Wednesday, October 19, 2011
[1781 - British General Charles Cornwallis surrenders to General George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia]
[1850 - Annie Smith Peck, mountaineer,
born in Providence, Rhode Island]
[1885 - Charles E. Merrill, philanthropist, stockbroker, born in Green Cove Springs, Florida]
[1901 - Arleigh A. Burke, US Navy Admiral, born in Boulder, Colorado]
[1909 - Robert Beatty, actor, born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada]
[1922 - Jack Northman Anderson, investigative journalist, columnist, author,
born in Long Beach, California]
[1967 - The Mariner 5 spacecraft makes a fly-by of the Planet Venus]
Some time ago, California began sending several hundred inmates a month from the population of about 172,000 in its severely overcrowded state prisons to private facilities in the States of Tennessee, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Indiana following a declaration of emergency by the Governator. One would have hoped that Arnold might use those wonderful skills he showed us in the Terminator movies to at least decrease the number of violent offenders, but alas, art imitates nature, not the other way round.
If California was a nation instead of one of the United States of America, its GNP would place it in the top ten of the world economies. Even so, its public schools are failing, its levees are crumbling, and too many of its children go without health care. When any state can number among its exports convicted felons and poisoned spinach, what does that say about its priorities and prospects?
William's Whimsical Words:
Once we have filled all the prisons in the good old USA, perhaps we can outsource our prisoner population to Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, or one of the former USSR states, as the CIA has been doing for years. Think of the money we could save by not waiting for trials, and convictions, and appeals, and all those other silly formalities.
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