{"id":23785,"date":"2016-09-06T13:01:17","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T20:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=23785"},"modified":"2016-09-06T13:01:17","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T20:01:17","slug":"open-thread-962016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2016\/09\/06\/open-thread-962016\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread &#8211; 9\/6\/2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">I&#8217;m feeling rather tired, as I slept poorly last night.&#160; I had a persistent&#160; itch on my left foot, which I could not scratch, because it no longer exists.&#160; That is so frustrating for a scratcher like me.&#160; I&#8217;ve been known to strip off my T-shirt and scratch my back with a tree.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Jig Zone Puzzle<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Today&#8217;s took me 3:47 (average 5:41).&#160; To do it, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jigzone.com\/puzzles\/2016-09-06-CE2504A965A9\" target=\"_blank\">click here<\/a>.&#160; How did you do?<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Short Tales<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=PX7M9psH0rM\" target=\"_blank\">YouTube<\/a>: <\/font>Joan Baez Live @ Woodstock 1969 Joe Hill<\/p>\n<p>&#160;<iframe loading=\"lazy\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/PX7M9psH0rM?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"640\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Mitch brought up this song in comments yesterday. Here is where I first heard the song.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/business\/currency\/making-profits-on-the-captive-prison-market\" target=\"_blank\">NY Times<\/a>: <\/font>But the country\u2019s historic incarceration boom has given rise to companies that provide services and products to government prisons. Many of these provide necessary equipment and services, of course, but some do so in rather unsavory ways.<\/p>\n<p>Take, for instance, the prison phone industry, a market that\u2019s dominated by several large, privately held firms that earn an estimated <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/03\/31\/us\/steep-costs-of-inmate-phone-calls-are-under-scrutiny.html\" target=\"_blank\">$1.2 billion per year<\/a>. Short phone calls from prison can cost up to fifteen dollars, largely because the companies operate as monopolies within prison walls. The private companies also offer state and local authorities a percentage of their revenue, which contributes to the surging cost of the calls and creates other perverse incentives. Some jails, for instance, have removed in-person family-visitation rooms to make way for \u201cvideo visitation\u201d terminals, provided by private firms, which can charge as much as thirty dollars for forty minutes of screen time. One prison phone company, Securus Technologies, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.prnewswire.com\/news-releases\/securus-provides-over-13-billion-in-prison-jail-and-government-funding-over-the-last-10-years-281105252.html\" target=\"_blank\">says<\/a> in its marketing materials that it has paid out $1.3 billion in these so-called commissions over the past ten years.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn some respects, this is worse than the private prison companies,\u201d Peter Wagner, the executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit criminal-justice think tank, said. \u201cI expect the government to waste money. But it\u2019s totally different for the government to collude with a private company to make poor people lose money.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Prison phone companies are hardly the only private venders that capitalize on a captive market. Corizon Health, one of the sponsors of the Louisiana prison trade show, is the country\u2019s largest prison health-care firm. It treats more than three hundred thousand prisoners nationwide, earning <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2015-06-02\/why-are-prisoners-dying-in-county-jail-\" target=\"_blank\">about $1.4 billion<\/a> in annual revenue. It is also the subject of numerous investigations and lawsuits. The company has been named as a defendant in at least <a href=\"https:\/\/action.aclu.org\/corizon\" target=\"_blank\">six hundred and sixty malpractice lawsuits<\/a> over the past five years, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">This is my own &quot;boutique issue&quot;.&#160; Republican states are the worst, but as much as I hate to admit it, abuse of prisoners and their families for profit is bipartisan. There is much more to read. Please click through.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/crooksandliars.com\/2016\/09\/cbs-gave-alberto-gonzales-free-publicity\" target=\"_blank\">Crooks and Liars<\/a>: <\/font>The penchant for mendacity and injustice among the cabinet of the Bush Administration makes it difficult to pick the absolute worst of Bush\/Cheney&#8217;s sadistic war criminals. That said, no one would argue that former A.G. Alberto Gonzales was certainly a standout for numerous reasons, including hard evidence of <a href=\"http:\/\/crooksandliars.com\/jon-perr\/did-alberto-gonzales-lie-to-congress\" target=\"_blank\">lying under oath about torture.<\/a> <\/p>\n<p>John Dickerson&#8217;s Sunday episode of Face the Nation provided a forum for Gonzales to peddle his apocryphal tale, True Faith and Allegiance, which is <em>hyped as a story of service and sacrifice in war and peace about his life and time serving the George W. Bush administration<\/em>. <\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#ff0000\"><strong>Bush Reich Barf Bag Alert!!<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" height=\"338\" src=\"\/\/embed.crooksandliars.com\/embed\/9LQeNAwW\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"600\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">This evil sleaze-bag&#160; may be the worst liar in Republican history, prior to Rump Dump Trump. After he fired federal prosecutors, because they refused to file bogus charges against Democratic political candidates on the eve of an election, and replaced they with goose-stepping Republicans, he was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2007\/04\/19\/AR2007041902571.html\" target=\"_blank\">He lied, saying &quot;I don&#8217;t recall&quot; and it&#8217;s variants 64 times<\/a>. CBS owes America an apology.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Cartoon<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/0624TCVOTE.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m feeling rather tired, as I slept poorly last night.&#160; I had a persistent&#160; itch on my left foot, which I could not scratch, because it no longer exists.&#160; That is so frustrating for a scratcher like me.&#160; I&#8217;ve been known to strip off my T-shirt and scratch my back with a tree. Jig Zone <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2016\/09\/06\/open-thread-962016\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}