Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2016 4:53 pm
And let's not forget this is on the heels of a member of SCOTUS whose funeral he also skipped.
I think that was the funeral where someone in the press corps asked the white house press secretary if Obama would be golfing the day of the funeral, and there was no comment.Leisher wrote:And let's not forget this is on the heels of a member of SCOTUS whose funeral he also skipped.
Leisher wrote:And let's not forget this is on the heels of a member of SCOTUS whose funeral he also skipped.
There’s not substantial historic precedent for presidents attending the funerals of sitting justices. President George W. Bush not only attended, but also eulogized Supreme Court chief justice and fellow conservative William Rehnquist in 2005. But before him, the last justice to die in office was Robert H. Jackson in 1954.
But the president warned that America had already accepted that law enforcement can “rifle through your underwear” in searches for those suspected of preying on children, and he said there was no reason that a person’s digital information should be treated differently.
...it'll be less effective than "Just Say No".
The presidency of Ronald Reagan marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks to his unprecedented expansion of the drug war. The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997.
Public concern about illicit drug use built throughout the 1980s, largely due to media portrayals of people addicted to the smokeable form of cocaine dubbed “crack.” Soon after Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, his wife, Nancy Reagan, began a highly-publicized anti-drug campaign, coining the slogan "Just Say No."
This set the stage for the zero tolerance policies implemented in the mid-to-late 1980s. Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, who believed that “casual drug users should be taken out and shot,” founded the DARE drug education program, which was quickly adopted nationwide despite the lack of evidence of its effectiveness. The increasingly harsh drug policies also blocked the expansion of syringe access programs and other harm reduction policies to reduce the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS.
In the late 1980s, a political hysteria about drugs led to the passage of draconian penalties in Congress and state legislatures that rapidly increased the prison population.
Leisher wrote:You like drugs.
We get it.
The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997.
But again harmless in itself.
In more than one in six cases, or 129,825 times, government searchers said they came up empty-handed last year. Such cases contributed to an alarming measurement: People who asked for records under the law received censored files or nothing in 77 percent of requests, also a record.
In terms of government spending, that's practically the definition of harmless.Malcolm wrote:The millions of dollars wasted on that horseshit may as well have been thrown into a volcano.But again harmless in itself.
Then there's the bloating of the prison system, which has cost untold billions in terms of direct cash, lives, and time. The country still follows an extremely cell-happy judicial philosophy.TPRJones wrote:In terms of government spending, that's practically the definition of harmless.Malcolm wrote:The millions of dollars wasted on that horseshit may as well have been thrown into a volcano.But again harmless in itself.
Obamacare insurance premiums will leap 6 percent a year over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office said Thursday — growing faster than the costs of private insurance as insurers try to calibrate their plans for the new health marketplace.