A fair and reasonable prison sentence

Englishmen love their dogs

Maybe that's why dog thefts have increased dramatically in England; they've increased 250 percent in the past year. “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in the field for 35 years,” said Wayne May, police liaison with Dog Lost, Britain’s largest lost-and-found dog service.

And, prices have increased substantially. A dog that would normally cost $500 is now $2,500 or more. Even rescue shelters are out of mutts. An Internet search for available dogs for adoption in the London area showed only a few dogs here and there. Brits looking for companions have started rescuing dogs from abroad. Most are stolen from cars, yards, outside stores and kennels.

Dog lovers are urging Parliament to act. They have submitted two petitions, with hundreds of thousands of signatures, to the government. The petitions want to make dog theft a serious offense, punishable by eight years in prison and $7,500 in fines.

Max Boot, a long time conservative, has some thoughts about President Trump

From the Washington Post
Three months ago — all the way back on April 5 — I proclaimed Donald Trump the worst president ever. Oh, how innocent I was. Sure, I knew he was bad. But not this bad. Back then I thought he was barely edging James Buchanan in the annals of presidential ineptitude. But now, with the commutation of Roger Stone’s well-deserved prison sentence and so many other vile acts, he has disgraced the nation’s highest office as no previous occupant has come close to doing. Think about all that has happened since April 5.

That was before security forces attacked peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square so that Trump could stage a bizarre photo-op. Before he pushed to send the armed forces into the streets. Before he embraced “white power” and called Black Lives Matter “a symbol of hate. Before he vowed to veto the defense authorization bill to prevent the renaming of military bases named after Confederate generals. Before he used the novel coronavirus as an excuse to shut down immigration and threatened to revoke the visas of college students unable to attend classes in the fall. Before he ignored reports that a Russian intelligence unit had placed a bounty on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Before he moved to pull out of the World Health Organization during the worst pandemic in a century. Before he held rallies that most likely helped to spread the disease. Before he falsely accused MSNBC host and Post columnist Joe Scarborough of murdering a staff member. Before former national security adviser John Bolton revealed that Trump praised China’s prison camps for Uighurs and asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to help him win reelection.

Most of all, that was before the coronavirus had infected more than 3.1 million Americans and claimed the lives of more than 131,000. The pandemic was already a disaster on April 5, but back then we still had “only” 331,000 cases and 9,400 deaths. On April 5, 1,344 new cases were reported. As many were recorded in 30 minutes on Friday, when daily new coronavirus cases climbed to a record-breaking 63,900. In early April it was still possible to imagine that the virus really would abate by the middle of summer. That this hasn’t happened — that the virus is still raging out of control in America while being brought under control in so many other countries — is directly attributable to the epic failure of leadership by a president who infamously proclaimed “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

But what makes Trump the worst president ever is not simply that he is colossally incompetent. It is that he is also thoroughly corrupt. It is hard to think of a single major decision he has made for the good of the country, rather than for his own advantage. Trump has so egregiously abused the power of the presidency that he makes Warren Harding and Richard Nixon look like choirboys. Trump was impeached for trying to use military aid to blackmail Ukraine into helping his reelection campaign. He seems to have learned nothing from the experience save that, with Republicans in control of the Senate, he can get away with anything. Since his acquittal, he has committed one appalling act of corruption after another.

Trump has purged anyone who dared to testify against him. The most recent victim was Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a decorated combat veteran who was forced to retire while being belittled by a callow White House press secretary as a “former junior employee.” Also gone are the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and numerous inspectors general who dared to investigate Trump and his cronies. At the same time, Attorney General William P. Barr has launched a politically motivated probe of the investigators who had looked into the Trump campaign’s copious ties to Russia. FBI agents have already been hounded into retirement and slandered by the president. They may yet face prosecution.

