The Obama-Biden Transition team has come around for Round 2 of Open Questions at change.gov. Which drug policy question will they dodge this time?
UPDATE: I just submitted a variation of my question from the last post. You can find it by searching for “challenge that decision”.
UPDATE 2: In related news, thank God for Senator Webb.
I do think Web is on the right track. We’ve long gone beyond the point where adding beat cops to the streats results in any greater public safety, because our prison system can’t accomodate the numbers already arrested, and prisons themselves haven’t been shown to have a causal relationship towards solving the problem, other than “warehousing” (primarily) young men until they are deemed to be too old to be inclined toward violent behavior.
I think we need to prioritize who needs to be punished, and how. Prison sentences should be relatively short but unpleasant experiences which actually serve as a deterrent. I’m not talking about torture or beatings – but the prison experience should be considerably less pleasant than life on the outside, including work to pay for the basics of life (food, shelter, etc.). The length of sentences should generally be six months to two years, except for the most heinious offences),
@1
Absolutely, and I’ve read Webb’s book where he mentions a lot of the same things. He seems to have an understanding of the problem (or at least a willingness to say it out loud) that hardly anyone else in Congress has.
The first thing we need to do is start dismantling mandatory minimums for all drug crimes. That’s been the heart of our prison overcrowding problem, because the person who gets arrested for selling drugs quickly has someone else stepping up to fill their shoes in the supply chain after they’re locked up. It’s a continual flow of people heading into jail. The same cannot said for other crimes.
Alert readers have noted lots of pistolero posturing at HA. Rabbit started it with a MuGuffey primer on guns ‘n’ ammo. Steve preened about busting caps in furry woodland creatures and shooting wads in furry farm animals.
Then a hateful troll, explaining that your liberal First Amendment stops where his conservative Second Amendment begins, implied that Olympia Christianists should get heeled and throw down on whiney atheists and uppity gays. What you didn’t hear at HA or in the Real America was a pistol-packing conservative Real American (and conservatives are firepower by definition) moving to Canada.
November 2004? Much handwringing and bedwetting at The Stranger. After slandering my gun-rack homeland as ‘the shithole of Wyoming,’ the Strangers started to whimper: stay or go? Do a liberal Okie caravan outta George W. Jesusland and go straight to BC? Where the bud is? Or wait for impeachment?
November 2008? Magesterial silence from us conservative troll Real Americans. That’s because we’ve got the guns, most of ’em. If you Obamaniacs don’t solve everything in about four weeks, we’re sending you to Canada. Right after we get the drop on Rabbit and Steve. They managed to beat the background checks, but that’s all the slack they get.
@3: Are you as big a moron as you seem?
First, after 8 years of Bush destroying the economy and the ability of the average working Joe to make ends meet – most thinking people realize that it will take a while to turn this titanic mess of an economy around.
Second, with the largest vote margin in history by a non-incumbent, most Americans want the change that Obama is proposing.
Third, no wimps like you are sending anyone to Canada – the adults are in charge. If you want to leave and get national health care with our neighbors up north, be my guest but don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
Go ahead, take on the police and the national guard and the constitution that you don’t respect, I dare you. Take your fake little gun and get the hell out of my country, you wimp! You and your ilk are all hat, no guts anyways.
@3 “Right after we get the drop on Rabbit and Steve.”
Delusional.
Would you believe, magisterial.
Chill, @4. You’re taking yourself way too seriously. Pop a few or a few dozen tomorrow night, go out to Wade’s on Saturday so you’ll be ready for the GAU riots, and you’ll be so self-actualized you can’t be pushed around by mere conservatives or anyone else.
A handgun’s even more helpful than Viagra for your condition, and you need all the help you can get.
And kisses to you, Steve darling.
In case you missed it (and missed me) …
Editor, New York Times:
Paul Krugman asserts that no “modern American president” would repeat Herbert Hoover’s 1932 blunder of trying to balance the federal budget during a depression.
In 1933 modern American president Franklin Roosevelt, making good on a 1932 pledge, balanced the budget and cut Hoover’s unbalanced proto-Keynesian spending by 31 percent. Jonathan Alter notes that FDR quickly reprised Hoover-era deficits, but reconfigured them as off-budget emergency spending. Liberal Brookings Institution observed that a fleeting period of New Deal recovery, attributed to Keynesian off-budget deficit spending, actually correlated with those years when the twin towers of New Deal industrial policy and agricultural policy were invalidated by the Supreme Court.
Some scholars write that Roosevelt’s reversion to balanced budget orthodoxy in 1937, during a depression, created the double-dip Roosevelt Recession that continued until World War II.
(signed) moi
Of course it all depends on what the meaning of modern is. Maybe FDR, like BO, is post-modern, in which case Krugman gets to keep his Nobel.
Kudos to the OP for bringing up the issue of prison reform, which should be a much bigger issue.
I think historians will look back at our record levels of human imprisonment the same way we now look back at slavery. Not to mention the issue of prison rape, which amounts to a defacto national policy of sexual torture. We are not going to score points with future historians there either.