Honey, I couldn’t make this stuff up.

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.

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This could be seen as hypocritical, because here are four ‘old white men’ holding up funding to a program that serves a predominately minority constituency of CHILDREN, while these same four ‘old white men’ are NOT PUSHING FOR REFORM on the hundred million dollar bonuses of their ‘old white men’ Wall Street buddies.

Chuck Grassley, R-IA, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla, Jon Kyl R-AZ and John Cornyn, R-TX have joined together to block further federal funding of Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

The allegations against Boys and Girls Clubs of America are:

Roxanne Spillett, president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, received a total compensation of $988,591 in 2008, according to the charity’s tax filings. She got a base salary of $360,774, a bonus of $150,000 and other compensation of $83,152, for a total of $593,926. She also received $385,500 in deferred compensation, most of which went to a retirement plan, and $9,165 in nontaxable benefits.

They are concerned that:

the chief executive of a charity that has been closing local clubs for lack of funding was compensated nearly $1 million in 2008. They also questioned why in the same year officials spent $4.3 million on travel, $1.6 million on conferences, conventions and meetings, and $544,000 in lobbying fees.

Hmmm, excessive travel and conference expenses, conventions and meetings and LOBBYING FEES?  Sounds like the typical life of a POLITICIAN.  What these men do not tell you is how many officials were included in that $4.3 million travel spending, whether the $1.6 million spent on conferences were to put on one conference or fifty, and why in all fairness a childrens’ organization NEEDS to spend $544,000 to LOBBY for funding…

Here’s what Boys and Girls Clubs of America accomplish:

• More than 4 million boys and girls served
• More than 4,000 Club locations
• Locations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and on U.S. military bases around the world
• More than 50,000 trained professional staff

Boys and Girls Clubs of America have helped millions of kids across America, including R&B singer, Usher.

From academic failure and gang violence to poverty, drugs and obesity, America’s youth face a daunting array of problems – with serious consequences and fewer safety nets at home and in the community. According to a 2007 BGCA alumni survey conducted by Harris Interactive, 57 percent of alumni reported, “The Club saved my life,” while another 28 percent credited Boys & Girls Clubs with keeping them in school.

“Growing up in the Club, I had the chance to experience a lot of positive things; it helped reinforce the values I learned at home including good character, leadership and giving back to my community, my country and my world,” said Usher. “It’s where I developed my love of singing and performing, received help with my homework, and it’s where I found a safe place to go after school.”

So how do we begin to have constructive change, when the complainers do exactly what they’re trying to stop?

And why do our kids need lobbyists to fight for money that is channeled to Big Banks whose CEOs’ crazy annual incomes are NEVER LIMITED?

Where is the integrity?

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I was struck by something Tom Hanks said in his recent interview in TIME Magazine:

How can Americans ask our young men and women to indiscriminately kill a shadowy enemy and then return to their ordered Coca-Cola lives Stateside?  “It’s even worse for our troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Hanks says. “At least the Pacific-war soldiers coming back from World War II decompressed on ships for weeks. And then once the troops arrived portside, it was often a long train ride home to Peoria. Today these guys in Afghanistan fight in bloody hell and are flown back in 18 hours. How can they cope with that? How can they suddenly go from Tora Bora to Peyton Place?” Even the legendary Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in World War II, suffered posttraumatic stress disorder after his return from the European theater. During one meltdown, a deranged Murphy held his wife hostage at gunpoint.

Recently, an angry Ft. Stewart soldier, Spc. Marc A. Hall, wrote a rap song about his rage at having been ’stop lossed’, forced again and again to re-enlist into dangerous war zones even though his contracted time in service had expired.  In the song, he describes revenge and vengeful acts on his Commanding Officers for betraying him and forcing him back into combat.

How is the Army handling it?  They want to ship him from the United States of America, where he is currently in military jail in Georgia, to KUWAIT!!! For a military trial.  He wouldn’t be able to put together a strong defense, because most of his civilian attorneys and civilian witnesses couldn’t fly to Kuwait to testify.  Its like he’s being toyed with, after he was toyed with for years of stop loss.

There is no mercy in the military.

So we need to find it in the civilian world.

It turns out that writing about your rage, or your sorrow, or fear, or brokenness actually helps you PROCESS the unthinkable things you might have seen or done in wartime. Author Maxine Hong Kingston has a writers group for US soldiers that has been helpful in their re-entry into their home environments. An anthology, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace was published with these writings.

