This, from Think Progress, nails it: private prisons spent just $45 million in bribes lobbying expenses, and netted over $5 billion just for detaining immigrants alone. Short answer to “what are WE all doing wrong?” is quite simple: playing by an outdated set of rules called “fairness” and what used to be known as “the rules” or “the law.” Fuck that. Among the bribes lobbying are efforts to have legislatures pass harsher sentences to increase private prison profits. Ain’t America grand? America is now a simple game: unless you want to be left behind with the rubes and suckers of...

Rest in peace, Dr. Sally Ride, America’s first female astronaut, who died at 61 of pancreatic cancer. In 1983, Dr. Ride was aboard the space shuttle Challenger (which would blow up three years later, with two other women aboard), for her debut mission. At the time, Dr. Ride’s mission [not to mention her whole career in the hard sciences] was quite groundbreaking (notwithstanding that the Soviets had sent women to space decades earlier…for all its flaws, the USSR had much less of a stick up its ass about things like that than we did… and do… note that there are,...

Alrightie then: this from A.P. lists members of Congress and others in power who got discounted loans from Countrywide in exchange for favorable treatment of that entity (and its sugar-mama, Fannie Mae). Naming names of the “VIPs” who took the bribes favorably discounted loans., we see… that the Keating Mozillo Five Six includes: Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D), both chairmen of key committees; and House members Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.), Brooklyn’s own Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.); Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), and Tom Campbell (R.-Calif.). Also in on the Countrywide discounted loan gravy train were .Mary Jane Collipriest, who was...

It’s that most irritating of situations– a July 4th (or Christmas or New Year’s Day) that fall on a Wednesday, more or less screwing up the possibility of a long weekend for many, but nonetheless, still interfering with the flow of a week. Yes, we’re supposed to celebrate that day some 236 years hence when a curmudgeonly Boston lawyer and a slave-owning Virginia Renaissance man, both of whom would go on to be Presidents of the United States, collaborated on a Declaration of Independence cribbed from John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers. And it kind of worked for quite a...

For those interested, the incomparable Scotusblog has complete coverage of the Supreme Court’s affirmance of the constitutionality of “Obamacare.” The most surprising wrinkle is the (unexpected) pragmatism of Chief Justice Roberts, who, correctly, found that this Franken-statute exceeded Congress’s powers under the Commerce Clause, but also found, in a most unexpected and “anti-formalistic” way that the “individual mandate” that is the primary funding mechanism of Romneycare Obamacare Oromney care Affordable Care Act was within Congress’s power under its taxing power. I readily confess that as an employed individual with health insurance (btw, for which my share of the premium is...

What Jimmy Carter said. “A Cruel and Unusual Record. America’s Shameful Human Rights Record.” Pretty much nothing more than crackpots and cranks like, say, the author of this blog have been telling you for years.

I try to be sanguine about these things (our pretensions of not being a dictatorship ended around eight years ago with the S. Ct.’s ducking of Padilla, as I saw it)… but Candace pronounces Habeas Corpus officially dead now (as the Supreme Court ducks all seven D.C. Circuit cases for which review was sought), and I can’t disagree. (When she posted that yesterday, Candace didn’t even know the pretty much foregone result in her own client’s case (scroll down to this case: 06/12/2012 Civil Action No. 2010-1020, ABDAL RAZAK ALI V. BARACK H. OBAMA, ET AL. Doc No. 1500 (memorandum...

Since we don’t have a rational system– merely one designed to serve its most powerful members at the expense of everyone else, though “everyone else” will merrily go along with what the elites want (just so long as a few buttons get pushed along the way, and, of course, the WonderBread and NASCAR/Jersey Shore Circuses keep flowing)– none of these devilishly simple and comprehensive solutions will likely be implemented any time soon on these shores. But the great Charles Hugh Smith is such a visionary, I feel compelled to shout out his stuff… particularly his current trilogy: Income Tax Solution:...

Wendy Kaminer raises an interesting question: might Barack Obama’s shameless fawning on Wall Street oligarchs (via expansion of the all-important national security state,manifested “on the ground” with the surveillance of, spying on, labeling of as “terrorists”, pepper-spraying, etc. upon (mostly) youths who dare to question the social order even to the extent of shaming) not merely be evil and stupid and wrong in every sense of the word– might it actually be bad politics? In a razor-thin electoral margin situation, Obama’s deliberate targeting of members of his own base… just might not be the greatest of ideas in terms of...

I don’t know what to make of the Grey Lady’s op- ed lamenting an unsuccessful House bill to dial back part of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act providing for… wait for it… due process of law (by civilian law enforcement) for Muslims dark-skinned people terrrrrrrrrorism suspects. The Grey Lady’s op-ed rightly lauds a decision from Manhattan federal court Judge Katherine Forrest striking down certain portions of the loathsome NDAA. Good for Judge Forrest. I agree, Still… my problem with the whole tenor of these stories is that, now, ten years after September 11th and the demonstration project known as...