The U.S. Sentencing Commission is holding a hearing today on whether to make the November 1 sentencing guideline reductions for crack cocaine retroactive. (Background here.)

You can read all of the letters submitted to the Commission for today's hearing here. I think the Commission will decide in favor of retroactivity. If so, it will be a huge policy decision.

Such a mass commutation would be unprecedented: No other single rule in the two-decade history of the Sentencing Commission has affected nearly as many inmates. And no single law or act of presidential clemency, such as grants of amnesty to draft resisters and conscientious objectors after World War II and the Vietnam War, has affected so many people at one time.

Retroactivity will be of some help to many of the 19,500 federal inmates currently serving time for crack offenses. The principal opposition is coming from prosecutors and the Justice Department, hardly a surprise.

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The DNCC is hosting the first media walk-through for the Democratic National Convention in Denver tomorrow.

Events kick off in an hour with a reception at the Wynkoop Brewery. Tomorrow is the walk-through. I'll miss some of it as I have early court in the morning. But I will be there to hear Howard Dean for lunch.

Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Howard Dean will address members of the media attending the 2008 Democratic National Convention Fall Media Walk-Through during a luncheon at 12:00 p.m. MT on TUESDAY, November 13, 2007, at the Pepsi Center in Denver. The Media Walk-Through is being organized by the Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC).

...Governor Dean will address members of the media from international, national, local and online outlets planning their coverage of the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

This should be fun. More details when I return.

Update below:

There's no question Barack Obama is to be credited for his role in enacting legislation in Illinois to require mandatory taping of interrogations to reduce wrongful convictions.

But, he is not a death penalty opponent.

Obama wrote in his recent memoir that he thinks the death penalty "does little to deter crime." But he supports capital punishment in cases "so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment."

A Chicago Tribune profile of Obama last spring (May 2, 2007, available on Lexis.com) contained this paragraph:

A critic of the state's broken capital punishment system, Obama spent two years working with Republicans to broker a series of reforms aimed at making it more difficult for the innocent to face execution. Still, Obama found himself on various sides of the death penalty debate. Five months into office, he voted to expand the list of death-eligible crimes to include the brutal murder of a senior citizen or a disabled person. Four years later, he opposed adding murders that were part of "gang activity" to the list, saying the term was a "mechanism to target particular neighborhoods (and) particular individuals."(my emphasis)

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Someone else, Ezra, notices how bad Bell Curve Sully has Clinton Derangement Syndrome:

. . . Sullivan is demonstrating . . . that, if Clinton is elected, he will . . . use his platform, his dozens of posts a day, his megaphone into the elite, to bring back the constant psychosexual speculation, the bizarre paranoia about the "true" nature of their marriage, the constant questioning of Hillary's feminist credentials, etc, etc. Phrased another way, Sullivan is saying, "nice press corps you have here. Shame if something should happen to it." That's the deal he, and some others in the media, are offering: Don't vote for Clinton, and we won't descend into hysterical Clinton-hatred again. As he writes at the end of his post, "I just want this on the record, ok?" And so it is.

The man is insane.

Like Booman (who responds to me here without actually addressing my points), many in the Left blogosphere seem oblivious to the Media bias against Democratic candidates. Bob Somerby demonstrates:

. . . According to Matt and Kevin, Russert performs a stale, stupid version of gotcha journalism. But land o’ goshen, people! He does it to everyone! Matt implies that Russert goes after both parties. Following up, Kevin seems to comes right out and say it—though we’ll admit that his language is framed in such a way that he hasn’t actually said this.

. . . At this point, it’s astounding when liberals go out of their way to say that Russert treats Republicans the same way he treats Democrats. If you want to know how Dems lose elections, just gaze on the way these two fine fellows refuse to fight; refuse to observe; refuse to stand up for your side.

Does Russert treat Republicans the way he treats Dems? By now, that case would be exceptionally hard to make. [More]

Ezra discusses a Hillary Clinton quote, via Joe Klein, that describes her views on the relationship between political rhetoric and policy. Like Ezra, I find it persuasive:

Obama has added a fillip of honesty by telling his audiences that [his energy] program might result in higher energy prices. I asked Clinton why she hadn't been similarly honest, and she immediately turned it around: Obama wanted to spend the proceeds of the pollution auction — perhaps as much as $50 billion — on alternative-energy research and development. "I have committed to putting money from that auction into programs to ... cushion the economic impact on working and poor families," she said. And then she added scornfully, "So if you want to go and get some debating point telling people this is going to cost you money, then I don't think you've thought through the policy as carefully as you could ... This is going to be a tough transition. It's got to be done politically. One of the ways to make it politically palatable is to rebut the Republican talking point that ... it's another huge tax increase on Americans. You know what? It isn't."

