Have a beer! It’s time for more Police State Follies!

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Von at Obsidian Wings on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates controversy: It would be nice — real nice — if our discussion of this incident embraced more than just race and included police tactics generally. Crowley had the power to toss Gates in jail because he didn’t like what Gates said. That just isn’t [...]

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Rachel Maddow interviewed Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley last Friday on the still-breaking news that the Obama Administration has abandoned the “enemy combatant” designation. Sharp as ever, Maddow noticed that the right to place people in indefinite detention without charges that the Bush Administration claimed through the magical invocation of that designation was nonetheless being reserved [...]

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Maybe I’m impatient. Eight years of BushAdmin bullshit wore my patience to a nub, so that when the new regime takes over with a clear mandate for change, I am in the back seat, asking, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? … Now? … Or now. Now? … Now now? [...]

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Click the image to go to the site where the cartoon is. For the reading.

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President Obama has ordered the transfer of Ali Saleh Al-Marri from indefinite solitary confinement to the U.S. criminal justice system. Held without charge for 5 years and 8 months, Al-Marri’s case was yet another example of BushAdmin overreach of executive power and subversion of civil liberties. So we should all cheer Obama’s move, right? His [...]

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Click the image to read the cartoon at full size. It will make you a better person.

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“The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped,” said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Airfield. “We all expected better.” From the AP story reporting that the ObamAdmin will continue the BushAdmin policy of [...]

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My friend Allie pointed out that the Senate Judicial committee hearing of Eric Holder’s nomination to be the first African-American Attorney General took place on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Another milestone, quietly noted. The biggest news coming out of the hearing is that Holder acknowledges that “waterboarding is torture.” We’ll hold him to that. Jonathan [...]

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From a Washington Post story on a Pew Center of the States study on the U.S. prison population: With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a [...]

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