Libertarian candidate for President Bob Barr has written his first post at Huffington Post. He says he was wrong about the war on drugs. He now realizes it has been a failure.

I'll admit it, just five years ago I was "Public Enemy Number 1" in the eyes of the Libertarian Party. In my 2002 congressional race for Georgia's Seventh District, the Libertarian Party ran scathing attack ads against my stand on Medical Marijuana.

....For years, I served as a federal prosecutor and member of the House of Representatives defending the federal pursuit of the drug prohibition.

Today, I can reflect on my efforts and see no progress in stopping the widespread use of drugs. I'll even argue that America's drug problem is larger today than it was when Richard Nixon first coined the phrase, "War on Drugs," in 1972.

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Shermanesque:

Asked on NPR's "All Things Considered" if he is auditioning to be Obama's running mate, [Ohio Governor Ted] Strickland said, "Absolutely not. If drafted I will not run, nominated I will not accept and if elected I will not serve.

By Big Tent Democrat

From an email I just received from the DNCC:

To kick-off Convention week in a spirit of unity, the DNCC, in conjunction with the Democratic Party's Faith in Action (FIA) Initiative, will host an interfaith gathering on Sunday, August 24th, beginning at 2:00 PM at the Wells Fargo Theater located in the Colorado Convention Center.

This is the first time a celebration of this nature has been part of a Democratic National Convention and is symbolic of the Party's desire to bring multiple communities together under its "big tent." The gathering will include clergy of different faiths, Party leaders, elected officials and local community leaders. Speakers and musical guests will be announced later this summer. The event will be open to the public.

This has been in the works for a while. [More...]

I'm not into post-mortems and haven't and won't be writing any about Hillary's campaign. As I said Saturday, I'm moving forward, just like she asked us to. But I like this part of Richard Cohen's column today in the Washington Post and thought I'd share it:

I often had more problems with her critics than I did with her. Some of them, clearly, needed to be medicated.

Now, though, an eerie silence has settled over the land. With Hillary Clinton out of the race, thousands of computer keyboards have been stilled, dozens of books have been abandoned in mid-chapter, and enormously influential bloggers, most of them unknown to me, have vanished from the Web. Some anti-Hillary obsessives (see the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) must be feeling the sickening vertigo once experienced by Vaughn Meader, whose entire show business career was based on impersonating John F. Kennedy and who, in essence, died when Kennedy did.

It's over, ladies and gentlemen. Hillary Clinton lost. And so did you.

The hateful attacks that have appeared in comments at TalkLeft have slowed down. My intolerance for those who continue to post them has risen. I'm erasing these users rather than deleting their comments one by one. Life is too short to be consumed by irrational hate.

(Comments now closed.)

Could legislative mindsets really be changing? Raymond Lesniak, a New Jersey state legislator, regretted his 1982 vote to reinstate the death penalty.

He did so, he says, not because he thought it was right, but because he was afraid that if he did not support capital punishment, the voters would punish him. Over time, Mr. Lesniak, a Union County Democrat who rose to the State Senate in 1983, became haunted by his decision, by the immorality of putting people to death, and by the possibility that an innocent person would be executed under the law that he supported.

New Jersey abolished the death penalty last year, a legislative accomplishment that Lesniak championed. What about his fear of being punished by voters who might think him "soft on crime"?

Mr. Lesniak’s constituents were not nearly as angry with him as he had feared. He concluded that elected officials are much freer than they believe to vote their conscience.

Sometimes leaders need to lead. It's easy to take opinion polls and to play it safe, but on an issue of life and death, it isn't a bad thing for a politician to vote his conscience ... assuming he has one.

Innocent people are convicted in Georgia, just like everywhere else. The problem will only grow worse now that Georgia, in an effort to trim the state budget, plans to lay off 17 public defenders in Fulton County.

On Monday, the county’s chief judge, Doris L. Downs, called the layoffs “irresponsible.”

For every public defender laid off, the same fate should befall a prosecutor. Why should those who are committed to defending the rights of the accused carry the weight of the state's failure to generate the tax revenues needed to make the criminal justice system operate fairly? [more ...]

At a press conference today, Sen. Barack Obama said he will not ask Jim Johnson to step down from his VP selection committee despite his ties to Countrywide Mortgage. Obama said he will not vet the vetters.

Obama: "These are not folks who are working for me."

The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released its latest report on the inmate population in America's jails and prisons. The headline spins "Slower Growth..." The reality: Our prison population increased once again, and we now have 2.3 million in our nation's prisons and jails.

The report is available here. Chief findings, according to the DOJ press release:

• Between January and June 2007, the prison population increased by 1.6% (or 24,919 prisoners), compared to a 2% increase during the first six months of 2006.
• The number of prisoners sentenced to more than 1 year increased 1.7% between December 31, 2006 and June 30, 2007, or at about the same rate as the total number of prisoners under jurisdiction.
• Between 2000 and 2007, the number of inmates in custody in prisons or jails increased by 367,200. Male inmates (315,100) accounted for 86% of the increase to the custody population. Female inmates (52,100) made up the remaining 14%.

I'm not big on expending time and energy on impeaching Bush and Cheney. They'll be gone soon enough and I'd rather spend my time arguing against McCain and another four years of the same.

Nonetheless, the articles of impeachment are an important read as a reminder of the crimes perpetrated by the Bush Admnistration and as a warning that they should never again be tolerated. The full text of the 35 articles is available here (pdf). You can sign a petition to support them here.

For more, check out AfterDowningStreet, Kucinich.us (temporarily on server overload)and Democrats.com

Congress is investigating grants awarded by the Justice Department to fight crime. Murray Waas, Brian Ross and Anna Schecter have the details. Of particular concern are the funds awarded by the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

One $500,000 grant was given to a golf group. A former staffer says the anti-crime funds are given to programs with the "right" connections.

A key witness will be a former employee of Flores' office, Scott Peterson, who says the grants were awarded based more on politics than merit. "This is cronyism, this is waste, fraud and abuse," Peterson told ABC News in an interview aired on Nightline Monday night. Peterson says the money for the golf program is one of a number of grants awarded to lower-ranked applicants rated in rankings compiled by Justice Department staff members.

"It's a lot of our taxpayer money that's supposed to go for some of our most vulnerable children," Peterson said.

A report released today by Human Rights Watch finds the conditions at Guantanamo are causing undue mental suffering among the detainees.

More than two-thirds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, including many cleared for release or transfer, are being housed in inhumane conditions that are reportedly having a damaging effect on their mental health, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.

The 54-page report, “Locked Up Alone: Detention Conditions and Mental Health at Guantanamo,” documents the conditions in the various “camps” at the detention center, in which approximately 185 of the 270 detainees are housed in facilities akin to “supermax” prisons even though they have not yet been convicted of a crime.

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For the past decade, John McCain has been the Media Darling of Washington. Paradoxically, I believe a lot of his trouble with the GOP base stemmed in large part from his carefully cultivated Media status as a "maverick," even though the record demonstrates that he was no maverick at all.

Now the Media Darling is Barack Obama and McCain's potential path to victory depends, imo, in part, on picking a fight with the Media. He certainly can not win on the issues and thus he needs to negatively brand Obama. With the Media unwilling to do to Obama what it did to Bill Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Hillary Clinton, McCain must now abandon his old Media constituency and strike at both Obama and the Media. Turkana points to this Politico piece that discusses the McCain execution of this strategy: