Should We Legalize Drugs? {Re-blogged}

Last night on my way home from work, I tuned into NPR, and they were airing a debate from the program Intelligence Squared US on the important and controversial topic: Should We Legalize Drugs?

In Colorado and Washington, voters recently approved measures to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Supporters say legalization will generate tax revenue, move the trade into the open, and free up law enforcement resources.

You can listen to the full debate, here.

And, I’d love to hear your opinion on this subject.  Comments and questions are welcome.

{Reblogged} Are We Becoming Medieval?

And, although I don’t necessarily agree 100% with the author, I think he does bring up some valid arguments.  I would diverge with him on a couple of points:
1. What is wrong with communitarianism? ( i.e. “nation states” or “city states” or as the author termed it “a nostalgia for localism”) — he seems to think that they are not wanted (I hesitate to use the word ‘bad’), somehow.

2. All the problems the West faces, specifically in the US, were not created by Obama taking office and running up 5 trillion more dollars worth of debt.  These problems are deep-seated, and transcend party affiliation, ethnicity or gender.  They have more to do with worldview, then with politics.  Which of course, are intra-related, one informing the other, hopefully.

 

Why is there today a nostalgia for localism? Shrinking Western populations with growing numbers of elderly and unemployed can no longer sustain their present level of redistributive taxation and entitlements. Europe, which can endure neither the disease of insolvency nor the supposed medicine of austerity, is only a decade ahead of what we should expect here in the United States, or what we see now in California — a construct more than a state, where the Central Valley is to the coast as Mississippi is to Massachusetts. 

Voters are also disgusted with government, and feel that their overseers are not even subject to the consequences of what they impose on others: We expect the Obamas to trash the 1 percent as they jet to Martha’s Vineyard, or a zillionaire John Kerry to demand higher taxes as he seeks to avoid them on his yacht, or an upscale French Socialist president to have a home on the Mediterranean — or, on the other side of the ledger, social-conservative elites to speak and act like metrosexuals. 

The frustration with the distant redistributive state extends beyond the technocracy to the very nature and legitimacy of the bureaucracies themselves. We know that no one trusts the National Bank of Greece or believes much in Eurobonds, but who trusts any more the GSA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or even the Secret Service to fulfill their missions competently, and with honesty and decorum? 

Nor can the redistributionist technocracy any longer make the case that its certifications, its very claims to legitimacy and entitlement — a PhD from Harvard, a JD from Yale, an MBA from Stanford — and its experience — tenure at Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, two years in OMB, a billet at the CBO, three years at the Federal Reserve — have warranted our trust. We certainly do not believe any more that such a résumé makes one a better legislator or administrator than another who has run a company, built a business, farmed, piloted a plane, or served in the military. Certainly an Al Gore or Barack Obama does not seem wise, no matter where he was educated or how many government posts he has held.

You can read the article in it’s entirety, here.

We Won – for Now Chris Hedges {Reblogged}

In January I sued President Barack Obama over Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorized the military to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely, strip them of due process and hold them in military facilities, including offshore penal colonies. Last week, round one in the battle to strike down the onerous provision, one that saw me joined by six other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, ended in an unqualified victory for the public. U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, who accepted every one of our challenges to the law, made her temporary injunction of the section permanent. In short, she declared the law unconstitutional.

Almost immediately after Judge Forrest ruled, the Obama administration challenged the decision. Government prosecutors called the opinion “unprecedented” and said that “the government has compelling arguments that it should be reversed.” The government added that it was an “extraordinary injunction of worldwide scope.” Government lawyers asked late Friday for an immediate stay of Forrest’s ban on the use of the military in domestic policing and on the empowering of the government to strip U.S. citizens of due process. The request for a stay was an attempt by the government to get the judge, pending appeal to a higher court, to grant it the right to continue to use the law. Forrest swiftly rejected the stay, setting in motion a fast-paced appeal to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and possibly, if her ruling is upheld there, to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Justice Department sent a letter to Forrest and the 2nd Circuit late Friday night informing them that at 9 a.m. Monday the Obama administration would ask the 2nd Circuit for an emergency stay that would lift Forrest’s injunction. This would allow Obama to continue to operate with indefinite detention authority until a formal appeal was heard. The government’s decision has triggered a constitutional showdown between the president and the judiciary. 

“This may be the most significant constitutional standoff since the Pentagon Papers case,” said Carl Mayer, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs.

“The administration of President Obama within the last 48 hours has decided to engage in an all-out campaign to block and overturn an order of a federal judge,” said co-lead counsel Bruce Afran. “As Judge Forrest noted in her opinion, nothing is more fundamental in American law than the possibility that journalists, activists and citizens could lose their liberty, potentially forever, and the Obama administration has now lined up squarely with the most conservative elements of the Republican Party to undermine Americans’ civil liberties.”