Politics is more than "straight talk." (I believe it has little to do with straight talk.) It is about presenting your policies in ways that will succeed politically. To govern, you must win. To enact your policies, you must persuade the public.

The strange thing to me is, as I have repeated often, Obama can not only do this, he can probably do it better than anyone. But he chooses not to. It baffles me immensely.

Booman writes:

Which gets straight to the problem with so many Democratic nominees. Was Michael Dukakis a tough guy? Could you believe Bill Clinton? Which Al Gore was going to show up to which debate? Where did John Kerry stand on the war? As Terence Samuel notes, this is not the kind of image that we need in our next nominee. Hillary has worked hard to project an image of toughness, but she hasn't mastered it at all, the art of creating trust. . . . [S]he isn't really all that tough and, more importantly, she isn't trustworthy. She doesn't project trustworthiness. . . .

What nonsense. There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is perceived as tough. Indeed, that is one thing the "castrating bitch" GOP meme has accomplished. But she has been attacked as untrustworthy. The funny thing is Booman notes that no Dem GE Presidential candidate seems to have figured out how to be viewed as trustworthy. But he thinks Clinton is the problem. What myopia! Bob Somerby has covered this extensively and it is amazing that Booman does not seem to know about it:

John Edwards is announcing a plan to help veterans with PTSD today in New Hampshire.

Under Edwards' plan, veterans could seek counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder outside the Veterans Health Administration system; the number of counselors would increase; and family members would be employed to identify cases of PTSD.

PTSD among vets has increased 70% in the last fiscal year. There is currently a backlog of 600,000 claims.

Edwards said that despite his opposition to how the war has been waged, the enlisted men and women deserve the nation's support when they complete their service. "Warriors should never be ashamed to deal with the personal consequences of war."

The five point plan will cost $400 million, which Edwards proposes to fund "through closing tax loopholes and more efficient tax collection."

Speaking for me only

Brad DeLong is a great progressive commentator on matters economic. But, for a second time that I know of, DeLong has demonstrated a thoughtlessness about race issues. The first, in which he was joined by Matt Yglesias, involved a defense of Bill Bennett's offensive remarks regarding fighting crime through termination of African American pregnancies. (See also Nathan Newman's great piece on the subject.) Today, in pointing out factual errors in a Bob Herbert column (Herbert erroenously confused the Consumer Price Index with the core inflation rate and confusingly used the technical term recession when making an argument about our skewed economy), DeLong, in my view, innocently but insensitively, asked:

How has the New York Times managed to pick Bob Herbert out of the 75 million liberal adults in America? It is a mystery.

Now, everyone is entitled to their opinion about Bob Herbert. Mine is that he is a national treasure. Certainly NOT liking Herbert is a respectable, though wrongheaded opinion. But surely DeLong SHOULD have known what his comment would invite.

For example, "respectable" champion race baiter, Andrew "Bell Curve" Sullivan wrote:

A question only a left-liberal could ask:

"How has the New York Times managed to pick Bob Herbert out of the 75 million liberal adults in America? It is a mystery." Is he kidding me?

Get it? It's because Herbert is black. Ha! What a funny racist idiot Sullivan is. And make no mistake. Andrew Sullivan is a racist. More.

As promised earlier, Obama on MTP:

SEN. OBAMA: . . . [O]n Social Security, for example, she has maintained, it appears, that if we just get our fiscal house in order that we can solve the problem of Social Security. Now, we’ve got 78 million baby boomers that are going to be retiring, and every expert that looks at this problem says “There’s going to be a gap, and we’re going to have more money going out than we have coming in unless we make some adjustments now.” . . .

Ah, the Social Security "crisis." More.

The Denver Post begins a series today on the inadequate job the feds are doing with respect to prosecuting crimes on Indian reservations.

Since Indian reservations fall under federal jurisdiction, crimes occurring on them are prosecuted by the Justice Department in federal court. Today's article highlights the number of sex assault and other violent crimes that never make it to prosecution. Two thoughts come to mind: [More...]

If you or I lie to the United States government, we get charged with a crime. If Boeing lies to the government about its ability to complete a contract to build spy satellites, it gets rewarded with a $430 million kill fee.