“At least sesame street is actually talking about prison; the rest of us are much happier completely ignoring it.  Perhaps because it’s so easy not to care about prisoners.  They are by definition convicted criminals.”

And when the Director of US Prisons testified before the US Senate, Sen Al Franken can’t even get an answer to the simplest of questions: what is the size of the average cell?  The Director of US Prisons stammers and looks confused as if there’s absolutely no conceivable reason how the “size” of a cell would be relevant to anything!  Sen Franken struggles to keep re-forming the question in more specific terms – “size, as in feet and inches” he says – and finally gives up turning to another Senator to ask, “Am I asking this wrong?”

Nope, you were not, funny man.  Eventually the Senators are told the average cell size is 10 x 7.

It’s pretty much impossible to pursue reform when there is no political concience willing to even asses the status quo.  :We don’t know because we don’t care” is the attitude, and perhaps understandably.

“What is clear is that we are doing a terrible job taking care of people that it is very easy for us all not to care about.”

Privatization of prison suppliers

Oliver also calls out how an exploding industry of private suppliers is failing prisoners.  Food suppliers have run out of food and one news report found maggots found in prison food.

Healthcare can be similarly lacking for prison inmates: 50 people died in Arizona DOC custody so far this year, for example.  Inadequate staffing and medical resources plague many facilities.  Oliver focuses on one woman who describes prison medical staff pouring packets of table sugar into her c-section for weeks after she gave birth in prison.

“You will never pay a political price for treating prisoners…badly.  You don’t even need to pretend to care.”  Then he plays a clip of an Arizona state legislator callously accusing the prisoner who had sugar poured into her wound of lying since inmates have so much time to think up allegations while incarcerated.

Total Reform Needed

“This is all so depressing.  Private prisons are bad, yes.  But the whole system just seems fundamentally broken.”

The post John Oliver Eviscerates US Prison System appeared first on Cliff Satell.

Absurd? Just a tad. In fact, as anyone who has bothered to think about it for more than 3 seconds knows, alcohol is orders of magnitude more dangerous to individuals and society. So for all my civil libertarian impulses (I was the head of the Duke Conservative Union at the time, after all), I offered up this reply (which was published virtually verbatim to my surprise.)

I’ve slightly edited the article below from the original Chronicle print version to make more sense on this blog.

Pot Does Not Kill Mexican Kids

By: Cliff Satell

Last week, the Chronicle published a column which made an impassioned case against marijuana use. It pleaded for us to prevent “another dead Latin American child,” by looking within ourselves as a nation and ceasing our rampant and destructive drug use. The author of that column, and his argument, is wrong for the following reasons.

First, he claims smoking weed is unethical because big mean people who bring pot here are violent. But you can’t argue weed is inherently unethical because the current distribution system is unsavory; his point has nothing to do with the “ethics” of marijuana use. Individual use is a choice everyone has the right to make, especially in a country that pretends to allow the pursuit of happiness. As a strong conservative, I’m embarrassed by the hypocrisy of most conservatives when they advocate the government first decide, and then tell us, what is ethical and what isn’t. The government should never be in the business of legislating morality unless another person’s rights are directly threatened.

Which brings us to his main point: he claims ‘blazing’ weed does threaten the rights of poor Mexican kids because of the border violence in sneaking the plant into America. Let’s analyze. People – especially Mexican-Americans originally – smoke a lot of weed. Some weed is imported. Weed becomes illegal as a way to control a growing Mexican-American population. Weed producers are forced to operate in an underground and illegal world, becoming ‘cartels’. They don’t want to go to jail. They fear jail so much they do whatever necessary to stay out, leading to violence. Poor Mexican kids die; UCLA kids get high.

Since demand is literally infinite and will never disappear, the only logical conclusion is to bring the production and distribution of marijuana out from hiding and into the bright light of sanctioned government regulation. Once regulated there would be no need to violently conspire to sneak drugs over because producers would operate like any other legal distribution business. Not only would it add new sources of tax revenue in a time of fiscal crisis, but it would stop the Mexican kids from dying since violence is no longer required. You don’t see gangs of French warlords killing each other trying to sneak Cabernet into America. Why? Because wine isn’t relegated to the dirty world of black markets where lots of bad people kill other people. Closer to home, you don’t see Massachusetts, New Jersey or any of the other 12 states that have legalized marijuana collapsing from gang activity or cartel warfare.

Third, the author’s logic clearly is misinformed. Most of the weed on campus at Duke and especially in the Northeast does not even come from Mexico. A significant percentage is made right here in America’s living rooms and bedroom closets. Another hefty percentage comes from Canada, where border regulations are less restrictive.

