Barack Obama is Hammond's disgusting picture

Living in South Carolina, this is particularly poignant for me:

"Are we prepared to see them mingling in our Legislatures? Is any portion of this country prepared to see them enter these halls and take their seats by our sides, in perfect equality with the white representatives of an Anglo Saxon race ... to see them placed at the heads of your Departments; or to see, perhaps, some 'Othello' or 'Toussaint' or 'Boyer' gifted with genius and inspired by ambition grasp the presidential wreath, and wield the destinies of this great Republic? From such a picture I turn with irrepressible disgust."

Well, it took 172 years, but an African-American with a name a lot more exotic than Othello or Toussaint did indeed become president of these United States. And it was particularly tin-eared, historically speaking, for a member of that self-same South Carolina delegation to hector Barack Obama at last year's State of the Union address. In truth, James Henry Hammond's racist diatribe was milder than those by other Southern "statesmen" who stirred hate and fear among their countrymen in the days leading up to the Civil War.

Jefferson Davis, in a speech to the Confederate Congress in April 1861, extolled slavery as a benevolent invention that allowed a "superior race" to transform "brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers." Alexander H. Stephens, Jefferson Davis' vice president, proclaimed that Jefferson and the Founders' high-minded declarations of universal liberty were "in violation of the laws of nature." This was profoundly wrong, Stephens said.

"Our new government is founded on exactly the opposite idea," thundered the vice president of the Confederacy. "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition."

The South will never rise again (thank Jesus). And it has instead continued to decline.

Bauer is a dolt

The comparison of SC's poor to "stray animals" by SC Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer is old news.  It may be what earned him only 12% of the vote in the gubenatorial primary here despite his huge name recognition advantage.  But in looking back at something else he said at the same meeting as the now-infamous remarks, I genuinely wonder how people this dumb gain so much power and influence:

Bauer went on, and he claimed, "I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina," adding, "You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I'll show you the worst test scores, folks. It's there, period."

Let's leave aside for the moment the politics of this statement.  Bauer is right:  the painfully obvious fact is that poverty is correlated to poorer educational outcomes.  But he's an idiot in the way he links them:  the correlation between poverty and low test scores is not caused by allowing poor children to receive free lunch.  It's one thing to not have an IQ of 140, and quite another to be so completely clueless about the logical fallacy being committed here (cum hoc ergo propter hoc).

How anyone could graduate from college -- just a USC business bachelor's degree, but still -- and display this stunning a lack of critical thinking skills is amazing.  How that same person could go on to be the second most powerful person in state government is criminal.

SC Republican Joe Wilson is an idiot and a liar

For shouting, "You lie!" during the President's speech after Obama's claim that the bills will specifically exclude coverage for illegals, Wilson proves himself both an idiot and a liar:

• CNN Fact Check
• Factcheck.org
• AP Factcheck
• Denver Post
• Newsweek
  
• ...&c.

Let's kick the loser out on his can in 2010. Elect Rob Miller.

The failure of the "War on Drugs" redux

I've said it before (and here), but Nicholas Kristof says it better:

June 14, 2009
Drugs Won the War
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

This year marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.

“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

For that reason, he favors legalization of drugs, perhaps by the equivalent of state liquor stores or registered pharmacists. Other experts favor keeping drug production and sales illegal but decriminalizing possession, as some foreign countries have done.

Here in the United States, four decades of drug war have had three consequences:

First, we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in prisons. The United States now incarcerates people at a rate nearly five times the world average. In part, that’s because the number of people in prison for drug offenses rose roughly from 41,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today. Until the war on drugs, our incarceration rate was roughly the same as that of other countries.

Second, we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad. One reason many prominent economists have favored easing drug laws is that interdiction raises prices, which increases profit margins for everyone, from the Latin drug cartels to the Taliban. Former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia this year jointly implored the United States to adopt a new approach to narcotics, based on the public health campaign against tobacco.

Third, we have squandered resources. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, found that federal, state and local governments spend $44.1 billion annually enforcing drug prohibitions. We spend seven times as much on drug interdiction, policing and imprisonment as on treatment. (Of people with drug problems in state prisons, only 14 percent get treatment.)

I’ve seen lives destroyed by drugs, and many neighbors in my hometown of Yamhill, Oregon, have had their lives ripped apart by crystal meth. Yet I find people like Mr. Stamper persuasive when they argue that if our aim is to reduce the influence of harmful drugs, we can do better.

Mr. Stamper is active in Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, an organization of police officers, prosecutors, judges and citizens who favor a dramatic liberalization of American drug laws. He said he gradually became disillusioned with the drug war, beginning in 1967 when he was a young beat officer in San Diego.

“I had arrested a 19-year-old, in his own home, for possession of marijuana,” he recalled. “I literally broke down the door, on the basis of probable cause. I took him to jail on a felony charge.” The arrest and related paperwork took several hours, and Mr. Stamper suddenly had an “aha!” moment: “I could be doing real police work.”

It’s now broadly acknowledged that the drug war approach has failed. President Obama’s new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, told the Wall Street Journal that he wants to banish the war on drugs phraseology, while shifting more toward treatment over imprisonment.

The stakes are huge, the uncertainties great, and there’s a genuine risk that liberalizing drug laws might lead to an increase in use and in addiction. But the evidence suggests that such a risk is small. After all, cocaine was used at only one-fifth of current levels when it was legal in the United States before 1914. And those states that have decriminalized marijuana possession have not seen surging consumption.

“I don’t see any big downside to marijuana decriminalization,” said Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland who has been skeptical of some of the arguments of the legalization camp. At most, he said, there would be only a modest increase in usage.

Moving forward, we need to be less ideological and more empirical in figuring out what works in combating America’s drug problem. One approach would be for a state or two to experiment with legalization of marijuana, allowing it to be sold by licensed pharmacists, while measuring the impact on usage and crime.

I’m not the only one who is rethinking these issues. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia has sponsored legislation to create a presidential commission to examine various elements of the criminal justice system, including drug policy. So far 28 senators have co-sponsored the legislation, and Mr. Webb says that Mr. Obama has been supportive of the idea as well.

“Our nation’s broken drug policies are just one reason why we must re-examine the entire criminal justice system,” Mr. Webb says. That’s a brave position for a politician, and it’s the kind of leadership that we need as we grope toward a more effective strategy against narcotics in America

Also, two idiot Republican racists deserve mention today in South Carolina -- Trey Walker calls a gorilla Michelle Obama's "ancestor" and Mike Green says Obama will tax aspirin because "it's white and it works". Am I surprised? Nope.