Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood open thread people.
• A federal judge today appeared to signal that he will mandate the early release of California inmates in order to control the unconstitutional prison health care disaster. This is happening because of a total failure of leadership from the top down over 30 years on prison policy, so they have no right whatsoever to object, but early release is not the final answer, only a temporary stopgap. If sentencing is unchanged, if the root causes are not addressed, we’ll be returning to this issue again and again. It’s also unclear if terminally ill prisoners would be the ones released, which would make no sense since they would merely become a burden on the strapped regular health care system.
• Lawyers in Santa Monica for Roman Polanski are seeking a dismissal of his notorious underage sex charge which has caused him to be in exile in Paris for over 30 years. They’re basing their motion on revelations of prosecutorial misconduct in the HBO movie “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.”
• I’m a fan of Citizens for Repsonsibility and Ethics in Washington, but lumping in a $145 charge from Rep. Loretta Sanchez for culturally appropriate Vietnamese attire during meetings in her Vietnamese-heavy district with Sarah Palin’s $150,000 clothing charge during the fall election is borderline insane.
• In other campaign finance news, MapLight.org, a Berkeley based watchdog group, is suing the state for electronic voting records for the legislators. That would be very, very helpful for us bloggers. Combining those with MapLight’s campaign finance tools would be even more powerful. Here’s their release.
• Village idiot Jim Boren thinks Darrell Steinberg represents politics as usual because some of his committee appointments have gone to the same Senators who held them under Don Perata. Uh, Jim? There are 19 committees and 24 Democratic State Senators. Everyone who doesn’t have a chairmanship is in the leadership. Do the math.
• Here’s one local election where the winner prevailed by one – 1 – vote.