Harry Reid is out of touch with reality

Harry Reid doesn't think Ted Stevens deserves to go to jail.

"My personal feeling, you guys, I don't know what good that [would do]... He was a real war hero too, you know. He's been punished enough."

That's because Reid and Stevens belong(ed) to the Senate, making them two of the most powerful men in America.

In America the rich and powerful do not generally go to prison. But for those in the lower classes:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

And who passes the laws that imprison so many Americans for so many crimes not similarly punished anywhere else in the world? The powerful men in America, that's who. The same ones who don't themselves go to prison very often even when convicted of crimes others would spend long prison terms for.

Consider, for comparison, Martha Stewart.

(...)the homemaking diva was sentenced to five months in prison and two years' probation Friday for lying to investigators about her sale of ImClone Systems stock in late 2001.

Federal Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum also ordered Stewart to serve five months of home confinement after her release and fined the lifestyle expert $30,000.

The sentence was the minimum the judge could impose under federal sentencing guidelines. The fine, while relatively small given Stewart's wealth, was the maximum allowed under federal rules.

Hours later, Peter Bacanovic, Stewart's former broker at Merrill Lynch, also was sentenced to five months in prison and two years' probation; he was fined $4,000.

Martha Stewart was rich enough so that her prison sentence made the news, (most cases don't) but since she was not a powerful Senator, she couldn't avoid the minimum sentence mandated by law. That law was passed by the House, the Senate, and signed by the President.

Oh, and Martha is not a veteran, either. Maybe she could have avoided prison time had she been a "war hero." If, of course, she had a Senator to speak up for her.

I used to defend Harry Reid as a man doing the bet he could in a difficult situation, but this statement and his refusal to act against his fellow Senator Joe Lieberman after Joe worked so hard, lied so much and attacked the Democratic Party in order to elect John McCain as President shows me who Harry Reid has become.

Reid is simply not going to push to investigate the corruption and idiocies out of Wall Street which have led to the current and worsening Recession because the wealthy Wall Street bankers are his friends. He'll sweep the failure of Hank Paulson's handling of TARP as he has handed out free money to his only Wall Street friends. Paulson is rich and powerful. And Reid represents the Democratic Party Senate culture.

Now I realize that the power of the Senate has gone to Reid's head and he has gone "Washington native." He is now reduced to representing his fellow Senators instead of the American people. It's time for Harry Reid to go.