We don't need more jails. We need to get help to the drug addicted, and make them productive members of society, rather than leave them where they continue to develop and refine their skills as criminals.

That will free up the jail beds for those irredeeamably addicted to greed. Not to mention their lap dogs protecting them, who would presume to keep us from the truth as they wield their black markers to destoy transparency.

Frank is right, although as a retired lap dog I'm a little nervous about the scope of his corrections ideas. And, after all, we're just the paying for this venture. Why should we have any right to know what the costs are?

Let me guess: The Bush administration will say that sections of the deal were blacked out for national security reasons. After all, if we show the terrorists how to do bank bailouts they could use that knowledge to hurt America.

Remember when the Bushies took to the Rose Garden to announce this deal? I feel like such an idiot because after all that has gone on, I still held out a little optimism that it wasn't partially a scam. Maybe, just maybe, Bush in his last days would do something to help the country as opposed to helping his base.

I've got to stop imagining any good in this loser. I guess the bailout deal was temporarily helpful in that it gave the markets the feeling that something was being done. Over and over I heard that phrase, "Well, we have to do something." But it's now starting to look like the same old pattern: President Bush causes a problem - then uses it against us.

The bailout was a fleece job. It doesn't directly address the mortgage problem. It's just more looting of America on the way down. No problem is so big, that it can't bring out small motives from the Bush administration.

President Bush is a goodness vacuum and the American People can't grasp that. I can't grasp that. I continue to kid myself that these people aren't the horrible lowlifes they appear to be.

And each time they prove me wrong.

You know that broken toilet on the space station? Let's send Joe the Plumber to fix it, then turn the place into an orbiting prison for George and the gang.

Interesting letter here that seems to answer a question I've had for a few weeks: "where are the winners in all of this putting *their* money"?

http://letters.salon.com/d29d4fcfed5f58e91d806e4e0a836810/author/

It seems odd to me that so many GS execs are pulling the levers at Treasury. Predictable that NPR would have a reassuring fluff piece on GS for us proles:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95748767&ft=1&f=1006

I'm too senile to remember whether I've posted this link here before, so don't make fun of me if I'm repeating myself. It's a piece I wrote a few weeks ago and posted as a diary on Daily Kos on this subject: Life in the Casino.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/25/143232/846/988/610247

Bill,

You may finally be on to something.

"I've got to stop imagining,,, I guess the bailout deal was temporarily helpful,,,I can't grasp that,,that these people aren't the horrible lowlifes they appear to be."

Now behave.

Yours is not to question why, yours is but to pay taxes and die.
Thank Gordon Smith for supporting off-shore banking to enable the fat cats to fleece us and our progeny without leaving a clue.

And to cheer us up even more, here's an article in The Guardian:

"Financial workers at Wall Street's top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year - despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/17/executivesalaries-banking

They MUST tell us. Under legal order of Congress oversight, by virtue of our Representative Member voting so in the majority.

If Blumenauer refuses to so vote our representation, then HE is one of THEM. Then our betrayer is Blumenauer, then our rejection is of HIM, then HE is the face we confront in adversarial indictment and prosecution, then HE is next election (2 weeks) LOSER, then Blumenauer is who prison is for.

Make it personal. Put a human face on it. The totalitarian fascism in the bureaucracy is not 'them,' IT IS BLUMENAUER. HE we arrest.

(Other Cong.Dist's insert name of current (dis)serving Member.)

Arguing generalities and trends of disembodied 'government' surely diffuses our power. Get practical -- WE have the BALLOT IN HAND -- get visceral, get bloody, move muscle, flail bones, GET IN HIS FACE. Blumenauer BETRAYS us. TRAITOR!

We OWN the damn banks. We DEMAND to see oversight of the bookkeeping and accounts of OUR BUSINESS. Else we close it down, all workers are fired, all wages are withheld. Because WE OWN IT.

