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Hillary Transue was sentenced to three months in juvenile detention. Transue made a web page mocking her assistant principal. (Photo: Niko J. Kallianiotis / The New York Times)

As many as 5,000 children in Pennsylvania have been found guilty, and up to 2,000 of them jailed, by two corrupt judges who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities that benefited. The two judges pleaded guilty in a stunning case of greed and corruption that is still unfolding. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan received $2.6 million in kickbacks while imprisoning children who often had no access to a lawyer. The case offers an extraordinary glimpse into the shameful private prison industry that is flourishing in the United States.

Take the story of Jamie Quinn. When she was 14 years old, she was imprisoned for almost a year. Jamie, now 18, described the incident that led to her incarceration:

"I got into an argument with one of my friends. And all that happened was just a basic fight. She slapped me in the face, and I did the same thing back. There [were] no marks, no witnesses, nothing. It was just her word against my word."

Jamie was placed in one of the two controversial facilities, PA Child Care, then bounced around to several other locations. The 11-month imprisonment had a devastating impact on her. She told me: "People looked at me different when I came out, thought I was a bad person, because I was gone for so long. My family started splitting up ... because I was away and got locked up. I'm still struggling in school, because the schooling system in facilities like these places [are] just horrible."

She began cutting herself, blaming medication that she was forced to take: "I was never depressed, I was never put on meds before. I went there, and they just started putting meds on me, and I didn't even know what they were. They said if I didn't take them, I wasn't following my program." She was hospitalized three times.

Jamie Quinn is just one of thousands that these two corrupt judges locked up. The Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center got involved when Hillary Transue was sent away for three months for posting a Web site parodying the assistant principal at her school. Hillary clearly marked the Web page as a joke. The assistant principal didn't find it funny, apparently, and Hillary faced the notoriously harsh Judge Ciavarella.

As Bob Schwartz of the Juvenile Law Center told me: "Hillary had, unknown to her, signed a paper, her mother had signed a paper, giving up her right to a lawyer. That made the 90-second hearing that she had in front of Judge Ciavarella pretty much of a kangaroo court." The JLC found that in half of the juvenile cases in Luzerne County, defendants had waived their right to an attorney. Judge Ciavarella repeatedly ignored recommendations for leniency from both prosecutors and probation officers. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard the JLC's case, then the FBI began an investigation, which resulted in the two judges entering guilty-plea agreements last week for tax evasion and wire fraud.

They are expected to serve seven years in federal prison. Two separate class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the imprisoned children.

This scandal involves just one county in the U.S., and one relatively small private prison company. According to The Sentencing Project, "the United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.1 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails�a 500 percent increase over the past thirty years." The Wall Street Journal reports that "[p]rison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails." For-profit prison companies like the Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) are positioned for increased profits. It is still not clear what impact the just-signed stimulus bill will have on the private prison industry (for example, the bill contains $800 million for prison construction, yet billions for school construction were cut out).

Congress is considering legislation to improve juvenile justice policy, legislation the American Civil Liberties Union says is "built on the clear evidence that community-based programs can be far more successful at preventing youth crime than the discredited policies of excessive incarceration."

Our children need education and opportunity, not incarceration. Let the kids of Luzerne County imprisoned for profit by corrupt judges teach us a lesson. As young Jamie Quinn said of her 11-month imprisonment, "It just makes me really question other authority figures and people that we're supposed to look up to and trust."

(Almost five years after 9/11, just how committed is Bush to keeping Americans safe?)

By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press WriterFri Aug 11, 5:56 PM ET

While the British terror suspects were hatching their plot, the Bush administration was quietly seeking permission to divert $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new homeland explosives detection technology.

Congressional leaders rejected the idea, the latest in a series of steps by the Homeland Security Department that has left lawmakers and some of the department's own experts questioning the commitment to create better anti-terror technologies.

Homeland Security's research arm, called the Sciences & Technology Directorate, is a rudderless ship without a clear way to get back on course, Republican and Democratic senators on the Appropriations Committee declared recently.

The committee is extremely disappointed with the manner in which S&T is being managed within the Department of Homeland Security, the panel wrote June 29 in a bipartisan report accompanying the agency's 2007 budget.

