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Month: January 2016

Waking the sleeping giant

Waking the sleeping giant

by digby

I’ve been waiting for this story:

Latino organizers sensed an opportunity when they heard Donald Trump was bringing his presidential campaign to Marshalltown, a small farm city that is home to an increasing number of Latino immigrants and their children.

So they organized protests at the high school gymnasium where Trump spoke Tuesday, with about 50 young Latinos marching silently outside as a smattering of Trump supporters hurled insults and laughed at them.

But the protest was only the beginning. Down the street, advocates held a drive to register voters and educate immigrants on the complexities of next week’s Iowa caucuses, the kickoff for the presidential nominating process.

“We want to turn his negativity into a positive for our community,” said Joe Enriquez Henry, whose group, the League of United Latin American Citizens, helped organize the event.

In Iowa, where voters have been exposed to the presidential campaign at a level of intensity that most Americans won’t experience until fall, Latinos have already begun to counterpunch Trump, prompted by his calls for a massive border wall to keep out immigrants whom he has described as rapists, drug dealers and carriers of infectious disease.

Advocacy groups have launched unprecedented voter registration efforts aimed at the state’s small but rapidly growing Latino population. The nonprofit Henry works for earmarked $300,000 for outreach in Iowa shortly after Trump got into the race, and the group’s field workers have led Spanish-language caucus training sessions for voters in most of the 11 counties where Latinos constitute more than 10% of the vote.

Democratic and Republican campaigns have also been wooing Latinos angered by Trump’s rhetoric. When Jeb Bush’s Latino outreach workers field questions about Trump, they often tell voters that caucusing for Bush is the best bet to combat the real estate mogul.

Whether a similar movement takes shape across the country remains to be seen, but many Latino leaders are hoping Trump could be the catalyst to push their growing but chronically underperforming electorate to the polls. There is talk of a “Trump effect” rivaling Proposition 187, the anti-illegal-immigration measure that jolted California Latinos to action 20 years ago and is credited with helping create the state’s current Latino power structure.

“My gut is that it’ll be substantial,” Democratic consultant Bill Carrick said of Latino turnout in November. “They have been activated.”
[…]
Latino Republicans face a different battle — and one that could have long-term consequences for their party.

Juan Rodriguez, 43, a prominent Colombian immigrant in Des Moines who owns a restaurant, an insurance agency and a Spanish-language radio station, said he decided to support Bush in part because Bush has stood up to Trump. Rodriguez also likes that Bush speaks Spanish, is married to a Latina and called Rodriguez personally to win his endorsement.

Rodriguez has been working hard to persuade fellow Latino business owners to caucus for Bush. A few have agreed. But others, like his brother, say they aren’t willing to consider Republican candidates because of Trump.

“Why should we vote for Republicans? They’re going to deport everybody,” his brother, a barbershop owner whose clientele is largely in the U.S. illegally, told him recently. “They’re going to deport my customers.”

I don’t know what will happen with this. All I know is what happened in my home state 20 years ago. I wrote about it in depth here. Let’s just say it didn’t work out well for the Republican Party.

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Yet more Republicans in disarray

Yet more Republicans in disarray

by digby

I love this one:

Some of the hawkish figures who Ted Cruz recently dismissed as “crazy neo-con invade-every-country-on-earth and send our kids to die in the Middle East” … say they’d consider supporting Cruz anyway if he’s the last man between Donald Trump and the Republican presidential nomination.

Cruz, it turns out, hasn’t fully burned his bridges with that set of advisers and supporters of George W. Bush — figures like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and former National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, who aren’t closed off to Cruz, especially in the case of Abrams. Indeed, despite some lingering resentment and suspicion, there are even glimmers of rapprochement as the Republican primary looks like it could become a two-man race.

“I would not hesitate to back Cruz as the nominee,” Abrams — who not long ago told National Review that Cruz’s use of the word neocon invoked “warmongering Jewish advisers” — told BuzzFeed News. “If it’s a two man race, it’s really extraordinary to see Republican office holders in some cases or former office holders saying they don’t like Cruz or they would go for Trump, who is from my perspective not a Republican, not a conservative, has no policy views on anything that you can actually describe or get a handle on.”

In an interview on his campaign bus in Iowa last week, Cruz told BuzzFeed News that, despite his jabs at neocons, he has “good relations with a great many foreign policy thinkers.” Cruz has in the past cited Abrams along with former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton and former CIA director James Woolsey as trusted foreign policy experts.