While seeking vengeance against those who spoke the truth about his ugly machinations, Trump has sought to reward those who broke the law on his behalf. Barr wants to drop charges to which former national security adviser Michael Flynn already pleaded guilty — a move that a retired federal judge described as “clear evidence of gross prosecutorial abuse.” Barr also sought a reduced sentence for Stone, even while conceding that his “prosecution was righteous,” before Trump on Friday simply set Stone free. Stone served as the liaison between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks, the website that Russian intelligence used to release stolen Democratic Party emails to help Trump win the presidency. Stone refused to testify about what he knew; he perjured himself and obstructed justice to protect the president. And now Trump has rewarded him for his silence. The quid pro quo is blindingly obvious. Not even Nixon during Watergate dared to pardon his co-conspirators or commute their sentences. That Trump has done so secures his unrivaled place in the annals of presidential infamy.

He is not just the worst president ever; he keeps getting worse.

A note from Garrison Keillor

A note to my peers: Let us disappear

After a week in Corona Prison with my loved ones, I must say — if I were to croak tomorrow, I’d look back on the week as a beautiful blessing. Feeling closer than ever to friends, the complete loss of a sense of time, the intense gratitude for the wife and daughter. We should make it an annual event. A week of isolation. Call it Thanksgiving. The one in November we can rename Day of Obligation. 

The news from Washington is astonishing, each day worse than the day before. The con man at the lectern, the trillion-dollar re-election bailout. Satire is helpless in the face of it. Nothing to be done until November.

 I’m an old man, I don’t worry about myself, I worry about the millennials and Gen Z and those little kids eating supper with their parents at our family Zoom conference the other night. Growing up with GPS, will they ever appreciate the beauty of a map? Will they bother to learn to spell, given spell-check, and doesn’t the love of language begin with forming the letters? Thanks to Netflix and a thousand other things, they’ll keep boredom at bay, but isn’t it boredom that brings out the creative urge in a person? Meanwhile, Greenland is melting, the sea is rising and warming, and the clock is ticking, and Washington, D.C., has become utterly foreign, like a moon of Uranus, pun intended. The millennials’ charismatic spokesperson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is five years away from running for president, and will America be ready to elect a hyphenated person in 2028? It’s doubtful.

It struck me as weird to see millennials enthused about a 78-year-old student radical from the Sixties. My generation has hung on too long and we need to be overthrown. We consider experience to be a prime requirement for public office and we’re wrong. Biden and Sanders have far too much experience, most of it wrong. The U.S. Senate is no qualification for higher office whatsoever. None. Look around — it’s governors who are doing the work of dealing with the Situation. The Senate is an echo chamber. Two years ago, Ocasio-Cortez was waiting on tables and tending bar at a taqueria in lower Manhattan, a natural doorway to politics, much better than law school. 

 My generation is over. The world belongs to the young and we geezers are tourists. (Have I said this before? I think so. My wife is nodding. I guess I have.) Do we allow tourists to vote in America? And here is an issue nobody in public office will touch with a ten-foot pole: why not establish polling-place testing for voters over 60 to eliminate those suffering from dementia from obtaining a ballot? 

 And so I am proposing that the right to vote cease at age 70. An arbitrary age, I admit, but so is 18. I know plenty of 12-year-olds who’re better qualified than some people my age. Face it, intellectual acuity declines with the passage of time and the ingestion of animal fats and malted beverages, and if it’s low to begin with, a person comes to a point where you need close supervision. I speak from personal experience. My knowledge of basic math peaked in the 11th grade, my science literacy long before that. I made my career in the field of fiction, a useful trade but not so conducive to good citizenship. I am a Biden supporter for the same reason Trumpers support Trump — because my man does not make me feel inferior: I listen to him speak and I think, “I could’ve said that, or something like it. I don’t think he’s going to do too much damage. And he’ll surround himself with smart people, just as I have. Right? Right.” Is this the sort of reasoning our country needs right now? 

 Personal admission: I was in New York during the Minnesota primary and so, for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t vote. It felt good. Why bet on a game when your team isn’t playing? 

 At 77 I am on a glide path and enjoying my days and don’t have so much at stake as that little family eating supper. The dad is a journalist, the mom is a nurse, two crucial lines of work. I am an old man with a good wife and daughter, whom I’m now going to ask if they can see where I put my glasses. Thanks for reading this far. Be well. Keep in touch.