Rep. Martin Sabo, D-Minn., who joined Republicans to block the administration's recent diversion of explosives detection money, said research and development is crucial to thwarting future attacks and there is bipartisan agreement that Homeland Security has fallen short.

They clearly have been given lots of resources that they haven't been using, Sabo said.

Homeland Security said Friday its research arm has just gotten a new leader, former Navy research chief Rear Adm. Jay Cohen, and there is strong optimism for developing new detection technologies in the future.

I don't have any criticisms of anyone, said Kip Hawley, the assistant secretary for transportation security. I have great hope for the future. There is tremendous intensity on this issue among the senior management of this department to make this area a strength.

Lawmakers and recently retired Homeland Security officials say they are concerned the department's research and development effort is bogged down by bureaucracy, lack of strategic planning and failure to use money wisely.

The department failed to spend $200 million in research and development money from past years, forcing lawmakers to rescind the money this summer.

The administration also was slow to start testing a new liquid explosives detector that the Japanese government provided to the United States earlier this year.

The British plot to blow up as many as 10 American airlines on trans-Atlantic flights was to involve liquid explosives.

Hawley said Homeland Security now is going to test the detector in six American airports. It is very promising technology and we are extremely interested in it to help us operationally in the next several years, he said.

Japan has been using the liquid explosive detectors in its Narita International Airport in Tokyo and demonstrated the technology to U.S. officials at a conference in January, the Japanese Embassy in Washington said.

Homeland Security is spending a total of $732 million this year on various explosives deterrents and has tested several commercial liquid explosive detectors over the past few years but hasn't been satisfied enough with the results to deploy them.

Hawley said current liquid detectors that can scan only individual containers aren't suitable for wide deployment because they would bring security check lines to a crawl.

For more than four years, officials inside Homeland Security also have debated whether to deploy smaller trace explosive detectors � already in most American airports � to foreign airports to help stop any bomb chemicals or devices from making it onto U.S.-destined flights.

A 2002 Homeland report recommended immediate deployment of the trace units to key European airports, highlighting their low cost, $40,000 per unit, and their detection capabilities. The report said one such unit was able, 25 days later, to detect explosives residue inside the airplane where convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid was foiled in his attack in December 2001.

A 2005 report to Congress similarly urged that the trace detectors be used more aggressively, and strongly warned the continuing failure to distribute such detectors to foreign airports may be an invitation to terrorist to ply their trade, using techniques that they have already used on a number of occasions.

Tony Fainberg, who formerly oversaw Homeland Security's explosive and radiation detection research with the national labs, said he strongly urged deployment of the detectors overseas but was rebuffed.

It is not that expensive, said Fainberg, who retired recently. There was no resistance from any country that I was aware of, and yet we didn't deploy it.

Fainberg said research efforts were often frustrated inside Homeland Security by bureaucratic games, a lack of strategic goals and months-long delays in distributing money Congress had already approved.

There has not been a focused and coherent strategic plan for defining what we need ... and then matching the research and development plans to that overall strategy, he said.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (news, bio, voting record) of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said he urged the administration three years ago to buy electron scanners, like the ones used at London's airport to detect plastics that might be hidden beneath passenger clothes.

It's been an ongoing frustration about their resistance to purchase off-the-shelf, state-of-the-art equipment that can meet these threats, he said.

The administration's most recent budget request also mystified lawmakers. It asked to take $6 million from Homeland S&T's 2006 budget that was supposed to be used to develop explosives detection technology and instead divert it to cover a budget shortfall in the Federal Protective Service, which provides security around government buildings.

Sens. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., the top two lawmakers for Senate homeland appropriations, rejected the idea shortly after it arrived late last month, Senate leadership officials said.

Their House counterparts, Reps. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., and Sabo, likewise rejected the request in recent days, Appropriations Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Brost said. Homeland said Friday it won't divert the money.

___

Associated Press writer Leslie Miller contributed to this story.

I don't want a check either but wouldn't be nice if they would give us the money instead of coming up with all these carppy bogged down packages?

What would you do if they would give us $30K or more? That would probably cost less than what they are proposing and you know darn well, that money would go into the economy faster than their plan.

WASHINGTON (AFP) �� The US Federal Reserve said Monday it had authorized China Construction Bank, a leading Chinese state bank, to operate in the United States.

The proposed New York City branch of CCB "would engage in wholesale deposit-taking, lending, trade finance, and other banking services," the Fed said in a statement.

The US central bank recalled that China Construction Bank Corporation (CCB) is 57.0 percent owned by the Chinese state, 19.7 percent by US banking group Bank of America and 5.7 percent by Temasek Holdings, a sovereign wealth fund owned by the government of Singapore. The remainder of the capital is publicly traded.

CCB is the second-largest bank in China, with total assets of approximately 1.1 trillion dollars, it noted.

The Fed said it had determined that CCB had adequate anti-money laundering safeguards and had committed to respect US laws on money laundering.

CCB's own funds exceed the minimum set by the 1998 Basel Capital Accord and "is considered equivalent to capital that would be required of a US banking organization," the US central bank said.

CCB would be the fourth mainland Chinese bank -- excluding banks in Hong Kong -- to open operations in the US, after the Agricultural Bank of China, the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications.

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China's top bank, also has asked the Fed for authorization to open a branch in New York.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081208/pl_afp/uschinabankregulatebankingcompanyccb

Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan has come out in favor of nationalizing some banks. (Photo: Reuters Pictures)

The US government may have to nationalise some banks on a temporary basis to fix the financial system and restore the flow of credit, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, has told the Financial Times.

In an interview, Mr Greenspan, who for decades was regarded as the high priest of laisser-faire capitalism, said nationalisation could be the least bad option left for policymakers.

"It may be necessary to temporarily nationalise some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring," he said. "I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do."

Mr Greenspan's comments capped a frenetic day in which policymakers across the political spectrum appeared to be moving towards accepting some form of bank nationalisation.

"We should be focusing on what works," Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, told the FT. "We cannot keep pouring good money after bad." He added, "If nationalisation is what works, then we should do it."

Speaking to the FT ahead of a speech to the Economic Club of New York on Tuesday, Mr Greenspan said that "in some cases, the least bad solution is for the government to take temporary control" of troubled banks either through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or some other mechanism.

The former Fed chairman said temporary government ownership would "allow the government to transfer toxic assets to a bad bank without the problem of how to price them."

But he cautioned that holders of senior debt - bonds that would be paid off before other claims - might have to be protected even in the event of nationalisation.

"You would have to be very careful about imposing any loss on senior creditors of any bank taken under government control because it could impact the senior debt of all other banks," he said. "This is a credit crisis and it is essential to preserve an anchor for the financing of the system. That anchor is the senior debt."

Mr Greenspan's comments came as President Barack Obama signed into law the $787bn fiscal stimulus in Denver, Colorado. Mr Obama will announce on Wednesday a $50bn programme for home foreclosure relief in Phoenix, Arizona. Meanwhile, the White House was working last night on the latest phase of the bailout for two of the big three US carmakers.

In his speech after signing the stimulus, which he called the "most sweeping recovery package in our history", Mr Obama set out a vertiginous timetable of federal decisions in the coming weeks that included fixing the US banking system, submission next week of the 2009 budget and a bipartisan White House meeting to address longer-term fiscal discipline.

"We need to end a culture where we ignore problems until they become full-blown crises," said Mr Obama. "Today does not mark the end of our economic troubles� but it does mark the beginning of the end."

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Walter Soehnge is a retired Texas schoolteacher who traveled north with his wife, Deana, saw summer change to fall in Rhode Island and decided this was a place to stay for a while.

So the Soehnges live in Scituate now and Walter sometimes has breakfast at the Gentleman Farmer in Scituate Village, where he has passed the test and become a regular despite an accent that is definitely not local.

And it was there, at his usual table last week, that he told me that he was madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail.

He says things like that. Texas does leave its mark on a man.

What got him so upset might seem trivial to some people who have learned to accept small infringements on their freedom as just part of the way things are in this age of terror-fed paranoia. It's that everything changed after 9/11 thing.

But not Walter.

