TOO IMPORTANT TO FAIL

The terrible fact is that a staggering 48-percent of all African American males will drop out of high school. Tavis Smiley explores what amounts to a national tragedy and looks at what to do about it.

The PBS show debuts Tuesday night in LA, but check listings for your cable provider to find out what time and which PBS station will have it.

LA TIMES SAYS STATE SHOULD BE FORCED TO DEFEND PROP 8 AGAINST CHALLENGES

The Times editorial board makes an interesting and worthwhile argument. I still don’t happen to agree with them, but their points in Monday’s editorial are good ones and essential to consider as you make up your own mind.

HOW 9/11 COMPLETELY CHANGED SURVEILLANCE IN THE U.S.

This story is from Sunday’s Wired Magazine by Ryan Singel, and is a definite must read. Here’s a clip:

Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein handed a sheaf of papers in January 2006 to lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing smoking-gun evidence that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of AT&T, was illegally sucking up American citizens’ internet usage and funneling it into a database.

The documents became the heart of civil liberties lawsuits against the government and AT&T. But Congress, including then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), voted in July 2008 to override the rights of American citizens to petition for a redress of grievances.

Congress passed a law that absolved AT&T of any legal liability for cooperating with the warrantless spying. The bill, signed quickly into law by President George W. Bush, also largely legalized the government’s secret domestic-wiretapping program.

Obama pledged to revisit and roll back those increased powers if he became president. But, he did not.

Mark Klein faded into history without a single congressional committee asking him to testify. And with that, the government won the battle to turn the net into a permanent spying apparatus immune to oversight from the nation’s courts.

Klein’s story encapsulates the state of civil liberties 10 years after the shattering attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. After a decade, the country is left with a legacy of secret and unilateral executive-branch actions, a surveillance infrastructure whose scope and inner workings remain secret with little oversight, a compliant judiciary system that obsequiously bows to claims of secrecy by the executive branch, and a populace that has no idea how its government uses its power or who is watching out for abuses.

Read the rest.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF A SECOND CHANCE – A FORMER GANG MEMBER GETS TO STAY IN THE U.S.

Hector Tobar’s LA Times story is one you shouldn’t miss. Here’s a clip from the story’s opening:

Before this week, the last time I’d seen Obed Silva was in an immigration court in downtown L.A. On that day, he rolled his wheelchair to the witness box and explained to a judge why he shouldn’t be deported.

That was in 2009. Born in Mexico but raised in Orange County, Silva is a 32-year-old former gang member paralyzed from a gunshot injury who reinvented himself as a scholar. It was the errors of his youth — as a teenager he shot and wounded a man at an O.C. party — that led to the deportation proceeding.

Professors at his alma mater, Cal State L.A., testified in immigration court on his behalf. After I told his story in this column, even a conservative talk-show host said he deserved to stay in the U.S. And in December, the government agreed to stop the deportation proceedings against him.

After nearly four years of court dates and adjournments, Silva’s final appearance before a judge lasted only a few minutes, he recalled. “Next thing I knew, the judge said, ‘You’re free to go.’”

This week Silva and I met again, at his mother’s home in Buena Park. I’d come to see what he was doing with his second chance.

He’s teaching writing at Cypress College and tackling his own painful story in a book. Much of his manuscript is about another man born in Mexico, a heavy drinker who was deported many years ago, and who isn’t missed on this side of the border:

Obed’s father, the late Juan Silva.

Juan Silva was, as Obed writes, “an alcoholic, a drug-addict and a wife beater.” Juan Silva, aged 48 at his death, was one of those fraught men who live hard and leave a lifetime of wreckage in their wake.

“I came to this country to run away from him,” Obed’s mother, Marcela Mendoza, told me. Juan Silva was, by Mendoza’s account, obsessed with the family that had escaped him. Soon after they left, he followed them northward……

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF PRISONS: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A RESEARCHER COMPARES U.S. PRISONS WITH LOCK-UPS ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD? ANSWER: THE NEWS IS NOT GOOD

“The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.”

