Surprise Surprise Hillary Lies To Hoosiers About Their Jobs (Updated Headline)

Update: Not Indiandians. Hoosiers. My bad, but I'm not running for president, so nobody can swiftboat me over that b.s.

After lying to people about the benefit of a so-called "gas tax holiday," Democratic Primary Spoiler Hillary Tonya Harding Sniper Fire Clinton is continuing her Deathmarch to Denver and blaming the Bush administration for the loss of Indiana jobs that was initiated by her husband's administration.

Let's give a big round of applause for actual real life journalists at McClatchy

Hillary Clinton loves to tell the story about how the Chinese government bought a good American company in Indiana, laid off all its workers and moved its critical defense technology work to China.

It’s a story with a dramatic, political ending. Republican President George W. Bush could have stopped it, but he didn’t.

If she were president, Clinton says, she’d fight to protect those jobs. It’s just the kind of talk that’s helping her win support from working-class Democrats worried about their jobs and paychecks, not to mention their country’s security.

What Clinton never includes in the oft-repeated tale is the role that prominent Democrats played in selling the company and its technology to the Chinese. She never mentions that big-time Democratic contributor George Soros helped put together the deal to sell the company or that the sale was approved by her husband's administration.

In response, the Clinton campaign said that Bill Clinton's administration had gotten assurances at the time it approved the deal that production would remain inside the United States, and that the shift of jobs to China didn't occur until under the Bush administration.

“Hillary Clinton must have been hoping we Hoosiers have short memories,” Ed Dixon of Valparaiso said in a letter to a local newspaper after a recent Clinton visit. “Her husband was president at the time and allowed this to happen.”

“They would have us believe Bush was behind this sale,” added Fred Sliger of Valparaiso in another letter, “when in fact the Clinton administration rubber-stamped this along with the sale of numerous other high-tech secrets to the Chinese. …Let's get the facts straight.”

No surprise of course that Hillary Clinton would obscure the truth for short-term political gain. I'm just having fun pointing it out. She will never be president. Ever.

Feels good to be on offense again.

Alphonso Jackson's State Of Mind

Hat Tip to ProgressiveSouth

There are so many people in the Bush Administration resigning in disgrace on any given week that it's hard to keep track. But Alphonso Jackson's tenure is particularly notable for its callousness and incompetence.

Perhaps nothing expresses Jackson's attitude towards his responsibility as housing secretary more than this anecdote, at the bottom of the Times report:

In 2004, less than two months after his confirmation as housing secretary, Mr. Jackson told a House panel that he believed poverty “is a state of mind, not a condition.” Two years later, he said in a speech that he had canceled a contract for a company after its president told him that he did not like Mr. Bush. Mr. Jackson later said he had made the story up.

Actually, poverty is the state of being broke. And under Jackson's tenure, there are more people broke than ever. Thanks to the Bush Administration's slow response to the mortgage crisis, the black middle class is losing its most important resources--the homes so many worked so hard to buy, which are now plummeting in value and being lost to foreclosures.

But of course, it's not just "poverty" that is a state of mind--it must also be "homelessness." That would explain Jackson's callous remarks in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, "it's not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again," a pretty ominous statement for someone who was at least partially responsible for helping to rebuild homes for residents displaced by Katrina. Jackson was probably still thinking of "homelessness" as a state of mind when he diverted funds earmarked for affordable housing in New Orleans on luxury hotels and casinos.

I suppose you could also refer to "corruption" as a state of mind, especially after Jackson spent his career as HUD secretary hooking up his buddies with lucrative no-bid contracts...it's kind of hard to imagine anyone in this administration getting in trouble for that though, isn't it?

The problem is the FBI tend to see corruption as a "crime" rather than a "state of mind", and they were apparently suspicious after Jackson threatened a developer in Philadelphia with retaliation from the federal government if he didn't agree to sell one of his properties at a substantial discount.

Jackson's behavior has led him to a new state of mind today, "resignation". And if the FBI has a strong case, Jackson might be experiencing a few other states of mind, like "arrest," "trial," and "incarceration."

Crack Penalties Could Be Reduced Retroactively

The Post is reporting that penalties for selling crack cocaine could be reduced, and the sentences imposed retroactively, allowing thousands to be be freed. The penalties for crack-related crimes are far harsher than those for crimes involving powder cocaine.

