren’t involved and don’t have healthy babies? That would come as a surprise to an awful lot of women (and the healthy children they’ve raised with love and, yes, involvement) and as a particularly heinous guilt trip to women who can’t afford to stay home with their babies for even a few weeks because they lack the paid family leave that Kasich opposes. Not to mention, how exactly does it work that a couple months of paid maternity leave is terrible for women’s careers and so we should oppose policies requiring that couple months of paid maternity leave, but staying home for “however many years” is something that should be accommodated and supported? 

Kasich is not only an enemy of the facts and an opponent of a policy that a majority of Americans support, he’s also just f’ing incoherent.

It has long been established that the death penalty in this country is racially unequal. Minorities are more likely to be sentenced to the death penalty: 42 percent of those on death row right now are black, while they make up just 12 percent of the country. Meanwhile, only 43 percent of death row inmates are white, significantly lower than the 65 percent white population nationwide.

But the racial disparity is even more pronounced when you look at the race of the victim, as murderer is much more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white. Black Americans are almost eight times as likely as white ones to be homicide victims. But almost 75 percent inmates currently on death row were convicted of killing white people, compared to only 15 percent where victims were black.

Nowhere is the death penalty’s racial inequality more apparent than Louisiana. The state has the dubious distinction of incarcerating more people than any other state in the nation, which is particularly notable given that the U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country on earth.

Now, a new study of race in Louisiana's capital convictions and executions lays out exactly how racist these death penalty convictions are.

According to the study, published in Loyola University of New Orleans’ Journal of Public Interest Law fall 2015 edition, in Louisiana "the ultimate punishment has long been reserved for crimes other than killing black men."

When you're doing as badly in the polls as Chris Christie is, it seems you can't be picky about your friends.

Presidential candidate New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) defended Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) during an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Monday morning, after LePage came under fire last week for racially charged remarks about heroin dealers impregnating "white women" in his state. [...]

"He's a good man and he's apologized," Christie continued. "Everyone of us — me and everybody else who's in public life — says things at times they wish they could take back."

Hey, what's a little fear-mongering about the Others coming to impregnate your "white women" among Republicans? Worrying about sketchy folks impregnating the white women has been the lynchpin of Republican campaigning for a half century now. Donald Trump based his own presidential run on it, and he is doing very well indeed.

For the record, LePage has not "apologized" in the conventional sense. On the contrary, he merely blasted media suggestions that his imaginary scenario of "D-Money," "Smoothie," and "Shifty" impregnating "white women" had anything to do with race, insisting he said "white women" as a clumsy shorthand for "Maine women"—since most of 'em are white, after all, and it's not like he gives a rat's ass about the others.

Also for the record, New Jersey governor and stubbornly still-unindicted Chris Christie is probably—and I’m just throwing this out there—not the best judge of who is "a good man." But once you've resigned yourself to hugging the crank railing about the dangers to "white women," you might as well hug him tight.

Job creation isn't the only accomplishment of President Obama's that Republicans are refusing to acknowledge. That's particularly true when it comes to Obamacare—to hear them on the issue, you'd think it's impoverishing and killing everyone who comes near it. That's because, when they're busy repealing it, they are also voting to repeal some amazing thing. Like 87,000 saved lives, just in hospital care alone.

Some of the see-what-sticks cost experiments also seem to be improving care. One recent report found that infections and other "hospital-acquired conditions" have declined 17 percent since 2010, when Obamacare created financial incentives for hospitals to avoid them. That reduction saved an estimated 87,000 lives and $20 billion. A similar effort to incentivize better management of discharged patients has coincided with a decline in hospital readmission rates that's keeping 150,000 more Medicare patients at home every day, according to Meena Seshamani, director of the administration's Office of Health Reform.

