Thank goodness somebody on Capitol Hill has finally introduced an intelligent drug legislation bill. Barney Frank and Ron Paul have cosponsored a bill which would end federal penalties for people caught with less than 100 grams of marijuana, which according to CNN is almost 1/4 pound (thanks to them for converting that–I’m the product of public school and couldn’t have done it on my own).

Current laws targeting marijuana users place undue burdens on law enforcement resources, punish ill Americans whose doctors have prescribed the substance and unfairly affect African-Americans, said Frank, flanked by legislators and representatives from advocacy groups.

“The vast amount of human activity ought to be none of the government’s business,” Frank said on Capitol Hill. “I don’t think it is the government’s business to tell you how to spend your leisure time.”

AMEN! It’s legal to drink, but not to drink and drive. Why should marijuana be any different? The fact that many irresponsible drinkers become violent and dangerous actually means that alcohol abuse is far more detrimental to society than the non-violent use of marijuana. However, it’s rare to see anyone calling for all out prohibition on alcohol after prohibition was proven to be such a dismal failure during the 1920s. I still don’t understand how anyone could believe that marijuana prohibition could have a better outcome than alcohol prohibition.

It’s also important to note that the feds, as usual, love to overstep their legal authority by ignoring state laws and the wishes of the majority of voters in the states. And, of course, marijuana prohibition tends to unfairly target blacks.

Frank, who is chairman of the Financial Services Committee, said that about a dozen states have approved some degree of medical marijuana use and that the federal government should stop devoting resources to arresting people who are complying with their states’ laws.

I’ll be following this bill closely. If it has a positive outcome, it will save the American economy trillions of dollars per year in saved court and jail costs as well as the lost productivity of workers who are jailed for non-violent drug offenses. This could be just the boost the American economy needs right now.

Related Posts:

Why Prohibition Doesn’t Work

DEA Intrusion

There comes a time in every society when difficult decisions must be made. That time, for the United States, came in the 20th century when the draft was instituted to ensure that we had enough troops to send into Europe and the Pacific to fight WWII. The draft continued until 1973 when massive social pressures and discontent with the Vietnam War gave the government enough incentive to discontinue involuntary conscription. Although there is no longer a draft in the US, young men are still required to register with the selective services to ensure that they can be called up into slavery if needed to man a new war effort. Those who neglect to register for the selective services are subject to prosecution, up to a $250,000 fine and up to 5 years in prison.

We may be coming upon a time that the US will be forced to make this difficult decision of forced conscription once again as the big government bullies on both sides of the aisle debate the merits of a third war while two are already being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. Children as young as middle school fear that they’ll be drafted straight out of high school to fight wars that they don’t believe in. They’re afraid that they’ll miss the opportunity to go to college, get married and have families of their own because they’ll be sent involuntarily to die in a foreign land in support of political ideals that they don’t support. The following video features a 13 year old boy that I met at the Jefferson County, CO Republican assembly this spring. He brought up the draft of his own accord, and I later asked him about it on camera to record his fears.

To make matters worse, Time Magazine in conjunction with the AARP and Target are sponsoring a lobbying bill to make conscription mandatory in the US. I’m not even going to expound on how ridiculous it is for the AARP to lobby for people 1/4 their age to be forced into military service. However, I’m shocked and appalled that both Time and Target are actually trying to pass legislation forcing our young people to die in a war that they haven’t voluntarily signed up for.

Today the two central acts of democratic citizenship are voting and paying taxes. That’s basically it. The last time we demanded anything else from people was when the draft ended in 1973. And yes, there are libertarians who believe that government asks too much of us — and that the principal right in a democracy is the right to be left alone — but most everyone else bemoans the fact that only about half of us vote and don’t do much more than send in our returns on April 15. The truth is, even the archetype of the model citizen is mostly a myth. Except for times of war and the colonial days, we haven’t been all that energetic about keeping the Republic.

It certainly sounds warm, fuzzy and generally nice to say that we should all join the military and “do something” for society. But what TIME has neglected to mention is that involuntary conscription is equivalent to involuntary servitude, which is expressly prohibited by the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution. In fact, certain state supreme courts have found conscription to be illegal prior to the end of the Civil War, including Pennsylvania.

