Under current federal law, a first time simple possession of five grams of crack cocaine requires the same five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence as a person in possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine.
Dick Durbin and Jeff Sessions think they did a FANTASTIC job, equalizing the criminal justice playing field 4/5 more, by changing the sentencing disparity, instead of eliminating the unconstitutional disparity between crack and powder cocaine.
“If you ever wonder if anything good ever happens there (in the Congressional Gym? the weights room or the shower?? ed. comment), it appears something good might have happened there,” Durbin said, which may or may not have been an oblique reference to former Congressman Eric Massa’s tale about being lobbied by Rahm Emanuel in the House gym. “Senator [Orrin] Hatch was there to witness it.”
Dick thinks quid pro quo is more important than doing the right thing:
The compromise was that Durbin would accept Sessions’ amendment to change the disparity from 100 to 1 to 20 to 1. In return, Sessions offered to withdraw his amendments that would have narrowed the circumstances under which a judge could reduce penalties for offenders who acted with “fear, impulse or affection,” and would have imposed a 10-year mandatory maximum for simple possession rather than eliminating the five-year mandatory minimum for simple possession entirely.
“My position is for one to one, equity and equality in sentencing, but in order to get things done you have to be prepared to make mutual concessions,” Durbin said. “That’s what we have done.”
Tell that to the poor person with 1/100th the amount of one type of cocaine in their possession, who serves as much time as the wealthier person with the 100x of a different type of cocaine in theirs. Changing that sentencing law to ‘a poor person with 1/20th the amount of one type of cocaine in their possession serves as much time as the wealthier person with 20x of a different type of cocaine in their possession’ doesn’t seem to be doing much more than moving chess pieces on a board.
And since when is legislation decided between TWO MEN, instead of the entire Senate? These guys act as though they single-handedly solved the racial crisis in our prison systems, by bartering. The sad thing is, for those caught in the wrong social strata, these two men create the rules.
We need a rule about qualifying to work for the U.S. Government. You should have to work in a day-care, deliver food to the elderly, sit with kids in school, and visit the incarcerated AND their families. You should not be able to legislate in such an impotent way when it harms one racial group more than your own, period.
Then we would have some protection against this kind of ‘wasted time’ legislation.
Students, professors, teachers and unions around the country will organize today to protest America’s imperiled system of education with more than 100 events in 32 states.
The movement started in California, where the public college system has been seized by tension and dissatisfaction over proposed tuition hikes, budget cuts and a series of racist events on University of California and California State campuses.
At the same time that we’re upping their educational costs, think about this:
The founding fathers said that our national debt should be paid off every generation. They said it is immoral to saddle the next generation with debt. Today we are saddling not only the next generation but the next and the next. This is taxation without representation because we are putting our posterity in debt when they are not old enough to vote on it.
Its not exactly fair to make students pay more for the ability to discover the ways in which we’ve betrayed them.
So kids, we won’t educate you, but we’ll sure house you for life!
On this day of protest, let’s give students our support. We’d rather have them smart so they can dig us out of the mess we’re in, so they can provide GOOD FOOD to us when we’re in nursing homes in just a few decades… We’ll be in trouble if they are all uneducated or incarcerated.
Is it just me, or does ANYone else notice that the bosses of our Representative Leadership are all old white guys, and that they look just like the guys who got us into this recession, the old white guy bankers?
And are they hard at work, both sides of the aisle working together to pull American taxpayers out of this recession? Are they spanking the bankers? Are they creating jobs?
No, they’re involved in a political death match. WITH EACH OTHER.
First, Sen. Richard Shelby put a blanket hold on all executive branch nominees to extort the executive branch into rigging procurement to guarantee that the company he favored won a bid on a defense contract. Oh, and he wanted the FBI to build a crime lab in his state, too.
And now, Sen. Lindsey Graham is copycatting, placing a hold on the closing of Gitmo hostage to extort the Department of Justice into not having a civilian trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
What are they doing? Holding up the smooth working of the Government of the United States of America? For their own political good? We have 3 branches of Government and all three are being held up by partisan politics in Congress.
They have NO IDEA what regular Americans are going thru right now. Because they can head off to Hawaii to caucus, or dine with lobbyists at expensive restaurants. They don’t have to listen to regular Americans.
They get to play their little power trips, while utterly ignoring the people who elected them.
If you’re part of the white privilege world, you might not notice something strange about this photo, the cover of Vanity Fair extolling HOLLYWOOD! 2010.