Under Obamacare, about one-fifth of Medicare patients have already shifted into alternatives to fee-for-service, and the goal is to get half the system paying for value rather than volume by 2018. Maryland’s hospitals are now paid through "global budgets" that include outpatient care, so they no longer have incentives to admit patients just to keep their beds full. A recent New England Journal of Medicine article found the state's hospital costs increased at less than half the expected rate in the program’s first year, saving Medicare $116 million. There are signs that Obama's convoluted jumble of changes may be starting to rationalize an irrational system. Patrick Conway, the director of the new innovation center, told me about a new Independence at Home experiment that coordinates nurse and doctor visits for frail and disabled patients—and saved Medicare $3,000 per beneficiary in its first year. One elderly diabetic who had 19 hospitalizations the previous year had only one after enrolling in the program.

This is what Republicans intend to repeal. The whole point of the vote they had last week, doomed as it was to presidential veto, was to set the stage for a Republican president who would sign their repeal. That repeal would sentence who knows how many people to premature deaths and back to the uncertainty that Republicans have forced on all the people living in the Medicaid gap now. Just to be clear, that's what they are planning on.

What they're not planning, five years into this, is replacing it. 

Chris Christie went back to his wheelhouse on Saturday. That means attacking teachers, the move that helped gain Christie his early YouTube fame as the kind of bully Republicans can love.

“The single most destructive force for public education in this country is the teachers union,” Christie said at a Jack Kemp Foundation panel discussion in Columbia, S.C., on Saturday. “It is the single most destructive force.”

Not poverty and inequality, which are among the best predictors of school success we have, yet which are ignored by Christie’s corporate education policy crowd. Not school underfunding or swelling class sizes—both things teachers unions fight. No, according to Christie, kids can show up in school hungry after sleeping in the car and sit there in a 40-student class and the teachers union will be the single most destructive force those kids face.

In Seattle, teachers went on strike for elementary school kids to get recess, for limits on standardized testing, for limits on therapist caseloads for special education students, for equity teams to address inequalities in the schools. That’s “the single most destructive force for public education in this country,” according to Christie. When Chicago teachers went on strike in 2012, they were fighting not only for raises and health care but for textbooks on the first day of class and air-conditioning in classrooms. And, faced with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s constant school closures and maintenance so bad that parents are cleaning school bathrooms out of desperation, Chicago teachers have voted to strike again. Because they’re “the single most destructive force for public education in this country” or because they’re fighting for better public education in this country? Chris Christie has his answer. 

Criminal charges are being recommended for a Los Angeles Police Department officer who shot an unarmed homeless man in the back in May of 2015.

Brendon Glenn, a regular fixture on and around the Venice Boardwalk, was said to be in an altercation with another man—a bouncer at a bar—when police intervened. LAPD Officer Clifford Proctor would later state that, in the ensuing struggle, Glenn attempted to take both his and his partner’s weapon. Investigators from the LAPD, however, found that Glenn was on his stomach when Proctor shot him twice in the back. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck made the recommendation of criminal charges. He says he was aided in part by video footage that captured most of the event. Even Proctor’s partner stated he did not know why Proctor shot Glenn. Proctor is black, as was Glenn.

Beck’s decision is a bit of a surprise to this writer (and many others, no doubt). Last year, when the Los Angeles Police Commission found that LAPD officers acted out of policy in the murder of Ezell Ford—a shooting with similar circumstances as Glenn’s—Beck made a video recording to LAPD’s 9,000-plus officers assuring them that they had his support. 

The recommendation to charge Proctor criminally was made to the Los Angeles County District Attorney by Beck last month. Good luck with that one. The current D.A., Jackie Lacey, has been a disappointment thus far in the area of cop accountability, following an historic pattern. The D.A.’s office has not charged any cops for on-duty shootings in 15 years. Under Lacey’s tenure, which began in December of 2012, sheriff’s deputies who assaulted visitors to the county jail—the visitors … not the inmates—led carefree lives until the FBI stepped in and investigated.

We’ll be keeping our eyes on this one. The L.A. district attorney’s office should be the one spot that can provide Angelenos with accountability and justice, since the LAPD obviously can’t.