The fact of the matter is that forcing people who don’t want to serve to go into the military will not make America a better or safer place. Instead, it will breed resentment and effectively make our nation less safe by giving us a military full of people who would rather not serve and planting the seeds for a generation of homegrown terrorists who would rather subvert than submit. I hope to see a boycott of Target stores and massive backlash against TIME Magazine for their support of unconstitutionally drafting our nation’s young men (and women?) to die for an empire that has never done anything for them.

For what it’s worth, Free Talk Live did a nice piece about the insanity of TIME’s lobbying efforts during the first hour of the July 29, 2008 show.

President Bush is so hated that he’s no longer being referred to as the president by the New York Times. This subtle attempt to undermine his authority and stature is long overdue.

Mr. Bush, a supporter of the death penalty, approved the sentence after Private Gray’s case wound its way through the Army’s legal bureaucracy and the military’s courts of appeal. The secretary of the Army sought Mr. Bush’s final approval.

If you’d like to read a series of high-quality book reviews about, well, lots of books, visit Valentine Reindeer’s Book Review Page.  She’s constantly adding reviews about books that she’s read throughout the years, and many of them are libertarian, political and historical works.

There’s also a great social networking site dedicated entirely to books called Good Reads. The basic gist is that you invite your friends, you list the books you’ve read or intend to read, and you rate them so your friends know what books you’d recommend to them. It’s a boatload of fun. Feel free to add me to your friends.

Sure, the government put men on the moon (unless you think they didn’t). But the last several decades have been dismal for NASA with spectacular failures such as the Hubble telescope’s nearsightedness, the metric system debacle and the Challenger and Columbia tragedies. Private enterprise, however, is giving us sub-orbital space tourism, and will undoubtedly increase the scope of operations as the program proves popular and profitable. It’s an interesting concept, involving a “mother ship” and smaller ship, being developed by Virgin.

The mothership is a white, four-engined jet designed to cradle SpaceShipTwo under its wing and release it at 50,000 feet (15,200m) in the air.

Once separated, SpaceShipTwo will fire its hybrid rocket and climb some 60 miles (100km) above the Earth.

Engineers still need to finish building SpaceShipTwo, which is now about 70% complete, according to Virgin Galactic.

I expect to see huge gains in private space exploration within the next two decades and I wouldn’t be surprised to see privatized endeavors overtake NASA as the world’s premier space agencies. The reason that this is likely to occur is simple. Private businesses have profit incentive to make them successful and innovative, whereas NASA can waste billions of dollars (see above) on ridiculous mistakes and never have to answer for it.

As the Olympic games roll around this summer, the Chinese promises of improved human rights in exchange for the privilege of hosting the games appear to have been empty promises. According to the BBC, there have been more crackdowns than usual on activism, including “re-education” at forced labor camps. There have also been accusations of censorship of the internet, even for foreign news reporters covering the Olympics. I guess nobody in China will be reading this.

Four Iowans were arrested on Friday for attempting to arrest Karl Rove.

Des Moines police arrested four people Friday who attempted a citizen’s arrest of former White House adviser Karl Rove.

Rove was in Des Moines to speak at a fundraiser.

A news release says a retired minister and three members of the Des Moines Catholic Workers community were cited for trespassing and released.

The four accused Rove of election fraud and conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States in the time before the Iraq war.

The arrest complaint also says they accused Rove of treason, sedition and subversive activities for fraudulent acts leading to the deaths of 300,000 Iraqi civilians and 4,000 U.S. Military personnel.

Kirk Brown and Mona Shaw, two of the four arrested Friday, attempted a similar arrest last March when Rove spoke at the University of Iowa.

So sad that they were arrested for exercising a basic right in the United States. Citizen’s arrests are legal in all but North Carolina, and this incident took place in Iowa where citizen’s arrests can be performed. Last week, university students in New Zealand offered a reward for anyone who was able to make a citizen’s arrest on Condoleezza Rice.

World opinion (and American opinion, as well) is against the United States. These criminals should be punished for their crimes, but as we’ve seen all too often, it’s only the losers of the war that must answer for their actions.

A new Zogby poll shows that more Americans support the right of states to secede than one might think. The type of individual who believes in the right of states and regions to declare their independence also defies some long held perceptions.