Courtesy of a boyhood friend

Prison College

See this on PBS on November 25 and 26

Who petitions the UN?

I thought it was only other countries residents that did so. Well, in October, human rights activists in New York City; Washington, D.C.; London; and Kingston, Jamaica presented the UN with a petition from incarcerated organizers requesting humanitarian intervention. These activists were referring to the South Carolina prison system. The petition called for adequate food and water, time outdoors, access to vocational training and the removal of steel plates blocking sunlight inside Level 3 prisons.

It seems that prisoners held in the state’s high-security prisons spend 20 to 24 hours a day in 9 by 11 cells with small windows that have been covered with steel plates. They have no access to rehabilitative services or educational programs and are not allowed any freedom of movement outside their cells.

The prisoners, themselves, say guards have committed serious abuses, such as withholding water from prisoners and arbitrarily subjecting prisoners to solitary confinement. Plus, they also list mold problems, rotting food, contaminated drinking water and a lack of access to showers.

In California local jails have become more dangerous

In 2011 the California prison system introduced some reforms, one of which was the shifting of responsibility from state prisons to county lockups. Since then, the rate of inmate-on-inmate homicides has tripled or quadrupled, and statewide the number has risen 46%. 

But county jails are not equipped to handle those who have been in a state jail; they are designed to hold people no longer than a year. They don't expect inmates to suffer from serious mental illness or chronic medical conditions that those facilities have been unprepared to handle. The majority of people in county jails are accused of crimes, innocent under the law, whereas prisons only hold those who have been convicted of felonies. Jails mix both populations, and the result has been deadly.

Economic Indicator #5

Security and Safety

• The murder rate was 5.1 per 100,000 people in 1960, rose to 10.2 per 100,000 by 1980, but had fallen back to 4.9 per 100,000 in 2015, before nudging up to 5.3 per 100,000 in 2017..
• The prison incarceration rate in federal and state institutions was 118 per 100,000 in 1960, 144 per 100,000 in 1980, 519 per 100,000 by 2010, and then down to 464 per 100,000 in 2016.
• Highway fatalities rose from 37,000 in 1960 to 51,000 in 1980, and then fell to 33,000 in 2010, before nudging up to 37,000 in 2017.

The 81

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) on Monday issued document requests to 81 individuals and entities as part of a sweeping investigation into President Trump’s campaign, business and administration.

1. Alan Garten

Garten serves as the chief legal counsel for the Trump Organization.

2. Alexander Nix

Nix previously served as the head of Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that did work for the Trump campaign and was later embroiled in a Facebook privacy scandal.

3. Allen Weisselberg

Weisselberg is the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, and has worked for the Trump family for decades. Michael Cohen identified him last week to lawmakers as an individual who was aware of the president’s asset inflation and a scheme to silence women who alleged affairs with Trump.

4. American Media Inc. (AMI)

AMI is the publisher of the National Enquirer and has been accused of engaging in “catch and kill,” a scheme to purchase unflattering stories about Trump and bury them.

5. Anatoli Samochornov

Samochornov was a translator for Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at a 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Veselnitskaya had promised Trump associates damaging information on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ahead of the meeting, but other attendees — including Donald Trump Jr. — said no such information was shared.

6. Andrew Intrater

Intrater is the head of investment firm Columbus Nova and has ties to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. The New York Times reported that Intrater gave Trump attorney Michael Cohen a $1 million consulting contract in 2017.

7. Annie Donaldson

Donaldson served as chief of staff to former White House counsel Donald McGahn, who left the administration in October.

8. Brad Parscale

Parscale worked for the Trump Organization prior to joining the president’s 2016 presidential campaign to oversee digital operations. Parscale is the campaign manager for the president’s 2020 reelection bid.

9. Brittany Kaiser

Kaiser is a former employee of Cambridge Analytica and was subpoenaed earlier this year in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

10. Cambridge Analytica

The data firm made headlines last year over a privacy scandal involving millions of users’ Facebook data. The firm did work for the Trump campaign and has ties to former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon.