Donald Trump isn't letting go of his Ted Cruz birtherism. And why should he? Fomenting fear of sneaky, underhanded foreigners is his thing.

Donald J. Trump sharply escalated his rhetoric about Senator Ted Cruz’s eligibility to be president on Saturday, suggesting that because he was born in Canada there were unanswered questions about whether he met the constitutional requirement to be a "natural-born citizen."

“You can’t have a person who’s running for office, even though Ted is very glib and he goes out and says ‘Well, I’m a natural-born citizen,’ but the point is you’re not,” Mr. Trump said while campaigning in Clear Lake, Iowa.

Most people, of course, consider Ted Cruz's birth to an American mother—thus making him an American citizen at birth—to be conclusive. But the Republican Party of the last near-decade has hosted a cottage industry of people suspicious of the idea that merely being born to an American mother counts as being "American" enough to be president, and Donald Trump has long considered himself to be that movement's undeclared king and/or chief justice and/or snack bar host. If these people can get themselves worked up over a president being born in the suspicious-sounding foreign locale of Hawaii, you can rest assured they won't take Calgary lying down. (Or maybe they will. Honestly, trying to predict what will or won't become the next grand conservative conspiracy theory is a fool's errand. By this time next week they could be insisting that Marco Rubio is secretly half-panda.)

What's perhaps more interesting is the lengths Ted Cruz's fellow Republicans are going to to not back Ted Cruz up on this one. Keep in mind that when past presidential contender John McCain's detractors were objecting to his birth on an American military base in Panama, the Senate was right quick to settle the issue in their fellow senator's favor. This time, however, Mitch McConnell says the Senate won't be getting involved in the issue. Likewise, Republican National Committee head Reince Priebus has pointedly declined to weigh in, even though vouching for the inherent American-ness of one of his candidates seems like literally the least his party could do.

So it seems that yes, Sen. Ted Cruz's fellow Republicans and senators really do hate him that much. No doubt if the Republican base makes Cruz the nominee, they'll all suddenly be piping up to explain how none of this was ever an issue. But in the meantime they're more than happy to hang Cruz out to dry—at least for a while.

The Supreme Court held oral arguments Monday in its latest chance to gut unions and screw working people. The case: Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. At issue: The plaintiffs, who were recruited by the far-right Center for Individual Rights, say that it’s a violation of their First Amendment rights to have to pay a fee for the services they get from their union, like collective bargaining and grievance representation. They don’t have to pay union dues, you see, they just have to pay a fee, called an agency fee or fair share fee, that covers the direct costs of representing them. But because the union spends other money—money from people who pay full dues—on politics, these plaintiffs feel they shouldn’t have to pay anything.

What’s at stake here? 

One brief in the case indicates that in states where teachers are covered by collective bargaining but aren't forced to pay agency fees, about 34 percent are "free riders." Moreover, states that have the compulsory fees for workers have much higher union membership in the public sector—an average of nearly 50 percent—compared with states where such fees are banned (17 percent). 

Those figures help to explain why this case is part of a concerted push by conservatives to sap the political clout of organized labor. In a new report on the case by the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, senior fellow Richard Kahlenberg writes that Friedrichs can be viewed as "a naked political grab, one that seeks to undermine the power of collective action by hardworking Americans and weakening the ability for unions to promote the interests of workers' rights nationally."

There’s a long-standing Supreme Court precedent that agency fees are constitutional:

In the 1977 decision, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Supreme Court made a distinction between two kinds of compelled payments. Forcing nonmembers to pay for a union’s political activities violated the First Amendment, the court said. But it was constitutional, the court added, to require nonmembers to help pay for the union’s collective bargaining efforts to prevent freeloading and ensure “labor peace.”

However, in 2014, the court ruled in Harris v. Quinn that “partial public employees” like home health aides didn’t have to pay the fees. That was widely seen as a step toward eliminating the fees for all public workers, and right-wing groups have pushed hard to make that happen. Like so many high-profile Supreme Court cases these days, Friedrichs is expected to come down to a 5-4 vote, but the expected swing vote comes from an unexpected source.

