Obama’s first 100 days

Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Andrew McCarthy and a host of wing-nut bloggers all claim that I’ve been palin’ around with Barack Obama. Now, I wish it were true. If it were, here are a couple of things I would put on his radar screen for his first 100 days in office.

Hey Barack, my friend--stop this

Catherine Gewertz at Edweek, “Urban Districts Urged to Prepare for Immigration Raids,” reports that horrible damage is being done to immigrant students as more and more of their parents are swept up in raids by the INS.

Rosa Maria Castañeda, a research associate at the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank that co-authored a report last year detailing the impact on children of three large-scale workplace raids, said that when such arrests occur, children often find themselves at school or day care with no one to pick them up, or alone at home with no adult supervision.

And this...

Colleen Shaddox, writing for Miller-McCune, “Juvenile Justice and the Theater of the Absurd,” makes a strong case against trying kids as adults:

About 200,000 minors enter the adult criminal justice system each year. Research on minors sent to the adult system says that they are more likely to re-offend and escalate into violent behavior than their peers who go to the juvenile system, where rehabilitative services are far more extensive. We also know that youths in adult prisons are at high risk for suicide and for victimization by adult inmates.

More agenda points to follow.