Tuesday 15 January 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
Would that Kentucky would engage in taking a stand against the feds such as this, but I’m afraid we’re just too addicted to federal cash buy-offs.
Comments Off on Would That . . . :: Share or discuss :: 2013-01-15 :: madlibertarianguy
Friday 11 January 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
This is the kind of shit that makes one want to go ballistic with rage. Reason:
In many parts of the country, marijuana users are flummoxed about how to explain their arrest records to current and future employers, how to regain custody of their children from the state, how to make all their drug court appearances, how to pay mandatory substance abuse counseling fees, and how to get their seized vehicles returned so that they can go to work and drug court and mandatory substance abuse counseling.
In D.C., marijuana users are worried about etiquette
[. . .]
If you’ve ever wondered why Washington, D.C. is so languorous about confronting our failed war on drugs, it’s because there is no war on drugs in Washington, D.C. Not if you’re white, that is. At every party I’ve been to since moving to D.C.–so many parties, dear reader!–pot was present. The party G. Gordon Liddy’s producer threw in Northern Virginia? People smoked pot there. The house-warming party hosted by an active duty air force officer? People smoked pot there, too. I’ve seen an Obama speechwriter smoke pot, and a McCain advisor smoke pot, and I even smoked pot with a congressional staffer whose boss was working on anti-marijuana legislation.
If one doesn’t get extremely angry at the idea of people writing laws that put people in jail for smoking pot, smoking pot, you too can fit in in DC.
Comments Off on A Tale of Two Worlds :: Share or discuss :: 2013-01-11 :: madlibertarianguy
Thursday 10 January 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
HuffPo with an exposé on how the TSA actively seeks to fuck those who choose to opt-out of the full-body scanners:
The TSA likes to talk about the “haves” — the elite-level frequent fliers, the soldiers in uniform, the crewmembers, who can now almost always bypass the scanners, the shoe-removal and the pat-downs, and get to the gate quickly. It’s received a lot of positive coverage from an unskeptical mainstream media about those programs.
But it doesn’t really say much about the “have-nots” — the passengers with medical conditions and implants that set off the magnetometers, the folks who don’t fly frequently enough to be part of the Pre-Check club and yeah, the opt-outs.
Actually, opt-outs are arguably the biggest segment of the new passenger underclass. The TSA doesn’t release statistics on air travelers who refuse a full-body scan, but anecdotal evidence suggests their numbers are large and growing.
Let’s take a closer look at how the TSA treats opt-outs as second class citizens.
Active steps taken to make a person’s flying experience as inconvenient as possible. They want to shame people in to compliance. It’s fucking sick.
Comments Off on Second Class Citizens :: Share or discuss :: 2013-01-10 :: madlibertarianguy
Thursday 10 January 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
Cops arresting students with impunity and charging them, for doing such horrible things as talking loudly, farting, and wearing things that cops deem dangerous. Vice:
More than a third of American sheriffs’ departments and nearly half of all police departments have officers assigned to local schools, according to Department of Justice statistics from early last decade. Students today are arrested in school for offenses that include talking back to a police officer, doodling on a desk with an erasable marker, farting, and being an eight-year old throwing a temper tantrum. In other words: criminalizing childhood misbehavior.
[. . .]
Few students, according to the NYCLU, are arrested for serious felonies. And importantly, the mad gunmen the NRA seeks to deter are rarities: Of all school-age children murdered in the United States, according to a 2001 study in American Psychologist, less than one percent actually take place at a school.
“We’re definitely opposed to having armed guards in schools,” says NYCLU senior staff attorney Alexis Karteron. School police by and large “aren’t there to deal with this extraordinary situation of an armed gunman coming in, so what they end up dealing with is minor incidents that really should be treated as disciplinary matters. And they end up being converted into criminal matters.”
In New York, 95 percent of the 882 arrests made by the NYPD School Safety Division in 2012 were of black or Latino students. Meanwhile, sixty-three percent of summonses were for “disorderly conduct,” a catchall charge in both the street and classroom.And a 2009 study found that the rate of students arrested for disorderly conduct was 100-percent higher at schools with police on-campus than at schools where the cops have to be called in to make an arrest—suggesting that officers criminalize misbehavior that could likely be better resolved without handcuffs.
Kupchik, who studied both urban and suburban schools, found that the criminalization of students impacts white, well-to-do students too. One suburban principal he studied established a rule that mandated arrests for any students caught fighting.