The neocons’ willingness to consider Cruz stands in sharp contrast with a new line of current conventional wisdom in Washington that Cruz, who is the object of particularly intense personal dislike from establishment Republicans, is actually less acceptable to the establishment than Trump. The logic of many of the Republican interventionists: Cruz, according to this argument, doesn’t really mean his criticism, or at least might change his mind; Trump, by contrast, has longstanding, if sometimes incoherent, isolationist impulses. And campaigns don’t always determine foreign policy, they note: George W. Bush promised a “humble” foreign policy free of nation-building, and look what happened.

They might be saying that. But I’m going to guess they have just recognized that this pompadoured billionaire Bond villain might just pull it off. They may be bloodthirsty imperialists but they aren’t stupid.

The problem is that a whole lot of GOP voters don’t give a damn about their intellectual blather about “American hegemony” and would rather trust their authoritarian gut. They don’t think trump is an isolationist. How can he be? He promises so many victories they’ll be coming out of our ears. He says the military will be so strong nobody will ever mess with us again. He says he’ll take their oil and bomb the shit out of ’em.

What more do they need to know?

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QOTD: A nice lady from Iowa

QOTD: A nice lady from Iowa

by digby

CNN talked to 150 Trump voters. Basically, they hate Muslims, they hate immigrants and they hate African Americans. They especially hate Barack Obama.

One older white woman was quoted at length:

I just think he’s pro-black. I hate to say he’s a racist but I really believe he is. White Americans founded this country. But we are being pushed aside because of this present administration and the media, the liberal media.

Another complained that she’s so afraid to say what she’s really thinking because of political correctness and Trump is changing that.

Trumpism in a nutshell. He’s making America openly bigoted again.

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Poor movement conservatives. They thought the right wing actually cared about ideology.

Poor movement conservatives. They thought the right wing actually cared about ideology.

by digby

I wrote about how Trump has revealed something very important about the conservative movement for Salon this morning. A good many of its believers have just been mouthing words all these years. They don’t care about their elaborate ideology. They just hate the other team:

If there’s one thing that Donald Trump has done for the leaders of the conservative movement, the Christian Right and the Republican party it’s that he’s teaching them a necessary lesson in reality: It turns out that a large number of their supporters don’t really care about ideology, morality or even their supposedly mutual loathing of the hippie Democrats on the other side. Their concerns run to something much more primitive.
Sure they all called themselves Republicans and/or conservatives. For decades they played on the same team. But all that stuff about “family values” and “drowning the government in the bathtub” and “constitutional conservativism” were just slogans they chanted for their team. They meant no more to them than “rah, rah, sis boom bah.”
National Review slowly came around to the knowledge that something terrible had happened to their movement and last week put out their ineffectual “Against Trump” issue. They realized too late that all the movement propaganda meant nothing to a whole lot of right wing voters. In fact it looks as though the constitution itself means nothing. And the conservative movement of activists, writers and grassroots organizations has suddenly awakened to the fact that a good many of those they considered true believers are completely oblivious to conservative ideology.
Poor social conservative and movement warrior Ted Cruz is finally recognizing that his fealty to the cause was a sucker move. It bought him the enduring enmity of the party electeds and too many of the movement conservatives just don’t care about any of that. That’s not to say he isn’t trying to rally the faithful. The Christian Broadcast Network’s John Brody aired some footage of Cruz desperately begging Iowa pastors to do everything they can to stop Trump:
“[I]f Donald wins Iowa, he right now has a substantial lead in New Hampshire, if he went on to win New Hampshire as well, there is a very good chance he could be unstoppable and be our nominee. And the next seven days in Iowa will determine whether or not that happens. So even if you’re thinking about another candidate, the simple reality is there’s only one campaign that can beat Trump in this state, and if conservatives simply stand up and unite, that’s everything.”
You can’t help but wonder if he regrets all those months of “bear-hugging” Trump now. In fact, it makes you wonder if the whole field regrets not unleashing hell on him from the very beginning. They couldn’t possibly be any worse off than they are now.
But as sad as Cruz may have been when he started the day yesterday, realizing that he’d devoted himself to a conservative movement that turns out to be an empty shell, imagine how he felt when Jerry Falwell Jr endorsed the libertine billionaire later in the morning. Falwell might as well have looked into Cruz’s face and laughed at his gullibility. All these years Cruz believed that following the Evangelical Christian code of conduct was a requirement and the man who inherited the legacy of the Moral Majority supplicated himself to a degenerate billionaire who says it’s never been necessary to ask God for forgiveness.
Sarah Posner wrote about this strange course of events for Rolling Stone yesterday:
For Falwell, Trump is a strongman who can save America where the Christian right has failed to do so. Falwell’s endorsement is a tacit admission that his father’s mission to rescue America from the supposed scourges of feminism, the “homosexual agenda” and secularism is now a defunct fundamentalist dream…
Trump has other qualities that many evangelicals admit they admire: wealth and success and — don’t let this surprise you — ruthlessness. Trump first addressed a Liberty University audience in September 2012, after his failed presidential bid. In his remarks, he suggested to students that they need to “get even” with adversaries in order to succeed, prompting an outcry over whether this advice was compatible with Christian values.
At the time, Trump’s special counsel, Michael Cohen — without pushback from Liberty — told ABC News that he conferred with a Liberty official, who confirmed, in Cohen’s words, that “the Bible is filled with stories of God getting even with his enemies, Jesus got even with the Pharisees and Christians believe that Jesus even got even with Satan by rising from the dead. God is portrayed as giving grace, but he is also portrayed as one tough character — just as Trump stated.”
Falwell later told a Christian radio program that he took Trump’s advice to mean that often succeeding in life requires “being tough.”
See? No need for all that weak tea about the meek and the poor. And surely when it comes to their driving obsession with sexual morality and abortion, it just takes a real man to put his foot down. And it’s clear who is the Real Man in this campaign. Donald Trump is an Old Testament leader for a New Testament world.
According to this poll, evangelicals are flocking to Trump.
Perhaps the most puzzled by what they’re seeing is the conservative movement old guard who spent decades creating the organizations that in recent years have risen up to challenge the Republican elites for supremacy of the party. They have made great strides, primarying apostates, defeating RINOs and even taking out good conservatives just to show they could. They showed the entire country that they are willing to destroy the government itself if that’s what it takes to demonstrate their commitment to their principles. They take no prisoners, give no quarter. And finally, after decades of hard work and strategizing, they are on the verge of total dominance.
Or they were until Trump came along and proved that many of the people they had been counting on to be the foot soldiers in this conservative revolution weren’t paying attention. In fact, they don’t even care that their new strongman leader openly says things like this:
“I’m going to be able to get along with Pelosi — I’ve always had a good relationship with Nancy Pelosi,” Trump said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” referring to the House minority leader. “Reid’s going to be gone. I’ve always had a decent relationship with Reid,” Trump said, referring to Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Senate minority leader. “I always had a great relationship with Harry Reid.”
Trump said he thought he’d get along with “just about everybody,” including Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), likely to be the next Senate Democratic leader, who Trump said he was “close to … in many in ways.”
“I’ve been in politics all my life, I’ve been dealing with politicians all my life,” Trump said of whether he would have any friends in Congress.
The man who has made a fetish of being politically incorrect reassured his ardent fans at a rally this week that it was all an act:
“When I’m president I’m a different person. I can do anything. I can be the most politically correct person you have ever seen,” Trump said at a rally in Pella, Iowa, on Saturday.
In what began as a typical Trump speech, the presidential candidate — who made headlines in December for saying he would ban Muslims from entering the US — said the reason for his tough rhetoric is twofold.
First, political correctness takes too long and “we don’t have time,” and second, with such a full slate of Republican candidates, Trump says he needs to be aggressive. “Right now they come at you from 15 different angles. You have to be sharp, you have to be quick, and you have to be somewhat vicious,” Trump said.
“When you are running the country it is a different dialogue that goes, and we can do that easily.”
(He seems to believe that he has experience at doing this, perhaps in a dream.)