11. Carter Page

Page served as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign and has faced intense scrutiny over his contacts with Russia. Page is also the subject of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant issued against him to wiretap his conversations over concerns raised by his Russian ties. Some House Republicans have claimed the warrant was an overreach of Justice Department surveillance powers and proof of bias against Trump within the department.

12. Columbus Nova

Columbus Nova is a private equity firm headed by Andrew Intrater, who is cousins and business associates with Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

13. Concord Management and Consulting

The Russian consulting firm is one of several groups indicted by Mueller for interfering in the 2016 presidential election and is accused of helping to fund a Russian troll farm. The company is linked to Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, who is known as “Putin’s chef” over his proximity to Putin. Concord is the only Russian entity to fight Mueller’s charge in court.

14. Corey Lewandowski

Lewandowski worked as Trump’s campaign manager until his firing in June 2016.

15. David Pecker

Pecker is the chairman of American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer. He reportedly received immunity from prosecutors in the investigation into payments to women who alleged affairs with the president.

16. Department of Justice

Trump has come under scrutiny for his frequent criticism of DOJ officials, including former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who each at one point had oversight for the Russia probe. The president’s firing of Comey sparked the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.

17. Donald McGahn

McGahn worked as the White House counsel until his departure in October. McGahn reportedly sat for hours of interviews with the special counsel’s office and is said to have persuaded the president not to fire Robert Mueller.

18. Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust

The trust holds the president’s business assets, ostensibly so that he avoids conflicts of interest during his presidency. Experts, however, have warned that that the trust provides little distance between Trump and his business empire.

19. Donald Trump Jr.

The president’s oldest son is an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, and has drawn scrutiny from investigators over his involvement in and subsequent cover-up of a summer 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information on his father’s then-opponent, Hillary Clinton.

20. Dylan Howard

Howard is the chief content officer for American Media Inc. Michael Cohen testified that Howard would have information on “catch and kill” efforts on stories related to the president.

21. Eric Trump

Eric Trump is the president’s son and an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, largely overseeing the family business during his father’s presidency.

22. Erik Prince

The former Blackwater head caught the eye of investigators over a meeting he reportedly arranged between Donald Trump Jr. and a Gulf emissary in August 2016, the first sign a country other than Russia had sought to influence the presidential election. Prince, whose sister is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, said last year that he has cooperated fully in the Mueller probe.

23. Federal Bureau of Investigation

Trump has been fiercely critical of former FBI leaders James Comey and Andrew McCabe. The president fired Comey in May 2017, sparking the appointment of the special counsel. The bureau first began investigating possible Russian interference in the 2016 election

24. Felix Sater

Sater is the Russian businessman at the heart of negotiations over the attempted Trump Tower Moscow project. Sater worked with Michael Cohen on the real estate project, which never came to fruition. Sater will also appear in a public hearing before the House Intelligence Committee later this month.

25. Flynn Intel Group

The Flynn Intel Group is a now-defunct lobbying organization created by former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The retired general and another partner at the group have since been implicated in illegal lobbying efforts in Turkey.

26. General Services Administration

The federal agency was reprimanded in an internal watchdog report last month stating it failed to properly assess the constitutional ramifications of allowing the Trump family to continue its lease on the old D.C. post office building following the 2016 election.

27. George Nader

Nader is a Lebanese-American businessman who serves as an adviser to the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. The special counsel’s office has reportedly examined Nader’s influence on Trump administration policy.

28. George Papadopoulos

The former Trump campaign staffer was first thrust into the national spotlight when he pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Since that guilty plea, Papadopoulos has disputed the Trump campaign’s assertion that he was essentially a “coffee boy” for the campaign, saying he consulted on foreign policy.

29. Hope Hicks

Hicks worked as the spokeswoman for the Trump campaign in 2016 and later joined the White House as the communications director. She left the administration in February 2018.

30. Irakly Kaveladze

Kaveladze is an associate of Russian developer Aras Agalarov and was one of the attendees of a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower where a Russian lawyer promised Trump associates damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

31. Jared Kushner

Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and serves as a senior adviser to the president. He has come under scrutiny during his time in the administration over concerns regarding his security clearance. The New York Times reported that the president last year ordered Kushner be given a top secret clearance against the concerns of intelligence officials.

32. Jason Maloni

Maloni worked as a spokesman for Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was convicted of bank and tax fraud in the Mueller investigation.

33. Jay Sekulow

Sekulow is one of Trump’s personal attorney representing the president in the special counsel’s investigation.

34. Jeff Sessions

Sessions served as the attorney general until his resignation in November. He recused himself from overseeing the special counsel’s investigation because of previously undisclosed contact with a Russian official during the 2016 campaign, prompting relentless criticism from the president.

35. Jerome Corsi

Corsi, a conspiracy theorist known for promoting the unfounded Obama birther theory, landed in investigator’s crosshairs over messages he exchanged with Roger Stone about WikiLeaks’s forthcoming release of hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign. He also was given draft court documents by Mueller’s team last year alleging he had made a false statement to the investigators, but has since said he no longer believes he will be indicted.

36. John Szobocsan

Szobocsan was an associate of the late Peter Smith, a GOP operative who sought to track down missing Hillary Clinton emails from Russian hackers.

37. Julian Assange

The infamous WikiLeaks founder has been at the heart of investigations over his organization’s release of damaging Democratic emails ahead of the 2016 presidential election. But Assange may already be facing sealed charges filed against him, after a court filing in a separate case mistakenly named him.

38. Julian Wheatland

Wheatland was named the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica in April in the aftermath of a privacy scandal that plagued the data firm, according to The Wall Street Journal.

39. Keith Davidson

Davidson was an attorney for both Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. He arranged agreements between the women and American Media Inc. as part of “catch and kill” schemes to silence their allegations of an affair with Trump.

40. K.T. McFarland

McFarland was deputy to former national security adviser Michael Flynn. She came under fire after her testimony before the Senate claiming she was “not aware” of Flynn’s contacts with Russians during the transition was at odds with emails she exchanged during that period of time. She also has interviewed with Mueller, but revised her statement after the conflicting accounts emerged.

41. Mark Corallo

Corallo previously worked as a spokesman for Trump’s legal team who reportedly spoke to the special counsel about the administration’s attempts to coordinate an explanation for a summer 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer.

42. Matt Tait

Tait is a U.K.-based security consultant who alleged the late GOP operative Peter Smith tried to recruit him to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

43. Matthew Calamari

Calamari is an executive vice president of the Trump Organization. He previously worked as Trump’s bodyguard.

44. Michael Caputo

Caputo worked as a communications adviser on the Trump campaign and has spoken with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

45. Michael Cohen

Cohen worked for roughly a decade as Trump’s personal attorney and "fixer." In testimony to House lawmakers, he implicated the president in potentially criminal activity, including bank fraud and campaign finance law violations. Cohen faces a three year prison sentence for a host of charges he pleaded guilty to last year.

46. Michael Flynn

Flynn served a brief stint as Trump’s national security adviser, but has remained a central figure in investigations into the administration. Trump said in February 2017 that he fired Flynn for lying to the vice president, but later tweeted he also fired the retired general for lying to the FBI, raising questions about whether the president obstructed justice. Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with a Russian official and admitted to lying about lobbying efforts for Turkey.

47. Michael Flynn Jr.

Flynn Jr., the son of the former national security adviser, had a brief role on the Trump transition team, but was fired after he promoted a conspiracy theory.

48. Paul Erickson

Erickson is a conservative political operative and the boyfriend of Maria Butina, who admitted last year to working as an agent of the Russian government. Butina’s attorneys identified Erickson as an individual who helped her establish unofficial lines of communications with people able to influence U.S. politics leading up to the 2016 election.

49. Paul Manafort

Manafort was the Trump campaign's chairman for the months leading up to the 2016 election. He has since been convicted in the special counsel’s investigation on bank fraud and tax fraud charges.

50. Peter Smith (Estate)

Smith, a longtime GOP operative who died by suicide last year, had reportedly raised thousands of dollars to try to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election. But investigators are likely most interested in the Wall Street Journal’s reporting that Smith was in touch with Michael Flynn ahead of his search for Clinton’s emails.

51. Randy Credico

Credico, a New York radio host, found himself testifying with congressional investigators after Roger Stone claimed that Credico was his back channel to WikiLeaks. Credico has repeatedly denied the allegation, saying that he did not get inside knowledge from Julian Assange and the group ahead of the WikiLeaks email dumps.

52. Reince Priebus

Priebus was the chairman of the Republican National Committee during the 2016 campaign and went on to serve as Trump’s first chief of staff. He left the administration in the summer of 2017.

53. Rhona Graff

Graff served as President Trump’s longtime secretary at the Trump Organization. Michael Cohen repeatedly pointed to her as being able to corroborate his testimony during his public hearing last week.

54. Rinat Akhmetshin

Akhmetshin, a former Soviet military officer, was one of several Russians who attended a meeting in Trump Tower with Trump campaign officials during the 2016 election. BuzzFeed News reported last month that he received half a million dollars in deposits linked to a Russian businessman around the time of the meeting.

55. Rob Goldstone

Goldstone is a British publicist who set up the 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between members of the campaign and a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.

56. Roger Stone

The self-described GOP political trickster has been eyed by investigators for years now, after Stone made statements during the 2016 presidential election that suggested he had prior knowledge of WikiLeaks’s dump of damaging Democratic emails. Stone, who was arrested and charged earlier this year by Mueller for making false statements to Congress, has denied having any direct contact with WikiLeaks, maintaining that he instead had a back channel to the group.

57. Ronald Lieberman

Lieberman is an executive vice president of the Trump Organization. Michael Cohen testified that Lieberman was aware that the president had inflated his assets to an insurance company.

58. Sam Nunberg

Nunberg served as a staffer for the Trump campaign before being fired for breaching a confidentiality agreement. He has testified with Mueller’s team, after initially publicly announcing that he would defy the subpoena, and has also met with congressional investigators. Nunberg is also known to have made false statements in the past.

59. SCL Group Limited

SCL Group Limited is the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, the data firm with ties to the Trump campaign that was embroiled in a Facebook data privacy scandal last year.

60. Sean Spicer

Spicer was the communications director for the Republican National Committee and worked as the party’s chief strategist leading up to Trump’s election. He went on to serve as White House press secretary for six months.

61. Sheri Dillon

Dillon has worked as a tax lawyer for the president. House lawmakers said earlier this month that Dillon may have given false information to government ethics officials about payments to women who alleged affairs with Trump.

62. Stefan Passantino

Passantino previously oversaw compliance with ethics rules during a stint in the Trump White House. He has since reportedly joined a private law firm run by former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus.

63. Stephen Bannon

Bannon worked as the chief executive on the Trump campaign and went on to serve as White House chief strategist. He left the administration in the summer of 2017.

64. Ted Malloch

Malloch, an American businessman said to have played a minor role in the Trump campaign, claimed last year that he was detained and questionedby the FBI at Boston’s Logan Airport about his involvement in the Trump campaign and his contacts with Roger Stone.

65. The White House

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that White House officials will review and respond to Nadler’s request “at the appropriate time.”

66. Trump campaign

The president’s 2016 election bid has been the subject of several investigations, probing whether it colluded with Russia to win the election. Campaign figures, including former head Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, have been questioned by investigators over their roles and what they observed during the course of the campaign.

67. Trump Foundation

The president’s private charity is already the subject of a lawsuit with New York state, alleging that it participated in a “shocking pattern of illegality.” Among the allegations are that Trump used the charity to illegally benefit his campaign, as well as settle issues with his privately owned Mar-a-Lago estate.

68. Trump Organization

Questions about the president’s private business have been a sticking point for Democrats, some of whom have suggested that Trump may be using the presidency for financial benefit. Trump handed over responsibility of his company to his adult sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., but questions about the role of the Trump Organization even before the election, including negotiations on the Trump Tower Moscow project, have lingered.

