The details of new domestic violence allegations against George Zimmerman are horrifying: He allegedly pointed a gun at the woman known only as his girlfriend. He allegedly broke a glass coffee table and barricaded the door after shoving her out of the house, according to the arrest report. Today, at a court hearing, prosecutors claim there was a previous unreported incident during which he allegedly choked his girlfriend.
And though the incident itself is terrifying for the presumed victim, it’s not all that surprising. Zimmerman had previously been suspected of domestic violence, though charges never came through because he smashed the iPad allegedly containing the video of key evidence against him.
All too often, incidents of domestic violence aren’t the first time a partner has threatened the woman he is in an intimate relationship with. In an age in which we are constantly trying to calculate the next attack, incidents of domestic violence are by comparison almost easy to predict.
Larry Sabato, author of The Kennedy Half Century: “In the days and years after Nov. 22, 1963, anti-Dallas sentiment was rampant across the country.”
This map and reporting from Daniel Strauss shows why Democrats should be worried about fixing Healthcare.gov in time for 2014 Senate races. Of the top ten most competitive races, only Kentucky built its own health insurance marketplace, and it enrolled more people than the nine other states with competitive races combined. Those states are forced to use Healthcare.gov, so Democrats in those states better hope it starts working — soon.
Daniel Strauss talks with a couple of the top staffers who were part of that mass exodus today yesterday from the Senate campaign of Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA).
If you’re monitoring the Obamacare enrollment process closely, you want to see evidence that the rate of enrollments are picking up. That would be consistent with expectations, and with how things worked when RomneyCare was launched in Massachusetts: higher rates of enrollment as you get deeper in to the open enrollment period and as deadlines approach.
There are some early indications that the pattern is going according to form. It’s early, and it’s only a few states, ones with their own exchanges, where access has generally been better than via HealthCare.gov. Too early to be definitive, but it’s what you’d expect to be seeing.
As you may have heard, state Sen. Creigh Deeds, the Democratic nominee for governor in 2009, is in critical condition at a Charlottesville hospital after being stabbed in his home, and his son Gus is dead from a gunshot wound. Details remain sketchy. Ongoing coverage at TPMLivewire.
Rob Ford on his new TV show Ford Nation: “I know in my heart everyone has personal problems. I urinated in a parking lot … what does that have to do with anything?”
I’m not sure it quite got everyone’s attention down here in the States. But it seems like today was the breakthrough day in the on-going, endless (and admittedly sublime) Rob Ford psychodrama. We linked to this boffo moment when ‘Mayor’ Ford ran across the Council Chamber to jump into an apparently imaginary melee involving his brother (City Councillor Doug Ford) and managed to clothesline City Councillor Pam McConnell. Beside that there wasn’t so much any one admission or profanity or bonghit or body check as the city government degenerating into a sort of post-modern hostage drama in which two bulbous goon brothers were holding this once proudly boring city hostage. At certain moments, I found myself thinking that the old John Candy/Eugene Levy era Second City TV was actually just a documentary about life in Canada.
As many wise people wrote during the height of the Trayvon Martin case, public morality plays don’t always align neatly with the deep-seated social injustices we connect them to. It was never clear to me that Zimmerman was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of racially profiling and then intentionally killing Trayvon Martin. Based on the evidence that was a difficult case to make. But that’s what Florida prosecutors charged him with. I don’t remember the ins and outs of Florida law. But what seemed more clear cut was something like manslaughter or negligent homicide. It always seemed possible to me that Zimmerman was just a coward with a gun and something to prove who got scared and killed a kid.