Today’s comic by Tom Tomorrow is The Junior Militiaman Playset! 

What you may have missed on Sunday Kos …

• February 13, Raleigh, North Carolina: Join the march for love, justice, and the vote, by Denise Oliver Velez

• GOP must lie to make Democrats sound extreme. Their ideas are extreme enough without embellishment, by Ian Reifowitz

• Why Democrats should climb onto the No Labels stage with Joe Lieberman, by Mark Sumner

• Yes, Obama's gun efforts could have stopped that killing, by Frank Vyan Walton

• Death with dignity is something we all deserve, by Mark E Andersen

• Let’s be real about guns, safety, open carry, and privilege, by Egberto Willies

• A hidden cost of gerrymandering: When even competitive seats are rendered uncompetitive, by Steve Singiser

• Silicon Valley is still getting it wrong on income inequality, by Jon Perr

• David Bowie, R.I.P.:

David Bowie, the iconic rock star whose career spanned more than half a century and whose influence transcended music, fashion and sexuality, has died aged 69.[...]

Bowie’s 25 albums produced a string of hits including Changes, Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. He was known for experimenting across diverse musical genres, and for his alter egos Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke. He also had a notable acting career.

His latest album, Blackstar, was released last week to coincide with his 69th birthday, and had received widespread critical acclaim.

Blackstar was the first Bowie release not to feature a picture of him on the cover: instead, a stylised black star heralded a darker work. On re-examination, there is much in Blackstar to suggest Bowie was saying goodbye, particularly in Lazarus, and the video for the title track, which opens with the image of a dead spaceman.

• Ringling Bros. 11 touring elephants retiring a year earlier than planned:

The decision to retire the elephants is a year and a half sooner than originally planned. In March, the company had said it would phase out its three touring elephant units, which perform 1,000 shows a year, by 2018.

The announcement came after decades of claims by animal rights activists that the circus treated the giant creatures cruelly.

• Here’s a pretend $100 for you to pretend-play Powerball and watch how long it takes you to lose it all. Chances of winning? 1 in 292 million. But somebody has to win eventually. Right?

• Presidential debates ignore climate change. Kids ask why:

As infamous political advisor Karl Rove recently pointed out, why should they care about climate change when we’ll all be dead in the next sixty years or so? While that may be true for our elected officials, that isn’t true of everyone alive today and that’s why ScienceDebate.orghas enlisted the help of young children to help force a desperately needed conversation about climate change.

• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin not only tells us what the polls say, he tells us why they say it. Lead in the Flint water, methane in the California air. Trump-driven Cruz birtherism might sort of have a point! GunFAIL damage runs so much deeper than the statistics say.

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Ted Cruz has been rising as Ben Carson falls, consolidating far-right support of the non-Trump variety. Now, the Texas senator and GOP presidential hopeful is just drinking Carson’s milkshake:

[Sam] Pimm, who at one point served as the executive director of the pro-Carson 2016 Committee, said he left the group quietly in the fall but remained a Carson supporter until Sunday, when he communicated to the Cruz campaign that he would be supporting the Texas senator, citing electability concerns about Carson.

He does not have plans to take on an official campaign role, but wants to be involved with Cruz, particularly in New Hampshire. His move comes as all five of the New Hampshire-based paid staffers at the pro-Carson super PAC also quit Sunday to back Cruz.

Here’s the lone, pathetic, bright spot for Carson: At least it wasn’t all of his Super PAC’s staff.

But a source familiar with the super-PAC's operations told The Hill on Monday that one paid super-PAC staffer, Sarah De La Cerda, remains in New Hampshire supporting Carson, "and intends to remain there."

Now there’s a sign of strength! 

At this point, can we declare “deciding not to work for Ben Carson” to be one of the hot political trends of 2016?