A little triage: New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson signed a bill to repeal the state’s death penalty. And California Representative Maxine Waters has introduced a bill to end mandatory minimum sentencing for Federal drug offenses.
The Daily Cuts:
152. Eminent domain abuse continues four years after Kelo, but some folks are fighting back. More here from reason‘s coverage of eminent domain issues.
153. It’s just no fun being a teenager in Texas.
154. New York state bureaucrats treat “direct-to-consumer” genomics firms as laboratories, burdening them with needless regulations.
155. Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton is my new folk hero. He decided to check out of this world on his own, rather than have the Feds put him in prison for the unpardonable crime of distilling his own moonshine. His tombstone reads “POPCORN SAID FUCK YOU”. Here’s to you, Popcorn.
156. Warren Meyer over at Coyote Blog presents this easy-to-follow checklist on how to start a business . . . in Alabama. The other 49 states may be different.
157. Congress shovels $182.5 billion dollars into the AIG furnace, then heroically recovers 0.09% of it for taxpayers.
Attorney General Eric Holder has clarified the new administration’s medical marijuana policy (see #145) by stating that the DEA will only go after pot dealers who violate both state and Federal law; i.e., anyone not sanctioned by a state where medical marijuana is legal. So dispensaries in California and patients in Colorado with cultivation licenses should be safe from the Feds, but not illicit dealers. It’s still not clear what this means for cases already pending in Federal courts, so it may not save Charlie Lynch, who was a licensed medical marijuana dealer in California but was tried and convicted on Federal charges, from a lengthy prison term. And it does nothing to address the fundamentally broken drug policies at the Federal level.
On to the Daily Cuts:
148. After a six-year battle with the Feds over obscenity charges, two porn film entrepreneurs plead guilty to reduced charges, earning them up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, a far cry from the five decades they faced on the original indictment. As Jacob Sullum points out, the prosecutor, U. S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, “seems to be a sincere moral crusader and therefore a public menace”.
149. Even though members of their own party seem lukewarm on the idea, it appears that the Obama administration still doesn’t have enough on its plate, and wants to add a revival of the Federal assault weapons ban. This time it’s not for the children, but for the poor Mexicans caught in the crossfire of a vicious drug war. Of course, if we Americans would just stop being such loser dope fiends, we wouldn’t need a drug war in the first place.
150. A Congresswoman from Ohio introduces a real clunker of a bill: $5,000 for any car you can drag to a dealership, to be applied towards the purchase of a new car. Of course the automakers are supportive of this boondoggle.
151. Comic relief: What, would you rather have the cops kicking in your door?
143. Homer, Louisiana police chief Russell Mills, after one of his officers shot and killed a 73-year-old mute black man:
“If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names,” said Mills, who is white. “I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested.
“We’re not out there trying to abuse and harass people — we’re trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear.”
Oh, but abusing and harassing black people—that’s just good police work. I guess we should at least thank Mills for the tacit admission that cops engage in racial profiling.
144. Another drug raid gone wrong, this time resulting in an unarmed Michigan college student getting shot by a cop. For what? The police are tight-lipped so far. But apparently the victim’s Facebook page is filled with drug references, so he must have been a dope-dealing punk, right?
145. President Barack Obama didn’t immediately make good on his campaign promise to end DEA raids on medical marijuana facilities, but eventually Attorney General Eric Holder directed Justice to call off the dogs. At one point the U. S. Attorney for Los Angeles got the memo—then he didn’t.
146. Jacob Sullum on John Yoo’s disturbing post-9/11 Justice Department memos, which laid out justifications for wholesale curtailments of civil liberties, including suppression of the press:
Yet civil liberties do not mean much if they are abandoned whenever the government thinks it has a good reason to violate them. It is precisely in times of crisis, when politicians are most tempted to take legal shortcuts and the public is most inclined to go along, that constitutional protections are most needed. Although Attorney General Eric Holder claims to understand this, his embrace of Yoo-like rhetoric and reasoning suggests his differences with the former Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer may be a matter more of circumstance than of principle.
147. Comic relief: “Take a number, wait your fucking turn” (uh, NSFW).