Month: April 2014

What It Means for America to Have the Largest Prison Population in the World

Trish

This video from the Hank portion of the VlogBrothers doesn’t follow where the $75 billion a year goes, nor does it discuss prison privatization, which drives the spending, but maybe it’s better to start, as the video does, by describing the problem’s scope.

Punitive measures that continue punishment even after the convicted have paid their debt to society turn every prison term into a life sentence

What is covered is something a criminal justice system employee once told me: the vast majority of people in prison today will at some point get out, and we are not only doing almost nothing with that day in mind, such as preparing them to do something different, but we are helping ensure their failure with punitive measures that are designed to continue punishment even after the convicted have paid their debt to society. This turns every prison term into a life sentence. And that’s good for neither them nor society, i.e., us.

I hope someone will do a similar video on the facts behind the DUI privatization rip-off, but that’s a subject for another day.

Obama’s Weekly Address Isn’t So Ho-Hum

Trish

Week in and week out, the president posts his “Weekly Address,” a reiteration of the best answer to the most pressing problem of the time, which will never see daylight because of Republican opposition to anything Obama-related. It’s easy to tune out Obama’s message, just to save a little heartbreak.

This week, in the wake of the proposed budget from Republicans (which will also go nowhere, since Democrats still rule the Senate*) the president again frames the sensible solution but kind of kicks butt with a little extra womp around the 1:17 mark:

The Republican budget begins by passing out massive tax cuts to the households making more than a million dollars a year. Then, to keep from blowing a hole in the deficit, they’d have to raise taxes on middle class families with kids. Next, their budget forces deep cuts to investments that help our economy create jobs, like education and scientific research.

What’s the bottom line, my president?

Policies that benefit the fortunate few while making it harder for working Americans to succeed — that’s not what we need right now. Our economy doesn’t grow best from the top-down, it grows best from the middle-out.

Wham.

* Be sure to vote in November! It really, really matters this time.

Scientists Agree that Humans are Responsible for Global Warming/Climate Change

Buck Banks

James L. Powell found 10,885 peer-reviewed scientific articles published in 2013 about global warming or climate change, and of those, only two attributed it to something other than human activities.

Writes Powell:

Very few of the most vocal global warming deniers, those who write op-eds and blogs and testify to congressional committees, have ever written a peer-reviewed article in which they say explicitly that anthropogenic global warming is false. Why? Because then they would have to provide the evidence and, evidently, they don’t have it.

What can we conclude?

1. There a mountain of scientific evidence in favor of anthropogenic global warming and no convincing evidence against it.

2. Those who deny anthropogenic global warming have no alternative theory to explain the observed rise in atmospheric CO2 and global temperature.

These two facts together mean that the so-called debate over global warming is an illusion, a hoax conjured up by a handful of apostate scientists and a misguided and sometimes colluding media, aided and abetted by funding from fossil fuel companies and right wing foundations.

On the one side, we have a mountain of scientific evidence, on the other, ideology and arm-waving. On that basis, we are endangering our grandchildren’s future and pushing humanity toward the destruction of civilization.

Christie’s Approval Rating Recovers

Buck Banks

51%

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) job approval rating, which has stabilized after suffering a significant drop when the Bridgegate scandal broke in early January, according to a new Monmouth University/Asbury Park Press Poll. The poll found the governor’s rating is similar to his standing in February, which fell by double digits since his re-election last year.

Tailgunner Ted Cruz to Get Record Book Advance

Buck Banks

$1.5 million

Amount Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) will be paid to write “a personal memoir about his controversial days in Washington and his vision for the future for HarperCollins,” the Washington Examiner reports. “The advance would be the biggest for a conservative politician in years, even more than the $1.25 million that former 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin received after her sensational rise in Republican politics.”