No New Deal on Drug War

The drug “war” pours billions of dollars a year down a bottomless rat hole. But who cares? It’s only money. The problem is, it pours millions of human lives down the same rat hole. All for nothing. Nothing at all. They do it to save us from a harmless drug that grows naturally along the roadways. A toxic dose of it has never been discovered. A McDonald’s Happy Meal will kill you quicker.

But the very suggestion that anti marijuana laws be repealed was laughed off by Obama. He’s not alone in that reaction. It’s a joke. It’s laughed off by everybody.

The next time a child is killed in a drive by shooting or a little old lady is murdered because the police had the wrong address, I’ll try to remember to laugh my ass off.

Keith Olberman, Still over the Top

I don’t like this. It’s over the top and inflammatory and in some cases wrong and misleading. Mostly it’s misleading. There are so many good things on that list and other things that are simply wrong, stupid or mere lies. I think the worst things are the half lies. Yes, for example, college is expensive and a lot of students go deep into debt to get educated. I’m glad people are willing to do that because we need educated people. However, “da man” did not make them do it. Nobody made them do it. They signed those loan papers with no gun to their heads. Another example is corporate farming. I”m not sure it’s a bad thing.

There are 300 million people in the US. Who must eat 3 times a day every day. Who is willing to starve so we can bring back family farming? Show of hands? I thought not. Farming is nasty, back breaking work that will keep you in deep poverty because there’s no money in it except on a huge scale.

And so on. And that’s not even getting into the loony conspiracy theories. I’m shocked they didn’t include how GW Bush engineered 9/11.

Collectivist Totalitarians, Right and Left

People on the extreme left and the extreme right, find diversity of opinion unbearable. Both groups are totalitarians and want to completely shut the other side up. They assume the exact same motive of any one who disagrees with them. They can’t imagine an EXCHANGE of ideas or learning anything new. They can’t imagine anyone else being right or themselves being wrong. None of their ideas are held provisionally pending new information.(I suspect that’s because their ideas are not based on information.) They certainly can’t imagine a marketplace of ideas where their views are on the exact same footing as everyone else’s.

Yes, I think government has an important role to play in people’s lives and I believe in a strong social safety net. But I also I believe in free market capitalism. I believe in private ownership of property. I believe in liberty, even for people I think are fools. I believe that extreme, lunatic right wingers get to say what they want and speak their mind. They even get to vote for whoever they think will represent them. I believe in their rights even when the right wingers are shocked that anyone to their left has all the same rights they do and work hard to strip them of their liberty.

It’s all about the money?

What’s really appalling about the Ryan plan is not just that it wants seniors to buy health insurance on the private market but it also abolishes the ACA (obamacare). That means all attempts to bring down health care inflation will be ended. The cost of health care will keep shooting out of sight.

The individual mandate will be gone and – best of all for those elderly people trying to buy insurance – all the laws against excluding people for pre-existing conditions will also be gone. Private insurance companies will not touch seniors and will refuse to cover them because their care is very expensive. Which makes the government vouchers worthless. Isn’t that great? The founding fathers would be so proud.

The Ryan plan neatly exposes the moral depravity of the tea baggies and the depths to which modern conservatives have sunk.

Those Liberal Republicans and Those Conservative Democrats

At one time whether you were Republican or Democrat was based generally on where you lived. Republicans were northerners and more industrialist and Democrats were southerners and more populist. Not always, but generally. Both parties had conservatives and liberals in them. During the civil rights era of the 1960s the Democrats led the fight for civil rights, especially the Democratic president. When the civil rights legislation passed, it pissed off all the conservatives in the Democratic party and they fled to the Republicans. So the south, which used to be the stronghold of Democrats was lost and became a Republican stronghold.

What I find very funny is that modern Republicans like to talk about how they are the party of Lincoln. Which means they now embrace the liberal principles they fled the Democratic party to escape. In 40 years they will swear that they were the ones at the forefront of promoting gay marriage!

Conspiracy Theories

The 9/11 attack was an inside job:
This conspiracy is as stupid as the birth certificate thing and for many of the same reasons.

We are supposed to believe that somebody as stupid as George Bush could pull something like that off? And furthermore we are supposed to believe that every single person – and it would have been hundreds of people – have kept perfectly silent about it? Hogwash. It would be easier to believe that Santa Claus makes it around the entire planet in a single night.