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the spring and summer of 2010, law professor and researcher Lucian Dervan, traveled to prisons in the United States, The Netherlands, and Israel to “compare the way each country detains its most violent and culpable residents.” The results of this research, he wrote afterward, “indicate something quite striking about what makes prisons around the world successful.” His results also indicated an alarming view of the way the United States treats its prisoners and what results from that dehumanizing treatment.

Here is a long clip from Dervan’s conclusions. (You can download the entire paper here.)

What makes one prison a violent and uncontrollable badland, while another is a calm, relatively safe, and productive facility for both staff and inmates? From my travels to three continents in search of an answer to this question, one aspect of each prison seems to contribute significantly to its success or failure. Where prisoners believed they were treated like human beings and were provided with reasonable living conditions and opportunities to utilize their time in meaningful ways, the prison environment was relatively healthy and rates of violence were low. In comparison, [in U.S. prisons] where prisoners were subjected to abhorrent living conditions and no efforts were made to treat them with a modicum of respect or provide them with even a scintilla of meaningful stimulation during the day, the prison environment was poisoned and violence ran rampant.

One final story from my travels will summarize the distinction between treating inmates like human beings and treating prisoners as mere objects for confinement.

[W]hen I traveled to Israel three prisoners were asked if they would volunteer to meet with me and, for their services, they were personally thanked by a prison official. During my visit to the state maximum-security prison, however, the treatment of the prisoners was quite different. At one point, a prisoner was sitting inside his cell reading a book. A
guard, who was showing me this particular wing of the facility, decided to demonstrate how he could control the lights inside this prisoner’s cell from outside. Without acknowledging the prisoner was even present, the guard then began switching the light on and off several times. When he was finished with his demonstration, still not having even acknowledged the presence of the prisoner inside the cell, he simply continued to walk down the corridor. It is striking to observe that the guards at this state facility treated prisoners with considerably less respect than the officers tasked with supervising convicted terrorists in Israel.

In conclusion, it is important to clarify why we care what type of environment exists inside a prison. It is certainly not clear that how prisoners are treated has any positive impact on recidivism rates. In fact, of the four prison systems examined in this Article, the one with the highest rate of recidivism is The Netherlands.Nevertheless, the environment inside prisons is vitally important. First, prisons in which inmates feel a sense of community appear to be less violent than those that serve as little more than warehouses for the one out of every hundred Americans currently behind bars. Second, prisons with high rates of violence are expensive facilities to administer because they require large staffs and incur incidental costs associated with medical treatment, overtime, and sick days. As such, prison systems can perform their functions in a more economically efficient manner by creating environments where prisoners are provided with incentives to cooperate and reject violence. Finally, treating prisoners as human beings and creating positive prison environments is simply the morally correct manner in which to administer a penitentiary.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky stated, “The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.” Even without the significant added benefits of reducing violence and lessening the administrative costs of running our prison systems, treating prisoners with dignity is the moral duty of any government. That abiding by this duty creates a safer environment for both staff and inmates and provides for the possibility of creating better prisons with less money should merely be considered a significant and
wonderful ancillary benefit.

FATHER MYCHAL JUDGE – “WE COME TO BURY HIS HEART BUT NOT HIS LOVE, NEVER HIS LOVE”

Like most news outlets, NPR had a string of good 9/11 stories. This, about the death of NY City Fire Department chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, is a particularly sweet one.

Father Mychal Judge was a Franciscan friar and a chaplain to the New York City Fire Department. He was also a true New York character. Born in Brooklyn, Mychal Judge seemed to know everyone in the city, from the homeless to the mayor.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Father Mychal arrived at the World Trade Center shortly after the first plane hit. And as firefighters and other rescue personnel ran into the North Tower, he went with them.

Bill Cosgrove, a police lieutenant, was also there. When the South Tower collapsed, it sent debris flying into the neighboring building. When the dust cleared, Mychal Judge was dead. Soon after, Cosgrove found him. Then, Cosgrove and a group of firefighters emerged from the rubble, carrying Father Mychal’s body….