Most marijuana in the US comes from California’s so-called Emerald Triangle, not Mexico.

And finally, the open secret now is that high-end pot comes from California’s humongous “Emerald Triangle” weed industry, a three-county region where marijuana makes up two-thirds of the economy (taxes anyone?). Progressive Californians legalized medicinal marijuana, creating a need for large scale farms to supply state-sanctioned distributaries. Medicinal weed, or “Cali bud” generally, is the bees knees that most consumers crave, not low-end Mexican schwag.

Finally, while we’re on ethics, let’s look at the reality. Alcohol kills roughly 100,000 per year (and is legal). Marijuana kills zero (and isn’t). Wait, you’re surprised? Mexican kids dies from bullets, not weed. Even Advil causes more deaths per year (7,000). Don’t cave to the government’s pathetic War on Drugs and its almost-laughable propaganda campaign that began as a racist way to keep out Mexicans from the Southwest in the 1930’s. Moreover, weed is a life-enhancer that gives peace, tranquility and yes, happiness to millions of hard-working productive Americans and Duke Students.

It’s awfully easy to point fingers at the big scary pot plant, ignoring that its legitimate medicinal and recreational use dates back thousands of years. But to say little Mexican babies are murdered every time a joint is rolled is beyond self-gratifying, it’s intellectual dishonesty at its worst. Get the facts and open your mind, then you’ll learn a really inconvenient truth.

The post Marijuana Does Not Kill Mexican Kids appeared first on Cliff Satell.

But, every now and again, Ann Coulter finds a way to offend every single reader while still including some valid logic and solid political points. She has the courage (or arrogance) to identify the blatant racism and demonizing from left-wing leaders who need their black voting bloc to remain in tact and victimized in order for them to stay in power. God forbid a black person evaluates the world for himself and decides to become a conservative. Or, dare I say, a Republican!

Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Michael Steele, Clifford Huxtable (and the guy who played him) and now Herman Cain are all being labeled turncoats, traitors, “whitey” and worse. Every day liberals wake up and call Republicans racist for opposing Obama. Even Morgan Freeman, whom I otherwise love, gets in on the absurdity that is now commonplace: anyone who doesn’t want Obama to succeed (in pursuing his failed policies which would hurt the country and waste money) must be a racist because they cannot stand seeing such a wise and wonderful black man in the White House. Why else would anyone dare oppose Saint Barack? But that story line doesn’t work so well if the Republicans nominate a Republican (…or a woman for Vice President, or have a black leader of the Republican National Committee).

Anyway, just read her words, she does a better job. And that doesn’t happen very often. Because, again, she’s crazy.

Why Our Blacks are Better than Their Blacks

by Ann Coulter

By spending the last three decades leveling accusations of “racism” every 10 seconds, liberals have made it virtually impossible for Americans to recognize real racism — for example, the racism constantly spewed at black conservatives.

In the last year alone, a short list of the things liberals have labeled “racist” include:

• Being a Republican;
• Joining the tea party;
• The word “the” (Donald Trump’s statement that he has a “great relationship with the blacks”);
• References to Barack Obama’s playing basketball (Trump again);
• Using Obama’s middle name;
• Scott Brown’s pickup truck;
• Opposing Obamacare;
• Opposing Obama’s stimulus bill;
• Opposing Obama’s jobs bill.

The surge in conservative support for Herman Cain confuses the Democrats’ story line, which is that Republicans hate Obama because he’s black.

Cain is twice as black as Obama. (Possible Obama campaign slogan: “Too Black!”)

This is why the liberal website Politico ran with a story on Cain that had everything — a powerful black man, a Republican presidential candidate, the hint of sexuality — except facts.

All we learned was: About a decade ago, as many as two anonymous women accused Cain of making unspecified “inappropriate” remarks and one “inappropriate” gesture in the workplace. (We had more than that on John Edwards’ mistress a year into the media’s refusal to report that story.)

If the details helped liberals, we’d have the details.

To have been accused of sexual harassment in the 1990s is like having been accused of molesting children at preschools in the 1980s or accused of being a witch in Massachusetts in the 1690s.

In the 1990s, one plaintiff won a $50 million jury verdict against Wal-Mart on the grounds that a “hostile environment” was created by her supervisor’s yelling at both male and female employees. In another case, a plaintiff won a $250,000 award for sexual harassment based on her complaint that a male colleague had reached for a pastry saying, “Nothing I like more in the morning than sticky buns,” while “wriggl(ing)” his eyebrows.

It got so crazy that a 6-year-old boy was suspended from class for a day for kissing a classmate on the cheek, and a Goya painting had to be removed from a Penn State classroom because a professor complained that it constituted sexual harassment.