69. Trump transition

The team overseeing Trump’s transition into the presidency is also facing questions from investigators. Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russians during the transition and Jared Kushner reportedly being the official who ordered him to do so have captured widespread media attention.

70. Viktor Vekselberg

Vekselberg is a Russian billionaire with ties to the Kremlin. He was a target of U.S. sanctions last year related to Russia's election interference. He reportedly attended Trump’s inauguration and has spoken with investigators from the special counsel’s team.

71. WikiLeaks

The group known for its distribution of classified materials has been facing intense scrutiny from Congress and reportedly from federal prosecutors. WikiLeaks released sensitive Democratic emails in the months ahead of the 2016 presidential election in two separate dumps. Mueller has indicted a dozen Russian military officers in the hack of the Democratic National Committee, the source of some of the emails shared by the group.

72. 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee

The president’s inaugural committee is reportedly under investigation for possible misuse of funds. Multiple attorneys general have also subpoenaed the organization for documents related to how it raised and spent money.

73. Christopher Bancroft Burnham

Burnham is the head of Cambridge Global Capital and served on Trump’s State Department transition team. He was recently named an independent director at EN+, a business with ties to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

74. Frontier Services Group

Frontier Services Group is a private security and logistics firm founded by Erik Prince, the ex-head of Blackwater.

75. J.D. Gordon

Gordon worked in the George W. Bush administration and served as a national security adviser to the Trump campaign. He reportedly exchanged messages with Maria Butina, a woman who admitted last year she worked as a Russian agent.

76. Kushner Cos.

Kushner Cos. is owned and operated by the family of White House senior adviser Jared Kushner.

77. The National Rifle Association

The NRA has come under scrutiny from Democrats over its communications with the Trump campaign in 2016.

78. Richard Gates

Gates worked as an aide on the Trump campaign and is a business associate of Paul Manafort. Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI as part of a plea deal with the special counsel and later testified against Manafort.

79. Tom Barrack

Barrack is a longtime Trump associate and was chairman of the president’s inaugural committee in 2016.

80. Tom Bossert

Bossert worked as Trump’s top homeland security aide from the time the administration took office until his resignation in April.

81. Tony Fabrizio

Fabrizio worked as a pollster for the 2016 Trump campaign and was once an associate for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. He was spotted by CNN reporters late last year interviewing with Mueller’s team.

A very strange - and inhuman - prison system

Wrongful convictions

There are a lot of them in America. Since 1989 over 2,200 convicted people have been exonerated in the United States, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. That's one every five days. Some have estimated that wrongful convictions range between 2 and 5 percent, meaning that as many as 100,000 innocent people may be sitting in the country’s vast prison network. Death row exonerations have, at last count, reached 162. These errors can be attributed to poor police work, unreliable witnesses, prosecutorial misconduct, juror gullibility, defense inadequacy, bad forensics passing for science, racism, and more.

She has never left home

Home happens to be a jail cell in Afghanistan. Meena, who is now 11, was born there, nursed there and weaned there. She has spent her entire life, including that in utero, in prison and will probably spend the rest of her childhood there as well. She is there because her mother is a convicted serial killer serving a life sentence. Afghanistan allows her to keep her daughter with her until she turns 18. Meena has no idea what the world outside the walls looks like.

Meena is not the only child in this prison; she is one of 36 children jailed with their mothers. It is estimated that there are hundreds of imprisoned Afghan children whose only crime is having a convicted mother. There is a program that runs orphanages for children whose mothers are imprisoned, but the women have to agree to let their sons and daughters be taken, and the program does not cover many areas of Afghanistan.

There are some amenities in prison. The women’s cells are arranged around a spacious courtyard, shaded by mulberry trees, and the children have free rein of it. There is a set of rusting, homemade swings, monkey bars and slides that end in muddy puddles. A schoolroom is in one of the cells, with a white board and a mixture of benches and chairs, seating 16 children at eight desks. A single teacher looks after three grades, first through third, an hour a day for each grade; at age 11, Meena has reached only the second grade.

Should it be a felony to boycott Israeli products?