Listen to the rest here.

AND JUST IN CASE YOU MISSED IT….FOX SPORTS AND THE STUNNINGLY RACIST USE OF USC STUDENT

As you may or may not know by now, Fox Sports ran a video about the inclusion of two more college teams—Utah and Colorado— in the PAC 10, which will now be the PAC 12. In order to publicize the change on Fox’s college sports show, the show’s “reporter” Bob Oschack interviewed students at USC about their reaction to the new of the change, and asked them to “give a good old fashioned American welcome” the two new schools. Oschack, however, did not interview just any USC students. He picked only Asian students and only Asian students with strong accents. The result was racial caricature that was utterly flabbergasting in its creepiness.

The story was first reported by the Colorado Daily Camera and in short order calls and emails began to stream into the network, Fox Sports at first issued a tepid apology that was little more than an “Ooops. Our bad.” Then, a few hours later, as the fury over the vile video grew, there were evidently some hurried meetings in FoxLand because the apology from the Fox Sports head got a little bit stronger—but not much.

We sincerely apologize to President [C. L. Max] Nikias and the entire USC community for the production and posting of the video. The context was clearly inappropriate and the video was removed as soon as we became aware of it. We will review our editorial process to determine where the breakdown occurred, and we will take steps to ensure something like this never happens again.

The fury continued, thus on Wed, Fox cancelled its college sports show, The College Experiment which had produced the horrid segment, yanked videos from the network site and Hulu, and apologized all over again. (Of course Fox couldn’t stop a million video flowers from blooming on YouTube and the like. For example, here at KCET in it is posted along with a commentary by blogger/teacher Ophelia Chong, which—by the way— is very much worth reading.

Although the news on the incident died down over the weekend, all is far from forgiven. After all, said one Asian commentator, Fox is the network that called Obama’s birthday party “a “hip-hop BBQ” that “didn’t create jobs”—and other fun racist moments. In other words, they created the environment in which it was only a matter of time that the racist crap on the news segments would bleed into areas like sports coverage.

TUESDAY ILLINOIS POISED TO ABOLISH STATE’S DEATH PENALTY

Go Illinois!

Reuters has the story. Here’s a clip:

Illinois was poised to become the first state since 2009 to abolish the death penalty after the state Senate approved the ban on Tuesday and sent it to Democratic Governor Pat Quinn for his signature.

The Senate vote came after House approval late last week. The Senate vote was 32-25.

Illinois has not executed anyone for more than a decade after former Republican Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in January 2000 following a series of revelations that people had been sent to Death Row who were later found to be innocent.

“We’ve had 20 innocent people on Death Row,” said Jeremy Schroeder, executive director of the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. “It’s time to be done with the moratorium and do the right thing.”

State Sen. Kwame Raoul, the measure’s sponsor, said that too many mistakes had been made in Illinois that sent innocent people to death row.

“We have an historic opportunity … to join the civilized world and end this practice of risking putting to death innocent people,” Raoul said before the vote.

FYI: The bill just passed would take the money saved from the Capital Litigation Trust Fund (which will no longer be needed), and re-allocate the $$$ to a fund for murder victims’ services and law enforcement.

OKAY, THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY CREEPY

This cheery ad is on the web page of the Palmetto State Armory.

Palmetto State Armory would like to honor our esteemed congressman Joe Wilson with the release of our new “You Lie” AR-15 lower receiver.

(For those unfamiliar with armaments, an AR-15 is the automatic rifle that is akin to an M-16, and the “lower receiver’ is the “gun” part of this particular gun.)

UPDATE: The above link to the ad no longer works. Obviously, it has been taken down.

Evidently Congressman Wilson was tickled by the matter since he is shown cradling the AR-15 named in his honor.