With no standard other than the subjective offense taken by the accuser, absolutely anyone could be called a witch, i.e., a sexual harasser. So it’s striking that the only two conservative public figures accused of being witches both happened to be conservative blacks: Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain.

Liberals go straight to ugly racist stereotypes when attacking conservative blacks, calling them oversexualized, stupid and/or incompetent.

The late, lamented, white liberal reporter Mary McGrory called Justice Antonin Scalia “a brilliant and compelling extremist” — while dismissing Thomas as “Scalia’s puppet.”

More recently, Democratic Sen. Harry Reid called Scalia “one smart guy.” In the next breath, he proclaimed Thomas “an embarrassment to the Supreme Court,” adding, “I think that his opinions are poorly written.”

When Bush made Condoleezza Rice the first black female secretary of state, terror swept through the Democratic Party. What if people began to notice and ask questions: “Who’s that black woman always standing with George Bush?” Never mind! He’s probably arresting her.

In addition to an explosion of racist cartoons portraying Rice as Aunt Jemima, Butterfly McQueen from “Gone With the Wind,” a fat-lipped Bush parrot and other racist clichés, allegedly respectable liberals promptly called her stupid and incompetent.

Joseph Cirincione, then with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Rice “doesn’t bring much experience or knowledge of the world to this position.” (Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose experience for the job consisted of being married to an impeached, disbarred former president.)

Democratic consultant Bob Beckel — who ran Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign so competently that Mondale lost 49 states — said of Rice, “I don’t think she’s up to the job.”

When Michael Steele ran for senator in Maryland in 2006, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dug up a copy of his credit report — something done to no other Republican candidate. He was depicted in black face with huge red lips by liberal blogger Steve Gilliard. Oreo cookies were rolled down the aisle at Steele during a gubernatorial debate in 2002.

Trafficking in racist imagery is consequence-free for liberals because they have ruined charges of “racism” with their own overuse of the term. By now, any accusation of racism has the feel of a Big Foot sighting.

It’s a neat trick, rather as if the Nazis had called everything “genocide” right before launching the Holocaust, and then admonished resisters not to “play the genocide card.”

Liberals step on black conservatives early and often because they can’t have black children thinking, “Hmmm, the Republicans have some good ideas; maybe I’m a Republican.”

The basic setup is:

Step 1: Spend 30 years telling blacks that Republicans are racist and viciously attacking all black Republicans.

Step 2: Laugh maliciously at Republicans for not having more blacks in their party.

It is beyond insane that Herman Cain would have considered running for president if he had the tiniest skeleton in his closet. To be an out-of-the-closet black Republican, you had better be a combination rocket scientist/Baptist preacher. Which, as it happens, Cain is.

Meanwhile, MSNBC is cutting into its prime-time programming to announce updates in the fact-free hit on Cain. That’s not because anyone there thinks he’ll be the nominee. Everyone knows it’s going to be Mitt Romney.

But liberals are determined to make sure that, six months from now, everyone has forgotten Herman Cain so they can go back to claiming Republicans oppose Obama because they hate blacks.

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER

Cliff Satell attended Duke University and led the Duke College Republicans as Vice-Chair.

The post Ann Coulter Makes Rare Legitimate Point appeared first on Cliff Satell.

On the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, it’s an especially good time to take a few minutes and rewatch Martin Luther King’s most famous speech.  One of the truly great orators of history, Dr. King could captivate an audience with a rhetorical dexterity rarely ever matched by any speaker.

While the Civil Rights Movement certainly had its share of charismatic leaders who could drum up a crowd, Martin Luther King uses his words to paint a picture of his message that is impossible to shrug off.  With accessible, positive, unifying language, Dr. King not only castigates the hypocritical status quo in 1960’s America, but he simultaneously touches the hearts of the American conscience, providing the very needed moral leadership to catapult the Movement’s goals into genuine motion.

Without King’s ability to speak to the Great Majority of Americans who believed in the Declaration of Independence’s words that “All Men Are Created Equal.”  Intellectually, most Americans were already on Dr. Kings side – even if they didn’t know it.  Instead of demanding that America change its fundamental being and bow to a minority group’s demands, Martin Luther King extolled the virtues of America’s ideals and urged all Americans to live up to our original founding creed.

King knew the Founders had got it right in setting the bar so high for the American experiment.  But while so many others excoriate the Founding Fathers as perpetrators of slavery, King used the lofty principles of the American Revolution to show how America didn’t need to fundamentally change, it needed to recognize what it already was: a beacon of liberty.