The request by the government to keep the law on the books during the appeal process raises a disturbing question. If the administration is this anxious to restore this section of the NDAA, is it because the Obama government has already used it? Or does it have plans to use the section in the immediate future?

“A Department of Homeland Security bulletin was issued Friday claiming that the riots [in the Middle East] are likely to come to the U.S. and saying that DHS is looking for the Islamic leaders of these likely riots,” Afran said. “It is my view that this is why the government wants to reopen the NDAA—so it has a tool to round up would-be Islamic protesters before they can launch any protest, violent or otherwise. Right now there are no legal tools to arrest would-be protesters. The NDAA would give the government such power. Since the request to vacate the injunction only comes about on the day of the riots, and following the DHS bulletin, it seems to me that the two are connected. The government wants to reopen the NDAA injunction so that they can use it to block protests.”

The decision to vigorously fight Forrest’s ruling is a further example of the Obama White House’s steady and relentless assault against civil liberties, an assault that is more severe than that carried out by George W. Bush. Obama has refused to restore habeas corpus. He supports the FISA Amendment Act, which retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution has traditionally been illegal—warrantless wire tapping, eavesdropping and monitoring directed against U.S. citizens. He has used the Espionage Act six times against whistle-blowers who have exposed government crimes, including war crimes, to the public. He interprets the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act as giving him the authority to assassinate U.S. citizens, as he did the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. And now he wants the right to use the armed forces to throw U.S. citizens into military prisons, where they will have no right to a trial and no defined length of detention.

Liberal apologists for Barack Obama should read Judge Forrest’s 112-page ruling. It is a chilling explication and denunciation of the massive erosion of the separation of powers. It courageously challenges the overreach of Congress and the executive branch in stripping Americans of some of our most cherished constitutional rights.

In the last 220 years there have been only about 135 judicial rulings that have struck down an act of Congress. Most of the cases involved abortion or pornography. Very few dealt with wartime powers and the separation of powers, or what Forrest in her opinion called “a question of defining an individual’s core liberties.”

Section 1021(b)(2) authorizes the military to detain any U.S. citizen who “substantially supported” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces” and then hold them in military compounds until “the end of hostilities.” The vagueness of the language, and the refusal to exempt journalists, means that those of us who as part of our reporting have direct contact with individuals or groups deemed to be part of a terrorist network can find ourselves seized and detained under the provision.

“The Government was unable to offer definitions for the phrases ‘substantially support’ or ‘directly support,’ ” the judge wrote. “In particular, when the Court asked for one example of what ‘substantially support’ means, the Government stated, ‘I’m not in a position to give one specific example.’ When asked about the phrase ‘directly support,’ the Government stated, ‘I have not thought through exactly and we have not come to a position on ‘direct support’ and what that means.’ In its pre-trial memoranda, the Government also did not provide any definitional examples for those terms.”

The judge’s ruling asked whether a news article deemed by authorities as favorable to the Taliban could be interpreted as having “substantially supported” the Taliban.

“How about a YouTube video?” she went on. “Where is the line between what the government would consider ‘journalistic reporting’ and ‘propaganda?’ Who will make such determinations? Will there be an office established to read articles, watch videos, and evaluate speeches in order to make judgments along a spectrum of where the support is ‘modest’ or ‘substantial?’ ”

Forrest concurred with the plaintiffs that the statute violated our free speech rights and due-process guarantees. She noted that “the Court repeatedly asked the Government whether those particular past activities could subject plaintiffs to indefinite detention; the Government refused to answer.” The judge went on to criticize the nebulous language of the law, chastising the government because it “did not provide particular definitions.” She wrote that “the statute’s vagueness falls far short of what due process requires.” 

Although government lawyers argued during the trial that the law represented no change from prior legislation, they now assert that blocking it imperils the nation’s security. It is one of numerous contradictions in the government’s case, many of which were illuminated in Forrest’s opinion. The government, she wrote, “argues that no future administration could interpret § 1021(b)(2) or the AUMF differently because the two are so clearly the same. That frankly makes no sense, particularly in light of the Government’s inability at the March and August hearings to define certain terms in—or the scope of—§ 1021(b)(2).” The judge said that “Section 1021 appears to be a legislative attempt at an ex post facto ‘fix’: to provide the President (in 2012) with broader detention authority than was provided in the AUMF [Authorization to Use Military Force Act] in 2001 and to try and ratify past detentions which may have occurred under an overly-broad interpretation of the AUMF.”

The government, in effect, is attempting to push though a law similar to the legislation that permitted the government to intern 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. This law, if it comes back into force, would facilitate the mass internment of Muslim Americans as well as those deemed to “support” groups or activities defined as terrorist by the state. Calling the 1944 ruling “an embarrassment,” Forrest referred to Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the government’s internment of Japanese-Americans. 