More at the link …

None Thought of Themselves as Monsters by @Batocchio9

None Thought of Themselves as Monsters


by Batocchio

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of several such memorial days worldwide. Last year, The Guardian ran a short, excellent piece by Holocaust survivor Gene Klein, who urged the importance of remembering what happened, especially as the number of survivors dwindles. It’s worth reading in full, but when I revisited it, one paragraph particularly leapt out:

It is terribly easy for one group to strike another group off the roster of humanity, to see others as vermin or pests, as an affliction that must be destroyed. It happens again and again. And once it does, people are capable of inflicting terrible hardship and pain on others and to feel they are righteous in doing so. None of the SS officers who ordered me – a starving teenager – to carry heavy steel rails up a hillside thought of themselves as monsters. They were adhering to their beliefs and they were serving their country. We must be constantly vigilant for the descent that takes us from self-righteous beliefs, to the dehumanization of others and into the sphere of violence.

The consequences of bigotry aren’t always violent, and bigotry doesn’t always get organized (thankfully), but it’s always harmful in some fashion. We know how these stories can end.

It’s a fashionable conceit in some circles that expressing bigotry, being “politically incorrect,” is a badge of honor and somehow bold and courageous. It is instead an act of intellectual, moral and personal cowardice, an attempt to assert power and preemptively – lazily – shallowly – dismiss other human beings outright. Embracing bigotry may not be a natural path, but it’s an easy one, not a sign of toughness (and certainly not reflection).

Klein moves on from “the sphere of violence”:

While we are capable of all of this, we can also rise to amazing heights in the service of others. For two weeks I had the good fortune to have a respite from hard labor while I was assigned to work with a civilian German engineer who was surveying the landscape where future roads would be built. He saw the terrible conditions I was living under and decided to help. Everyday he hid food for me from the SS kitchen where he ate lunch. Chicken, milk, rice and cheese left under a bench in the back corner of a barracks. He cared, he took a risk and he saved my life. He deserves to be remembered too.

No one should be judged because of his or her nationality, religion or race. We were sent to the camps because propaganda was believed, individuality was erased and hate was rampant. When asked if I am angry with Germans, I think of the German engineer and know that individuals must be judged by their own personal actions. If I can hold this as a guiding principle after what happened to my family and me, then you can, too.

Last week was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and King often spoke about meeting hate with love. That may be too high a moral bar for some of us (or most of us) to reach with any regularity, but Klein’s piece essentially suggests tackling dehumanization and bigotry with humanizing stories and tales of connection. And while hyperbolic, inaccurate invocations of the Holocaust definitely aren’t helpful (and that’s the real point of “Godwin’s law”), some more serious comparisons prove valid, and a commitment to basic human rights remains valuable.

You can find several videos of Gene Klein online, and in this one, he speaks movingly of the German engineer he credits with saving his life. The engineer saw Klein as a fellow human being, and acted to alleviate his suffering. That story continues to be worth remembering.

Did Elizabeth Warren just quietly endorse Bernie Sanders? by @Gaius_Publius

Did Elizabeth Warren just quietly endorse Bernie Sanders?

by Gaius Publius

Sanders’ latest Iowa ad. This is the first ad I’ve seen that features a Muslim woman (h/t Zaid Jilani).
“Anyone who shrugs and claims that change is just too hard has crawled into bed with the billionaires who want to run this country like some private club.” –Elizabeth Warren, 1/21/16

Did Warren just quietly endorse Sanders? I think she did, but please decide for yourself. It’s pretty clear she did what the Huffington Post headline writer said, “Elizabeth Warren Sinks Clinton’s Hopes for Endorsement.” Here’s the data.

There have been discussions about the possibility of an Elizabeth Warren endorsement — of Sanders, some say; or of Clinton, others say; or of no one. I have some thoughts here (“The Great Unmasking“) that apply to what would happen to Warren should she side with the Wall Street crowd under any pretense or rationale whatever. So I’m glad to see she’ll avoid a “Howard Dean moment” after all. (No, not the scream; I’ll expand on that later. Dean has decided to lose what Warren has decided to keep — a progressive reputation.)

Liam Miller at the Huffington Post has these thoughts:

Elizabeth Warren Sinks Clinton’s Hopes for Endorsement

In a speech before the Senate Thursday, on the sixth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, Elizabeth Warren made clear — for those with ears to hear — that she will not endorse Hillary Clinton.

If you have observed how closely Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’s messages line up, it is hard to imagine that she would endorse Clinton over him, anyway. Even so, the question has remained. But now, were there any question about whether or not Clinton is truly a Progressive, Elizabeth Warren — with her extraordinary, precise eye for the heart of an issue, and her unsurpassed clarity of expression — has answered it.