When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.  This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

King’s gift for persuasion is on full display here.  Keep in mind this speech was given during an extremely volatile time in American life.  The Voting Rights Act was languishing in Congress, the peace dividend after World War II was all but over, and race riots were a constant threat to a peaceful society.  In fact, many commentators were convinced the March on Washington would devolve into yet another violent demonstration.  King’s monumental task of inspiring a demoralized black America to continue fighting with positivity in order to claim the “riches of freedom and the security of justice” while also appealing to moderate whites and a bitterly stubborn Southern tradition of knee-jerk opposition to Civil Rights.

He could have complained on behalf of black people to the white establishment.  He could have lambasted white people for the sins of their fathers and a diminishing – though certainly prevalent – racist minority.  Dr. King could have used his unparalleled pulpit to instigate anger and sow seeds of division.  He could have transferred the “heat of oppression” his people were so used to into a vindictive quest to return the hatred onto the oppressors.

But he didn’t.  After warning that there “will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights,” King emphasizes the importance of entering “the palace of justice” with a clear moral imperative:

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.  We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline… Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

All this and the speech was only mediocre to that point – at least to Dr. King himself.  He did not believe the speech was going as well as it should – he was not capturing the crowd in the same way he knew he had done before.  And with the increasingly volcanic political environment, he knew that to let this moment pass him by could mean missing out on the opportunity to move the Civil Right’s Movement a major step forward.

And then something happened.  Mahalia Jackson – the world-famous Queen of Gospel who had appeared many times with Martin Luther King previously – must have sensed that Dr. King was leaving something on the table.  “Tell them about the dream, Martin! she encouraged from just behind the podium.  And so he did, beginning one of the single most well-known and powerful sections of rhetorical awesomeness that have ever been recorded:

I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the diffichttp://www.cliffsatell.com/wp-admin/post-new.phpulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.  It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream.  I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

.

.

The post Worth Rewatching: Martin Luther King Had a Dream appeared first on Cliff Satell.

Smerconish may have his thinking cap on, but he is wearing it backwards apparently.

Boy has Michael Smerconish fallen off the wagon as he comes to Obama’s defense. He used to be a highly respected centrist voice in Philly radio, and now he is a willing sycophant pushing this nonsense spin onto the world. Smerconish endorsed Obama out of nowhere 4 years ago, and he is so desperate to justify that very poor decision that he can’t see past his own keyboard.

The “context” of Obama’s remarks – as well as the remarks by Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren upon which his were based – show how truly out of touch this President is. It’s a pathetic “straw-man” argument… WHO, exactly, is arguing that America doesn’t create an environment beneficial to all? Who is arguing that successful people do it 100% on their own? Romney sure isn’t. The GOP sure isn’t. Just Obama, Warren and Smerconish’s made up enemies.

We need a President who believes in the ingenuity and industriousness of the American entrepreneur… someone who nurtures the competitive spirit; someone who challenges us all to take risks and thing big; someone who subscribes to the notion that individuals matter and that successful people are what powers everything that Obama cited (who do you think pays the tax bill to fund research programs like DARPA?)

This line particularly irked me because it is a total non-sequitur designed to de-legitimize any dissent. Ironically, it is Smerconish who is avoiding a “substantive conversation” by refusing to analyze and understand President Obama’s world view:

The trouble with the president’s remarks? They extended beyond the 20-second attention span of this campaign. And when the edited version made the rounds, a legitimate, substantive conversation about social contracts was instead reduced to silly charges of socialism.

Shame on you, Mr. Smerconish.

The post Michael Smerconish Makes Stupid Point appeared first on Cliff Satell.

As MSNBC put it today:

Worries about the state of the economy in the U.S. and around the world slammed stocks on Thursday, driving the Dow Jones industrial average to close down more than 500 points. It was the Dow’s worst drop since October 2008.

As President Obama celebrates his 50th birthday party, millions of unemployed Americans are asking what happened to all those “shovel-ready” jobs he promised during the stimulus debate? And what about the 400,000 jobs that were promised if we passed the Health Care bill? And, of course, what about the now infamous chart the White House produced predicting that the unemployment rate would never climb higher than 8% with his massive stimulus?

What Jon Stewart and other armchair liberal economists ignore is that Conservatives don’t argue against government existence itself. Rather, Conservatives – yes, even those wacky Tea Partiers – are pointing out that the government doesn’t actually have any money. It never has and it never will. Every single cent the government spends comes from my pocket, your pocket and your neighbors pocket. So every dollar they spend is a dollar that you and I can’t spend on something we need (like gas, for those of us who enjoy driving to places).