Obama isn’t a citizen and can’t  produce a valid birth certificate:
We are supposed to believe that someone who has access to the highest level top secrets of our country didn’t undergo a background check deep enough to discover a phony birth certificate. But a bunch of rednecks have seen through the sham and figured it out. Yeah, that makes sense. Not.

The New Phony Black Racism Scandal

When Andrew Breitbart constructed a phony video to destroy ACORN, Rachel Maddow showed the unedited video that was NEVER shown on Fox noise. The guy who was supposed to have been “caught” lost his job. What Fox didn’t mention is that he called the cops the minute the phony “pimp” was out of his office. Then Maddow asked “Who’s next? Who are they going to destroy next?”

Next up was Shirley Sherrod. Andrew Breitbart showed a small portion of a video of her giving a speech in the 1980s in which she tells a story about how she was once prejudiced against white farmers and learned to overcome it. Guess which part of the speech Breitbart cut out? Hours after his video was released Sherrod was fired.

Now CNN is playing ALL the tape showing the entire story and the white farmers that she talked about in the story have come forward and verified that she helped them enormously and was always good to them.

Did Breitbart apologize? Oh, heavens no. Breitbart is trying to lie his way out of it now and so is Fox. David Frum said of this incident “When Dan Rather succumbed to the forged Bush war record hoax in 2004, CBS forced him into retirement. Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather, but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him.”

Right wing conservatives should be pounding Breitbart into the ground over this. But they won’t. Just now the Drudge Report banner headline is “NO GO BLAGO DEFENSE RESTS.” Redstate.com is saying Breitbart is doing to the left what they’ve “always” done to the right. It’s what I like to call the “Tommy does it worser!” argument.

Andrew Breitbart is a lying sack of shit and the right wing – those famous bastions of morality, honesty and decency – should give him the boot. But I won’t be holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

Not Much of a Surprise

Marijuana Prohibition and Racism without Racists

Excerpt:
“Young blacks and Latinos use marijuana at lower rates than young whites. So why are police in California arresting young blacks and Latinos at higher rates than young whites, and at greater numbers than their percentages of the population?”

Why, indeed?

Winners? Losers?

Huh?

This is from the FrumForum:

There are winners from the Gaza flotilla and losers. In human terms, the losses begin with the battered and injured IDF soldiers who boarded the Mavi Marmara. One may wonder if we should not tally as winners the nine militant blockade runners who gained the martyrdom they sought.

Seriously? The losses begin with the “battered and injured”  IDF soldiers and the winners are the 9 people who were gunned down? Really? If Frum freekin’ nuts? Usually he is far more sensible this but for the right wing Israel is justified in doing anything it feels like doing, no matter what.

Frum continues:

The point of the flotilla was not of course to deliver humanitarian aid — or even to ease the Israeli blockade of Gaza. As is, Gaza receives more humanitarian aid every 24 hours than was contained in the entire flotilla. And of course Hamas could ease the blockade at any time by releasing Gilad Shalit and forswearing violence against Israel.

The point of the flotilla was to end Israeli inspection of Gaza cargoes, so that Hamas could resume importing weapons.

So what? Gaza receives enough aid to keep the population alive on a starvation diet. More aid is desperately needed. I’m sure Hamas would love to start importing weapons. I have no sympathy for them. None of that is the point. It is, in fact, the default straw man argument the right wing always uses when anybody criticizes anything the Israelis do.

The point is the Israelis gunned down 9 people who were no threat to them. They could have easily disabled the ship and towed it to shore where they could inspect it. They chose not to do that. That was wrong.  This incident looks like part of a long moral downward slide of both the Israelis and their right wing supporters.

More on the Israeli Flotilla Raid

I’ve been watching the video of the flotilla raid released by the Israelis – MSNBC has it practically on a 24-hour constant loop – and I don’t see it as exculpatory. In fact it astonishes me that the Israelis think it is. What I see is a bunch of people with clubs and knives being invaded by people with machine guns. Clubs and knives are not long-distance weapons. All they had to do was disable the boat and tow it to shore. They didn’t even need to board the thing at all.

The 19-year-old American who was killed in the raid had a bullet in the chest and four bullets in the head fired at close range. That doesn’t sound like self defense or the heat of battle. It sounds like an execution, a stone cold murder.