ASSANGE LAWYERS WORRIED ABOUT “ILLEGAL RENDITION” AND THE DEATH PENALTY

The NY Times has the story:

Lawyers for Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks antisecrecy group, said on Tuesday that they would oppose his extradition to Sweden because he might subsequently face “illegal rendition” to the United States, risking imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or even the death penalty.

They made the assertion in defense documents released after Mr. Assange made a brief appearance in a British high-security court for a largely procedural hearing concerning his resistance to demands for his extradition to Sweden, where he has been accused of sexual misconduct….

LATE TUESDAY UPDATES

LA COUNTY DEPUTY SHOT BY SUSPECT

The LA Times has the story:

A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy was shot in the face Tuesday night in East Los Angeles after he and his training officer were attacked by a reputed gang member on parole, authorities said.

The suspected gunman was fatally shot by the training officer after a struggle ensued, authorities said.

Deputy Mohamed Ahmed, 27, was taken to a local hospital and may lose sight in one eye, said a source familiar with the incident. The Sheriff’s Department initially reported that the deputy had been shot in the cheek.

Ahmed did not appear to have suffered any brain damage and was listed in critical condition. He joined the department in April 2007.

As we hope for the health of Gabrielle Giffords, we also hope for LA County Sheriff’s Deputy Mohamed Ahmed.

There are all kinds of other topics that need discussing, but they will have to wait until Tuesday as, for better or for worse, the Tucson shooting, and the issues that swirl around it, still demand to be front and center.

In his Monday column Paul Krugman talks about what he calls “eliminationist rhetoric.”

I don’t know if he coined the phrase or has just appropriated it. Whatever the case, it goes to the heart of what is problematic in a certain kind of political speech that has come out of the weeds and into the open these past few years. It is not the fiery rhetoric that has been part of politics since the country’s founding, rather it is another darker strain of partisan vitriol that characterizes one’s opponents, not as the loyal opposition, but as monsters.

Here’s a clip from Krugman’s column:

….As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line.

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

The NY Times Monday editorial has this to say:

Jared Loughner, the man accused of shooting Ms. Giffords, killing a federal judge and five other people, and wounding 13 others, appears to be mentally ill. His paranoid Internet ravings about government mind control place him well beyond usual ideological categories.

But he is very much a part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery. With easy and legal access to semiautomatic weapons like the one used in the parking lot, those already teetering on the edge of sanity can turn a threat into a nightmare.

Last spring, Capitol security officials said threats against members of Congress had tripled over the previous year, almost all from opponents of health care reform. An effigy of Representative Frank Kratovil Jr., a Maryland Democrat, was hung from a gallows outside his district office. Ms. Giffords’s district office door was smashed after the health vote, possibly by a bullet.

And there is this from the Wall Street Journal:

Jim Gilchrist, who founded the immigration-law enforcement group Minuteman Project, said he sensed a “violent streak” in American politics and brought a bodyguard to public events. “I am in fear of my life from people like this who are on my side of the argument,” as well as from extremists “from the ultra-left,” Mr. Gilchrist said.

As signs emerged that the alleged shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was a disturbed loner, party leaders weren’t suggesting any direct link between specific political statements and his actions. Authorities haven’t commented on possible motives.

But the shootings appear to be yielding the kind of ruminations on civility and violence not seen since domestic terrorists blew up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Some lawmakers and liberal activists implored President Obama to use the moment the way President Bill Clinton did in 1995, not only to call for national unity but to denounce a political culture of violence…..

….In the run-up to the November elections, Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle talked of “second amendment remedies” to voter frustrations.

Candidate Allen West, now a Florida congressman, said during the campaign of his Democratic opponent: “Let me tell you what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house. That’s the only way that you’re going to win.”

And finally this from E. J. Dionne at the Washington Post:

Let’s begin by being honest. It is not partisan to observe that there are cycles to violent rhetoric in our politics. In the late 1960s, violent talk (and sometimes violence itself) was more common on the far left. But since President Obama’s election, it is incontestable that significant parts of the American far right have adopted a language of revolutionary violence in the name of overthrowing “tyranny.”

