- This Guy’s Going to Jail Forever for a Marijuana Conviction | GOOD • by Cord Jefferson
- Cornell Hood II is only 35 and he's never been convicted of a violent crime. …a Louisiana judge sentenced Hood to life in prison after his fourth marijuana conviction. …Now Hood, who has a young son and had been applying for student loans to go to college, is going to jail forever.
Assuming Hood lives to be 76, the latest average life expectancy for American males, the state of Louisiana will theoretically spend $576,153 (PDF) keeping him behind bars for the next several decades. Factor in the crimes committed by his son, who is more likely to act out now that he's in an even less stable home, and it's very possible a simple marijuana case could end up costing the state nearly $1 million.
- I Feel Like A Black Republican | The Atlantic • by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- David is pointing to something else, something which I tried to get at in my Malcolm piece. Throughout the 80s and 90s, there were a lot of black folks on the public stage who many of us loved, but never really held up as role models or hoped would be "accepted." You can understand why, say, Mike Tyson, Chuck D, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, OJ Simpson, NWA, or Snoop Dogg might be polarizing. …
If Common is disturbing, Shirley Sherrod wants to discriminate against white people, MIchelle Obama is obsessed with Whitey, and Barack Obama has a hatred of white people, then the rest of us are in real trouble. When you talk about "nonthreatening" this really is the best we've got.
- Cruel and unusual budget | Hullabaloo by digby
- Oh my goodness. It looks like the Republicans may have awakened certain members of the Catholic Church to who they really are:
[blockquote from letter to House Speaker Boehner by some Catholic academics]
It calls GOP policies anti-life. …
This should be interesting. The American Catholic bishops long ago decided to make abortion and contraception their only focus. And it resulted in an unholy alliance with a Political Party that would have called Jesus a communist. But Ryan's plan is so cruel and heartless that it seems they couldn't ignore it any longer.
- The starving beast will work for food | Hullabaloo by digby
- This story about the Koch brothers buying teaching slots at public universities for conservative ideologues is shocking, but only in its crudeness. The wealthy have endowed Universities for years for their own purposes, although I doubt many of them had the nerve to totally flout the normal academic conventions by insisting that they get to appoint their own people. And Universities normally would not have allowed such strings to be attached because they cared about their academic integrity. …
So now that the plutocrats managed to make taxes the equivalent of the black plague and then produced an economy that only benefits themselves, the starving public beast has no choice but to do whatever they want if it wants to stay alive.
- Schoolgirls ‘beaten’ in Bahrain raids | AJE
- In a secretly filmed interview, 16-year-old tells how she was severely beaten amid kingdom's crackdown on protests.
- Texas Taxpayers Finance Formula One Auto Races As Schools Layoff Teachers
- Texas, which may balance its budget by firing thousands of teachers, plans to commit $25 million in state funds to Formula One auto racing each year for a decade.
[My bookmarks live at delicious.com/camryl. In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. Also, signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
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