Good stuff on All In
by digby
Chris Hayes has been doing amazing work out here this week on California’s drought. If you missed the earlier episodes, be sure to go to the MSNBC site and take a look when you have a chance. He’s the only cable news host who gets out from behind the desk to go do this kind of longform investigation on his show and it’s really informative and well done. Here’s the segment he did on the political battle over water, which will likely come as a surprise to a lot of people.
He also did a very interesting piece on mass incarceration, which Salon’s Jenny Kuttner covered:
After commuting the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders earlier this week, President Obama became the first sitting president in American history to visit a U.S. prison on Thursday, as part of a push for reform that might just be the one thing congressional Democrats and Republicans can agree to get done. Examining the implications of Obama’s historic visit, MSNNC host Chris Hayes tackled the political symbolism of the visit, which he believes bodes well for ending mass incarceration.
“It’s kind of hard to imagine that 20 years ago, a Democratic president pushing to shorten sentences and reduce incarceration would feel that he had the political room to do it,” Hayes explained. “But now, it seems that having the world’s largest prison population, full of racial discrepancies, is increasingly seen as a policy failure — even as a source of national shame. There seems to be surprising support from both Democrats and Republicans to do something about it.”
I have been skeptical of this coalition simply because I believe that the GOP base (and opportunistic GOP strategists) are highly unlikely to sit still for anything that smacks of human decency toward African American convicts. But Hayes made me wonder if some political cross currents might just indicate that there’s a chance. It would be pretty to think so.
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