Of course government has necessary functions like defense, police, paving roads and issuing basic regulations in order to create a level playing field and consistency in the marketplace. But don’t tell me that the government has ever been a more responsible investor in anything than you and me, the people who actually earned the money the government loves to take.

It has nothing to do with “rich” and “poor.” It has to do with competence, first and foremost. Well, it should still be pointed out that the top 5% of income earners (the so-called “rich”) pay over 60% of the tax burden. And, more than 40% of Americans pay no income tax at all. So when President Obama talks about “spreading the wealth around” or Paul Krugman assails the rich for supposedly not paying their “fair share”… I can only ask, what would their fair share be??

The fact is, Obama’s “recovery” has been anything but. Basically every single promise Obama and his economic team of wunderkinds has made regarding jobs and the economy has been utter BS.

And before I hear the “but he inherited such a mess!” arguments, let’s compare Obama’s “recovery” to Reagan’s, when the situation was FAR more dire than in 2009 when Obama took office. If you recall, President Carter left Reagan a nightmare of stagflation – super high inflation and even worse unemployment. So what happened because of Reagan’s policies?

After the end of the ’81–’82 recession unemployment fell sharply as growth expanded dramatically. Twenty-seven months after the official end of that recession, unemployment had fallen to 7.5 percent from a peak of 10.8 percent. At the same point after the recent recession, unemployment had fallen not 3.3 percentage points, but only 1.4 percentage points. The reason is not hard to find. In the seven quarters following the ’81–’82 recession, GDP growth averaged 7.1 percent (on an annual basis). In the current post-recession span it has averaged only 2.8 percent. We need 2.5 percent growth just to absorb increases in the work force. The first quarter of 2011 had only a 1.8 percent increase in GDP.

The tax burden decreased, freeing up business to keep their hard-earned money and do what they do best: employ people. The government doesn’t do a very good job of employing people since every job they “create” comes at the expense of private sector funds that could have been used to invest in more efficiency and innovation, leading to a net greater creation of private sector jobs. Reagan’s recovery is beating Obama’s by more than 15 million jobs at the same point in time after the respective recessions ended. That’s amazing.

Reagan inherited a much worse situation and improved it swiftly and significantly. Obama’s policies have done… not so much.

The Investor’s Business Daily laid out the case well:

Compare the two worst post-World War II recessions. Both the 1981-82 and the 2007-09 downturns were long (16 months and 18 months, respectively) and painful (unemployment peaked at 10.8% in 1981-82 and 10.1% in the last one).

What’s dramatically different, however, is how each president responded.

Obama massively increased spending, vastly expanded the regulatory state, and pushed through a government takeover of health care. What’s more, he constantly browbeats industry leaders, talks about the failings of the marketplace and endlessly advocates higher taxes on the most productive parts of the economy.

In contrast, Reagan pushed spending restraint, deregulated entire industries, massively cut taxes and waxed poetic about the wonders of a free economy.

The result? While the Reagan recovery saw turbocharged growth and a tumbling unemployment rate, Obama’s has produced neither. Consider:

• GDP. In the seven quarters after the 1981-82 recession ended, the economy cranked out quarterly growth rates that averaged 7.1%. Under Obama, GDP growth has averaged a mere 2.8%. (See chart at right.)
• Unemployment. Under Reagan, the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.5% by this point in the recovery. Under Obama, it’s still stuck at 8.8%.
• Long-term unemployment. There were far fewer long-term unemployed by this point in the Reagan recovery; just 18% of the unemployed had been without a job 27 weeks or more. Under Obama, that figure is an astonishing 45%.
• Consumer confidence. By this point in the Reagan recovery, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index had hit 100. Today, the index stands at just 65.4.
• Deficits. Under Reagan, the federal deficit was trimmed to 4.8% of GDP by 1984. Under Obama, the deficit is expected to climb to 10.9% of GDP this year.

Obama and his defenders like to say he inherited the worst downturn since the Great Depression and that things would have been worse still had he not acted. But the recession was almost over by the time he took office — and officially over just six months after that.

Bottom line, my nephew could more adeptly run the White House than President Obama. At least he wouldn’t promise everything under the sun and then sit back and blame everyone and their mother for his problems. Reagan led. Obama complains. Reagan was positive. Obama is a negative, annoying crybaby. Reagan fostered a new era of prosperity that led to him winning 49 states in 1984. Obama has fostered a new era of government dependence and irrational class warfare that has pissed everyone off (especially the disenfranchised folks who so applauded Obama’s meteoric rise) and achieved absolutely nothing.

Gotta love Democracy, eh.

The post Obama Recovery Sputters appeared first on Cliff Satell.