That's what a bill before the Senate will do. For quite a while, there has been an active international movement (the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement) to boycott Israeli products until it ends its occupation of Palestinian lands. The boycott is explicitly nonviolent and is supported by activists, celebrities, faith-based groups, and political and social justice organizations around the world.

If the bill passes, it would be a felony for Americans to support BDS, with a penalty of up to $1 million and 20 years in prison.

The Supreme Court has ruled that Americans’ right to peaceful boycott with the aim to “bring about political, social, and economic change” is protected by the First Amendment. Thus, this bill is unconstitutional.

One Hell in America

That's what solitary confinement is. Between 80,000 and 120,000 men and women are held in solitary confinement every day in this country. Most of them are African-American or Hispanic, and make up 80 percent of the country’s prison population and 95 percent of the inmates confined in solitary cells. Things are getting worse: in the five-year period from 1995 to 2000, the most recent years for which data are available, the number of prisoners held in solitary confinement increased by 40 percent. Here's what a solitary cell in Rikers looks like:

Note that the light is always on. Usually there aren’t any windows. The toilet has no toilet seat or paper and there is no shower. In a book containing essays by former residents of solitary, Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement, residents describe being shackled to their bunks by their feet and hands, and moved from place to place like animals. They report being fed slop and also left without food in a state of extreme hunger. They write that hooded guards, armed with tasers and bats, in body armor and riot gear, extract prisoners from their cells and leave them lying on the floor, beaten, bruised, and unexamined by doctors. And the place truly stinks.

Prisoners are subject to the whims of prison officials, they have no legal recourse. They can be placed in solitary for minor infractions such as walking too slowly, or too fast, or talking too much. Prison guards are prosecutors, witnesses, and judges.

Montana is not California...

...when it comes to sentencing a father for raping his young daughter. In Montana, the judge handed down a 30-year suspended sentence after the man admitted he raped his 12-year-old daughter. But then the judge ordered the man to spend 60 days in jail, giving him credit for 17 days already served. In California, the father was sentenced to 1,503 years in prison for raping his teenage daughter.

Prison in Paraguay

You can rent this prison cell for a down payment of $5,000 and weekly rent of $600.

There are three rooms in the cell, including a conference room, library and kitchen. You'll also have had air conditioning, comfortable furniture, an en-suite bathroom and a DVD collection. It was occupied by a drug lord from Brazil.

Only 8%

At the end of 2013, private prisons only held 8 percent of all U.S. prisoners. But, with the profits they can make - the two biggest prison companies make hundreds of millions a year - it's likely that they now control more than 8%. These companies do more than simply run a prison. They transport prisoners, operate prison bank accounts, sell prescription drugs, prepare inmate food, and manage health care, prison phone and computer time.

The companies, as you would expect, cut costs, but often these cuts result in not enough guards to handle the job. An Idaho prison was understaffed by 26,000 man-hours in 2012, according to a state audit, and the company falsified records to hide the uncovered shifts.

Here is what a California privatized prison looks like.

A different summer camp

It's only two days and it is in Arizona in the middle of summer.  The curriculum reads as follows,  “The campers will follow jail regulations, wear inmate clothing, work as an inmate laborer, eat jail food, sleep in jail tents/bunks, and attend education programs”. The purpose of the camp is to show youngsters the miseries that await them if they commit crimes and wind up in prison.

Did you guess that the camp is offered by Maricopa County, whose sheriff is the estimable Joe Arpaio?

Detaining migrants can be good business....

...for those companies, such as Corrections Corporation of America, our largest private prison and detention company. But it is not only American companies that are doing well; it is a multi-million dollar international industry. The United Nations estimates that one in every 122 people on the planet is displaced.  These are the people placed in these centers, although most of them are not criminals in any way; many are children.

Our Congress supports these centers. They mandate that at least 34,000 people be housed daily in detention centers.

We should look more to government-controlled detention centers as private immigration detention centers are more crowded than state-run ones, and detainees in them have less access to educational programs and quality medical care. This means mental health care, outdoor activities and healthy food are far less available in private detention centers than at those run by the government.

Leaving prison