Private prison system explodes

Now we have a powerful new industry, full of wealth, ready to buy politicians, in order to convince them to keep the prisons filled with non-violent drug offenders. The numbers presented by AlterNet are shocking:

From 1999-2010, the total U.S. prison population rose 18 percent, an increase largely reflected by the "drug war" and stringent sentencing guidelines, such as three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentences. However, total private prison populations exploded fivefold during this same time period, with federal private prison populations rising by 784 percent (as seen in the chart below complied by The Sentencing Project).

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Parsing Obama’s terrorism speech

Glenn Greenwald characterizes Barack Obama's recent terrorism speech as a Rorschach test--something for everyone:

The highly touted speech Obama delivered last week on US terrorism policy was a master class in that technique. If one longed to hear that the end of the "war on terror" is imminent, there are several good passages that will be quite satisfactory. If one wanted to hear that the war will continue indefinitely, perhaps even in expanded form, one could easily have found that. And if one wanted to know that the president who has spent almost five years killing people in multiple countries around the world feels personal "anguish" and moral conflict as he does it, because these issues are so very complicated, this speech will be like a gourmet meal. But whatever else is true, what should be beyond dispute at this point is that Obama's speeches have very little to do with Obama's actions, except to the extent that they often signal what he intends not to do.

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Censoring PBS

How much is PBS self-censoring? I live in St. Louis, where the PBS affiliate has never included the programming of Democracy Now. Bill Moyers was long a persona non grata according to the powers that be at PBS. These two items are all the evidence you need to know whether PBS censors progressive points of view. Ring of Fire has now provided even more evidence:

America’s Public Broadcasting System, or PBS, is surrendering to private influence of the Billionaire industrialists, the Koch Brothers. “Citizen Koch,” a documentary that exposes the money driven politics that influenced the Wisconsin uprising, was rejected by PBS for fear of offending one of its key contributors, David Koch. The move by PBS was not the failed negotiation as they suggest it was, but a censorship, against their better judgment, to protect the hand that feeds them.

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The other side of parenting

I've enjoyed being a parent, though it has sometimes been a lot of work. I'm proud of who my two daughters are turning out to be. They teach me many things, including humility. Recently I read this post at Huffpo, an extraordinarily sad post, or at least that is how I reacted. This website features the comments of people for whom parenting is a sad, and sometimes dismal experience. It includes a "confessional" where people often openly express their dark thoughts regarding their own children. Here's the post, and here's the "Scary Mommy Confessional."

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