The 2005-2006 statistics are in. America increased its prison population by the greatest amount since 2000.

The United States, which has the most prisoners of any country in the world, last year recorded the largest increase in the number of people in prisons and jails since 2000, the Justice Department reported on Wednesday.

It said the nation's prison and jail populations increased by more than 62,000 inmates, or 2.8 percent, to about 2,245,000 inmates in the 12-month period that ended on June 30, 2006. It was the biggest jump in numbers and percentage change in six years.

Reasons for the increase:

Criminal justice experts have attributed the record U.S. prison population to tough sentencing laws, record numbers of drug offenders and high crimes rates.

The picture above is of Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN)in 1969 when he was a student at Hofstra University. From his Wikipedia entry:

"He ran for student senate and opined in the school newspaper that his fellow students should vote for him because he knew that 'these conservative kids don't f*ck or get high like we do...

Fast forward to the present, and Sen. Coleman opposes the legalization of marijuana. In a recent form letter his office sent out he wrote:

"I oppose the legalization of marijuana because, as noted by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, marijuana can have serious adverse health affects on individuals. The health problems that may occur from this highly addictive drug include short-term memory loss, anxiety, respiratory illness and a risk of lung cancer that far exceeds that of tobacco products. It would also make our transportation, schools and workplaces, just as examples, more dangerous."

Lawyer Norm Kent went to college with Coleman and now serves on the NORML Board of Directors. He fired off this response to Coleman, which is just great reading. While I will highlight below, I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Ding, Dong, S. 1639 is dead.

The Senate drove a stake Thursday through President Bush's plan to legalize millions of unlawful immigrants, likely postponing major action on immigration until after the 2008 elections.

The bill's supporters fell 14 votes short of the 60 needed to limit debate and clear the way for final passage of the legislation, which critics assailed as offering amnesty to illegal immigrants. The vote was 46 to 53 in favor of limiting the debate.

The roll call vote results are here. While the defeat is considered a "stinging setback" for President Bush, I'm glad it's dead for other reasons. The path to citizenship was too onerous and the bill failed to preserve the principles of family reunification and protect workers' rights. It was too heavy on border enforcement and too punitive.

We probably won't see another bill until 2009, when we have a new President, hopefully a Progressive Democrat and a new Congress.

Looking ahead, here's what I think a 2009 bill should include. In fact, I'm going to call it the TalkLeft Immigration Reform Act of 2009 (TIRA). This is a work in progress and I may propose Amendments as time goes on.

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In a another 5-4 decision (Justice Kennedy did not join the plurality opinion, only the judgment, more on that later), the new Roberts Supreme Court, throwing away claims of judicial minimalism and any claims to respect for federalism, today ruled unlawful two VOLUNTARY school integration plans. Justice Stevens, in dissent, wrote:

While I join JUSTICE BREYER.s eloquent and unanswerable dissent in its entirety, it is appropriate to add these words. There is a cruel irony in THE CHIEF JUSTICE.s reliance on our decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294 (1955). The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.. Ante, at 40. This sentence reminds me of Anatole France's observation: [T]he majestic equality of the la[w], forbid[s] rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread. THE CHIEF JUSTICE fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed, the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools.2 In this and other ways, THE CHIEF JUSTICE rewrites the history of one of this Court's most important decisions. Compare ante, at 39 (history will be heard.), with Brewer v. Quarterman, 550 U. S. ___,___ (2007) (slip op., at 11) (ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting) (It is a familiar adage that history is written by the victors.)

The White House announced today it won't turn over documents subpoenaed by the House and Senate Judiciary Committees concerning Harriet Miers or Sara Taylor in the U.S. Attorney firing probe. The text of White House Counsel Fred Fielding's letter is here.

The deadline for the document production was today.

In reaction, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy accused the administration of shifting "into Nixonian stonewalling" and revealing "disdain for our system of checks and balances."

This is the first time Bush has claimed executive privilege since 2001.

John Conyers is threatening legal action against the White House:

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"Blonde airhead Media buffoon" David Gregory said to Elizabeth Edwards, that we should strip away Ms. Coulter's "inflammmatory rhetoric" and get to her real point which is that:

Bill Clinton "was a very good rapist"

and that:

Timothy McVeigh should have parked his truck in front of the New York Times, joked that a Supreme Court justice should be poisoned, and said that America should invade Muslim countries and kill their leaders.

and that John Edwards is a "faggot," has a bumper sticker that says "ask me about my dead son" and that he should be killed by terrorists.

But other than that, let's engage Coulter's substance - like her argument that McCarthyism was good because liberals are traitors.