They’re all white! And SUPER SKINNY. Utterly lacking in diversity. They do not represent Hollywood’s future. But Vanity Fair thinks they do!
Hmmm, patrician looks? That’s code for ‘white’. ‘Button nose’? That’s what most plastic surgeries are trying to create, also code for ‘white’. ‘Ivory-soap’? Its a white bar of soap.
Totally lacking creativity, Vanity Fair has missed out on these lovely young women:
Zoe Saldana, from both blockbusters AVATAR and STAR TREK,
and they forgot Gabourey Sidibe from PRECIOUS,
and they forgot Freida Pinto from SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE.
Seriously, he entered a Senator’s office to ‘alter’ her phones to prove that she was refusing to take calls contrary to her opinion on health care reform… He got caught dressed like a telephone repairman. One of his accomplices had a listening device. He tweeted about his case, and there’s a possible gag order. He’s up against SERIOUS Criminal Charges. At 25, he was released to LIVE WITH HIS PARENTS, which many feel is laughable, as in ‘hahaha the 25 year old boy has to live with his parents’. Then he was interviewed as an activist on FOX News. That’s ‘white’ justice. Not true justice. Did FOX interview beaten-on WTO protestors, or people stealing food in New Orleans after the levees broke and the US Government didn’t respond with food?
Now he’s on FOX News saying ‘This was all a HUGE misunderstanding’. He says its investigative journalism. Yeah right, just like David Letterman’s extortionist is saying he was simply asking for a ’silence payment’ similar to that paid to Tiger Wood’s ho’s… We live in a world of murky interpretation of ethics and these ‘Jedi mind wipes’ provided by FOX News, ‘this wasn’t a felony trespassing, this was conservative activism’ are now considered a legal defense.
Do the crime?
Do the time, buddy.
But let’s watch what justice prevails for him, the white boy ‘conservative filmmaker’ who dressed like THIS
thinking he was a Pimp. Pimp? He looks like a drunken FRAT BOY thinking he’s all that. He’s so lucky he found ‘easy to dupe’ employees at ACORN, where he said he was bringing in underage prostitutes and wanted business advice.
He’s arrogant, has an unhealthy sense of entitlement and his own righteousness. That’s not criminal, but it is annoying. It is, however, criminal to trespass onto a Federal Building, a Senator’s office space, have listening devices and tamper with phones.
Let’s see if he does any hard time. Then let’s compare that to non-white, lesser known, low-income sentencing for similar crimes committed by less media-savvy perps, minus the felony wiretapping charges that he thinks he’ll squiggle out of. He’s the poster boy of ‘anti-corruption’ for the right wing pundits now. I bet this boy gets off, and his real brethren, other criminals, do hard time.
I just came across a post at Sociological Images about an outrageously racist flash video game called Border Patrol. They note that in the game, “you try to keep three types of Mexicans from crossing the border: drug dealers, Mexican nationalists, and ‘breeders.’” Video game site Kotaku — which thankfully also calls the video game racist — gives a highly similar description. As you’ll notice in the image above, which is of a heavily pregnant and barefoot caricatured woman crossing the border, she is also on her way to the welfare office.
But you may also notice something else. Looking at the image, there are bullet holes in the sign that says “Welcome to the United States” (with a picture of a flag that seems to indicate an anti-Semitic message that the country is run by Jews — am I missing something?). The woman in the game also looks like her head is in the cross hairs of a gun.
That’s right, in this game we’re not “stopping” Mexican immigrants from crossing the border without documentation by, oh, calling the police. Or by using another horrific and degrading option like catching them in a net to send them back over the border.
Burn your kids CDs so kids can feel the heat, so they can feel the eternal flames they’ll suffer in hell for listening to this music and being ‘gay friendly’.
LIDDY: I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, “the race.” And that should not surprise anyone because she’s already on record with a number of racist comments.
Finished with the race-based attack, Liddy moved on to denigrate Sotomayor’s gender:
LIDDY: Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.
Finally, Liddy disputed the entire idea that there’s anything wrong with the paucity of women and total lack of Hispanics on the Court:
LIDDY: And everybody is cheering because Hispanics and females have been, quote, underrepresented, unquote. And as you pointed out, which I thought was quite insightful, the Supreme Court is not designed to be and should not be a representative body.
The Supreme Court has had 106 white men out of 110 sitting judges. Two women, two men of color.
G. Gordon Liddy believes that its okay to have the highest court in the land run by white men only, not reflective of the ethnic diversity of the people the high court is governing.
As if that isn’t bad enough, 
