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From Your Lips… to YOUR ears

from www.thedailyshow.com posted with vodpod

Bush Educates Obama on Foreign Policy

Tell me you’ve stopped laughing long enough to read what his instructions are.

Bush hits Obama on foreign policy

WASHINGTON — Setting aside his stated reluctance to enter the presidential campaign, President Bush on Thursday strongly criticized Barack Obama’s expressed readiness to meet with foreign leaders cast as tyrants, warning that such discussions “can be extremely counterproductive” and “send the wrong signal.”

He also challenged Democrats’ skepticism about the North American Free Trade Agreement, and reminded Obama that Al Qaeda has been seeking to establish a base in Iraq “for the past four years.”

I don’t intend to counter every lie and obfuscation he blathers with every open lip move. His rhetoric is known for what it is… lies, deceit, untrustworthy bullshit. There are a few people in my life that I can say one would be safe with doing exactly 180 degrees different than their instruction. This idiot, W, is one of them.

If this man says something or instructs someone on something, your safest bet is that exactly opposite is most prudent.

Since he is only speaking to the most rabid 19%ers, anyway, it is meaningless.

Rednecks, do you still feel Bush has any credibility at all?

Bush has long objected to talking with adversaries — notably from Cuba, Iran and North Korea. Asked why such talks, without preconditions, would be wrong, he said they would “give great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity.”

The last sentence strips this nincompoop of any and all credibility. We are talking about the man who is suppressing Americans human rights and dignity. This man is the pot calling the kettle black. He is a total failure and embarrassment to this country.

We’re Number 1! We’re Number 1! We’re Number 1!

By God, America is Number One at something afterall.

US prison numbers reach record high

 More than one per cent of US adults are serving prison sentences, higher than any other country in the world, according to a new report.

The US penal system held more than 2.3 million adults at the start of the year, the Pew Centre on the States said on Thursday.

More populous China was ranked second with 1.5 million behind bars, while Russia was third with 890,000.

“Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America also is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran,” the report said.

The report said growth in prison numbers had not been driven by a similar increase in crime rates or a corresponding increase in the nation’s population.

“Rather, it flows principally from a wave of policy choices that are sending more lawbreakers to prison and, through the popular ‘three-strikes’ measures and other sentencing enhancements, keeping them there longer,” it said.

Correction expenditure

US states spent more than $44bn on corrections last year, the report said, compared with $10.6bn in 1987.

Ryan King of the Sentencing Project, a US prison reform group, told Al Jazeera that many of those currently incarcerated were serving sentences for minor offences or were drug users.

“We are using tens of billions of dollars of our domestic resources to incarcerate individuals who would be much better off either under community supervision or in a public health treatment programme.”

The report said that the national prison population had almost tripled between 1987 and 2007.

While one in 106 adult white men are incarcerated, one in 36 Hispanics and one in 15 African-Americans are behind bars.

Young black men

Younger black men fare even worse, with one in nine African-Americans ages 20 to 34 held behind bars.

King said this was the case because US law-enforcement agencies chose to enforce drug laws more strictly among African-Americans.

“African-Americans are more likely to be arrested because law enforcement is centred in those communities.”

While men are still 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than women, the female penal population is “burgeoning at a far brisker pace”, the study said.

Some states, such as Texas and Kansas, had slowed their prison population growth, with more use of community supervision for lower-risk offenders and use of sentences other prison.

Are you proud to be an American, yet?

UPDATE from dday at Hullabaloo (I didn’t see this before I posted):

This, incidentally, is one area in which Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, has been so effective. Getting the Kansas legislature to move in this direction must have been a monumental task.

We desperately need a more progressive prison policy that recognizes the actual intention of imprisonment, to rehabilitate and return the jailed back to society with opportunities for advancement. Locking the problem offenders away for longer and longer hasn’t worked. Sentencing that focuses on treatment, and which pairs tougher sentences to actual risk, is far preferable. Chris Bowers calls this one of the untouchable symptoms that lawmakers have to this point been loath to challenge. But the cost has become too high to ignore. I think it’s an area where a more transformational politics would be a godsend.