This excellent video/song is from Reason.
See Ron Paul on Drugs, OS pot compendium & of course NUDITY for the best of OS on the issue. I've updated it with more worthy pot posts TODAY.
Excerpts from Senator Webb's Parade article, Why We Must Fix Our Prisons:
America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace. Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness. Our failure to address this problem has caused the nation's prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives.
… The United States has by far the world’s highest incarceration rate. With 5% of the world’s population, our country now houses nearly 25% of the world’s reported prisoners.
… Drug offenders, most of them passive users or minor dealers, are swamping our prisons. … Justice statistics also show that 47.5% of all the drug arrests in our country in 2007 were for marijuana offenses. Additionally, nearly 60% of the people in state prisons serving time for a drug offense had no history of violence or of any significant selling activity. … African-Americans — who make up about 12% of the total U.S. population population — accounted for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison.
… It is incumbent on our national leadership to find a way to fix our prison system. I believe that American ingenuity can discover better ways to deal with the problems of drugs and nonviolent criminal behavior while still minimizing violent crime and large-scale gang activity. And we all deserve to live in a country made better by such changes.”
_______________
And now for some nudity:
Find more about Dan Lacey, painter of Naked Obama and his Unitycorn. He seems to be tracking the happenings of the presidency fairly closely, so I expect to see naked Obama and his Unitycorn with naked G20 leaders depicted with oils on canvas soon.
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Peter Winkler
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Comments
Here's another: Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, if you are suffering the torments of the damned and you desperately need to die then good luck finding someone to help you out. In this country we have more compassion for out pets than we do for people. Don't give me that horseshit about the sanctity of human life, slippery slopes and so forth. If I can't die when I need to I am NOT free. Land of the free????
It is a plant. If the federal government can assert the power to prevent you from growing a plant in your backyard for personal consumption under the Commerce Clause, I fail to see that it would not have any other power, which would make such a government dangerously subject at best to a tryanny of majority a la DeTocqueville, which is not a trivial issue at all.
Fewer than 3000 people die from illegal drug use yearly (ZERO from pot), whereas prescription drugs take out hundreds of thousands of citizens.
The commerce clause is so stretched it is due to snap back hard. The over 20 million people who have been arrested for marijuana possession probably consider our government extremely tyrannical.
Pawed!
there is a lot of abuse of california's medical marijuana list, but there are also genuinely sick people. obama's unwillingness to take a clear stance on this issue doesn't suit a system of laws: this is fast becoming a system of men. thanks for writing!
This post is great here BBE. It should be front and center on all the daily rags.
Hypocrite indeed.
I either haven't smoked enough pot lately or haven't been following American politics closely enough to understand all the subtleties, but I'm laughing all the same.
so classic. Great tune there.
Decriminalization is the way to go but i wouldn't
expect any moves in that direction too soon.
Change in our dear land is a slow mover.
RATED
Obama's flippant dismissal of this issue reveals more about him that many admit. Marijuana decriminalization is a deceptive issue that frames many more philosophical matters about our culture, society and jurisprudence system other than just someone's right to get high. The fact Obama dismissed the issue in that manner, relying on old canards and obfuscations, shows his resemblance to a run-of-the-mill politician and not at all what he claims.
Is this yet another corporation masquerading as a human?
Rated and roll another one!
you slander the commander
of chief ofchiefs
called to the Universal Summit 2009.
Thirty years from now, in,um,
2039,
will rate you well & obama not so well
then: what will your good karma accumulated
do to help the starving illiterates and the gnawing Mass Consumer
"do you consume?"
here in 2039, is how we guage a man's worth.
If he consumes, well, he'd, um
ostracized plenty! and...sometimes the sneaky, um,
arabs try to tease you to admit you consume,
when now the cool thing is not to consume
and it's you, Blue,
who makes this world,
and it isnt a world where presidents can doobie up with the homeboys.
Edgar J wallace told me:
"send this obama to the blacks! seeif they can be made sense of! damn loud people..."
it's swell here. no consuming of any kind
thanks to Behind blue eyes
winning over the Obama hawaiian grill & good time
Hawaiian style...
Hawaii...some vacation stop or spot is it?
no its the far far west...not the east..
jme
and he's perking up...jim