We're a product of the '60s, he said. We believe government should be way away from us in that regard.

He was referring to the recent decision by him and his wife to be responsible, to do the kind of thing that just about anyone would say makes good, solid financial sense.

They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn't call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn't try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn't changed.

So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called.

When you mess with my money, I want to know why, he said.

They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union and me. And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act.

The more I'm on, the scarier it gets, he said. It's scary how easily someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy.

Eventually, his and his wife's money was freed up. The Soehnges were apparently found not to be promoting global terrorism under the guise of paying a credit-card bill. They never did learn how a large credit card payment can pose a security threat.

But the experience has been a reminder that a small piece of privacy has been surrendered. Walter Soehnge, who says he holds solid, middle-of-the-road American beliefs, worries about rights being lost.

If it can happen to me, it can happen to others, he said.

(Bob Kerr is a columnist for The Providence Journal. E-mail bkerr@projo.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)

This again from the McClatchy news group, which is not conservative by any means:

Mother's Day in Crawford
by Medea Benjamin and Gayle Brandeis

When Cindy Sheehan marched into Crawford, Texas to ask President Bush why her son died in Iraq, it was Mother's Day. Not the Hallmark-infused, soft focus, breakfast-in-bed Mother's Day that shows up on the calendar in May. This was the day that Julia Ward Howe envisioned when she created Mother's Day in 1870 as a time for all the mothers who lost their sons in the Civil War to protest the senseless violence.

Cindy Sheehan has risen up against the senseless violence of this war in Iraq, and countless women and men have risen up with her. The numbers at Camp Casey continue to swell, and support pours in from all corners of the globe. While George Bush says he feels Sheehan's pain but must get on with his life, Sheehan's supporters are uprooting themselves from their lives-often at great personal sacrifice-- to vigil beside her in the hot Texas sun. Tired of seeing our soldiers and countless Iraqis die in an unjustified war, millions of Americans-especially mothers--are joining Sheehan's revolution of the heart. And in the process, they're exposing Bush's own heartlessness for refusing to meet with a grieving mother, and more tragically, for needlessly putting our sons and daughters in harm's way.

Those in the smear-Cindy camp have told Sheehan, in no uncertain terms, that she should go back home, where she belongs. But Sheehan has followed Julia Ward Howe's imperative:

As men have often forsaken
the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great an earnest day of counsel.

Sheehan's hoped-for day of counsel with Bush may never arrive. But another sort of counsel is taking place, the sort that Howe imagined:

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace.

This is precisely what is happening at the vigil in Crawford, Texas. Women are running the camp itself, organizing Sheehan's schedule, holding women's circles to share their grief and hope, writing letters appealing to Laura Bush, and strategizing ways to broaden and deepen this movement for peace.

During the Vietnam era, the anti-war movement was fueled primarily by students. Today, the anti-war movement is being fueled largely by mothers. Look at some of the organizations that have been created in the last few years: CODEPINK: Women for Peace, Gold Star Families for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Raging Grannies. All of them reflect a mother's intense desire to not only shield her children from harm but to stop her children from doing harm to others.

We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

In a recent statement urging Americans to listen to Cindy Sheehan, Elizabeth Edwards said, If we are decent and compassionate, if we know the lessons we taught our children, or if, selfishly, all we want is the long line of the brave to protect us in the future, we should listen to the mothers now. Thanks to Cindy Sheehan, the mothers have arisen. Thanks to Cindy Sheehan, the world can't help but listen. Hopefully, George Bush is also hearing the message.

Medea Benjamin and Gayle Brandeis are members of CODEPINK: Women for Peace, a group that has been actively involved in the vigil in Crawford, Texas. Medea Benjamin is co-founder of CODEPINK, founder of Global Exchange, and nominee for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. Gayle Brandeis is the author of The Book of Dead Birds, which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change.

Her mother got $.25 a week for groceries to feed 8 kids. Many a night they had ketchup bread or if they had it, sugar bread (toast with butter and sugar), potato or pea soup. Meat was a luxury and they might have had chicken once a month.

They worse shoes with cardboard in them when the soles wore out. Everybody wore the next-in-line older siblings child's clothes when they outgrew them unless they were . My aunt stated by the time the clothes got to her, they were patched so many times the thread hurt her skin.

