Bruce Lisker, who was accused of killing his mother in 1985, should be sent back to prison because the U.S. 9th Cir­cuit Court of Appeals recently ruled in another case that inmates should not be allowed to file late peti­tions for release even if they can prove they are inno­cent, accord­ing to the attor­ney...
Read more »

By Dex­ter Filkins and Alissa J. Rubin (New York Times) One of the country’s most senior pros­e­cu­tors said Sat­ur­day that Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai fired him last week after he repeat­edly refused to block cor­rup­tion inves­ti­ga­tions at the high­est lev­els of Mr. Karzai’s government. West­ern offi­cials con­firm reports that Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and...
Read more »

First of all, does anyone know why the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform even held a hearing about steroid usage among baseball players? Was there a dry spell and the Committee couldn't find anything in the government that needed to be reformed? This is the Congress that in 1994 didn't ask for...
Read more »

By Cathy Busse­witz (AP) For the sec­ond time in two years, Cal­i­for­nia Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger has ordered most state work­ers’ pay cut to the fed­eral min­i­mum wage because law­mak­ers missed their dead­line to fix the state’s $19 bil­lion bud­get deficit. The Legislature’s fail­ure to act has left the state with­out a spend­ing plan as...
Read more »

Amer­i­cans United for Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State today warned cor­rec­tions offi­cials in three states not to use pub­lic funds to send inmates to a pro­posed “Christians-​​only” prison in Oklahoma. Cor­rec­tions Con­cepts, Inc., has pro­posed build­ing a pri­vate prison in Wakita, Okla., that will indoc­tri­nate pris­on­ers in fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tian­ity and will be staffed solely...
Read more »

Due to its claimed use in ter­ror­ism, pos­ses­sion of the Casio F91W watch was listed in Com­bat­ant Sta­tus Review Tri­bunal reports and other gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments as a rea­son for these detainees’ con­tin­ued deten­tion. The watch was pop­u­lar all over the Moslem world because it had great prayer alert fea­tures. Among those listed: Abdul­lah Kamel...
Read more »

(AP) Fidel Cas­tro says the spread­ing oil slick foul­ing the Gulf of Mex­ico is proof that the world’s most pow­er­ful gov­ern­ments can­not con­trol large cor­po­ra­tions that now dic­tate the public’s destiny. It still is unclear whether some of the 3 mil­lion gal­lons of spilled crude could even­tu­ally reach Cuba’s shores — though gov­ern­ment sci­en­tists...
Read more »

The Inte­rior Department’s Min­er­als Man­age­ment Ser­vice, the fed­eral agency respon­si­ble for reg­u­lat­ing off-​​shore drilling, had a series of big scan­dals tied to ram­pant drug use, orgies, lax or non-​​existent audit­ing and over­sight dur­ing the Bush administration. Read the rest Oil Rigs, Orgies and Ston­ers | Talk­ing Points Memo.
Read more »

By David Abel (Boston Globe) Early yes­ter­day morn­ing, Valerie and Rob Shirk cor­ralled their 10 home-​​schooled chil­dren into their van for the 2 1/​2-​​hour drive from their home in Con­necti­cut to Boston, arriv­ing just in time to hear Sarah Palin denounce government-​​run health care at the tea party move­ment rally on Boston Common. They thought...
Read more »

By Dave Lin­dorff (Com­mon Dreams) The 2011 mil­i­tary bud­get, by the way, is the largest in his­tory, not just in actual dol­lars, but in infla­tion adjusted dol­lars, exceed­ing even the spend­ing in World War II, when the nation was on an all-​​out mil­i­tary footing. Mil­i­tary spend­ing in all its myr­iad forms works out to...
Read more »