Here’s something oddly frightening: did you know that The Prohibition Party still exists? That’s right: there are people so out of touch that, despite what happened from 1919 to 1933 and what’s happening now with the “drug war,” they honestly believe that making alcohol illegal is a good idea.
The website is pretty priceless (animated gifs! lulz), and includes links like “See what the Bible has to say” (warning: immediate sound, like it’s 1997 or something). There’s another site, marginally more professional looking, at prohibitionists.org; it contains a veritable wealth of information about what kind of crazies still live, work, and vote in this country. You know, just in case you hadn’t seen Fox News lately and had forgotten.
Time Magazine produces a simple poll:
I post this without comment, so that you can admire it and draw your own conclusions. (Blatantly stolen from Matthew Yglesias.)
Here’s a lengthy commentary on the state of the “drug war,” why it’s always been doomed to failure, and why the administration is legally prevented from even discussing stopping it. Interesting fact:
Since 1998, the ONDCP has spent $1.4 billion on youth anti-pot ads. It also spent $43 million to study their effectiveness. When the study found that kids who’ve seen the ads are more likely to smoke pot, the ONDCP buried the evidence, choosing to spend hundreds of millions more on the counterproductive ads.
People sometimes ask me, “Hey, didn’t you use to be a Libertarian? What happened with that?” (Okay, nobody asks me that. Anybody who knows I once subscribed to Libertarian principles is probably unaware I’ve changed. So I should probably say: I no longer consider myself a Libertarian, but a Liberal, albeit with certain caveats, such as the fact that I think people should still be allowed to pack heat.)
This article taking Governor Palin to task on cap-and-trade doesn’t really have much to do with Libertarianism, except for one excerpt:
My decision to drive creates traffic that imposes a cost on society. A company’s decision to fish in the ocean imposes a cost on the world’s common stock of fisheries. A banker’s decision to take on a huge amount of risk creates danger for the economy as a whole. The problem is that none of these private actors adequately bears the cost of their decisions.
(Italics mine.)
The short version of why I no longer consider myself to be Libertarian is that “Every man for himself” doesn’t seem like particularly good public policy.
I think Sarah Palin took this straight out of Tex Winter‘s playbook. Tommy Craggs on Gov. Palin’s Full Court Press:
How can the Southern Baptist Convention still call itself a Christian organization? Bigoted idiots.
The Southern Baptist Convention has broken its 127-year-old ties with a Fort Worth Baptist church because the SBC views its stand on homosexuality as too lenient, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Baptist Press report.
This, among other reasons, is why anyone who purports to be a “Christian” needs to answer one question: what is your church’s stance on homosexuality?
Oh, Sarah Palin. Will you never go away? Todd Purdum on the subject. Here are a couple amusing parts:
But there were ominous signs—indications of an erratic nature. This is the third thing McCain could have discovered about Palin—a woman, after all, who kept a pregnancy secret for seven months, flew all the way home from Texas to Alaska with a near-full-term baby while leaking amniotic fluid, and then finally drove the 45 minutes from Anchorage to a hospital in Wasilla, all so that the child could be born in the 49th state.
And:
When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”
Um…
whoa.
For those of you who are, like me, “Pro-Mo,” I need you to sign the petition to keep Lt. Dan Choi from being kicked out of the army for being gay. Particularly since the Obama administration has its collective thumb in its butt, waiting for some kind of magical fairy to give them permission to rescind discriminatory policies. And no fairies are likely to show up because they keep kicking them out of the military.
That is all.
