Tag: posts

After New Mexico
cops launched an exhaustive exploration of David Eckert’s digestive
tract that found no trace of the drugs they said they thought
they’d find, their boss insisted that “we follow the law in
every aspect.” The really horrifying thing about Eckert’s ordeal,
says Jacob Sullum, is that the courts might agree with
Gigante. 

View this article.

For
decades, Head Start has consistently disappointed anyone who
expected it to make a real difference in the fortunes of the poor.
A 2010 study by the Department of Health and Human Services
concluded that though there were modest benefits to participating
kids, they soon evaporated. “The benefits of access to Head Start
at age four are largely absent by first grade for the program
population as a whole,” it admitted. “For 3-year-olds, there are
few sustained benefits.” Our elected officials generally agree that
withholding money from social programs shortchanges the poor,
writes Steve Chapman. They fail to notice that for the most part,
providing money has the same effect.

View this article.

In London, England, police
arrested street preacher Tony Miano for speaking insulting
words in public. Miano delivered a sermon on sexual
immorality and listed homosexuality and fornication as examples of
sexual sins. A woman complained, and two police officers were sent
to arrest him.

In 2012,
writes Nick Gillespie, “voters in Colorado and Washington passed
full-on, no-hemming-or-hawing pot legalization by large majorities.
Lawmakers in each state have spent the better part of the past year
figuring out how to tax and regulate their nascent commercial pot
industries, which will open for business in 2014 (until then,
recreational pot is only supposed to be cultivated for personal
use). The spirit behind the legalization efforts in both states was
that marijuana should be treated in a ‘manner similar to
alcohol'”:

Unfortunately, it’s starting to look like both states are
going to treat pot in a manner similar to
alcohol during Prohibition. Not only are
pot taxes likely to be sky high, various sorts of restrictions on
pot shops may well make it easier to buy, sell, and use
black-market marijuana rather than the legal variety. That’s a
bummer all around: States and municipalities will collect less
revenue than expected, law-abiding residents will effectively be
denied access to pot, and the crime, corruption, and violence that
inevitably surrounds black markets will continue apace.

View this article.

In 2012,
writes Nick Gillespie, “voters in Colorado and Washington passed
full-on, no-hemming-or-hawing pot legalization by large majorities.
Lawmakers in each state have spent the better part of the past year
figuring out how to tax and regulate their nascent commercial pot
industries, which will open for business in 2014 (until then,
recreational pot is only supposed to be cultivated for personal
use). The spirit behind the legalization efforts in both states was
that marijuana should be treated in a ‘manner similar to
alcohol'”:

Unfortunately, it’s starting to look like both states are
going to treat pot in a manner similar to
alcohol during Prohibition. Not only are
pot taxes likely to be sky high, various sorts of restrictions on
pot shops may well make it easier to buy, sell, and use
black-market marijuana rather than the legal variety. That’s a
bummer all around: States and municipalities will collect less
revenue than expected, law-abiding residents will effectively be
denied access to pot, and the crime, corruption, and violence that
inevitably surrounds black markets will continue apace.

View this article.

The
latest Fox News poll finds 55 percent of Americans now disapprove
of President Obama’s general job performance and 61 percent
specifically disapprove of his health care handling, the highest
numbers since they first began asking these questions in 2009. Not
even during the IRS or AP scandals, NSA revelations, or Syria
debacle did Obama’s favorability ratings take such a hit. President
Obama’s personal image has also been tainted, writes Reason
Foundation director of polling Emily Ekins. Now a majority of
Americans do not find the president honest or trustworthy, the
highest level since Quinnipiac began asking the question.

View this article.

It seems as though a “national
conversation” will not be part of the solution to fixing the
insurance coverage messes that have followed the launch of health
exchanges. The insurance commissioner of Washington, D.C., tried
and is now
looking for a new job. Courtesy of The Washington
Post:

A day after he questioned President Obama’s decision
to unwind a major tenet of the health-care law and said
the nation’s capital might not go along, D.C. insurance
commissioner William P. White was fired.

White was called into a meeting Friday afternoon with one of
Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s (D) top deputies and told that the mayor
“wants to go in a different direction,” White told The
Washington Post on Saturday.

