Diane Dimond's New Site
Did you enjoy the 243rd birthday of our country over this long weekend? Wait a minute. Do I hear some grousing out there? Is that grumbling I hear about the state of the nation? Complaints that everything is not perfect in the USA?
Get a grip, people. No nation can be faultless in its operation. We are, after all, a group of flawed human beings trying to govern ourselves as best we can. [Read more…]
See if you can find the logic in this. A local government issues traffic fines to residents for infractions like not wearing a seat belt, expired registration tags or a broken taillight. If the fine isn’t promptly paid then interest and penalties pile up and soon a $50 or $100 ticket can quickly balloon to many thousands of dollars.
If a person cannot afford to promptly pay the full ticket what sense does it make to keep piling on extra monetary demands? [Read more…]
Seventy-five years ago, tens of thousands of brave and selfless young men from the United States, Canada and Great Britain took part in the largest seaborne invasion history has ever seen. It was carried out on the beaches of Normandy, France and propelled by the ideal that no one man should dominate others, no foreign power should be allowed to conquer another.
In coordination with young people from the French Resistance who staged elaborate pre-invasion sabotages against Hitler’s invaders we ousted the dreaded Nazis from their unlawful occupation of France. Even after much blood was shed on that beach surviving warriors would go on to rescue western Europe from German domination as well. The Nazi regime was crushed. Democracy emerged alive and well. [Read more…]
How is it that someone accused of dozens of criminal acts can throw millions of dollars at a problem and pay his way out of trouble?
That is what’s happening with Horrible Harvey Weinstein, except if all goes as planned he won’t be paying out anything. His insurance companies will handle the payoffs to the tune of at least $44 million. [Read more…]
Guess how much our nation’s system of mass incarceration costs each year? I’m talking about the taxpayer funded budgets of prisons, jails, probation departments and the public employees who staff them. Add in the cost of running the criminal justice system; the amount spent on health care, food and incidentals for inmates and the financial burden on families that have a person in the system.
Put all that together and guess how much we, collectively, spend on our system of imprisonment in the United States? [Read more…]
So democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders wants to give all prisoners the right to vote. He said so during a recent campaign speech, much to the surprise of many. I was among them.
Sanders believes “the right to vote is inherent to our democracy” and even “terrible people” like the Boston Marathon bomber should be allowed to participate. No other democratic candidate has gotten behind this idea, although several have said they support returning the right to vote to convicts after their release.
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This is not a column about impeaching our current president. This is a column about ...
A famous Greek myth recounts the tale of the diabolical King Sisyphus. He was punished ...
We live in a remarkably over regulated world. Yet almost unbelievably there are few hard ...
