Perfect timing. Obama announces that he's won the support of the prison guards' union in New York.

And today the LA Times runs a report on all the dirty tricks that the California prison guards' union uses to make sure that nobody can tell them what to do or when to do it or how to treat the prisoners or even hold them accountable for anything at all.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-guards25sep25,0,7466470.story

These are not dedicated public servants. They're abusers of power, violators of human rights and the enemy of all prison reform.

The California prison system needs reform very badly and this power-mad union is the biggest obstacle.

Our prison system can't even keep a prisoner with simple asthma alive. And the guards' union consciously and deliberately thwarts everything the state tries to do to improve the situation.

Sorry Obama -- now I can't vote for you now. I don't want the prison guards' unions of America to have the same kind of national political power that they've used and abused so badly in California.

Every single day the War on Drugs reduces racial equality in America and every single day people stand by and just let it happen.

It's going to happen again today.

TODAY the War on Drugs is going to reduce racial euqality in America and TODAY people are going to stand by and let it happen.

Guess what? It's all going to happen all over again tomorrow. And the next day and the day after that too.

Nobody who supported Gray Davis has a moral right to complain about lack of accountability at Abu Ghraib. Davis' policy towards prison guards was to let them do whatever the heck they wanted and protect them from any accountability for their actions.

Now it looks like Obama's lining himself up to be the new Gray Davis.

It's pretty sad that America is so overincarcerated that the most wealthy and powerful labor unions in the country are now the prison guards.

A lot of Americans were raised by severely post-traumatic veterans in an era when PTSD didn't yet have a name or any treatment aside from a night at the bar drinking with old friends.

I think that had a lot to do with the sixties. A significant fraction of baby boomers were raised by traumatized veterans who treated their PTSD with booze and rage.

If you grew up in a home like that, then marijuana would have felt like it was sent to you by God. You would have wanted to run away to San Francisco and put flowers in your hair dream up some better way to live.

A war is never really over when they say it is.

And that includes today.

The prison guard unions. Read today's LA Times to see just how powerful they are in California. Powerful enough to ignore the state legislature, the governer and the federal courts and thwart all attempts to reform the state's crisis-ridden prison system.

The truth of the global economy is that the U.S. is never, ever again going to be competitive as a manufacturer of cheap cars, either globally or in the United States.

But we're still the number one country in the world when it comes to incarceration. We're still the global leaders in prison economy.

You see these small towns that have lost their manufacturing base to globalization, and the town leaders are hoping that the construction of a new prison is going to save them.

That's a strange kind of vampire economy but it's the one we're living in right now.

I mean there he is, Irish and everything, yet he's able to go on TV without getting drunk, spouting Yeats or crying about his poor mother.

And he hardly talks about leprechauns at all.

They need to stop making cars and come to California and get jobs guarding prisons.

(Note: We're hating on the culture here, not the thin people themselves.)

Right -- like you only hate bikinis, not the women who wear them.

Who makes culture if not people themselves?

The cultural criticism business creates a good shield behind which you can say anything you want about people but avoid any accountability for actually saying such things about people. Because you were criticizing the culture, not the people.

Like what Salon keeps doing to Demi Moore -- recycling old tabloid stories with zero sources or attribution claiming she had full body cosmetic surgery.

You see -- if Demi Moore was a real actual person, then that would be morally wrong.

So when exactly do thin people stop being people and turn into a culture that it is morally acceptable to hate?

What's the difference between culture and people, if culture is made out of -- people?

I'm voting for whichever major Democratic candidate ends up winning the least support from the prison industry or from prison guard unions.

Incarceration is turning into a new kind of pseudo-industry in America. The people involved in this industry have a lot of cash to throw around to politicians who will keep their economy booming.

Their cash has created a real mess in California. Read the LA Times. This is one story where the LA Times shows why it wins Pulitzers and other publications don't.

So now I'm watching the candidates. Obama already screwed up. He's now the property ot the New York prison guards union. Who's going to be next?

That's no joke about the Irish. I mean the Irish have been on the bottom rung of American society before and have been the recipient of racist treatment by Anglo-Saxons for... well, centuries.

O'Reilly doesn't seem to understand very much about his ethnic heritage. There's more to being Irish than a last name and a parade. There's a history of being stereotyped, discriminated against, enslaved, and even lynched.

But he's not going to get it, and even if he did, he has to pretend not to get it in order to play up to his audience.