White said the mayoral deputy never said that he was being asked
to leave because of his Thursday statement on health care. But he
said the timing was hard to ignore. Roughly 24 hours later, White
said, he was “basically being told, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ ”

On Thursday, after the president announced that he was going to
try to get insurance companies to delay cancellations for a year of
policies that were not in compliance with the Affordable Care Act’s
coverage requirements, White was one of the people who worried it
would make a bad situation even worse. He issued a statement
agreeing with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners
that the change “threatens to undermine the new market, and may
lead to higher premiums and market disruptions in 2014 and
beyond.”

The statement has been removed from the department’s web site.
Sources tell The Washington Post leaders were upset that
the statement had not been vetted by the mayor’s office before
posting.

Read the whole story
here.

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With the
clock ticking on the legislative session, President Obama held a
Roosevelt Room meeting on immigration reform, even as House Speaker
John Boehner dismissed the idea, at least for this year. At issue
is the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” bill. It offers many of America’s
11 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship while
still requiring them to pay back taxes. It’s also designed to make
legal immigration easier and illegal immigration more difficult.
Importantly, writes Cathy Reisenwitz, it mandates the use of the
federal government’s intrusive and unreliable E-Verify system,
aimed at cracking down on employers who hire unauthorized
workers.

View this article.

There’s no evidence that the Transportation Security
Administration’s Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques
program actually works, the Government Accountability Office
reported last week—for the third time. The GAO asked, given the
lack of scientific support for the approach, why the TSA is
deploying thousands of behavior detection officers, at a cost of
$200 million dollars per year, to exercise their spidey senses in
airport terminals.

Just days later, independent security researcher Evan Booth, of
Terminal Cornucopia, demonstrated that
you can build a grenade with materials purchased at the airport
after you pass through the TSA checkpoint. In the past,
he’s built incendiaries, crossbows, and other weapons on the same
principle.

As you can imagine, this provided the basis for an interesting
conversation about airport security with RT’s Ameera David.

I’m happy to let Reason readers know that the feature-length
documentary America’s
Longest War: A Film About Drug Prohibition is on sale at
Amazon. Made by Paul Feine and Alex Manning – the team that brought
you the award-winning Reason Saves Cleveland with Drew Carey
– America’s Longest War is an unflinching and
deeply disturbing analysis of how the drug war destroys lives and
causes untold suffering and waste.

There are many
victims of the drug war, and AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR tells some of
their stories.

In 2001, Cory Maye, a black man in Mississippi, shot and killed
an intruder while protecting his 18-month old daughter. The
intruder turned out to be a white police officer conducting a raid,
and Maye was sent to prison for murder. Maye was ultimately
released in the Summer of 2011.

Jose Guerena is a retired Marine who served two tours in Iraq.
In the Spring of 2011, Guerena heard people breaking into his
Arizona home, told his wife and son to hide in the closet, and
grabbed his military weapon. Police broke in the door and fired 71
bullets, hitting Guerena 22 times. Guerena bled to death alone,
inside his home. The police found nothing incriminating inside the
house.

In 1991, Robert Moss and his wife had a one-year old and a baby
on the way when Moss was convicted of conspiracy to violate
marijuana laws. Because of federal sentencing guidelines passed in
the mid-80s, Moss was sentenced to more than 20 years in federal
prison. Moss returned to his family in Seattle in the Fall of
2011.

Sandra Rodriguez is a reporter at El Diario, a newspaper in
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Over the past few years, Rodriguez has been
a first-hand witness to an astounding escalation in drug war
related violence and the executions of two of her colleagues.
Neither case has been solved, but that’s no surprise. Fewer than 3%
of the murders in Juarez are investigated.

In 2012, Aaron Sandusky, a medical marijuana dispensary owner in
California, was found guilty of conspiracy to violate federal
marijuana laws. Sandusky is now in prison serving a 10-year
sentence.

AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR features interviews with presidential
candidate Gary Johnson, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, Huffington
Post investigative reporter Radley Balko, Alice Huffman of the
NAACP, Alison Holcomb of the ACLU, Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug
Policy Alliance, author John Gibler, El Diario de Juarez reporter
Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, UTEP professor Tony Payan, El Paso city
representative Suzie Byrd, federal public defender Guy Iversen,
former cop Neill Franklin, Judge James P. Gray and former DEA
Administrator Robert Bonner. Original score by Doug de Forest.

America’s Longest War includes a succinct history of
the racist roots of drug policy, an update on the story of Corey
Maye (who was placed on death row after defending himself and his
child in a no-knock drug raid), a report of drug-prohibition-fueled
violence in Mexico, a disturbing tally of Barack Obama’s awful
record, and more. 

For more information and to buy the DVD for just $11.95,
go here now.