The judge said in her opinion that the government “did not submit any evidence in support of its positions. It did not call a single witness, submit a single declaration, or offer a single document at any point during these proceedings.” She went on to write that she found “the testimony of each plaintiff credible.”

“At the March hearing, the Court asked whether Hedges’ activities could subject him to detention under § 1021; the Government stated that it was not prepared to address that question. When asked a similar question at the August hearing, five months later, the Government remained unwilling to state whether any of plaintiffs’ (including Hedges’s) protected First Amendment future activities could subject him or her to detention under § 1021. This Court finds that Hedges has a reasonable fear of detention pursuant to § 1021(b)(2).”

The government has now lost four times in a litigation that has gone on almost nine months. It lost the preliminary injunction in May. It lost a motion for reconsideration shortly thereafter. It lost the permanent injunction. It lost its request last week for a stay. We won’t stop fighting this, but it is deeply disturbing that the Obama administration, rather than protecting our civil liberties and democracy, insists on further eroding them by expanding the power of the military to seize U.S. citizens and control our streets.

Andrew Breitbart – Dead at 43

It was sudden,” Joel Pollak, editor-in-chief of breitbart.com told Current TV. “It was a shock.”

According to the LA Times’ – Breitbart was

a Hollywood-hating, mainstream-media-loathing conservative and shot to stardom with two stories in recent years: breaking the story over sexually charged tweets by liberal Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York, a scandal that led to his resignation; and posting a video of Shirley Sherrod, a black employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in which she appeared to make racially charged comments, leading to her firing and then a subsequent apology by the Obama administration when it was later revealed her comments were taken out of context.

Sherrod released a statement saying: “My prayers go out to Mr. Breitbart’s family as they cope during this very difficult time. I do not intend to make any further comments.”

Breitbart spent his first years helping to edit the Drudge Report and later helped launch the Huffington Post. In 2005, he launched his news aggregation site Breitbart.com, which was designed to counter what Breitbart described as the “bully media cabal” that he says ignores stories at odds with prevailing liberal orthodoxy. His goal, he often said, is to “destroy the institutional left.”

His big splash came in 2009, when he posted an undercover video in which a pair of conservative activists posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend asked employees of the community group ACORN for help with a brothel that would house underage Salvadorans. ACORN was embarrassed when some of its workers seemed too helpful; Congress responded by defunding the organization.

I’m wondering if there is something more to his death, considering that he was on the brink of releasing possibly incriminating tapes from Obama’s college years.  Just a thought.

You can watch the video of Breitbart declaring that “we’re going to vet Obama this time!”

Obama on Contraception & Religious institutions

On the “end of the Iraq War” (yeah right!!)

Gingrich is a liberal

There’s simply no polite way to say this: Newt Gingrich is a liberal.

The new entry into the GOP presidential sweepstakes is a smart fellow.

He is an impressive orator.

He’s a good student of history.

He was a significant part of political history in 1994.

But Newt Gingrich is not Republican presidential timber for 2012.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates this point than his disagreement with Rep. Paul Ryan’s alternative Republican budget.

Gingrich thinks it’s too radical. He thinks it requires too much of a change from previous policy. He believes the federal government has some constitutional responsibility for the health care of individual Americans. And he believes Ryan’s budget is too much of a sudden shift away from Barack Obama’s tyrannical, top-down, illegal mandates.

This is crazy.

Read the article by Joseph Farah.

John Boehner speech

House minority leader John Boehner gave a rousing speech in opposition to “Obama care” on Sunday.  As you can see by the passion with which he speaks, he was very much against this bill!  I don’t generally agree with him (he’s a neocon), but I must congratulate Mr. Boehner when he does something right and good.  This was one of those times.

So I want to say thank you to all of the men and women who fought for months and months to try to kill this bill, for all of their hard work and dedication.  Your fight was not wasted!  Thanks to you, our voices were heard… and ignored by those who have another agenda, not the people’s best interest at heart.

We the People still have a choice… this November.  Let’s vote America!!!

ObamaCare: Would Abortions be Included?

This is a re-post of a blog from last year, but due to the fact that the congress is coming up on a vote on the “Health Care Reform” bill, I thought that it would be good to be reminded of some of the horrible implications of this bill, should it pass!

ObamaCare: Would Abortions be Included?

As the health care reform debate continues to rage; town halls bringing much attention to the lack of real concern the congress has for the American people, many questions remain to be answered. Many in the “life begins at conception” camp have some nagging questions: “Does the proposed plan make exception for abortions?” “Will tax payers money go for the killing of innocent, unborn life?”

Among those in the congress, several have already made it clear that the answer is a resounding (well, it really depends if you want to tell the truth or not) yes! The press has picked up on this as well, exposing it as one of many vulnerable “blemish spots” in the plan. There was even a summit held two weeks ago, via the Internet, to discuss the “abortion mandate” and what is really in this health care bill.

