Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
from none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies
who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
Sir Richard Francis Burton
Holder, the Drug Prohibition, and Mandatory Sentences
I have a nuanced position on Holder's announced policy to use discretion not to prosecute low-level individuals not tied to certain drug vendor organizations (drug cartels, gangs, etc.) for offenses with stiff mandatory sentences. (Let me be clear that I think taking drugs is a stupid way to abuse one's body, but I worry more about the direct and collateral damages of the war on drugs, including a global leading incarceration rate, expensive, overcrowded prisons, the opportunity costs of expensive law enforcement, correlated crime and violence, people trying to rebuild their lives with a criminal record, etc.). The concern I have is that I don't like the Obama Administration abusing discretion to make policy (think, for instance, of the politicization of INS policy) when they disagree with the enforcement of laws. I consider that the province of the legislative function to pass relevant reforms. What we need is comprehensive reform of prison and drug prohibition law, not lawlessness, violating the rule of law: pick and choose prosecution.
Senate Majority Leader Reid Earns Another JOTY Nomination
“It’s been obvious that [GOP Congressmen are] doing everything they can to make him [Obama] fail,” Reid said. “And I hope, I hope — and I say this seriously — I hope that’s based on the substance and not the fact that he’s African-American.”Playing the race card, you piece of work? The reasons the GOP opposes Obama's partisan agenda are the same reasons that they opposed the same policies before Obama got elected to the US Senate. And Reid knows it.
Reid had more garbage to swill:
The Senate Majority Leader also called the Tea Party “modern-day anarchists". But he stressed the Tea Party doesn’t resort to violence like the anarchists of World War I, choosing instead to thwart government from within. “They do not believe in government,” he said. “Anytime anything bad happens to government, that’s a victory to them. And that’s what’s happened. We have absolute gridlock created by a group of people who represent few Americans. But it makes it extremely difficult to get things done.”No, the Tea Party is not responsible for decades of failed domestic policy, for creating dependency on government handouts versus personal initiative, for putting government workers above taxpayers, for noncompetitive, monopolistic practices, for mediocre public education, for the largest public debt in world history, for setting conditions for malinvestment in the economy, etc.
The Tea Party and libertarians do believe in government that protects individual rights and provides a common defense; Reid, of course, confuses unchecked centralized Big Government with the concept of government. We have gridlock because Obama, Reid, and Pelosi and their cohorts are in a state of denial over the need for realistic fiscal policy, confronting unfunded liabilities, the need for scaled-back foreign policy, and restoration of individual liberties, including economic liberty and an unobtrusive government that recognizes its own legitimacy is based on a reduced set of core competencies. The size of the pro-liberty contingent in Congress is not relevant to its moral legitimacy and certitude; nevertheless, Reid's disingenuous rhetoric is disproved by the public record; we could not stop the unconstitutional Patriot Act from being renewed, we could not get the Congress to address the fact that Obama has acted illegally in north African and Middle East intervention, he is unconstitutionally bombing nations (like Pakistan and Yemen) with which we are not at war, and he has refused to acknowledge that the recent Egyptian coup requires, by law, cutoff of Egyptian aid.
Stop-and-Frisk Declared Unconstitutional: Thumbs UP!
I am getting tired of the media's obsession with race-based politics, i.e., racial profiling. The issue has to do with the unconstitutional abuse of police discretion; if there is no probable cause to search a person, period, I don't care if it's a green Martian, a glasses-wearing nerd wearing a pocket protector, or an obese man wearing a polka dot tie, it shouldn't be done. Search by intuition or a police officer's personal worldview violates the concept of the rule of law.
Let's Stop the Madness of Foreign Aid
Charles V. Peña does a good job reviewing the insanity of our funding foreign governments often acting against our policies and principles. Here's a telling excerpt:
The United States lavishes about $50 billion annually in economic and military assistance on other countries around the world....What do Angola, Cambodia, Chad, Haiti, Laos, Somalia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Yemen and Zimbabwe have in common? They all receive U.S. foreign aid and, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, boast some of the most corrupt governments in the world—strong-arm governments in most cases...Egypt is a clarion call to stop throwing good money after bad.Follow-Up Odds and Ends
For anyone not familiar with the story of Baby Veronica's case, an adoption case reaching SCOTUS, see my earlier rant. I'll summarize salient elements here: the Congress in the 1970's was concerned about a significant adoption rate of Indian (Native American) children raised on reservations by non-Indian couples and essentially gave Indian tribes a legal trump card in relevant adoption cases they could use to preserve their population and culture. In the case of Baby Veronica, her biological father, who has a modest amount of Indian blood by ancestry (less than 5%), apparently enough to register as a Cherokee, and was never brought up on a reservation, was engaged to a Latina; the father refused to support the pregnancy or Veronica until if and when they got married, and the fiancee eventually broke off the engagement. He was willing to give away paternal rights, assuming his former fiancee held custody of their daughter.
