The New York Times' Monica Davey has a report today on prisoner early release programs done by state governments that face budget deficits. The plans have mostly proved to be politically poisonous. Here in Illinois, Gov. Pat Quinn prematurely ended an early release plan when 50 of the 1,700 prisoners the Illinois Dept. of Corrections released proceeded to commit new violations. In fact, Quinn went so far to say that he wasn't fully aware of the plan -- claiming that the Dept. of Corrections went against his directives. Early release programs may not be the best way to balance a state budget. But evidence that some early release prisoners have committed new violations needs to be put in context.

The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports that shrewd political actors Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican Senator, and Rahm Emanuel, the White House Chief of Staff, are conceptualizing a compromise on the "war on terror." Reflecting the pragmatic, "centrist" tendencies of both of these Washington power players, the ...

Ned distills the argument from Phillip Longman and Barry C. Lynn's Washington Monthly piece that Justice Department anti-trust enforcement is dead -- and job creation is partly dying because of this. But is anti-trust enforcement is dead? I counted no less than six examples of allegedly monopolistic companies ...

The argument that Phil Longman and Barry Lynn make in the latest Washington Monthly is that America's post-WWII boom, and the explosion of innovative companies which appeared in 1970s and 1980s America, depended on government anti-monopoly initiatives taken during Roosevelt's New Deal.  It's a provocative idea, and a hard one to prove in a magazine article, but Longman and Lynn point out that FDR's Justice Department set out to engineer rivalries within large industries whenever possible . . . and in sectors of the economy where efficiencies of concentration were far harder to prove -- retail, restaurants, services, farming -- the government protected open markets. Competition among the fast-growing corporations of America's post-war boom led to "an astounding burst of innovation," one that the authors say is lacking in today's economy -- one dominated by fewer and fewer large corporations that not only throttle competition, but even cut back their own innovations in order not to upset a marketplace they comfortably control.

The Washington Post's Carrie Johnson reports that Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe -- who has been occasionally rumored for a Supreme Court position -- will actually take a position in the Justice Dept. to work as an advocate for legal access to the poor. Perhaps Tribe can give visibility ...

The New York Times' Ian Urbina catalogs various states that in the past year passed a law that made it easier to purchase and/or carry a gun. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has done nothing to control guns: [G]un control advocates say, Mr. Obama has failed to deliver on campaign promises ...

Jack Balkin's Balkinazation blog has a spirited criticism of the Justice Department's decision not to recommend professional sanctions for Jay Bybee and John Yoo,  the Justice Dept. Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who gave legal clearance for CIA interrogation techniques that amounted to torture. I agree with Balkin, though ...

The Wall Street Journal's Jess Bravin has an interesting piece about the Supreme Court reviewing the handgun ban in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois and how those in favor and opposed to the gun ban don't split along traditional liberal-conservative lines. Regardless, of whether these municipal handgun bans are constitutional, ...

The Washington Post's Carrie Johnson reports that the Agriculture and Justice Departments have reached a $1.25 billion settlement in a class action lawsuit by black farmers who claim that the Ag. Dept. discriminated against black farmers in providing federal loans and subsidies. Johnson reports that black farmers first sued ...

The Washington Post's Peter Finn reports that five Guantanamo Bay detainees will be resettled in Spain. This means that the Obama administration has resettled 24 detainees, repatriated 24 detainees....and left 192 detainees still at Guantanamo with 110 cleared for resettlement or repatriation. The administration had announced a plan to close ...