Needless to say, Americans are outraged, and not just over this abortion provision. We simply do not want the government tell our doctors what they can or cannot do to help us stay healthy.  Choice. Plain and simple.  Big brother would literally be looking over the shoulder as doctors are told, through the new computer database of their patients records what treatment their patient is eligible for, what surgery they can have, what medication they may receive. Washington must decide. Or should they?

I guess freedom has a time limit. It can only “work” for “so long” before it becomes “irrelevant” and “old-fashioned” or “un-useful” in the scheme of those who are more “big government” minded. Incredible! Freedom is what made it possible for me to even express my opinion. If it was not for the thousands of our fallen heroes, we would not even be engaging in this health care debate.

The problem with the form of government we have (and we’ve had it for a lot longer than just Bush #2) is that it sees freedom, individual expression, anything that the Constitution embodies as being wrong headed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Our rights do not come from government. They come from God. This is clearly re-stated (for those who have not read the Bible) in the Declaration of Independence. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.. It continues in the second paragraph… We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

What does all of the aforementioned mean? Simply, God created man in His image, He loves life because He made life. Therefore, as created beings, subject to the will of God, we must protect and love life as well. It is the very essence of our nation. Without life, our nation is dead.

Secondly, God established certain laws that should dictate the way we live. The Ten Commandments are a prime example of part of God’s law. In a perfect world, these laws would be the skeleton structure for every form of government. Sadly, mankind has chosen to reject God and His laws. That all started back in the Beginning when Eve ate the forbidden fruit and gave to Adam to partake.

We should therefore understand from these words the very nature of our government and how it was formed. Encouraging our elected leaders to stay within the bounds of the founding documents, having them as a guide for their political decisions.

In closing I want to entertain two questions:

1. Will the unborn, precious little child in its mother’s womb be protected under this plan being pushed by those in D.C.? The sanctity of human life is not just a thing of the “right.” Really life is something we face each day. It is a unique and beautiful gift, a group of miracles. For without life, there would be no America. No world as we know it. Nothing great to look forward to with bright hope-filled dreams. Life is the essence of a nation.

2. Are there provisions that would guarantee the right to physician assisted suicide (also know as: Euthanasia) for those deemed “too old to be productive to our society?” Does this not frighten us? Reminding us of what Hitler did during the Third Reich to those who were “dangerous” to his objectives? If this passes and becomes law, I guess anyone over 55 will have to be pushed out of the way so that the younger folks can truly fulfill their potential; until they become “too old to be productive” of course. A sick, vicious cycle.

   The world is obsessed with the cult of youth. It will destroy us if we do not take heed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Several months back I ran across this powerful video. Eliot Mooney’s parents learned even before he was born that he had a serious disease – One that would kill him, either before he was born or shortly thereafter. They choose life. Little Elliot was born with a hole in his heart, DNA that placed faulty information into all the cells of his body, and many other serious problems, and yet he survived birth to live an extraordinary life – for 99 days.

So my question is: Would this bill protect all the little Eliots of America? Or will it kill them needlessly?

Let’s fight for life!!

“Unless the LORD builds the house,

those who build it labor in vain…

Behold, children are a heritage from the

LORD,

the fruit of the womb a reward.

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior

are the children of one’s youth.

Blessed is the man

who fills his quiver with them!

He shall not be put to shame

when he speaks with his enemies in

the gate.” Psalm 127:1,3-5 ESV

Healthcare Hoax?

Yesterday was a historic day in American politics.  For 7 hours, members of both political parties met with the president at Blair House for a “healthcare summit” to negotiate a plan regarding the massive overhaul of our nation’s healthcare system that has been discussed so vigorously.

But was it all for nought?  Was it just a hoax?  Seven hours wasted bloviating?  I think the answer is a resounding YES!

Here is just one example of what happened repeatedly to the those who brought sound arguments to the table… they were stonewalled by president Obama and his associates.  Or just ignored.

And I am not alone in my suspicions about yesterdays “summit”.

After President Obama accepted the fact that his agenda was going nowhere, he used his State of the Union address to try and turn things around. He spoke of bipartisanship …….a practice he rejected for the first year of his term.He used healthcare as a central focus for demonstrating his new found desire for bipartisanship. He even suggested that Democrats and Republicans work together on it. This was a novel idea, for up till that point, Republicans have been locked out of the closed door meetings that took place among Democrats in an attempt to muster enough votes among themselves to pass their combined 5,000 pages of healthcare reforms.

I believe the rage will continue until this whole “overhaul” is scrapped and the process begun anew.

And to those who have sold out for a few hasty dollars… remember there’s an election coming this fall.

photo credit