Of the all the participants in the poll, 22% agreed to the statement: “I believe any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic”. Some 73% of respondents disagreed and 5% said they weren’t sure. While I believe that a growing number of Americans are coming to the conclusion that the United States is beyond the hope for reform, there was a surprising twist to this poll. A much higher percentage (44%) of participants than that which agreed with the secession statement agreed that: “I believe the United States’ system is broken and cannot be fixed by traditional two-party politics and elections”.

So it seems that nearly half of Americans believe that some kind of drastic change is needed and that barring something like a major triumph on the part of third parties, the change cannot come about through the current political process. They just aren’t ready to accept the idea that it may be time to allow some states to leave the union yet. I will be interested to see how these numbers change in the coming years. While believing in the right to secede is simply an intellectual statement, most of those who supported the right to leave the union also seemed ready to support such an effort where they lived.

Of all those questioned 18% said that they would support a secessionist movement in their own state. What may surprise many people is that Hispanics and African Americans were each more than twice as likely as whites to support the right to secede. This defies the notion that “states’ rights” are somehow linked with racism or Jim Crow laws. Blacks and Hispanics supported secession by a far greater margin than southern respondents as a whole. Of the Hispanics polled 43% agreed with a right to secede and 40% of African Americans agreed with it. These numbers dwarf southern support, which was only slightly higher than the national average at 26% supporting secession.

While conservatives are supposedly the champions of states’ rights, this study showed that self described liberals are actually more likely to support the right of secession. It could be argued that anger with the Bush administration is the reason for liberal support of secession, but I disagree. There is currently a Democratic majority in the congress, and it appears that Barrack Obama stands a good chance of becoming the president in just a few short months. Liberals must be supporting secession for reasons that extend beyond simple partisanship.

It is a the founding principle of the United States that when the people in a state or region are dissatisfied with their government, they have a right to sever their ties with that government and govern themselves. This right of self determination was not unique to the men who founded the United States. Indeed they spoke in language that made it clear that all men in all times had the same rights to life, liberty, and property. Men also have the right and the obligation to abolish a form of government that threatens these rights and form a new government to better serve the people.

I must say that I have been slow to endorse secession as remedy for the problems faced by the United States, but I have become more and more convinced that the federal government, as it currently exists, has grown so far beyond the limits of the constitution and beyond the ordinary means of reform that secession is an appropriate remedy. Some people would call this sentiment seditious, and in fact it is, but that is not the same as being unpatriotic. George Washington was a patriot because he wanted liberty for his countrymen, but he did not attempt to reform the whole British Empire. Rather he supported the right of his countrymen in Virginia to leave the empire and govern themselves.

It would have been impossible to secure a republican form of government for the entire British Empire, and if one takes a step back and takes an objective view of the difficulty in restoring the constitution of the United States, it is very analogous to reforming the whole British Empire. There is no reason that secession should be violent, but a shadow has been cast over the word by the Civil War and the American Revolution. While in the case of independence for the colonies there may have been no way to avert violence, the civil war could very easily have not been fought. There was not a great outcry for war in the North due to the secession of the South. Many more Americans then believed that states had the right to leave the union. It was only when federal forces refused to leave their Army base in Charleston, South Carolina and the Carolinians fired on a US fort that the war began.

If we reach a point where a state declares its independence from Washington, there is no reason that it will lead to war. Americans must affirm their ability to govern themselves and their right to determine how their government should look. I believe that secession movements may ironically be the most likely thing that would lead the federal government to return to a more constitutional system. When it becomes clear that the people in the individual states feel stifled by federal intervention, the federal government may decide to surrender most of its control over the states rather than loose all of it.

A recent study performed by a San Fransisco physicist proved beyond a reasonable doubt that soldiers suffering from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) have very real changes to their brains. Although it’s not news that war causes PTSD (also known as shell shock when associated with war), the medical community was in awe at the proof of the changes in the physical structure of the brain caused by the after effects of being deployed in a war zone.

The yellow areas, Schuff explained during his presentation at the city’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center, showed where the hippocampus, which plays major roles in short-term memory and emotions, had atrophied. The red swatches marked hyperfusion - increased blood flow - in the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for conflict resolution and decision-making. Compared with a soldier without the affliction, the PTSD brain had lost 5 to 10 percent of its gray matter volume, indicating yet more neuron damage.

I’m betting that if we cared enough to study the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’d find that they too suffer from PTSD and the very real and very unfortunate effects associated with it.

