Jack & Jill Politics

I just finished being on the debut of Meet The Bloggers, a new, web-based political discussion and activism show. Our topic was “Send Karl Rove To Jail” for his refusal to obey a subpeona from the House Judiciary Committee. Here’s the explanatory video

Marcy Wheeler over at Firedoglake has been blogging up a storm about this. She’s thorough and detailed and relentless.

My points are simple.

• The U.S. has one in four prisoners in the world. The world!
• One in 100 U.S. adults are behind bars
• Most of the growth in U.S. prison population has come from non-violent drug offenses
• Hundreds of thousands of people, our people, are systematically imprisoned for trivial violations of the law. Families and communities are destroyed, begetting a cycle of despair and disenfranchisement with an incredible human, social and economic cost

Karl Rove is a bad person. He has engineered the manipulation or theft of several elections. He helped usher in eight dark years of the Bush presidency. But more simply, homey broke the law by having the audacity to ignore a subpeona from the United States Congress. He not only skipped out. He left the country.

Meanwhile, a brother in California is late to a meeting with his probation officer and goes right back to prison.

Rove must be held in contempt and must go to prison, preferably an overcrowded, unhygienic, violent outpost where he can experience a small taste of the horror that he’s helped inflict on others.

Go on over to MeetTheBloggers.org and sign the petition.

One more thing. The mass incarceration syndrome affecting America destroys communities. Take a step to help rebuild the Gulf Coast community by signing this ColorOfChange letter to bring Katrina victims home and engage them in a civic works effort to restore their community.