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From a Washington Post story on a Pew Center of the States study on the U.S. prison population:

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a distant second, noted the report by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

The ballooning prison population is largely the result of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been hit particularly hard: One in nine black men age 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women age 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 white women in the same age group.

Take that, China! Booyah! In your face!

Dahlia Lithwick on America’s growing tolerance of torture:

Our views on water-boarding seem to be on the same trajectory as our views on sexual humiliation and stress positions—it looked sort of awful at first, but after a few months it seemed more like a fraternity prank. That’s the road we’re headed down with water-boarding. We’ve gone from banning it to trivializing it to justifying it. We are becoming inured to torture at approximately the same rate that it’s becoming legal. How convenient.

Senator Joe Lieberman and SCOTUS Judge Antonin Scalia, having watched too many episodes of “24″, want to leave the “torture” option open just in case that “ticking time bomb” scenario ever comes up.

And apparently so does John McCain. Despite his own experiences as a tortured POW, McCain will back a Bush veto of the just-passed legislation banning waterboarding. Well, at least McCain showed up to vote against the bill. His Democratic rivals were too busy campaigning.

Oh, and: While the BushAdmin’s DOJ spokesman declared that waterboarding is indeed currently illegal, the BushAdmin reserves the right to change that in the future. Don’t worry, they’ll notify Congress.

That’s what it takes for the Democrat-controlled Congress to approve retroactive immunity for the telecommunications corporations who began cooperating with the BushAdmin’s domestic spying program before September 11th. Not that it was justifiable after the date, but at least there was a fig leaf of a rationale.

Just so we’re clear: our government spies on us, rounds up people it defines as “enemy combatants” (a term it made up) in wide dragnets, puts them in secret detention, tortures them, uses torture-based evidence in military tribunals, invades a country without provocation based on fabricated evidence and chimera threats, loses billions of dollars that it can’t keep track of, employs mercenaries with no legal accountability, and rewards corporate cronies with no-bid contracts in “reconstruction” projects that remain unfinished.

Our government. The one we support with our tax dollars and our votes. Both parties.

To his credit, Barack “Changety-Change Change” Obama voted “Yea.”

Hillary “Experience” Clinton did not vote.

And fuck yeah I’ll politicize that.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has been following the fate of the FISA bill and surveillance matters for months now. His post on this news is worth reading in entirety.

CIA Chief Michael Hayden confessed to three instances in which CIA interrogators used water-boarding against al-Qaeda suspects.

Previously, his boss has gone on record describing water-boarding as torture and that, should there be a legal determination confirming it as such (hello, Mukasey?), there would be a “huge penalty.”

We’ll see. I’m not holding my breath….no pun intended.