Stripping away my joking inflammatory rhetoric about Gregory, my point is has David Gregory gone insane?

The Trackstick records its own location, time, date, speed, heading and altitude at preset intervals. With over 1Mb of memory, it can store months of travel information. The Trackstick is the perfect tool for individuals looking for a way to track anything that moves. Use it for recording the exact routes you take when hiking, biking or vacationing. Record the location of everywhere you went, import pictures and other information into Google Earth to offer an entirely new perspective of your journey. Includes GPX photo stamping feature for adding your favorite photos to you own maps.

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Yesterday, Matt Yglesias noted he was taken to task by Red State and other Right blogs for being a pointy-headed Harvard grad pontificating about things military. So it was great irony today to see, as reported by The Angry Rakkasan, General John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, being lectured to by pointy-head AEI scholar Frederick Kagan on things military. Rakkasan links to the Chicago Trib blog which reported:

Major Gen. John Batiste (ret.) who commanded the Army's First Infantry Division in Iraq, and is a respected critic of the war, said the insurgents have the initiative since they can pick where and when to explode a truck bomb for instance. But Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, rejected that view, saying that under the new strategy being executed by Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, the initiative was on the U.S. military's side. . . . It was one of those strange Washington moments where the military expert with real experience as a combatant commander in the battlespace at issue was being told he was wrong by an Inside-the-Beltway expert who likely never fired a weapon at anyone in anger.

I expect outraged posts throughout the Right blogs to protest this lack of respect for military experience. No I don't.

Paul Charleton, the former U.S. Attorney for Arizona who was fired by Attorney General Gonzales, testified before Congress yesterday and said Gonzales was "overzealous" in his determination to seek the death penalty, often against the advice of prosecutors in charge of the case.

The Bush administration has so far overruled prosecutors' recommendations against its use more frequently than the Clinton administration did.

The pace of overrulings picked up under Gonzales's predecessor, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, and spiked in 2005 and 2006, when the number of times Gonzales ordered prosecutors to seek the death penalty against their advice jumped from three to 21.

One example is the case of meth dealer Jose Rios Rico. Charleton describes Gonzales' unwillingness to listen to his arguments against seeking the death penalty based on the lack of forensic evidence showing Rico was the murderer:

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Paris Hilton was on Larry King Live for the entire hour tonight describing her three weeks in jail. She exhibited both grace and humility. She seemed genuine to me. There was no self-pity.

She's clearly struggling to find herself and seems determined to have something positive come out of the experience.

I doubt it's easy for anyone to go in front of millions of people and describe her fears and psychological disabilities or to describe something as humilitating as being strip-searched.

Interesting: Paris denies ever taking illegal drugs. She says she doesn't have a drinking problem. She has ADD and takes Adderall. Her parents don't support her financially, she describes herself as a businesswoman with her own successful businesses.

I'm sure there will be a million comments on the internet in the wake of tonight's interview tearing her down. I give Paris a lot of credit.

For more than a decade, Guy and Genevieve Vang waited for the immigration bureaucracy to respond to their application for political asylum. They had two children, U.S. citizens by birth, before the government decided, in late 2000, to begin removal proceedings.

They and their [first] two children came to the United States from France, the country they fled to after they escaped war in Laos and Vietnam. They got working papers, filed for political asylum and waited.

They eventually opened up a restaurant, Bangkok 96, in Dearborn, Mich., and had two more children. But they continued to wait on word from the government about their asylum application.

If the government didn't believe the Vangs were worthy of American residence, it should have rejected their application promptly. Instead, the Vangs were trapped in a paperwork maze. Their green cards were renewed annually but their asylum application languished. Shouldn't the government be obliged to act promptly if it seeks to remove people who are working legally, paying taxes, raising a family, and obeying the law?

The Vangs' only hope is legislative relief. They're scheduled to be deported in less than 60 days. Sign a petition.

It's about time.

The Senate Judiciary Committee today issued subpoenas to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and the Justice Department after what the panel’s chairman called "stonewalling of the worst kind" of efforts to investigate the National Security Agency’s policy of wiretapping without warrants. ...

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the committee, said the subpoenas seek documents that could shed light on the legal basis used by the administration to justify the wiretapping, as well as on disputes within the government over its legality.

In addition, the panel is seeking materials on issues related to the wiretapping , including those concerning the relationship between the Bush administration and several unidentified telecommunications companies that aided the N.S.A. eavesdropping program.

The White House, via a deputy press secretary, promised to "respond appropriately." Meaning: stonewall until the last day of the Bush presidency, build a big bonfire, and blame the document loss on a terrorist attack.