GEL's Profile
- Middletown, RI
- GEL
- Veteran of the US navy 1996-2000. Spent 5 years as a defense contractor. Now spend my free time behind a camera and I blog about politics and photography.
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Copyright © 2009 The Women’s International Perspective
End the war on marijuana. That's one quick way to reduce the prison population.
Separate, more tailored school programs for hard case students. This will reduce gang activity and juvenile crime rates. I'd even go so far as setting up overnight schools to protect students whose home life is a wreck.
Ban privately run prisons. Private companies can't be allowed to profit off of crime.
Improve accountability in our prisons. Violent prisoners need to be kept segregated from the rest. Gangs inside prisons need to be broken up.
In Denmark I believe, they're experimenting with more automated prisons, to reduce problems between inmates and correction officers.
Posted by GEL | February 2, 2010 10:36 AM
While I agree with the third parties on many issues to some degree, I have one beef with them all and it concerns strategy.
Politics is a by-product of the American public. The GOP exploits the fact that many Americans are low-information voters. This allows republicans to cause problems for a very political democratic party. Even a hint of liberalism is converted into hyperbolic ranting and raving from the right which leads to lost votes and support in some regions for the left. Look how much flack is thrown Obama's way.
The third parties seem to ignore this state of affairs and believe they can simply bypass the politics of America. The base for the third parties can't put these groups into power. The excuse makers on the left often don't vote, which leaves the democratic party to seek out swing voters, which means being centrist. It's a catch 22 situation.
It's also an exhausting balancing act. Initially I chided the democrats for not ending the war after 2006. Then I saw the political theater from the right and realized why the war had not ended. Maybe I'm all wrong about this, and it would have been better for the democrats to fall on their swords and for the republicans to hold onto power and complete the destruction of this country and their party to move the public to change their ways.
Who would pull that trigger though? Would the public forgive whoever did it?
Posted by GEL | October 28, 2008 3:44 PM
"As long as these walls and checkpoints remain, Casey says Iraqis have no real hope of rebuilding a strong stable economy. This is hardly the free and democratic society promised by the Bush administration."
Disaster capitalism in all it's malevolent glory. To a lesser extent the same narrow focus on keeping us all "safe" rather than safeguarding our democracy is hurting us here in America. We've made it harder for everybody to cross our borders. We are herding free speech into zones, radicals are polarizing our society, pre-emptive house raids on journalists and lawyers are being used to stifle dissent, and now in some parts of Houston, the media are being shut out from reporting on the damage from Hurricane Ike, standard practice in China. As democracy suffers so too will the economy and the soul of the American people.
We are treating the Iraqi's far worse than the British ever treated colonial Americans, and we launched a violent revolution to stop that treatment. Is it any wonder why Iraq has been beseeched by violence?
Posted by GEL | September 15, 2008 4:45 PM