Go with the CCA, it will be great!

In California, where prisons are overcrowded, they're luring prisoners to agree to be transferred to out of state prisons, the LATimes notes. The best part is the video included there. It's what the wardens are showing prisoners to convince them that going to a Corrections Corporation of America facility in Tennessee will be great...

DC

(you know, stopping the war, one beat at a time?)

credit to Erica for photos 1&2

Watch out, HC

Kate Michelman, former head of NARAL, explains why she has joined the Edwards campaign.

"vegetarian co-worker makes tall sandwiches"

Gates fallout

After the LA Times published a two part expose showing that the Gates Foundation invests money in companies that are harmful to its own work, the foundation said on Wednesday that it would reasses its investments, and further clarified the policies in a statement Thursday.

There are lots of lessons here, but one of them is that the LATimes still matters. It may be losing readers and about to get chopped up even further, but it's still doing important work (see Jack Shafer for more). TIME magazine, with its four million readers or whatever, can uncritically call Bill and Melinda and Bono the people of the year, but they can't do work like this. The LAT still can. Let's hope whoever owns it in the future doesn't totally kill it.

Iraq round-up

• It's not a "surge". Perhaps it's an "escalation". Even Frederick Kagan -- one of the guys whose idea this all is -- says it's not a surge. That's because a 'surge' would be 2-3 months, where as what they're talking about here is much longer.
• On TPMCafe, Vali Nasr says that the Bush plan is to try to militarily defeat Sadr -- and that that is a terrible idea.
• In the Gallup poll from a few days ago, 15% call for an immediate withdrawl of all troops while 39% call for full withdrawl "by Jan 2008". Add that together and that's 54%. Strange, you don't hear much "but a majority of Americans support withdrawing all troops within a year" in the US media.
  

Winter is so, like, last century

Prospect Park, 01/06/06.

For all the Barbara Boxer fans out there...

Under pressure from extremist Jewish groups, Senator Boxer has rescinded an award she gave to Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

See Newsweek online.

Call Barbara Boxer's office to tell her what you think.
(202) 224-3553

Clinton vs. Obama

The Post's Shailagh Murray compares the Senate voting records of Clinton and Obama. It says, though, that looking at such records is tricky because when in the Senate you have to do a lot of voting for something before you vote against it, etc. (but we trust that for the votes they're mentioning in this article, they're giving us what we need to understand it, right?).