It is Obama’s opponents who carried guns to his speeches and cited Jefferson’s line that the tree of liberty “must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

…The point is not to “blame” American conservatism for the actions of a possibly deranged man, especially since the views of Jared Lee Loughner seem so thoroughly confused. But we must now insist with more force than ever that threats of violence no less than violence itself are antithetical to democracy. Violent talk and playacting cannot be part of our political routine. It is not cute or amusing to put crosshairs over a congressional district.

Liberals were rightly pressed in the 1960s to condemn violence on the left. Now, conservative leaders must take on their fringe when it uses language that intimates threats of bloodshed. That means more than just highly general statements praising civility.

Quite honestly, other lives may depend on it.

What everyone now knows (or ought to know) is that, on Sunday five newspapers—The New York Times, the Guardian of the U.K., Germany’s Der Spiegel, France’s Le Monde and Spain’s El Pais—began publishing carefully vetted excerpts from 250,000 diplomatic cables leaked to the publications by the now infamous website WikiLeaks.

It is, as WikiLeaks itself puts it, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain.

The U.S. government is—surprise, surprise— mighty upset by the leaks, and loudly condemned them as “reckless.”

So what are the ethics of such leaks in general and these leaks in particular?

On this topic many are opining like crazy. Among those most worth reading are the following:

1. Simon Jenkins writing for The Guardian. (Jenkins is a columnist/author/BBC commentator who has previously been the editor for both the Evening Standard and the London Times. In other words, he’s a not a trifler in the world of British journalism.)

Here are some clips:

Anything said or done in the name of a democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be “world policeman” – an assumption that runs ghostlike through these cables – that interest is global. Nonetheless, the Guardian had to consider two things in abetting disclosure, irrespective of what is anyway published by WikiLeaks. It could not be party to putting the lives of individuals or sources at risk, nor reveal material that might compromise ongoing military operations or the location of special forces.

In this light, two backup checks were applied. The US government was told in advance the areas or themes covered, and “representations” were invited in return. These were considered. Details of “redactions” were then shared with the other four media recipients of the material and sent to WikiLeaks itself, to establish, albeit voluntarily, some common standard.

The state department knew of the leak several months ago and had ample time to alert staff in sensitive locations. Its pre-emptive scaremongering over the weekend stupidly contrived to hint at material not in fact being published. Nor is the material classified top secret, being at a level that more than 3 million US government employees are cleared to see, and available on the defense department’s internal Siprnet…..

{SNIP]

The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment. If American spies are breaking United Nations rules by seeking the DNA biometrics of the UN director general, he is entitled to hear of it. British voters should know what Afghan leaders thought of British troops. American (and British) taxpayers might question, too, how most of the billions of dollars going in aid to Afghanistan simply exits the country at Kabul airport.

[SNIP]

The money‑wasting is staggering. Aid payments are never followed, never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world’s superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive….

Read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

2. The New Yorker’s senior editor, Amy Davidson, essentially agrees with Jenkins

She writes:

Timothy Garton Ash, who writes that he has been taking “dives into a vast ocean” of cables for the Guardian, says of the cache,

It is the historian’s dream. It is the diplomat’s nightmare….a multi-course banquet from the history of the present.

And that sounds right: the Times, in its summary, managed to work in a “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse whom Muammar Qaddafi kept near him and a wedding in Dagestan with “drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers.” (Garton Ash called that “highly entertaining” cable “almost worthy of Evelyn Waugh.”) It also has accounts of attempts to gain control the Pakistani nuclear arsenal (for insight into that matter, see Seymour M. Hersh’s 2009 piece), warnings about Iran’s plans in that direction, and contingency planning for the collapse of North Korea. (One suggested measure to prepare for that last one: help the Chinese make money there.) There are so many anecdotes and so much color that one might forget where it all tends, and what one ought to do about it.

