Politics Plus

Jon Stewart returned from vacation and interviewed Barack Obama for the last time.  Even without much of Jon’s usual comedy, the interview was worth watching.  One reason is that Jon has a depth od understanding most professional news reporters seem to lack.  The other is Obama’s candor.

Two titans of the establishment left facing their twilight, President Obama and Daily Show Host Jon Stewart, sat down on Tuesday night for an extended interview on topics ranging from ISIS to the media to Iran to the crumbling VA system.

It was a relatively friendly interview, with Stewart asking open-ended questions and more or less letting the President take the floor. The one exception would be when Stewart addressed the failures of veteran care in recent years.

"Boy, rough ride for the veterans recently. First the attack in Tennessee, and then this systematic issue with the VA and healthcare", Stewart said. Veteran care has always been something of a personal issue with the Daily Show host; one of his segments on the topic even led to some reforms earlier this year…

Inserted from <Alternet>

I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did, and I hope that is not the last time those two share a stage.

I am still disturbed by the way Bernie Sanders was heckled at Netroots.  He was treated like someone who did not care about black people, humiliated, and shouted down.  However, if you put Bernie’s record, over the years, on the table, it’s clear to see that he has done more for civil and human rights than any other candidate in the presidential field.

Over the past few months, one lingering blemish on Bernie Sanders' candidacy for the Democratic nomination is his indifference to racial justice and civil rights issues.

But the truth is, Sanders has a 50-year history of standing up for civil and minority rights, as he told the attendants of Netroots Nation after he was interrupted by Black Lives Matter protesters. Of course, it's understandable that they want to bring attention to the movement…

…Here are 20 ways Sanders has stood up for civil and minority rights, starting in the early 1950s up to the present year.

1. Raising Money For Korean Orphans: International solidarity was an unusual concept for any American to have in the 1950s, let alone a high school student. But one of Sanders' first campaigns was to run for class president at James Madison High School in New York City. His platform was based around raising scholarship funds for Korean war orphans. Although he lost, the person who did win the campaign decided to endorse Sanders' campaign, and scholarships were created.

2. Being Arrested For Desegregation: As a student at the University of Chicago, Sanders was active in both the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1962, he was arrested for protesting segregation in public schools in Chicago; the police came to call him an outside agitator, as he went around putting up flyers around the city detailing police brutality.

3. Marching In March On Washington: Sanders joined the mega-rally called by the leaders of the civil rights movement, a formative event of his youth.

4. Calling For Full Gay Equality: 40 years ago, Sanders started his political life by running with a radical third party in Vermont called the Liberty Union Party. As a part of the platform, he called for abolishing all laws related to discrimination against homosexuality…

Inserted from <Alternet>

I have shared just the first four examples.  I urge you to click through for the other sixteen.

To be critical of Bernie, he did not have a detailed platform already prepared to deal with systemic racism against blacks.  But it’s the time in candidates’ campaigns that they’re just beginning to cobble their positions on  most issues together. 

The simple truth here is that Bernie needed to learn more about the issue.  Had the leaders of the Black Lives* Matter movement sought Bernie out and educated him on what steps need to be taken to deal with systemic racism, I have no doubt that Bernie would have incorporated their positions into his campaign and fought for their positions even after his campaign is over.  That’s how Bernie is.  That is also what MLK would have done, and it would have been a far more productive move than humiliating their most likely ally.

*typo corrected

Almost every week, Republicans join a competition to see who can say the most outlandish things, and in the process, they push the envelope on just how evil InsaniTEA can become.  I trust that you will believe it, when I tell you that last week was no exception.

Iowa tea partier Steve King makes a very bizarre claim.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro recently had the audacity to suggest that the GOP has alienated and continues to alienate Latino voters. This may have something to do with Donald Trump’s recent statement that Mexican immigrants are “rapists and murderers” and the fact that not that many GOP-ers backed away from that assertion.

It may also have to do with the fact that Republicans have fought tooth and nail against Obama’s attempt to grant amnesty to the children of undocumented immigrants.

So Castro recently told MSNBC that the GOP can “kiss the Latino vote goodbye.”

In response, the GOP’s chief immigrant-basher-before-Trump, Iowa’s Steve King, who notoriously accused immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America of having “cantaloupe calves” from all the dope they are smuggling, took offense.

He shot back, cluelessly: What does Julian Castro know? Does he know that I’m as Hispanic and Latino as he?

Nope, we’re willing to wager Castro did not know that. Nor did we. Nor did anyone in the universe. 

