links for 2009-12-23

There's indication the Founders intended pardon power as a check against injustice, not only in cases of wrongful conviction, but where the law was misapplied or where a conviction otherwise wouldn't be in the interest of justice or fairness... Yet that isn't how governors generally use the pardon. Instead, they bestow redemption on guilty people who claim that they're rehabilitated. This converts the pardon from a check on an imperfect system to an almost religious capacity for conferring forgiveness, for reasons often more personal than related to public policy. There's room to debate whether the criminal justice system is too punitive and if it should focus more on rehabilitation... But the pardon and clemency power isn't the place for it. That power is correctly used to draw attention to injustice, not grant mercy to a few lucky (and guilty) souls. Barbour is handing out mercy to killers while paying no heed to the staggeringly flawed system operating right under his nose.

GEORGIA IS #19. "One was a survey of 1.3 million Americans done over four years by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which asked people about their health and how satisfied they were with their lives. Those self-assessments were stacked against “objective indicators” borrowed from researchers at U.C.L.A. They included state-by-state variances on quality-of-life gauges like climate, taxes, cost of living, commuting times, crime rates and schools.

When the two sets were blended, the economists discovered that the subjective judgments closely tracked the objective ones. In other words, people knew what they were talking about when they said if they were happy or not. Americans who described themselves as satisfied tended to live in places where the quality of life was good by most standards — where the sun shone a lot, the air was reasonably clear, housing didn’t leave you busted, traffic wasn’t too fierce and so on.

Harris concludes that the average hours spent online have increased from 7 hours from 1999 to 2002, to between 8 and 9 hours in 2003 to 2006, and surged after that.

There was a sudden spike in time spent online in 2007 when the average hours spent on the Web increased to 11 hours. Last year, Internet users were online for 14 hours a week, double what it was from 1999 to 2002, although Harris says this could have something to do with the outbreak of the financial crisis and the lead-up to the presidential election in October 2008