"

The [Supreme Court] ruling affirmed the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal’s ruling that called for the release of up to 46,000 prisoners. The state shed some prisoners after it temporarily sent inmates to out-of-state prisons, and sent those in state prison to county jails. The court’s mandate will force the state to reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of its capacity.

“For years the medical and mental health care provided by California’s prisons has fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements and has failed to meet prisoners’ basic health needs,” Kennedy wrote. “Over the whole course of years during which this litigation has been pending, no other remedies have been found to be sufficient. Efforts to remedy the violation have been frustrated by severe overcrowding in California’s prison system. Short term gains in the provision of care have been eroded by the long-term effects of severe and pervasive overcrowding.”

Kennedy said in his opinion that prison overcrowding led to terrible conditions where more than 40 inmates had to share one toilet, or over 200 people were housed in a gym. Lawyers said that prison overcrowding and poor health care drove prisoners with mental illness to commit suicide in “holding tanks where observation windows are obscured with smeared feces,” and inmates were “discovered catatonic in pools of their own urine after spending nights in locked cages.”

There are about 146,000 inmates right now incarcerated in California prisons that were meant for just 80,000 people, Southern California’s KPCC reported Monday.

"

"The suit charges district officials allowed Gideons International to hand out Bibles to students, prayers over an elementary school loudspeaker, a youth pastor’s weekly visits with middle school students during lunch and a middle school teacher’s hanging of a cross over her whiteboard. The ACLU also asserted that graduations and other school events have been held at churches when non-religious venues were available."

"Winograd and Michael D. Hais, co-authors of the upcoming book Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America, say the economic challenges they face and the attributes they are forming will create a “civic” generation. It will have a preference for solving problems together, making the class of 2011 comparable to the class of 1931, which fought in World War II and helped build the American middle class"

"President Obama is the leader of a nation in which justice is but a distant dream for millions of residents. He leads a nation that can afford billions of dollars annually for war but cannot feed the nearly 18 million children who lived in homes without food security in 2009. And yet, the Nobel Peace Prize winner can fix his mouth to say that killing a man on the other side of the globe provides proof of America’s exceptionalism."

"Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion. The people retain the right through their elected state representatives and state senators to enact, amend, or repeal statutes regarding abortion, including, but not limited to, circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest or when necessary to save the life of the mother."