Inserted from <Alternet>

If Steve “Cantaloupes” King is Hispanic and Latino, than I am a dawg, not a cat.  This is just the fifth of five Republican moments from last week alone.  Click through for the other four.

Most of you are aware that I do volunteer work in Oregon State Penitentiary working with a group of around 100 prisoners that I affectionately call ‘my guys’, as I have often shared some of the things I have done with them, while maintaining their privacy.  I came across an article that asks some of the same questions and shares the same concerns that I have had for some time now: that all the effort toward prison reform is directed at nonviolent offenses.

For the most part, President Obama’s address to the N.A.A.C.P. annual convention on Tuesday was a remarkably honest appraisal of the American criminal-justice system. In an emphatic and sometimes moving speech, the President laid out some of the outrageous statistics that reformers have been citing for years: our prison population of 2.2 million has more than quadrupled since 1980, even though crime has been declining for two decades; the U.S. has five per cent of the world’s population but houses nearly a quarter of its prisoners; blacks and Latinos represent about thirty per cent of the nation’s population but almost sixty per cent of its prisoners. The result, Obama said, is a system that wastes billions of dollars a year and prevents too many people, especially minority men, from contributing to society, the economy, and their children’s lives. “Mass incarceration makes our country worse off,” he said. “And we need to do something about it.”

Obama’s bluntness was bracing, but as he made these statements he also repeated one of the most enduring myths of criminal-justice reform. “Over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before,” the President said. “And that is the real reason our prison population is so high.”

It is simply not true that the growth of the prison population is mainly due to the sentencing of nonviolent drug offenders. About half of federal inmates are serving sentences for drug crimes, but the federal system only accounts for about two hundred thousand prisoners. In state prisons, which house about 1.3 million, only sixteen per cent of inmates are serving a sentence for nonviolent drug offenses, according to the latest Department of Justice statistics. About fifty-four per cent, by far the largest number, are there for violent crimes, and about nineteen per cent for property offenses, like burglary. There is less data on the breakdown of the more than seven hundred thousand people in local jails; the most recent D.O.J. survey, in 2002, found that people with drug charges and violent-crime charges each made up about a quarter of jail inmates. Assuming that’s still the case, even if every single nonviolent drug offender were released tomorrow, the incarcerated population would stand at around 1.7 million—still nearly a fifth of the world total.

As Leon Neyfakh wrote for Slate in March, the distinction between “nonviolent” and “violent” is not always clear-cut. Some “violent” crimes, like illegal gun possession, in many states, don’t require an actual violent act, while some offenders who did commit violence may plead guilty to a less serious, nonviolent charge. But it’s clear that the vast majority of inmates are imprisoned for something other than nonviolent drug offenses. There is, in short, no way to make a meaningful dent in mass incarceration without lowering the number of people locked up for violent crimes…

…It’s comforting to think that we can undo the moral and economic failures of the criminal-justice system without relinquishing any of our desire to punish people who commit acts of violence. But, as the President said, we need to be honest. Having a fifth of the world’s prison population would be better than having a fourth, but not by much. We can end mass incarceration, or we can maintain current policies toward violent crime, but we can’t do both. [emphasis added]

Inserted from <The New Yorker>

For most of our history, America has followed a correctional policy of lex talionis, the notion that the purpose of prisons is to punish evildoers.  While this is no longer acknowledged, officials saying instead that the purpose is to protect the public from evildoers, it is still practiced, especially in sentencing and release.  The biggest contributors to US violent prison populations are mandatory minimum sentences and three strikes laws that take sentencing out of the hands of judges.  With such sentencing laws, prisoners have less incentive to reform.

As an alternative, I support restorative justice.  The purpose of prison is to return to the community individuals who have made the effort to understand their crimes, correct the thinking errors that justified their crimes, and developed intervention strategies to recognize problems early-on and break the cycle, before it spirals out of control to more crime.  This is the kind of work I do with my guys.

Among my guys, there may be a couple nonviolent drug offenders, but I can’t think of any.  They have committed violent crimes.  Nevertheless, I trust all the men with whom I have worked long enough to know well.  Of those that have been released since 2005, only two of over twenty five have returned to prison, and  both are out again.

So I am not suggesting leniency for violent criminals.  I am suggesting giving them an opportunity to earn their freedom by doing whatever it takes to change into a law-abiding citizens who are not a threat to their communities.

You should support restorative justice for one reason.  Since almost every prisoner is released eventually, you can be sure that someone, who has committed a violent crime will be moving into your neighborhood.  Would you prefer the embittered person warehoused under a mandatory minimum, whose only change is that he is better educated in criminal technique?  Or would you prefer the product of restorative justice, who did whatever it took to change?