“Obama’s Coming For Your Guns!!!!” Sale
Posted on March 12, 2014 in Political Cartoons
Obama’s nonexistent, extrajudicial quest for yer guns: keeping local gun establishments in business for years.
How To Put Our Broken Prisons Back Together
Posted on March 12, 2014 in Articles
The Article: America’s punishment addiction: how to put our broken jails back together by Robert Ferguson in The Guardian.
The Text: In the United States, people can land in prison for life over minor offenses. They can be locked up forever for siphoning gasoline from a truck, shoplifting small items from a department store or attempting to cash a stolen check. Sentences across the United States in the last 30 years have doubled. Roy Lee Clay, for example, received in 2013 a sentence of mandatory punishment of life without parole for refusing to accept a plea bargain of 10 years for trafficking 1kg of heroin. Even the sentencing judge found this “extremely severe and harsh”. The bigger picture: a recent Human Rights Watch report found that the threat of harsh sentences leads 97% of drug defendants to plead guilty rather than exercise their right to a public trial.
Most citizens are shocked when they hear such reports. Federal judge John Gleeson of New York said that the way prosecutors use plea bargaining “coerces guilty pleas and produces sentences so excessively severe they take your breath away”. Federal judge Mark Bennett of Iowa has described the “shocking, jaw-dropping disparity” of prior-conviction enhancements to force a plea bargain in a case.
But these and other shocks mean nothing without a larger shock of recognition: Americans like to punish.
The 16 Best Russian Invasion Of Ukraine Memes
Posted on March 11, 2014 in Images
There is no subject too esoteric for the conventional meme. As Ukraine falls to hell in a handbaskst, delight in these memes. It’s not like you understand the cultural implications of the 1994 Orange Revolution, anyway.
The Republican Party’s Pot Dilemma
Posted on March 11, 2014 in Articles
The Article: The Republican Party’s Pot Dilemma by Molly Ball in The Atlantic.
The Text: Christopher Beach was trying to defend keeping marijuana illegal to a roomful of conservatives, and it was not going well.
When Beach insisted the drug war has not been a complete failure, laughter rippled through the crowd.
When he said governments sometimes have to protect people from themselves, there were groans and boos.
One after another, audience members stood to quibble with his statistics and accuse him of bad faith. As the discussion drew to a close with yet another hostile blast in his direction, Beach mumbled into his microphone, “This is just getting more fun.”