“They’re not as good at the softer side of things,” says Kupchik. He compliments most police officers he met during his study for being well-intentioned and caring people but laments that administrators and teachers now outsource complicated disciplinary matters to people who are neither counselors nor educators and lack the necessary training. “They don’t know what to do with a crying 15 year old.”
“Cops are really trained in street tactics that aren’t entirely appropriate in schools,” adds the NYCLU’s Karteron.
The criminalization of student conduct was part of a broader push for Zero Tolerance policies that took off after heightened concern over youth violence in the mid-1980s and intensified in the wake of the 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School.
School police help enforce a regime that deals out suspensions for transgressions ranging from signing a gospel song with friends at lunch, making out with a love interest, or blowing spit balls. Schools now also require drug tests for an ever-expanding set of extracurricular activities that now includes middle-school sports and even chess club, Future Farmers of America, and band (though a California judge in 2009 ruled drug testing for the latter set unconstitutional under state law).
Suspension rates have more than doubled since the 1980s, according to a Columbia Teachers College’s Hechinger Report article. And Zero Tolerance mirrors the criminal justice system’s racial disproportionality, with black youths three-and-a-half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students.
The very same liberal establishment outraged over the NRA’s proposal has, with conservative support, made police officers commonplace in many schools over the past two decades. It was the Clinton Administration that initiated federal funding for school-police partnerships.
I won’t have my child subjected to criminal penalties for being a kid.
Comments Off on Reason 1,254,989 :: Share or discuss :: 2013-01-10 :: madlibertarianguy
Thursday 10 January 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
This is just wrong. The Deseret News:
Barbara Alice Mahaffey died of colon cancer in her bedroom last May. Ben D. Mahaffey, 80, said he was distraught and trying to make sure his wife’s body would be taken to the funeral home with dignity, when he says officers insisted he help them look for the drugs.
“I was holding her hand saying goodbye when all the intrusion happened,” he told the Deseret News.
Barbara Mahaffey died at 12:35 a.m. with Mahaffey, a Navy medic in the Korean War, and his friend, an EMT, at her side. In addition to police, a mortician and a hospice worker arrived at the home about 12:45 a.m., Mahaffey said. He said he doesn’t know how police came to be there.
Mahaffey said he was treated as if he were going to sell the painkillers, which included OxyContin, oxycodone and morphine, on the street.
Something tells me that the cops are running a scam where they hear of deceased elderly, then scramble to get the drugs so that they can sell them. What the fuck else can explain cops at a house to search for prescription drugs mere minutes after a woman dies in the middle of the night?
Comments Off on Just Wrong :: Share or discuss :: 2013-01-10 :: madlibertarianguy
Wednesday 9 January 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
Mother Jones when writing about a coalition of progressive activist groups which met shortly after Obama’s re-election. See if you can spot the disconnect:
At the end of the day, many of the attendees closed with a pledge of money and staff resources to build a national, coordinated campaign around three goals: getting big money out of politics, expanding the voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, and rewriting Senate rules to curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation. The groups in attendance pledged a total of millions of dollars and dozens of organizers to form a united front on these issues—potentially, a coalition of a kind rarely seen in liberal politics, where squabbling is common and a stay-in-your-lane attitude often prevails. “It was so exciting,” says Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director. “We weren’t just wringing our hands about the Koch brothers. We were saying, ‘I’ll put in this amount of dollars and this many organizers.'”
The liberal activists have dubbed this effort the Democracy Initiative. The campaign, Brune says, has since been attracting other members—and also interest from foundations looking to give money—because many groups on the left believe they can’t accomplish their own goals without winning reforms on the Initiative’s three issues. “This isn’t an optional activity for us,” Brune tells me. “It is mission critical.”
Progressive Activists: spending fuck-tons of cash in politics to ensure that no one else can.
Fucking hypocrites.
Comments Off on Hypocrisy Writ Large :: Share or discuss :: 2013-01-09 :: madlibertarianguy
Wednesday 9 January 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
Green fuel is a panacea of green activists. They can’t get enough of the shit regardless of the consequences of using it. For them, it’s all about protecting the earth, but in reality supporting it with government subsidy kills people. Unfortunately for Guatemalans, ethanol cannot be competitive in the marketplace without a subsidy. Investors.com:
At what point does environmental zeal descend into inhumane policy? Try the ethanol mandate, which is now creating a wave of state-sponsored hunger in poor countries like Guatemala as food is diverted to fuel.
In a buried item in Saturday’s New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal reported that growing demand for biofuels in the U.S. is having a catastrophic impact on the small poor nations south of our border, such as Guatemala.
