Mitt Romney: International Man of Mystery

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Obama Will Seek To Scale Back Drug War In Second Term: Report

Nick Wing
Huffington Post

President Barack Obama will take steps to draw down the nation’s decades-long war on drugs if he wins a second term, Marc Ambinder reports Monday in GQ.

Sources close to the White House also told The Huffington Post that the administration is looking at ways that it can reduce barriers to reentering society for those caught up in the drug war, such as a longstanding policy that denies federal financial aid to college students convicted of drug-related offenses, including possession.

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If not drug legalization, what, Mr. President?

By Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald

If President Obama had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. So the president famously said.

And the president’s son would thereby find himself at significantly greater risk of running afoul of the so-called “War on Drugs” than, say, a son of George W. Bush. Depending on what state he lived in, a Trayvon Obama might be 57 times more likely than a Trayvon Bush to be imprisoned on drug charges.

This is not because he would be 57 times more likely to commit a drug crime. To the contrary, white American men commit the vast majority of the nation’s drug crimes, but African-American men do the vast majority of the nation’s drug time. It is a nakedly racial disparity that should leave the U.S. Department of “Justice” embarrassed to call itself by that name.

So it is difficult to be anything but disappointed at President Obama’s recent declaration at a summit in Colombia that “legalization is not the answer” to the international drug problem. The president argued that drug dealers might come to “dominate certain countries if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint.” This dominance, he said, “could be just as corrupting if not more corrupting than the status quo.”

One wonders if the president forgot to engage brain before operating mouth.

Dealers might “dominate certain countries?” Has Obama never heard of Mexico, that country on our southern border where drug dealers operate as a virtual shadow government in some areas? Is he unfamiliar with Colombia — his host nation — where, for years, the government battled a drug cartel brutal and brazen enough to attack the Supreme Court and assassinate the attorney general? That scenario Obama warns against actually came to pass a long time ago.

Similarly, it is a mystery how the manufacture and sale of a legal product could be “just as corrupting if not more corrupting than the status quo.” How could that be, given that there would no longer be a need for drug merchants to bribe judges, politicians and police for protection? What reason is there to believe a legal market in drugs would be any more prone to corruption than the legal markets in cigarettes and alcohol? Or, popcorn and chocolate?

The president’s reasoning is about as sturdy as a cardboard box in a monsoon. Even he must know — who can still deny? — that the drug war has failed. When it comes to quantifying that failure, several numbers are stark and edifying:

Forty-one. That’s how many years the “War” has raged.

Forty million-plus. That’s how many Americans have been arrested.

One trillion-plus. That’s the cost.

Two thousand, eight hundred. That’s the percentage by which drug use has risen.

One-point-three. That’s the percentage of Americans who were drug addicted in 1914.

One-point-three. That’s the percentage of Americans who are drug addicted now.

The numbers come from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of cops, judges, DEA agents and other drug warriors who are demanding an end to the drug war. Their statistics call to mind an old axiom: the definition of crazy is to continue doing the same thing but expecting a different result.

That said, it is not difficult to understand why the president — or anyone — might flinch at the notion of legalizing drugs. It is a big, revolutionary idea, an idea that would change the way things have been done since forever. If someone feels a need to pause before crossing that line, that’s understandable.

But let none of us do as the president did — hide behind a specious argument that offers no solution, no way forward and, most critically, no leadership.

Drug legalization is not the answer? OK, Mr. President, fair enough.

What is?

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Confusion, Irregularities Surround GOP Caucus

8newsnow.com

LAS VEGAS — There are caucus ballots in question in Clark County, but officials won’t say how many. While Mitt Romney has declared victory in Nevada, the question remains who will come in second and third place.

Two things are in question: Ballots that exceed the number of voters and voters who were turned away.

“I think the situation was run abysmally. I think they failed to put out adequate information, obviously. In 10 minutes, there were a lot of people who did not get the word as to how this was going to run,” said GOP voter Dr. John Alexander.

Dr. Alexander went to Palo Verde High School, only to find the doors locked Saturday morning. He remembers running into more than a dozen people also trying to get in.

