I am off to Dallas and should resume posting on Thursday. Have a great week, and I will see you all in a few days.
John Cole started Balloon Juice early in 2002. Those who have followed along know that this has been quite the journey.
Wonderful
I believe that the way our current system is set up, very few come out out of prison a better person. Via TalkLeft, we find Gray Davis’s latest attempt to make this worse:
The state’s financially strapped corrections department is prohibiting inmates from leaving their cells at three prisons in an attempt to reduce overtime pay for guards and is considering further cost-saving restrictions at most of the system’s 32 institutions, according to the chairwoman of the state Senate committee that oversees prisons.
Fabulous. Folks, unless someone is on Death Row or in jail for life with no chance of parole, these people WILL be released from jail. And in most cases, they will still be unskilled, uneducated, and perhaps carrying Hepatitis B, HIV, or both. The only skills training they will have received are PhD’s in hard crime, an education provided free of charge from their fellow inmates. Add to this to the well known destabilizing effects of sensory deprivation caused by longterm solitary cofinement, and we are ACTIVELY experimenting in the creation of a breed of supercriminals- supercriminals who will be one day back on the street, living down the street from you, and more than likely, responsible for the majority of the violent crimes happening in your town or neighborhood.
It is not being soft on crime to recognize that this is a recipe for disaster. You are not a flaming liberal for not wanting to have these monsters released from prison in a worse condition than when they entered (and we did put them away for a reason, didn’t we?) You are not a bleeding heart commie for wanting prisoners to receive education, skills training, and rehabilitation. What you are is someone with an IQ higher than a pool of tepid water.
Oh hell. Go read this. This is sort of related.
Travelling Next Week
I will be travelling next week, leaving here Monday morning and driving to Memphis, where I will stay the night, and then driving on to Dallas. I figure two days of driving time, and then I fly home on Wednesday. If there is anyone in the area who would like to meet, send me an email.
BTW- I am not on business, but helping an old friend move. He left today with a moving van and one car in tow, and his wife is pregnant, so I volunteered to take the other car down for him.
The Real Question
I am sure this will be spun as more evidence of an anti-homosexual agenda, but something is bothering me about this:
The Justice Department has barred a group of employees from holding their annual gay pride event at the department’s headquarters, the first time such an event has been blocked by any federal agency, gay rights leaders said today.
Justice Department officials told the group, called DOJ Pride, that it could not hold its annual event at the department because the White House had not formally recognized Gay Pride Month with a presidential proclamation, Marina Colby, a department policy analyst who is president of the group, said. The group represents several hundred gay and lesbian employees at the department.
“This sends a real chilling message to Justice Department employees who are gay and lesbian,” said David Smith, a spokesman for Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest gay advocacy group.
“This says, `You’re not welcome,’ ” Mr. Smith said. “It says that employees can celebrate Asian-American heritage month, and Hispanic heritage month and so on, but you cannot.”
Why the hell are government assets being used for ANY of these celebrations? And if they are going to let there be Asian-American Heritage month, I agree with DOJ Pride, let them have Gay Pride month. But here is a better suggestion- GET RID OF ALL OF THEM and get back to work.
RIP, Big East
It looks like the Big East football conference is officially done:
Five schools filed a lawsuit Friday to try to prevent Miami and Boston College from jumping to the Atlantic Coast Conference, accusing them of secretly taking part in an expansion plan that could ruin the Big East.
The lawsuit, filed in state Superior Court in Hartford, Conn., says Miami and Boston College professed loyalty to their conference while concocting a “deliberate scheme to destroy the Big East and abscond with the collective value of all that has been invested and created in the Big East.”
Big East schools went ahead with millions of dollars in renovations and upgrades under the assumption they would be part of a healthy conference for years to come, the lawsuit contends.
Go to hell, Miami and BC, but Miami in particular. One more reason to dislike Donna Shalala.
Paul Krugman, Hack
Is there anything he can get right? Is there anything he won’t lie about? I loved this from today’s column:
Of course, the big betrayal was George W. Bush’s decision to push this tax cut in the first place. There is no longer any doubt that the man who ran as a moderate in the 2000 election is actually a radical who wants to undo much of the Great Society and the New Deal.
Show me once where he ran as a moderate. And don’t tell me that ‘compassionate conservative’ meant moderate. There are enough other lies in this column that I am sure you will see the column referred to over and over again.
F*** France
In the words of my apolitical mother, “The French are really making it hard to like them, aren’t they.” That was her mild response to the outrageous behavior displayed by our frog friends during Serena William’s loss to Justine Henin-Hardenne:
However, I thought the crowd at times showed poor taste toward Serena. There were a couple of occasions when the linesperson didn’t call the ball out and Serena stopped in the middle of a point to circle the mark and the chair umpire confirmed that the ball was out. Serena was completely in the right, but the crowd reacted negatively toward her. After that, they proceeded to cheer when Serena would miss the first serve, which is completely inappropriate.
Completely inappropriate is also putting it mildly. Serena’s mother got it right:
Her mother, Oracene Price, was more blunt: “The crowd showed a lack of class and total ignorance – or they just don’t know tennis and the etiquette of tennis.”
Even Henin-Hardenne acknowledged that the crowd’s behavior “sometimes could be a little bit too much.”
The French suck. We simply have to face facts and move on.