The first ten minutes of Warren’s speech address corruption in campaign finance, and the impact of Citizens United. She lists seven steps we could take right now, including six actions — bills before Congress, executive action, and powers already within the purview of the FEC and the SEC; and the seventh, a Constitutional Amendment to restore federal and state authority to regulate campaign contributions.

Warren is eloquent, moving, and on topic as always. Right at the end, however, she changes gears. I almost missed it; what she had said up to that point was so compelling that my mind was ringing. It was only on the second listen that I caught them: three sentences that leapt from the specific (campaign finance reform) to the general (Progressivism itself)…

Then Miller presents those sentences. From the video (see below), they are:

“A new presidential election is upon us. The first votes will be cast in Iowa in just eleven days. Anyone who shrugs and claims that change is just too hard has crawled into bed with the billionaires who want to run this country like some private club.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, Miller adds that Warren “reminds us that ‘politically impractical’ is just code for ‘wealthy donors don’t like it.'” Here’s that Warren speech, cued up to the key moment.

A comment about Warren: This election is calling out everyone who leads, from positions of power, the work for progressive causes. Many are passing that test. Some are not. The result has become, indeed, a great unmasking. I’m glad to see, for Warren as for others, that the mask is identical to the face, she has nothing she won’t want us to see, and she’s proud to make that known.

Will this non-endorsement endorsement be a game-changer? The stars may be lining up.

Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. If you’d like to help out, go here; you can adjust the split any way you like at the link. If you’d like to “phone-bank for Bernie,” go here. You can volunteer in other ways by going here. And thanks!

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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One dead extremist by @BloggersRUs

One dead extremist
by Tom Sullivan


Notice on refuge website.

The FBI and Oregon State Police have sealed off the area around the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon after the arrest of the leader of the occupation that began there earlier this month. They promised to arrest any unauthorized persons attempting to reach the refuge. Read: reinforcements.

KATU Portland reports:

HARNEY COUNTY, Ore. — One person is dead and eight others, including Oregon occupation leader Ammon Bundy, were detained following a violent confrontation with the FBI and state police Tuesday night.

It all began with a traffic stop while Bundy and some of his followers were en route to a community meeting at a John Day senior center, about 70 miles north of Burns.

Shots were fired after FBI agents, Oregon State troopers and other law enforcement agencies made the stop on US Highway 395.

Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Brian Cavalier, Shawna Cox and Ryan W. Payne were arrested during the stop. Joseph Donald O’Shaughnessy and online talk-show radio host Peter Santilli were arrested in Burns. Jon Ritzheimer was arrested after surrendering to authorities in his home state of Arizona.

The armed militants had occupied the refuge headquarters outside Burns, Oregon for nearly a month.

Arizonan LaVoy Finicum, 54, was killed, KATU reports. He had previously told reporters he would die before going to prison:

“There are things more important than your life, and freedom is one of them,” he said at the time. “I’m prepared to defend freedom.”

NBC News reports:

All face federal felony charges of conspiracy to impede federal officers from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats, authorities said.

Protesters led by the Bundy brothers have occupied the land refuge since the beginning of the year. Members of the group had been scheduled to appear at 6 p.m. for a meeting with authorities in the town of John Day in Grant County.

The hope is that the remaining occupiers will leave on their own.

CNN fills in some details:

News of Finicum’s death quickly reached the protesters still holed up at the refuge.

“It appears that America was fired upon by our government,” the occupiers said on the Bundy Ranch Facebook page. “One of liberty’s finest patriots is fallen. He will not go silent into eternity.”

The occupiers also claimed Finicum had his hands in the air when he was shot.

Reports from the Oregonian counter that claim: “Finicum and Ryan Bundy disobeyed orders to surrender and resisted arrest.”

Another posting to the Bundy Ranch Facebook page reads:

Levoy Finicum was Shot and murdered in Cold blood today in Burns Oregon by the FBI and State Law enforcement. He had his hands up and was shot 3 Times. This Man Is one of the best Patriots, Husband, Father, Grandfather, friend and Neighbor, that this world will ever know. Spread this far and wide!

A Bundy Ranch Facebook commenter responded (I’m paraphrasing), “This aggression will not stand, man.”

Tyranny, sheeple, government conspiracy, #LibertyRevolution, patriots, blood of tyrants, etc., etc., etc. Expect a lot more spur rattling, gun displays, and home-school constitutional scholarship before this settles down.

