Los Angeles is weighing an exemption from term limits for Police Chief Bill Bratton.

Removing the terms limits would require voter approval and revise one aspect of the police reforms that stemmed from the 1991 beating of Rodney G. King, which sparked riots when four LAPD officers were initially acquitted of brutality. Those reforms limited the police chief to two five-year terms.

I was at Chief Bratton's first swearing-in ceremony in 2002.(One of the cops providing security was 1960's singer Bobby Sherman -- here's a picture of my pal Mickey Sherman (no relation) and me with him.)

All of my coverage of Chief Bratton's tenure as LA Police Chief is here. I hope he gets another term.

In a much discussed public letter to AIG, a Mr. Jake DeSantis has resigned from AIG. I do not know the particulars of Mr. DeSantis' situation, but I am familiar with the fact that AIG was effectively bankrupt in September 2008. To wit, his hard work to that date would have gone uncompensated because of the failure of the company he worked for. Mr. DeSantis is claiming he would have moved on to greener pastures absent assurances from Ed Liddy, the acting AIG CEO:

. . . A.I.G. management assured us on three occasions during that month that the company would “live up to its commitment” to honor the contract guarantees. . . At no time during the past six months that you have been leading A.I.G. did you ask us to revise, renegotiate or break these contracts — until several hours before your appearance last week before Congress. . . . We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised. . . .

[MORE . . .]

The guiding principle behind the Geithner plan is, as Paul Krugman noted yesterday,

"that we’re looking at an unnecessary panic. The housing bust, so the story goes, has spooked the public, and made people nervous about banks. In response, banks have pulled back, which has led to ridiculously low prices for assets, which makes banks look even weaker, forcing them to pull back even more..and if we can get the market in troubled assets going, people will see that things aren’t really that bad...the vicious circles will turn into virtuous circles."

I'm a layman with no economics background but I have followed the housing boom and bust pretty closely and I think that Geithner's plan is guided by an unreasonably optimistic view of the value of toxic assets, particularly housing.

Consider the following: [More...]

The results of the first behavioral study to investigate whether people will provide false secondary confessions raises significant concerns about the use of such evidence when informants are offered incentives. The study was conducted by psychological researchers at the University of Arkansas.

A "secondary confession" is a polite name for snitching. A news article on the study is here. The study is now published in the Journal of Law and Human Behavior in an article titled “Snitching, Lies and Computer Crashes: An Experimental Investigation of Secondary Confessions.”

Bottom line: "[A]n incentive increased the rate of false rather than true secondary confessions."[More...]

Amnesty International has released a new report , Jailed Without Justice (available here, pdf). Via Reuters:

On an average day, the rights group said, more than 30,000 immigrants are in detention facilities. That's triple the number that were in custody a decade ago, according to Amnesty's report "Jailed Without Justice: Immigration Detention in the USA."

"America should be outraged by the scale of human rights abuses occurring within its own borders," said Larry Cox, director of Amnesty International USA.

Big Tent Democrat is traveling (maybe he'll post from the air if he's on a flight with wi-fi access like the other day) and I'm just getting online.

If the new ad on the right for cloned cows has you scratching your head, I'm told it's timely for April Fools.

Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

The New York Times calls out President Barack Obama for "flinching" in his choice to lead the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

In January, Obama offered the job to well-respected civil rights lawyer Thomas Saenz of Los Angeles. Saenz had an impressive resume:

Mr. Saenz, the former top litigator in Los Angeles for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, ....was a leader of the successful fight to block California’s Proposition 187, an unconstitutional effort to deny social services and schooling to illegal immigrants. He has defended Latino day laborers who were targets of misguided local crackdowns, from illegal police stings to unconstitutional anti-solicitation ordinances.

What happened? [More...]

What it means to live in New Orleans: in the past 48 hours alone, I marched alongside a riotous Sunday afternoon second line held by The Revolution Social Aid and Pleasure Club and caught a Monday night performance from the great trombonist Glen David Andrews that was so ecstatic that he ended up crowd-surfing atop the adoring revelers.

Since I moved to New Orleans about two years ago, I'm constantly reminded of the social critic James Howard Kunstler's notion that our country is "a land full of places that are not worth caring about [and] will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.”

Despite its multitude of problems, New Orleans proves itself worth defending nearly every day, no small feat for an American city these days. And I very am proud to live here.

The New York Times reports on the number of states reversing course and closing prisons as a means of saving money.

Some states, like Colorado and Kansas, are closing prisons. Others, like New Jersey, have replaced jail time with community programs or other sanctions for people who violate parole. Kentucky lawmakers passed a bill this month that enhances the credits some inmates can earn toward release.

Michigan is doing a little of all of this, in addition to freeing some offenders who have yet to serve their maximum sentence. And last Wednesday, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat, signed legislation to repeal the state’s death penalty, which aside from ethical concerns was seen as costly.

It's about time we began getting smart about crime instead of just tough on crime.

It's going on now. Talk about it here.

Update (TL): News recap here. The transcript is here.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

A rational citizen, by definition, praises and supports political leaders only when they do the right thing (regardless of motive), and criticizes and opposes them when they don’t. It's just that simple. Cheerleading for someone because they're on "your team" is appropriate for a sporting event, not for political matters. Political leaders deserve support only to the extent that their actions, on a case-by-case basis, merit that support, and that has largely been the behavior of progressives towards Obama.

(Emphasis supplied.) In that vein, I will be cheerleading for the Florida Gators tonight in their game against Penn State in the NIT. Sure, it's not the Big Dance, but the Gators are still my team. In an unrelated note, Howard Dean writes a dkos diary. Dean was truly an important transformational figure in the Democratic Party. I wish him good luck in his future endeavors.

Speaking for me only

Four smart economists, Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Simon Johnson and Mark Thoma, discuss the Giethner Plan.

Definitely worth a read.