It is, for example, intriguing to read in a cable the Times highlights, about the day Afghanistan’s vice president arrived in the United Arab Emirates carrying fifty-two million dollars in cash with him (how much luggage space would all those bills take up?); but it’s also devastating. The cable said that he “was ultimately allowed to keep [it] without revealing the money’s origin or destination.” What are the options for its “origins”? Drug money, bribes, a straight theft of American taxpayer dollars meant to support our effort there? Here as in many cables, the strong narrative only throws into relief the incoherence of our Afghan policy, which remains a story with no obvious end….

[SNIP]

….maybe the government, if it expects the word “secret” to constitute a clear warning about the potential for danger to one’s country, should think hard about what the word means. The White House’s protests Sunday, in response to the release, that “President Obama supports responsible, accountable, and open government at home and around the world, but this reckless and dangerous action runs counter to that goal,” would be more persuasive if the Administration hadn’t, for example, recklessly invoked the states secrets privilege itself.

That brings us back to Garton Ash, and the idea that the documents present a historian’s dream but a diplomat’s nightmare. Between the two, one’s sympathy is with the former—because what historians dream of is, more often than not, what voters in a democracy require.

3. Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Russell Adams and Jessica Vascellaro, don’t take a side, but give a round-up of what others have said.

Read the cables themselves here.

Pre-scribbled bucket image by Thomas Saur

Two LA Groups have just received $500,000 in federal grants to help create programs modeled on Geoffrey Canada’s remarkable Harlem Children’s Zone.

The two groups are Proyecto Pastoral at Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights. (Love, love, love these folks. They are such a great choice.)

And the Youth Policy Institute—another group with a very good reputation, and which is very well set up to implement a program like the Promise Grants hopes eventually to fund.

Of course, $500 grand is just about enough to complete the paperwork on something as ambitious as providing cradle to college help for entire neighborhoods of children, with the notion that if you change the whole ecology in which a kid lives, you can dramatically transform that kid’s chances for a good and productive future.

Here’s how Howard Blume of the LA Times explains the HCZ strategy:

The Harlem zone covers a 97-block area of Manhattan with a $48-million budget, or about $5,000 per child annually, not including government funding for schools that substantially surpasses education spending in California. Mothers can begin to participate in its programs when they are pregnant, and services follow their children throughout their education.

In addition, the HCZ features some hot shot charter schools right in the middle of its 97 blocks.

In other words, our two new LA “Promise Neighborhoods“—two among 21 in the nation—are just about….hmmm…. $47.5 million short of what they need to launch anything resembling what Geoffrey Canada is doing, and what the Obama administration hopes to create around the nation.

The good news is that this half-million dollar jump start puts both of these groups in the running to go for some much larger federal grants, say $10 or $20 million for each neighborhood.

In other words, the Obama administration wants the two groups to use their respective $500,000 grants to develop a plan.

Will it work? Hard to say. But it’s exactly the right chance for this administration to be taking.

The New York Times also reports on its two Promise Grant winners.

Here’s a clip:

“This represents a down payment for the future educational success of children in some of the most distressed and challenged communities around the country,” Arne Duncan, the federal education secretary, told reporters in Washington.

Mr. Duncan said President Obama had asked Congress for an additional $210 million for the project in next year’s budget. Most of that would go toward bringing the improvement plans to life, although organizations would have to reapply to receive the new money….

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As most of you likely know by now, on Saturday afternoon, on the eve of the health care reform vote, Obama spoke to the Democratic caucus who listened with uncharacteristically silent attention. There was no pep rally atmosphere.

Obama centered the speech around a Lincoln quote: “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine.”

It was a very smart, very emotional, very carefully crafted speech—and worth listening to in its entirety.

One of the things I’ve learned in nearly 20 years of writing about street gangs, is that for a man or woman who has been involved in gangs to truly rescue his or her life—and to heal from the scarring that deep involvement in gang life produces—one has to face the bad stuff, the damage that has been done—both by and to oneself. There are no short cuts. A reckoning is needed, a facing of the hard truths, a dark night of the soul, a clear-eyed assessment of whatever wreckage has occurred.