Clark County says they had dozens of calls like his, but even more ballots are in question. At the Republican Party’s unofficial headquarters, more than a dozen volunteers are still counting ballots. Officials say the number of ballots exceed the number of people who signed in.

They won’t say much about their plans for the ballots in question, but want to use this as a learning experience moving forward.

“We’ll look at this as an opportunity to further educate — what we need to do to avoid this kind of confusion. It’s going to be there for a while. We’re going to evolve,” said Clark County GOP Communications Director Bobbie Haseley.

Haseley says many volunteers didn’t go home until 4 a.m. today. They returned just hours later in several closed door meetings trying to figure out what went wrong. They plan to be at their headquarters as long as it takes to determine a second and third place winner in the caucus.

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Rick Santorum’s fear of freedom

The American Conservative

Those suspicious of Santorum’s commitment to individual rights need look no further than Santorum himself for confirmation. As he told NPR in 2006,

“One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a libertarianish right. … This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.”

Santorum reveals no antipathy toward unfettered state power at all; in his world taxes are tithes, not theft. For the rest of us, his own nephew has a more realistic take in his endorsement of Ron Paul:

“If you want another big-government politician who supports the status quo to run our country, you should vote for my uncle, Rick Santorum. America is based on a strong belief in individual liberty. My uncle’s interventionist policies, both domestic and foreign, stem from his irrational fear of freedom not working.”

Paul’s lead causing panic

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Wednesday, December 21, 2011

A new Iowa State University poll shows that Ron Paul is accelerating away from Mitt Romney in the race to capture the key Republican primary, with the Congressman placed first in front of Newt Gingrich, having captured more of former frontrunner Herman Cain’s supporters than Romney.

“Paul is the first choice of 27.5 percent of 333 likely caucus-goers among the 740 registered Republicans and 200 registered independents contacted by ISU,” reports KRCG.com. “That’s up from 20.4 percent in an ISU/Gazette/KCRG poll in November. He’s followed closely by former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich whose support increased from 4.8 percent to 25.3 percent. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney came in at 17.5 percent, up from 16.3.”

However, despite the campaign’s building momentum, the Republican establishment has gone all out to denigrate Paul’s success, even rhetorically sabotaging the legitimacy of the Iowa primary.

Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, who has been offered a potential VP slot under a Romney administration, ludicrously suggested that voters should completely disregard a Ron Paul victory and instead concentrate on which order Romney and Gingrich finish.

“People are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third,” said Branstad, adding, ““If [Mitt] Romney comes in a strong second, it definitely helps him going into New Hampshire and the other states,” comments taken to mean that Republicans should “ignore” Ron Paul, according to Politico’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.

Despite the fact that two out of the last three winners of the Republican primary in Iowa have gone on to become the GOP nominee, the corporate media has universally written off Paul’s chances in a callous effort to pre-empt reality. They are scared stiff that Paul could establish himself as a national frontrunner, which is a very real possibility given that he has captured a greater than expected number of Herman Cain’s voters, who himself was the national frontrunner before he was forced to drop out after revelations about his private life.

The snobbish, sneering attitude towards Paul that has been cultivated by the establishment has little to do with his chances of winning the overall nomination and everything to do with the guardians of the status quo being terrified of a Ron Paul administration going to war with a corrupt Washington elite.

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Gingrich: free speech should be curtailed to fight terrorism

Former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, caused a stir by proposing that free speech may have to be curtailed in order to fight terrorism.

“We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we’re unfortunate,” Mr. Gingrich said in 2006 during a speech in New Hampshire. “We now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren’t for the scale of the threat.”

That’s right, Mr. Gingrich would DESTROY freedom in America to save it.

He lives, he dies, he lives, he dies

Here’s the most preposterous thing about this story.

After they “killed” him his last time, they took his body and threw it into the sea.

Arguably, the most wanted man in the world and the only proof that he was killed the other day is this:

1. A woman on the scene said it was him

2. The people on the scene said it looked like him

3. DNA tests “conclusively” proved it was him