The problem is not the usual suspect of the past — local socialist policies — but the socialism going on up north called the ethanol mandate, which has resulted in 44% of U.S. corn crops getting burned as fuel.
That may sound good to a U.S. environmentalist, given that ethanol has been marketed as a “green” energy, but to a tiny nation like Guatemala, it’s a disaster.
There’s nothing wrong with importing food, of course, so long as a nation moves on to more productive competitive advantages. But there was never any time for that to happen. The imposition of the Renewable Fuel Act of 2007 came right after the 2005 Central American Free Trade Agreement. Cheap, subsidized corn rolled in from the U.S., displacing local farmers, and then prices shot up with the ethanol mandate. That law requires one-tenth of all U.S. gasoline to contain corn-based ethanol, offering distorted incentives to U.S. farmers to sell their corn at subsidized prices, leaving less for food.
The mandate has diverted so much corn to fuel, it’s cut into the amount of corn available for exports. Corn exports have fallen nearly 50% since 2007, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.
As a result, corn prices have soared as much as 100% for Guatemalans, making corn not just expensive but out of reach for the impoverished population, which spends two-thirds of its money to buy food. The Times reported that half of Guatemalan children are malnourished.
When you support paying farmers to grow corn specifically for the purpose of putting it in fuel so that you can feel better about your energy choices, and the end result is poor people dying of starvation and suffering with severe malnutrition, you are fucked up.
Comments Off on Environmental Policies that Kill :: Share or discuss :: 2013-01-09 :: madlibertarianguy
Tuesday 8 January 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
It seems pretty clear that Obama lives in la la land. The Wall Street Journal:
What stunned House Speaker John Boehner more than anything else during his prolonged closed-door budget negotiations with Barack Obama was this revelation: “At one point several weeks ago,” Mr. Boehner says, “the president said to me, ‘We don’t have a spending problem.’ ”
[…]
The president’s insistence that Washington doesn’t have a spending problem, Mr. Boehner says, is predicated on the belief that massive federal deficits stem from what Mr. Obama called “a health-care problem.” Mr. Boehner says that after he recovered from his astonishment—”They blame all of the fiscal woes on our health-care system”—he replied: “Clearly we have a health-care problem, which is about to get worse with ObamaCare. But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem.” He repeated this message so often, he says, that toward the end of the negotiations, the president became irritated and said: “I’m getting tired of hearing you say that.”
Wow. How one, much less the one in charge, can look at a federal budget that has more than doubled in less than 10 years and still insist that we don’t have a spending problem, and that we simply can’t afford to cut any part of the budget because we’re already in a cycle of severe austerity is beyond me. My kindergartner can tell you that when you spend significantly more than you take in, you have a spending problem, but the president of the land can’t?
We. Are. Fucked.
Comments Off on La La Land :: Share or discuss :: 2013-01-08 :: madlibertarianguy
Tuesday 8 January 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
From the DC affiliate of CBS:
Annual FBI crime statistics show that more people are killed with clubs and hammers each year than by rifles or shotguns.
In 2011, there were 323 murders committed with a rifle but 496 murders committed with hammers and clubs. There were 356 murders in which a shotgun was the deadly weapon of choice.
Clearly we need to ban hammers.
Comments Off on Clearly We Need to Ban Hammers :: Share or discuss :: 2013-01-08 :: madlibertarianguy
Tuesday 8 January 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
Hey! Dumbfuck Obama voters! What did you expect was going to happen when you elected a guy who’s number one priority was to raise taxes?
With President Obama back in office and his life-saving “fiscal cliff” bill jammed through Congress, the new year has brought a surprising turn of events for his sycophantic supporters.
“What happened that my Social Security withholding’s in my paycheck just went up?” a poster wrote on the liberal site DemocraticUnderground.com. “My paycheck just went down by an amount that I don’t feel comfortable with. I guarantee this decrease is gonna’ hurt me more than the increase in income taxes will hurt those making over 400 grand. What happened?”
Shocker. Democrats who supported the president’s re-election just had NO idea that his steadfast pledge to raise taxes meant that he was really going to raise taxes. They thought he planned to just hit those filthy “1 percenters,” you know, the ones who earned fortunes through their inventiveness and hard work. They thought the free ride would continue forever.
If you want big government, you have to pay for big government. I hope you’re happy with your smaller paycheck, because you’re the ones who asked for it.
Comments Off on What Did you Expect? :: Share or discuss :: 2013-01-08 :: madlibertarianguy