There is a courtroom in Pennsylvania that takes into account the extenuating circumstances of a soldier’s service, offering a Veteran’s Affairs mentor and programs to help.

Drugs and addiction account for a significant percentage of veterans’ crimes: nearly half of vets in federal prison, for example, are locked up on drug charges. Fully 61% of veteran prisoners are dependent on or abuse alcohol or drugs. Meanwhile, cases of post-traumatic stress disorder — many left untreated — only compound the problem.

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America organization’s tagline is ‘For America’s Newest Generation of Veterans and the People Who Support Them’. They offer a hand to help veterans re-acclimate to their families and their jobs and their lives.

We need to UN-BOOT CAMP our brave men and women in the Military, especially if the Military will not do so.

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The mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater, now Xe, funded by right wing evangelicals, is accused of  taking WEAPONS from the US Military and Afghan Police forces,

signing them out under the South Park name ‘Eric Cartman‘…

Eric Prince, who runs Xe, has a security division, a fleet of private planes, he’s got Bush’s former head of Counter Terrorism, the man who was charged with finding Bin Laden and failed to do so and is now running a private CIA Total Intelligence Solutions for Xe.  Blackwater is implicated in the murders of Iraqi citizens, (they LOST THEIR LICENSE to operate in Iraq), in gun running, has been paid billions for its private army around the world and is considered ‘armed and dangerous’, supposedly outside the legal protection of the US military.  2/3 of their contracts with the US Government are ‘no-bid’.

And the Republicans are going to host a party for their ‘under 40′ donors at the Blackwater compound.

According to an RNC fundraising document uncovered on Wednesday, RNC “Young Eagles” — party major donors under 40 — will meet at the facility in the spring.

Its dangerous to national security when one political party parties with the assistance of a troubled private mercenary army.

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Today is a national day of protest for students:

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.

In California, Governor Schwarzenegger wants to tie education spending to prison spending, because only 7.5% of the general fund goes to higher education but a whopping 11% goes to the prison system.

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.

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According to Lawrence Lessig, there are two places we are in denial:

The first is that things are actually much worse than anyone ever talks about. The pivot points of our financial system — the infrastructure that lets free markets produce real wealth — have become profoundly corrupted. Balance sheets are “fictions,” as Professor Frank Partnoy put it. Trillions of dollars in liability hide behind these fictions. And as expert after expert demonstrated, practically every one of the design flaws that led to the collapse of the past few years remains essentially unchanged within our financial system still. That bubble burst, but we can already see the soaring profits of the same firms that sucked billions in taxpayer funds. The cycle has started again.

You know all about the billion dollar bonuses, but have you forgotten about the billion dollar bailout?

But the second point was even worse. Expert after expert spoke as if the problems we faced were simple math errors. As if regulators had just miscalculated, like a pilot who accidentally overshoots the run way, or an engineer who mis-estimates the weight of cargo on a plane. And so, because these were mere errors, people spoke as if these errors could be corrected by a bunch of good ideas….

But we aren’t in our current double dip recession because of math errors, that’s blind.  We are here because our governmental system is beholden to political interests and guess who has the most money to throw at Congress? The same unregulated corporations who put a gun to the global economy’s head, took obscene profits, got bailed out (remember that you’re not getting bailed out via credit card reform or mortgage reform or healthcare reform) paid themselves bonuses and are now experiencing a bump in their business (WHY? because they’ve again BET AGAINST AMERICA).

Lessig has a solution:

We need to admit our (democracy’s) problem. We need to get beyond this stage of denial. We need to recognize that until we release our leaders from a system that forces them to ignore good sense when there is an opportunity for large campaign cash, we won’t have policy that makes sense. Wall Street continues unchanged because the Congress that would change it is already shuttling to Wall Street fundraisers. Both parties are already pandering to this power, so they can find the fix to fund the next cycle of campaigns.

…privately funded public elections tend inevitably towards this kind of corruption. And until we solve that (eminently solvable) problem, we won’t make any progress in making America’s finances safe again. FixCongressFirst. Only then will sensible policy be possible.

With Billionaires running for office and committing $100 million of their own money IN CASH to their campaigns, with Wall Street and lobbyists funneling billions to keep the current governmental/corporate back-scratching going on and to ensure that NO REFORM HAPPENS, American workers will be bankrupted again and again.  This Congress is incapable of the change we need, because they are so happy to jump on planes and go to vacation spots, on corporate dimes, while you and I think they are working for us.