QOTD: Nate Silver

QOTD: Nate Silver





by digby

Nate Silver rounds up his fellow data analysts for a chat about the state of the race and other things every few days and it’s always interesting. Highly recommended.

But I loved this exchange today between Silver and Harry Enten:

natesilver: Let’s spare a few moments for our friend Ted Cruz. Lots of powerful Republicans have spent three weeks trying to knock him out of the running in Iowa. But suppose he survives and wins the state by several percentage points. What does Cruz do then? And what does “the party” do, having fired a blank in their attempt to execute Cruz?

harry: Well, I think Iowa is a very Cruz-friendly state, so I don’t know what it means for “the party” on that score. I do think it’s good news for them, however. I continue not to understand why they are going after Cruz and not Trump. It’s one of the many things this cycle that just makes very little sense to me.

natesilver: Maybe they’re just not that bright. It was the same donor class that threw $100 million behind Jeb!, after all.

I’m with Enten — I remain gobsmacked that so many of the allegedly “reasonable” Republicans are so petty that they’ve opted to strengthen Trump the madman simply because Cruz has been a thorn in their sides. And they say Cruz is only interested in himself…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Cruz may be a threat to GOP electeds but Trump is a threat to the the entire party as an institution. They don’t care.

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Dispatch from torture nation: good news for a change

Dispatch from torture nation: good news for a change

by digby

And I mean it. The president made this announcement yesterday:

In 2010, a 16-year-old named Kalief Browder from the Bronx was accused of stealing a backpack. He was sent to Rikers Island to await trial, where he reportedly endured unspeakable violence at the hands of inmates and guards — and spent nearly two years in solitary confinement.

In 2013, Kalief was released, having never stood trial. He completed a successful semester at Bronx Community College. But life was a constant struggle to recover from the trauma of being locked up alone for 23 hours a day. One Saturday, he committed suicide at home. He was just 22 years old.

Solitary confinement gained popularity in the United States in the early 1800s, and the rationale for its use has varied over time. Today, it’s increasingly overused on people such as Kalief, with heartbreaking results — which is why my administration is taking steps to address this problem.

There are as many as 100,000 people held in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons — including juveniles and people with mental illnesses. As many as 25,000 inmates are serving months, even years of their sentences alone in a tiny cell, with almost no human contact.

Research suggests that solitary confinement has the potential to lead to devastating, lasting psychological consequences. It has been linked to depression, alienation, withdrawal, a reduced ability to interact with others and the potential for violent behavior. Some studies indicate that it can worsen existing mental illnesses and even trigger new ones. Prisoners in solitary are more likely to commit suicide, especially juveniles and people with mental illnesses.

The United States is a nation of second chances, but the experience of solitary confinement too often undercuts that second chance. Those who do make it out often have trouble holding down jobs, reuniting with family and becoming productive members of society. Imagine having served your time and then being unable to hand change over to a customer or look your wife in the eye or hug your children.

As president, my most important job is to keep the American people safe. And since I took office, overall crime rates have decreased by more than 15 percent. In our criminal justice system, the punishment should fit the crime — and those who have served their time should leave prison ready to become productive members of society. How can we subject prisoners to unnecessary solitary confinement, knowing its effects, and then expect them to return to our communities as whole people? It doesn’t make us safer. It’s an affront to our common humanity.

That’s why last summer, I directed Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and the Justice Department to review the overuse of solitary confinement across U.S. prisons. They found that there are circumstances when solitary is a necessary tool, such as when certain prisoners must be isolated for their own protection or in order to protect staff and other inmates. In those cases, the practice should be limited, applied with constraints and used only as a measure of last resort. They have identified common-sense principles that should guide the use of solitary confinement in our criminal justice system.

The Justice Department has completed its review, and I am adopting its recommendations to reform the federal prison system. These include banning solitary confinement for juveniles and as a response to low-level infractions, expanding treatment for the mentally ill and increasing the amount of time inmates in solitary can spend outside of their cells. These steps will affect some 10,000 federal prisoners held in solitary confinement — and hopefully serve as a model for state and local corrections systems. And I will direct all relevant federal agencies to review these principles and report back to me with a plan to address their use of solitary confinement.

I find it hard to accept that we’ve been torturing anyone with solitary confinement, much less juveniles, but ain’t that America…

Good for Obama for putting this one on his presidential bucket list.

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