400,000 terrorists? "After having begun a series of investigative stories criticizing the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in May 2008, CNN reporter Drew Griffin reports being placed with more than a million other names on TSA's swollen terrorism watch list. Although TSA insists Griffin's name is not on the list and pooh-poohs any possibility of retaliation for Griffin's negative reporting, the reporter has been hassled by various airlines on 11 flights since May. The airlines insist that Griffin's name is on the list. Congress has asked TSA to look into the tribulations of this prominent passenger." Really? Congress is just now asking, after years of harassment of innocent people - including one of their own members? It's not as if this story is news - early on, we recall the story of a member of Ralph Nader's presidential campaign (and not someone with a particularly Muslim name) who mysteriously found his ability to fly being curtailed in 2002 because he was "on the list". Everyone named David Nelson (including Rick's brother), has had the same problem. And does "Ted Kennedy" sound like the name of a Muslim terrorist? The old German Jews who helped raise and educate me are all dead, now, but I know exactly what they'd say about governments that make lists of people who it's okay to harass. Thom Hartmann discussed just this process in the first hour of his show, yesterday.

"Slammed: Welcome to the Age of Incarceration [...] We treat 10-year sentences like they're nothing, like that's a soft penalty, when in much of the rest of the world a decade behind bars would be considered extraordinarily severe. This is what separates us from other industrialized countries: It's not just that we send so many people to prison, but that we keep them there for so long and send them back so often. Eight years ago, we surpassed Russia to claim the dubious distinction of having the world's highest rate of incarceration; today we're still No. 1." It's also the most expensive way to run a criminal justice system, just in terms of the sheer dollars wasted on keeping people imprisoned, and never mind the many, many costs in families destroyed, crime increased rather than reduced, and whole neighborhoods disrupted. (Via Cursor.)

Digby warns that falling for Mukasey's gambit would be "a political mistake of epic proportions [...] setting the table for possible decades of being pressured and intimidated into supporting wars and military interventions against the best interests of the country and the world --- not to mention their own political interests. It is not a winner for liberals to help the conservatives pursue their imperial goals. There's no political need for this, so if they do it, one can only assume it's because they actually support the Orwellian concept of endless war." (And wow, dday says that McShame even managed to lose Joe Klein.)

Mukasey's antics inspire more signs that Steve Soto has lost his patience: "For years now, all Leahy and Schumer needed to do was throw the Senate GOP's attacks against Janet Reno's alleged lack of independence back into their faces, and demand to know what's different now. But that would require guts and brains, and since Schumer and Leahy are part of the same vile Beltway party as the GOP, it's a moot point." (Also: Blood for Oil - Once dismissed as a "conspiracy theory", it's now an in-your-face fact.)

Phil Ochs, "The Power and the Glory" (with Jim Glover).