Their idea of play was to go to the coal yards and pick the best coal they could and get it home without getting caught by the Iron Police.

They didn't have a car. They didn't have a radio. They would hear news by going to the store and listening to their radio.

All the kids had to quit school when they were 16 so they could get a job and help out at home. At that time, the only jobs for boys were in the coal holes as breaker boys and slate pickers and the females cleaned houses or worked in the garmet factories. They would hand over their paychecks when they got paid (which was not on a regular schedule, either). My mom worked for $.10/hour cleaning homes 5 days a week. My aunt made $.08/hour 6 days a week in the garment factory. Out of the pay, they would receive $.50 to do with what they wanted and it had to last until the next payday.

be it grizzly or human, when her child is taken from her, and no valid, truthful explanation is given as to why.

Look at the lengths Beth Twitty is going to in Aruba. She wants answers, as well.

Somehow, though, it seems worse when you entrust your child to your government and then, once the shock and disbelief has passed and most of the other grieving stages have passed, you wake up one morning and realize the man you believed and believed IN, the president of the United States, deceived and lied to you and continues to lie to other mothers all over the country. My heart goes out to this brave woman and all those other mothers who also have lost their children. If Bush had 1/1,000th of her courage, this country might be in a much safer place today.

trumps the baby's right to life. I get it. I do not agree. And it is not a "religious" issue, that is a misstatement. There are many who are not "religious" who do not believe abortion should be legal either. I do not split hairs; I believe life begins at conception, it is ridiculous to stay anything different. If something grows, it is alive. That is science, has nothing to do with "moral issue." So why not just tell the truth? That a mother's choice, in your eyes, trumps the right of the baby to live. I do not happen to agree with that. And I cannot understand how you keep on and on and ON about "all living things" yet are okay slaughter of innocent babies by the millions every year in this country. Abortion results in a dead baby, regardless of the "soul" issue. As to moral issue...killing someone is against the law in this country. Murder is illegal. If a mother waits a day after the baby is born to kill it, she is a murder. Just because the baby is now outside the womb? Gimme a break. If you want to give a woman the right to kill her baby, so be it, that is on you. But at least call it what it is.

Scott Peterson was charged with two murders...Laci's and Conner's. If Conner was not "alive" how did Scott Peterson murder him? There are many states who charge a person who kills a pregnant woman with two murders. See how ridiculous it is to state that, then turn around and say if Laci had chosen to kill Conner, that would have been okay, because it is HER uterus.

All that being said...we all have issues that are important to us. I believe the issue of abortion is very important. I believe the right of the child to live trumps the right of the mother to dispose of it like yesterday's trash. I am entitled to that opinion, and I am entitled to try to get a law overturned that was unconstitutional on its face. I am entitled to try to get it on a ballot in individual states so that the people of this country can decide if they want to, in their own states, legalize abortion. I am entitled to choose a candidate who will work toward those goals as well. That is not the only reason I chose this candidate, but it is an important one. And I am entitled to never vote for a Democrat for the same reason, just as you have the right to never vote for a Republican for whatever reason.

And as to my "religion..." That is also why I obey the law of the land, which right now is legalized abortion. I don't picket abortion clinics and shout at women going into them. I don't shoot at doctors who perform abortions. And if, by God's grace, some states are allowed to pass abortion laws, I would hope each of you would respect the right of those states to do so, just as I have respected the law currently in place. There will always be places to go for abortions, and if Americans can go to India for surgeries, women who want to kill their babies could surely find a state to go to to have it done.

You want to champion a certain segment of society (the poor, unfortunate, suffering....). I want to do the same, only my segment is the most vulnerable, the most defenseless, the most at the mercy of others, the unborn children. Why does it grate you so much to have voices speak for them? Do I, and others like me, not have that right? Apparently not, in your eyes.

I still shake my head in disbelief that your caring for "all living things" does not extend to the babies and how you can justify their destruction on the altar of "choice," and not only that, but castigate those who would speak for them. God forbid it ever comes to the day that another has that kind of power over YOUR life, to decide if you live or die. God forbid!