Should the panel adopt the new policy, the sentences of 19,500 inmates would be reduced by an average of 27 months. About 3,800 inmates now imprisoned for possession and distribution of crack cocaine could be freed within the next year, according to the commission's analysis. The proposal would cover only inmates in federal prisons and not those in state correctional facilities, where the vast majority of people convicted of drug offenses are held.

By far the largest number -- more than 1,400 -- of those who would be eligible for sentence reductions were convicted in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, which has jurisdiction over Northern Virginia and the Richmond area, according to an analysis done by the commission. Nearly 280 inmates convicted in federal courts in Maryland would be eligible, as well as almost 270 prisoners found guilty in the District of Columbia.

The commission is taking up one of the most racially sensitive issues of the two-decades-old war on drugs. Jurists and civil rights organizations have long complained that the commission's guidelines mandate more stringent federal penalties for crack cocaine offenses, which usually involve African Americans, than for crimes involving powder cocaine, which generally involve white people. The chemical properties of the drugs are the same, though crack is potentially more addictive.

Nearly 86 percent of inmates who would be affected by the change are black; slightly fewer than 6 percent are white. Ninety-four percent are men.

The commission's proposal does not change sentencing recommendations for powder cocaine.

A few things come to mind: Given the incredible amount of people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses, this is really a trickle. Also, releasing people from prison really isn't enough; to reduce recidivism inmates have to have the kind of vocational or educational skills necessary to find gainful employment and avoid the traps of their former lives.

Naturally, the Bush Administration is opposed, because cocaine makes people dangerous, irrational, paranoid, and possibly prone to messianic delusions. Of course, Mr. Bush is only speaking from his own personal experience.

Well, that's not exactly what they said.

The Bush administration opposes the new plan, arguing that it would overburden federal courts and release potentially dangerous drug offenders. In a letter to the commission, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher wrote that the release of a large number of drug offenders "would jeopardize community safety and threatens to unravel the success we have achieved in removing violent crack offenders from high-crime neighborhoods."

But many federal judges, public defenders, parole officers and civil rights advocates favor the move, asserting that the penalties for crack cocaine charges have fallen disproportionately onto black people.

Were the Bush Administration concerned with creating sound policy rather than moralizing, they would propose a plan to help inmates re-enter society safely and with the proper career tools to help them avoid a life of crime. Even from a conservative point of view; recidivism is a disaster for taxpayers.

But black people don't vote Republican. So isn't it better to have as many of us disenfranchised and unable to vote as possible?

Black Leaders Repeat Call For March On Justice Department, Civil Rights Division Spins Its Record

Al Sharpton and others are repeating a call made last month for a march on the Civil Rights Division to protest the Bush DoJ's failure to prosecute hate crimes:

A group of national civil rights leaders came to Washington yesterday to reiterate calls for a massive march next week on the Justice Department to protest what they said was the federal government's failure to prosecute hate crimes.

Headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, the son of the legendary civil rights leader, the group said the march will start at noon Nov. 16 and proceed seven times around the department's headquarters, at Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

[...]

"It is our feeling that with the increased amount of hate crimes and hate signs -- hanging nooses, swastikas -- that have gone on around this country unaddressed . . . this Justice Department has been silent, and absent . . . on the cases of civil rights in our times," Sharpton said.

The DoJ tried to spin its record, saying its prosecuted more civil rights cases than any other in history. Of course, the nature of those cases is different from the original aim of the Civil Rights Division, and they certainly haven't been on behalf of black civil rights.

Last year, the department charged 22 people with hate crimes. That was down 71% from 76 in 1997.

Meanwhile, the department has charged more people with police misconduct and human trafficking. For example, since 2001, the department has prosecuted 360 people on charges of human trafficking, compared with 89 in the six years before that.

FBI figures show that hate crime reports fell 11% from 1997 to 2005, the most recent year available.

A New York Times article a few months ago pointed out that the entire focus of the Civil Rights Division had shifted to one more suited to the Christian Rights' agenda, including protecting religious groups that want to descriminate on the basis of religious background or sexual orientation:

The changes are evident in a variety of actions:

¶Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

¶Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

¶Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques.

¶Taking on far fewer hate crimes and cases in which local law enforcement officers may have violated someone’s civil rights. The resources for these traditional cases have instead been used to investigate trafficking cases, typically involving foreign women used in the sex trade, a favored issue of the religious right.