---

A later remark seems too pat, uncomprehending ineffectual rubric (talking points), about putting meth freaks in prison.

It never would work, and now that another treatment, an effective remedy and repair IS KNOWN, then rote recitation of outmoded superstitious anthem-dogma sounds the more discordant tone-deaf.

Prison never rehabilitates anybody. Education does; knowledge, experience and understanding reforms the living process. Blumenauer belongs in prison as the punitive condition in our legal compact which he knowingly signed and now has breached and violated us. Meth freaks belong in a medical clinician setting.

Research testing in human trials has found that psychedelic drug treatments, especially psilocybin and LSD, 'rebalances' brains in ways that cure addictions, including meth, alcohol, nicotine, gambling addictions and more; and is curative of PTSD, of obsessive/compulsive disorder, of phobia and lethargic depression syndromes, and curative of cluster, stress, and migraine headaches. Treatment is outstandingly efficacious, with repeated results above 70%, or 2 out of 3, rate of rebalanced, brain-harmonized 'cures.'

So, CONGRESS!, RENOUNCE the regressive dark-ages fear-fostering 'illegal drug' laws, and get the medicine to the mentally mangled victims of catapulted powerlust propaganda. And tax that commerce.

And especially MEGAdose those office-holding psychopaths in their prison cells.

Neuroscientists Probe Psychedelic Psilocybin, By David Biello, Scientific American, July 12, 2006.
In follow-up interviews conducted two months later 67 percent of the volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as among the most meaningful of their lives, comparing it to the birth of a first child or the death of a parent, and 79 percent reported that it had moderately or greatly increased their overall sense of well-being or life satisfaction.

Psychedelic Healing? -- Hallucinogenic drugs ... may be used to treat mental ailments, By David Jay Brown, Scientific American MIND, December, 2007.
Before 1972, close to 700 studies with psychedelic drugs took place. The research suggested that psychedelics offered significant benefits: they helped recovering alcoholics abstain, soothed the anxieties of terminal cancer patients, and eased the symptoms of many difficult-to-treat psychiatric illnesses, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

We don't need more jails, we need better leaders.

Alas, we have probative links that suggest Tenskey has been self medicating.

Whoa! The Trees are alive and Bush is dead.

Bush is very much alive and his deeds will far outlive the end of his reign.

"We need to get help to the drug addicted, and make them productive members of society"

You can't help those who won't help themselves and you can't make someone do something they don't want to do. I agree that we need to provide those who do want to help themselves with a method for helping themselves become productive members of society, but that's the extent of it. I've love to hear more about your ideas though, as it seems like we have only two poor options (jail or rehab). Maybe a combo of both would be appropriate?

Nothing to see here folks just keep moving. Vote for Mcain or Obama just keep moving, pay no attention to that curtain just keep moving folks nothing to see here

How about rehab for the disease AND jail for the crime. Treat them like we now treat the criminally insane. Give them mental health care and put them in jail if they are ever deemed "sane."

Drug use should not be a defense for committing crime.

Drug use should not be a defense for committing crime.

I wouldn't argue that it should be. But how many people behind bars are repeat offenders who need real rehabilitation, or are behind bars simply for drug use?

We lock up a larger portion of our population than just about any other country. And we lock up people knowing they will be brutalized, sodomized, and choosing between being a bully or someone's bitch. At enormous cost to society.

Is this a good system working to reduce crime, and helping overworked law enforcement?

It doesn't seem to me it is.

I always find it funny how many icons of the rich start talking about sterilization of the less-productive members of the pool: I'd almost be willing to accept this if the idea were applied all the way around. I for one advocate mandatory spaying and neutering of every last exec involved with this mess: Weed-Eaters for the boys and Roto-Rooters for the girls, and anybody who complains doesn't get anaesthesia. After all, they won't do anything of accomplishment if they're put in jail or slapped with a minor fine, but we can always use gangs of MBA eunochs to pick up garbage too foul to leave to prison gangs.