The woman decided that the best interests of her daughter was to place her with a more financially able couple in South Carolina. The biological father, who had failed to provide a single cent of support for Veronica, quickly reneged on signing over his paternal rights; under South Carolina law, his failure to support his daughter would have been enough to allow the adoption to proceed. But in desperation he seized on his nominal status as a Cherokee--and, incredulously, the tribe's lawyers agreed to back this piece of work--to stop the adoption. The state courts bowed to the principle of federal supremacy, and 2-year-old Veronica was taken from her adoptive parents' home and handed over to deadbeat Dad, while the parents threw a Hail Mary pass appeal to SCOTUS, which agreed to take the case.
The national media has distorted this case; as a clear example, note that the update CBS story I'm referencing specifically calls Veronica a Cherokee Indian girl in its headline. I believe that Veronica is 1.2% Cherokee by blood; this means that Obama, whose mother was white, is more than 40 times more white than Veronica is Indian, and when's the last time you heard Obama referred to as an American white man? Does the mainstream media have any shame?
In any event, the case was handed back to South Carolina, and Family Court Judge Daniel Martin recently finalized the adoption (the biological father Dusten Brown failed to get SCOTUS to stop the adoption) and as part of the transition process was to reintroduce Veronica to her adoptive parents just over a week ago; Brown did not show up with Veronica. The father is not cooperating with the judge's order and has been on National Guard training duty, while Brown's wife and relatives are holding onto the child in Oklahoma, despite court orders. There is now an arrest warrant for Brown for custodial interference, and according to the latter report, he has been relieved of training duty and is to return to Oklahoma to comply with court orders.
The sympathetic treatment of Brown by the media and the morally outrageous statements by Cherokee lawyers in the report (wanting to wrap Brown behind the flag and national service) have me personally seething. The adoptive parents comply with an unjust law and rulings and give up 2-year-old Veronica, but this piece of work refuses to abide by the law, deeming 3-year-old Veronica would be traumatized by returning her to the only parents she's ever known? How pathetic is this? Any kidnapper could say the same thing. As if a deadbeat father's wishes are more equal than Veronica's birth mother's wishes...
Speaking of the birth mother, we have the following excerpt:
Meanwhile, Maldonado, the girl's biological mother, is pursuing a lawsuit against the federal government, arguing that the Indian Child Welfare Act is unconstitutional on the basis that it uses race to determine custody in violation of equal-protection laws.It's not only race--it's that some racial/ethic blood traces are more equal, out of context to a child's overall heritage. This whole thing is a perversion of the very nature of the original law: Veronica was not born and raised on a reservation to an Indian couple. It subordinates the best interests of the child to an incidental fact of her ancestors. Conceptually, Maldonado is spot on: if the US justice system is principled, it will agree, but I don't hold a lot of hope for the Obama Administration and appointed judges to go beyond politically correct groupthink. After all, Obama's two feminist SCOTUS justices ruled against the original adoption; a lot of the fawning CBS coverage sounds like what I would characterize as Sotomayor's pro-kidnapper rationale. The law ripped this girl from the loving arms of her adoptive parents.
I don't have a dog in this fight--except I love kids and God has never blessed me with a child of my own, and I've never adopted a child. But I would expect, perhaps naively, our justice system to have at least the wisdom of Solomon. Veronica's mother knew that the best she could do for her daughter was to let her be raised by two loving, financially able parents; Veronica's father didn't want to support her and was willing to let her be raised by a struggling single parent. What do you think would have been the judgment of Solomon?
Kid Praying to The One...Disturbing on So Many Levels: Thumbs DOWN!
Isn't it about time to stop the madness of marketing political propaganda to young children?
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Michael Ramirez and Townhall |
The Beatles, "Ballad of John and Yoko"
