{ 2 bars + 3 stars }

Rally in support of Mir Hussein Moussavi, 6/15/2009.

This is how citizens should react when their government steals an election.  If only we’d protested like this back on Dec. 13, 2000 — the day after the conservative wing of our Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush president.

In HuffPo today, read the excellent criticism by Micheal Rowe of O’Reilly, Coulter et al. re the direct causal link between the hateful spew of their ilk and the right-wing domestic terrorism in D.C., yesterday, and the political assassination in Wichita last month. To wit:

As a group, they are the pop culture equivalent of necrotic carrion beetles, crawling with insectile determination from one infected open wound in the American psyche to another. The wounds include fear of race, fear of foreigners, fear of sexuality, fear of difference, hysterical religious fundamentalism, violent nationalism, and paranoia. They lay their eggs in the infected abrasion, then scuttle away. When the eggs hatch, disgorging rage and discontent, they start counting money.

Rowe also keenly highlights the parallel to mid-October, 2008:

[McCain] address[ed] the intended racial slur [of an elderly supporter] and disavow[ed] it, however badly. . . . Sarah “Screw the Political Correctness” Palin, on the other hand, seemed right at home. She marched into those same crowds grinning and winking, and “Yoo betcha-ing” like she was onstage at the Miss Alaska pageant. While her supporters waved watermelon slices and stuffed monkeys, Palin talked about who the “real Americans” were, and who was “palling around with terrorists.” She refused to address the blatant racism of her fans, or address the obvious exploitation of Obama’s middle name, Hussein, and the implication she herself was making with her “terrorist” comments.

Taken as a whole, it’s hard to imagine the dialogue on the right improving before it gets much, much more dangerous.

If only the indigent accused had it so good.

Everyone remembers the 1992 comedy hit ‘My Cousin Vinny,’ starring Joe Pesci as the eponymous Vincent LaGuardia Gambini, Ralph Macchio, Fred Gwynne (R.I.P.); Marisa Tomei was (inexplicably) awarded the Oscar for best supporting actress, even.

The plot of M.C.V. centers around an Alabama capital murder trial in which a woefully under-prepared Vinny, despite all the southern-fried justice, somehow manages an acquittal (due in part to Yankee hairdresser knowledge of mud and limited slip differentials).

But in real life, a capital murder charge in Alabama, if you’re poor — and you undoubtedly are — is a virtual death sentence in and of itself, as the state pays practically nothing for the constitutionally guaranteed representation of indigent defendants.

Case in point: NYT, today, profiles the trial of Holly Wood (seriously), a mentally-retarded man convicted of capital murder in 1994, whose newly-minted defense attorney failed to even mention Mr. Wood’s severe mental deficit during the sentencing phase, let alone explain it as a mitigating circumstance of his crime. The result: a 10-to-2 jury in favor of the death penalty.

And yet the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which includes Alabama, held that such gross incompetence, in a state where trial judges literally run for re-election based on their number of death sentences, is “a strategic decision, not a grave error.”

Sure, if your client’s goal is a swift execution.

Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, Wood v. Allen, 08-09156, 556 U.S. ___. Stay tuned.