Anybody who’s been through therapy or some 12-step program or other knows that same rule: healing and health require that you take a good look at the wounds—both those caused, and those received.

The same is true for a nation. One cannot just sweep harmful acts under the rug and hope that they will all vanish. They won’t. The poison comes out one way or the other. Sunlight cleanses. A lack of open air merely causes festering.

That’s also what Frank Rich says-–only using other words— in his Sunday NY Times column.

Here’s how it opens:

To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.

That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.

There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists….

Read on.

(PS: Last night’s opening skit from SNL—embedded above— was pretty funny, and, in it’s own tangential way, relates.)

FACING LIFE WITHOUT…..FOR KIDS

In 2008, the U.S. became the sole country in the world that still sentenced youth under age 18 to life without parole. A bill recently introduced into the California state legislature, SB 399, would take a step toward ending that practice, at least in California. (In 2007, I covered some of the issues surrounding kids doing life. And last year Human Rights Watch released an excellent report on the kids in California serving Life Without.)

Certainly kids are capable of committing terrible crimes. And under State Senator Leeland Yee’s bill, juveniles can still be given Life Without. But is allows for the sentence to be reviewed after 10 years with the idea that certain kids might have earned the possibility of a resentencing hearing.

Juveniles are not adults. Everything we have learned in the last two decades about brain development has made that clear. Various groups in the juvenile justice world are gearing up to support this bill. I hope the California state legislature is intelligent enough to pass it. Perhaps one day we can join the rest of the world and do away with Life Without for kids altogether. SB 399 will not accomplish that goal. But a step in the right direction is better than none.

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THE RED CROSS TORTURE PAPERS

Journalist/Author Mark Danner got his hands on unreleased report by the International Committee of the Red Cross that detailed the torture of prisoners in the CIA’s so-called black sites and published what he learned in the New York Review of Books.

The accounts and the analysis are extremely credible, and the writing is excellent. Here’s how it opens:

We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase “War on Terror”—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was “a wartime president”—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead….

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MAUREEN DOWD UNLOADS ON AIG.…AND SOME MEMBERS OF OBAMA’S ADMINISTRATION

I hate to belabor the issue, but MoDo makes some sharp points and draws blood:

…As Andrew Cuomo pointed out on Tuesday, 11 of the A.I.G. executives who received retention bonuses of $1 million or more — including one who received $4.6 million — were not even retained. They’re no longer working at A.I.G. Bonuses were paid to 52 people who have left the company. [Aaarrrgggg!]

[SNIP]

What President Obama should have said to the blood-sucking bums at A.I.G., many of them foreigners who were working at the louche London unit, was quite simple: “We stopped the checks. They’re immoral. If you want Americans’ hard-earned cash as a reward for burning up their jobs, homes and savings, sue me.”

[SNIP]

Geithner, who comes from the cozy Wall Street club, and Liddy believe it’s best to stabilize the company and keep on board the same people who invented the risky financial tactics so they can unwind their own rotten spool.

Isn’t that like giving bonuses to the arsonists who started a fire because they alone know what kind of accelerants they used to start it?

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ALASKA PIPE DREAMS?

This isn’t a social justice story per se, but it’s quite intriguing, and it is making a stir. I’d heard that best-selling author and journalist Joe McGinnis had been spending a lot of time in Alaska working on a hot Sara Palin-related business story.

The resulting piece came out yesterday in the April issue of Portfolio magazine and it has already pushed Palin to schedule a press conference for this morning.

McGinniss has written about Sara Palin’s relationship to state’s proposed $40 million natural gas pipeline that she has bragged that she fought to bring about. The heart of the matter may be found in this ‘graph:

Barack Obama wants the pipeline. It says so right on the White House website, in the section about energy and the environment: prioritize the construction of the alaska natural gas pipeline. But Obama might not realize that one of the biggest obstacles in its path—all Palin’s rhetoric notwithstanding—is the woman who wants to take the presidency from him in 2012, Governor Sarah “Drill, Baby, Drill” Palin.

it’s intriguing, controversial… and definitely worth reading.

