I just saw Michael Sandel on The Colbert Report expressing outrage at the idea of allowing votes, citizenship, and improved prison cells to be marketable commodities.
I don’t have much of a dog on either side of this fight, since the three institutions he mentions (at least in anything like their present form) are all ones I think should be abolished. So Sandel’s question moves me about as much as the question “should the right to beat one’s slaves be a marketable commodity”?
358 prisoners have died in a prison fire because the guards a) couldn’t find the keys to unlock the cells, and b) wouldn’t let firefighters into the building. (Story here.)
But judging from u.s. news coverage, the really important story is that Whitney Houston is still dead.
Going through old papers I find this gem from my Randian past: a very short sf story that I wrote in (but not for) college, titled “Under the Violet Sun.”
Some of my stories actually had plots (hopefully I’ll dig them up eventually). This one, not so much.
And now Tom Knapp is in CounterPunch, explaining how the Casey Anthony trial was a failure of justice regardless of whether she was guilty or innocent.
You can also hear a clip from Kevin Carson being interviewed by Iranian Press TV here, on the role of big business in war. Those of us who have long suspected that Kevin Carson and Walter Block are the same person will find vindication in the graphic that Press TV chose to represent Kevin’s face.
In related news, Homer Simpson endorses Kevin’s “Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model”:
Lisa, if you don’t like your job you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.
Cory Maye, about whose case I’ve blogged previously (here, here, here, and here), is finally due to be released. (CHT Sheldon.) It falls short of what he deserves – he was required to plead guilty to manslaughter for exercising his right to defend himself and his family, and he’s being offered no compensation for the unjust treatment he has received – but it beats being murdered by the state or spending the rest of his life in a cage, the two fates that judges had previously chosen for him.
All honour to Radley Balko for his untiring efforts to keep this case before the public!
Addendum:
If you’re interested in donating to help Maye get his life back together, Radley has details.
My third post (yeah, been crazy busy lately) at Bleeding Heart Libertarians is now up: “Prison Break.”