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Cover of new Newsweek in a waiting room.

Just one question: didn’t the GOP just have 8 years?

Newsweek’s title is: IF THE REPUBLICANS WERE IN CHARGE…  Well they got voted out of the majority, and the Presidency.  So countering Obama’s agenda might seem like its their job as the opposition party, but its not.  When GWB was President, Dems were told to be patriotic and follow their President, which many did.  They followed him into a trillion dollar war, trillion dollar deficit and a housing implosion and lobbyist/insurer/banking explosion.

So why, one year in to a Democratic Presidency, are we wondering what the Republicans would do if they were in charge?

We see it every day, the detritus, the lost jobs, the massively increased credit card charges, the $500 million bonuses to bankers who destroyed the world (yes, Goldman Sachs, people still blame you).

Newsweek shows its death knell: NEWS and WEEK are supposed to be going together, not guesstimating what the 8 year veterans have up their sleeve.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the obstructionism, the lack of reform in the financial arena and the refusal to provide Americans with reasonable health care reform.

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The New York Times shares an ABC interview with Speaker Nancy Pelosi about potential Congressional job loss due to voting for Healthcare Reform:

Ms. Pelosi was asked what she would say to House Democrats who were “in real fear of losing their seats in November if they support you now.”

“Our members, every one of them, wants health care,” Ms. Pelosi said. “They know that this will take courage. It took courage to pass Social Security. It took courage to pass Medicare. And many of the same forces that were at work decades ago are at work again against this bill.”

“But,” Ms. Pelosi continued, “the American people need it. Why are we here? We’re not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress. We’re here to do the job for the American people, to get them results that give them not only health security, but economic security.”

Once you are in Congress, odds are you will stay for a few terms.  Except when actual WORK is being done and lines are drawn and talk show hosts are frothing at the mouth.  Then you risk losing your job if you vote your conscience and vote how the American people want you to vote.

Good news is, we might actually get real healthcare reform.  Bad news is, any members of Congress that don’t survive November elections will not be using the Republican ‘revolving door’ to lobbying firms on K Street.  This vote will actually pit members of Congress AGAINST their usual Sugar Daddies: obscenely profitable corporations who want the status quo with most Americans in their sticky web of inadequate health care coverage.

The commercialization of our healthcare means that the companies profiting off the physical and mental health of Americans (by avoiding those of marginal and ill health) have the governmental power… Its the insurance companies that mount repeal campaigns, not individual voters.  Understandably, the insurance companies (and banks, and lobbyists) don’t want to be in the same boat as the American people, jobless without benefits.

Sure, wouldn’t it be great to still be rolling in dough, like the insurance companies are, even though most of your workers aren’t?  Wouldn’t it be great, if like Republican Bunning, you could pay yourself an additional $90,000 a year from your ’supposedly charitable’ foundation so that you wouldn’t have to live on only $170,000 a year as a Congressman?

So, Members of Congress: PLEASE VOTE YOUR CONSCIENCE, not your job security.  Hate to remind you, but that’s why we sent you there in the first place.

Your vacations and perks might come from insurance companies who flood you with re-election donations, and your future job might be as a million dollar lobbyist, but today, in Congress, you represent US.

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I tweeted all day yesterday (www.twitter.com/marywallace) during the Healthcare Summit at the White House.  A great website, www.sunlightfoundation.com live streamed all day, updating charts next to each speaker with a list of their top career donors!  Not surprisingly, many of the Republicans who oppose healthcare reform are fully funded by insurers, banks and lobbyists.

It was shocking to hear man after man after man say, let’s get out a clean piece of paper and start over again.  REALLY?  After they had done so much work on their own bills?  DID THEY BRING CLEAN PIECES OF PAPER TO START WORKING ON THE SPOT? No.

I noticed that the overwhelming majority of Republicans were old white men (I’m talking to you Boehner, even though you’ve got that fake tan going on).  In the pockets of the insurance industry and their lobbyists.

But I woke up today to this guy’s face, it looks so shocking in its aged meanness.