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At least that was the title of the main twitter thread during Barack Obama’s speech tonight: #NSOTU

Here are are a few of my moment to moment thoughts—or demi-thoughts:

Among my favorite lines:

“…..dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American.”

(What’re yours?)

PS: At the LA Times, Doyle McManus has a nice piece on Obama’s oratory.

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Forget the pre-speech nattering. Important issue? Michelle’s GREAT navy blue sleeveless, above the knee dress. (Priorities, people!)

Repubs are twittering about Capt. Sully being there. Okay. Reasonable. For me it’s the dress, for them it’s the hero. We can cheer both.

Not to be mean, but it’s a relief not to see Cheney behind the president with his snarl/grimace/smile.

“We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before. ….The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation. The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach.”

Okay Obama’s listened. He has to be positive so we don’t all shoot ourselves. Or stay in bed. Sad, but psychologically true.

“In other words, we have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election.”

TRANSLATION: Dear America: Read Emotional Intelligence, damnit.

“Now is the time to act boldly and wisely – to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity.”

TRANSLATION: We aren’t going to die, as long as you get with the program, people. (Whew!)

“Nobody messes with Joe. “ Good reframing of Biden’s personality. If you can’t fix it, feature it. Okay, that works.

John Boehner looks like he’s reading a novel while Obama’s talking. Ayn Rand? No, maybe it’s that program that was handed out. I hope it’s the program.

Note to Joe Lieberman. Spit out the gum BEFORE the speech next time.

“This is not about helping banks, it’s about helping people.” (Line of the night, thus far.)

Energy….Health care…Education. E! H! E! Hey! E! H! E! Hey! Go Barack

I can actually see people twittering. More Repubs than Dems. Then the tweets turn up on my Twitter feed. Weird. The U.S. Congress has just turned at 13.

Okay, everyone stood up and applauded for education—as freaking well they should with a freaking 50 percent dropout rate.

They’re actually cheering about not passing along the debts. But they don’t cheer bringing the def. down? Fascinating.

Do you think this is like the party where everyone’s noisier when they’ve had a couple of drinks? (And what drinks are they serving?)

Somebody on Twitter said that Pelosi was dressed in Soylent Green. That’s harsh.

We love the bank president giving away the bonus. And we love the girl who wrote Obama. “We are not quitters.” Brilliant.

If Obama speaks to the better angels of all in the congress, will you answer from your better angels, dearest Republicans? We need to know.

After I wrote that, @Johnculberson…twittered back: “We all need to do our best to work together wherever we can for the good of the nation.” Okay, Culberson, I’m holding you to it, “whenever we can” notwithstanding.

Jindal’s on: Dear Bobby, during Katrina the gov’t was run by greedy, mendacious weasels. There’s a difference.

Props to NOLA for their charter schools. No argument there. Credit where credit is due.

Yeah, yeah, Bobby Jindal is a winning enough guy. And this was a thankless job. But he had nothing to say. Nothing. Zero. Except to say, NO, to Obama. And simply being a contra isn’t good enough in this desperate fiscal/political climate.

David Gergen reminded the viewers that that nasty ol’ unneeded Fed Gov’t gave $175 billion for Katrina recovery (and counting). Reality check, Bob, hon.

The line that still rings is this one: “It’s time for America to lead again.” Is that exceptionalist in some deep, dark way? No. Leading is a good thing…. if one moves toward the light. Hell, somebody’s got to.

Over all, a stunning, strong-minded, inspiring speech. Thank you, Barack.

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PS: It is important to note that as we cheered Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, we also just learned that his salary has been cut 40 percent, and that his pension has been terminated. Meanwhile, in 2005 when US Airways filed for bankruptcy, the company wanted to keep its exec bonuses. Fortunately the judge said NO. Heck of a job, private enterprise.

(Photo by Evan Vucci / AP)