It’s also important to note that a ridiculous number of US troops have been diagnosed with brain injuries ranging from mild to severe. These brain injuries will effect them for the rest of their lives and may play a role in how well these men and women rebound from the stresses of war.

As many as 150,000 troops have been diagnosed with brain injuries, the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force reported last year, but it’s unknown how many suffer from mTBI. Mild brain injuries are less often diagnosed because soldiers often believe getting knocked around is part of the job. But over time, with each successive mild brain injury, the effects can become more severe.

Regardless of your opinion of war or the American troops’ involvement in it, it must be agreed that as a society we have to do better at providing psychological treatment for them to ensure that they can live healthy and productive lives after returning home.

The Second Amendment is now more secure than it was a year ago with the Supreme Court ruling in DC vs. Heller. Sadly the anti gun rights lobby has tried to incite fear that, because this ruling may be used to overturn some of the most draconian gun bans in the United States, it will result in a great increase in gun violence. The fact that Washington DC had both the worst murder rate in the country as well as the most overbearing gun laws seems to escape these people.

Many more states have moved to allow concealed carry of firearms over the last decade, and there is strong evidence which shows a correlation between the introduction of lawful concealed carry and a drop in violent crime. This trend is shown in More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws by John R. Lott. In fact there is a vast body of evidence that suggests violent crime rates are lower in areas of the United States where the average citizen is permitted to defend themselves. While there have been a number of “studies” conducted by anti gun rights groups that suggest the use of firearms for defense is more likely to harm the gun user than protect them there are serious flaws in the methodology used to reach this conclusion.

Some of these studies have looked at the number of gun accidents and instances where a citizen is harmed with their own gun in attempting to defend themselves compared to the number of shootings that are found to be in self defense. In about 90% of the cases where a firearm is used in self defense, the presence or mere mention of a firearm brings an end to the situation with shots being fired. This is something I have witnessed personally. Of the other 10% of cases where shots are fired only a small percentage of those cases result in injury to either party. If the presence of a gun does not deter the aggressor, warning shots usually do. In addition some of the data used in these studies was shown to simply be inaccurate.

There are so many statistics that I could cite to show that, in addition to being a basic human right, the use of firearms for self defense actually reduces violent crime.  I can’t possibly do the issue justice here, but I recommend that anyone who believes that gun control is effective needs to look at the fact sheet put out by Gun Owners of America. They take the time to cite their sources, whereas I find many anti gun groups convey their message based on poorly supported emotional claims.

Some anti gunners argue that high rates of violence in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have nothing to do with the fact that it is very hard for law abiding people to obtain firearms in these jurisdictions. They argue that urban areas will always have higher rates of crime, and sometimes I can’t help but feel that this reference to “urban crime” is sometimes little more than a thinly veiled reference to the ethnic minorities, who make up a high percentage of the inner city population.  It is preposterous to think that people have a higher propensity for violence because they live in a city.

I don’t see gun laws in Los Angeles effectively disarming the gang members in that city. People who are willing to commit murder over territory for drug sales and prostitution are clearly not going to loose sleep over the potential for a firearms charge. However, law abiding parents and business owners in these areas with high gang violence will be dettered from obtaining a firearm to defend their families and businesses if it means potentially going to prison.

I always hear people ask if we really want to be like the “wild west” where people supposedly took the law into their own hands and commonly dueled on the main drag at high noon. Firstly, life in the old west was not actually what you see in a John Wayne film. Secondly, I would argue that the gang violence that exists in a place like LA or DC today is like what you would see in a John Wayne film. This is because of the draconian gun laws, and the fact that they disarm average people, not despite of them. Gun owners are by and large peaceful people who simply want to live quietly and safely with their families. No one I know who owns a gun straps it on and goes out looking for a fight. Quite to the contrary of the wild west argument, criminals quickly become much more shy about attacking innocent people and imposing their “ownership” over neighborhoods through violence and intimidation when citizens can protect themselves.

Gun rights help save lives and protect property every day. Where these rights are respected there are far fewer lives taken by guns. I can only hope that there is meaningful restoration of gun rights in places like Washington DC, so that the residents of these crime stricken areas can have the means to defend themselves. They are, after all, the people who are most likely to be put in a situation where they must defend themselves. Violent crime is always used as an excuse to expand a police state, but allowing private citizens to own guns reduces violent crime far more effectively without infringing on our rights.