Its Jim Bunning, from Kentucky, who single-handedly blocked the Senate from extending unemployment benefits for 1.2 million Americans, while complaining

‘I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that started at 9:00,” he said,
“and it’s the only redeeming chance we had to beat South Carolina since they’re the only team that has beat Kentucky this year.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in Kentucky is 10.7 percent.  With a population of 4,200,000, that’s over 420,000 unemployed.  NOT GOOD.

As I said yesterday on twitter, Americans forced their government to pull out of the Vietnam war when TV images and newspaper images of dying and dead American soldiers inundated American households.  We had believed the rhetoric from Washington, but when our own young men and women came home in wheelchairs and body bags, it was the power of the images that turned the tide in the US government’s ability to continue the war.

We are inundated these days with image after image of Congressmen who deny health insurance reform to working Americans (while covered under government plans themselves), who deny childcare to the working poor (while having it available themselves), who send other people’s kids to war while their own drink excessively underage in bars (I’m talking to you, George W. Bush).  The images from the bargaining table yesterday were predominantly old, white men.  Sure, old white men run the insurance companies and the banks and the lobbying firms.  But if you walk around any city in America, you’ll see all different ages and colors and sexes.  How did we whittle down our vision of who should represent us in Congress to one color, one age AND one sex? How did that one type of person end up in charge of everything?

Its time for new employment rules: in order to serve in Congress, you have to agree to take 1/2 the $170,000 salary until your state’s poor and homeless and lower class and middle class are stable.  The other half? It goes into a fund to counter the lobbying of your beloved insurers and banks.  You get no health insurance until all your state’s citizens are covered.  Can’t make that work? Then you don’t deserve cadillac coverage yourself.  And if you have a daughter or son of military recruitment age? They go to war until no citizen from your state is overseas.  That would stop the illegal multiple re-ups that the military is getting away with.

Seriously, to be in Congress, you should REPRESENT your people.  And I’m sure the 10.7% unemployed in his state are not thrilled with his current, very visible, choice of basketball over their ability to feed themselves.  Especially knowing that Bunning fought to keep campaign donor information hidden, and paid himself an additional $90,000 a year 2006-2008 from his FOUNDATION while donating less than that from his foundation to charity, because, you know, the Senate paycheck of $170,000 isn’t enough. His greed is shocking, in light of the funds he’s withholding from Americans and his own constituents.

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pacificcoastnewsonline.com

When I say some Americans are above the law, you think I’m talking about this famous & rich white chick who is ending 3 years probation after a DUI for driving all over the road in 2007.  She seems to still be getting away with her blatant, in public, in-your-face breaking the law.

Nope, I’m talking about this guy who broke the War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal statute that makes it a federal crime for any American to violate the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder, torture or inhuman treatment.  Anyone who knew about, ordered or failed to take steps to stop torture is guilty under the statute.

And if someone dies while being tortured? Then those who tortured, knew about, ordered or failed to take steps to stop torture are subject to life imprisonment and/or the death penalty…

Why isn’t he in jail?  By his own words, he broke this law. He admitted telling the Justice Department to write arguments that waterboarding is legal.  (Just as an FYI, remember that the Executive Branch is supposed to be SEPARATE from the Justice Branch, and the Legistlative Branch?  That’s supposed to be the basis of the American governmental system, isn’t it?)  Telling Justice to cover his ass means that he ordered others to commit illegality, which makes him a war criminal.  AND, on TV last week, he defended CIA Operatives and Justice Department stooges who did waterboard, saying they shouldn’t be punished for doing what they were told…

I’m sorry, but the chain-of-command is always responsible for the illegalities they force their underlings to do…  That was the point of the Nuremberg Trials.  Cheney admits breaking the law, admits he made underlings follow his lead and yet is doing the equivalent of smoking a joint on a public street in front of tons of paparrazi;  Cheney just did it on nationwide TV.

Where is the justice?  Oh yeah, he co-opted it…  Yet there is hope:

18 U.S.C. § 2441 has no statute of limitations, which means that a war crimes complaint can be filed at any time.

The penalty may be life imprisonment or — if a single prisoner dies due to torture — death. Given that there are numerous, documented cases of prisoners being tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan (see for example this report), that means that the death penalty would be appropriate for anyone found guilty of carrying out, ordering, or sanctioning such conduct.

That means that Cheney could be rounded up as a fugitive as long as he is alive, just like those old Nazis you see on the news.

There really should be ‘justice for all’, not just justice for the 2,300,000 Americans who aren’t either rich, famous or powerful enough to game the system…

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