ACLU Steps Up

I ran into a pollster outside of Powell's Bookstore last fall. He was canvasing for the ACLU. Boy, oh, boy, I've been wanting to talk to someone from the ACLU for a long time. Seems to me that they have been shirking their duty, pursuing namby-pamby issues like voter rights that appeal to the coffee-klatch hostesses in the Bos-Wash suburbs. What they should have been doing is tackling things like the Patriot Act and the incarceration of the mentally ill.
    When I asked the pollster about this, his response was that the ACLU deals with Civil Rights, which confused me. Does that mean they don't deal with criminal issues? Aren't most criminal cases predicated on civil rights?
    Anyway, seems I was wrong. Headline in today's Oregonian:

Judge rules no-fly list infringes on Constitution

Seems the ACLU has been working this case for the last four years. Case was heard in Federal Court in Portland, Oregon, a famously blue state.

P.S. If Democrats are liberals, and liberals are socialists, and socialists are blood-brothers of communists, how did the Democrats become associated with the color blue? I mean communists have been called Reds for forever, but in the modern USA, it is the Republicans, the staunch opponents of anything that even smells of cooperation, who are the Reds. Why is that?

We need a new ACLU

Near as I can tell, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) has become a lapdog for Social Justice Warriors. In other words they are spending their efforts fighting issues that don't matter to most people. To be sure, those issues no doubt mean a great deal to the people who are contributing cash money. That's fine, that's what they want to worry about, I'll let them.

But there are any number of other issues that are more serious and are screwing people over left, right and center. With that many problems you'd think someone would have started an organization to pick up the slack.

There might be one, but evidently I'm not holding my mouth right, because five minutes on Google turned up nothing that looks like it might be a serious alternative to the ACLU.

I wonder if it might be because people outside of the ACLU's echo chamber tend to think in terms of personal responsibility and aren't prone to making donations to anybody, especially someone who is going to spend the money on lawyers.

Letter to the ACLU

Just An Earth Bound Misfit put up a post about "those hate-filled lunatics of the Westboro Baptist Church", which sent me wandering off in search of the origin of the referenced story. Never did find it, but my browser is a little crippled these days due to an attack by the evil effing WindowsFixDisk malware. All of which prompted me to drop a line to the ACLU. Since I wrote it, it must be wonderful, so I thought I would share.

In theory I support the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)*, which is why I was a little perturbed to find a story about the WBC (Westboro Baptist Church) on www.stoptheaclu.com. A quick look at your site shows several articles that apparently support the WBC.

If the WBC really believed in what they were saying, it would be one thing, but they are not. They are gaming the system.

Near as I can tell, this bunch of troglodytes are in it for the money. They stage these protests hoping someone will attack them and "violate their civil rights", where upon they turn around and sue. They have done this before and made a bunch of money, so they continue the practice, hoping for more money.

*In practice I don't send you any more money because it seems that all my money is spent sending me more requests for money. Also, I'm unemployed, which is why I have time to harass you about this.

Could it be that the WBC has made a big contribution to the ACLU and this is why you are supporting them?

ACLU - American Consulting Lawyers are Useless

211 Robbery in Progress

Marcel put up a post this morning about civil-asset-forfeiture, which got my blood up enough to follow the links, which almost got my blood up enough to write a post, but then I checked my blog and found I've written more about the ACLU than I remembered. Okay, that's not hard. I write stuff down so I don't have to remember it, I can just check my blog.

Now I'm wondering why the ACLU continues to be such a weak sister. Let's see who's in charge. Oof. Big group. Susan Herman is the President and her most recent blog post is titled

Here's How You Can Make Constitution Day a Federal Holiday

Well, now, that's some strong leadership for you.

TMAP - The Media Accountability Project

The Media Accountability Project Trailer from The Media Accountability Project on Vimeo.

Looks like we might have an outfit that could step into the shoes that the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) abandoned I don't know how many years ago. Or maybe the ACLU just has their hands full and can't handle the landslide of crap coming down the hill.

Via The Feral Irishman

Quote of the Day

The VA losers will never give up. Despite their mandate of care, a heavy percentage of VA staffers live far to the right of Genghis Khan. If they lose here, they will push this case all the way to The Supremoes, whose hit song, Fuck You, Billy Jack, plays well with close to fifty percent of the illiterate US masses, who show no sign of abandoning their nicotine and alcohol addictions. - W1GYF, 23 October 2012 7:33PM

Found in the comments on a story about medical marijuana in The Guardian. I don't know who's behind the War On Drugs. Normally I don't blame the people ('the masses'). The conspiracist part of me says it's the current drug vendors, legal and illegal. The legal drug vendors (prescription pain medication, alcohol & tobacco) don't want any competition. The illegal vendors know that legalization will cut into their profits. But sometimes I just get really tired of all the bullshit and stupidity and I just want to say Fuck You, you ignorant sons-of-bitches, whoever you are, who are promoting this incredibly stupid War On Drugs.

P.S. I'm looking for links and this pops up:

    Okay, I see this and I think 'somebody is keeping the Anti-Drug Warriors supplied with drugs'. We're stretching the boundaries of what we can get away with. But then I click on the link (how can I not?) and it goes to a website that belongs to a band called The War On Drugs. No mention of Soma or prescriptions or much of anything besides music. What's going on here?
    A couple of days ago I was looking to see if the ACLU was doing anything about the no-fly list and a couple of links to Stop The ACLU! pop up. I've run into these guys before, blood red commies as near as I can tell, but let's see what kind of nonsense they are spouting now, so I click on the link and it leads off into la-la-land. Somebody intercepted the URL and redirected it.
    Now I've had problems before with some kind of virus on my machine screwing with the URLs, but it's been quiescent for the last several months, except for slowing my machine down to a crawl. I only notice it when I am running videos, so I haven't bothered to root it out. All this makes me wonder what's going on. Is some hacker really trying to screw with these specific sites? Or are key word phrases triggering it? This is a level of sophistication above the old "jump random and destroy" virii of years past. It's not as sophisticated as that Worm that took out the Iranian centrifuges, but with all the bloatware running around now, you can't really tell whether you machine is infected or not. And I'm pretty sure the virus writers are a couple of steps ahead of the anti-virus people.

Mass Market Politics

Indian soldiers who served during World War I in France. ca. 1915. (Library of Congress)

I have a hard time communicating with my family. They like to talk, they talk a lot, when they are together they talk constantly. But it's not deliberate, considered, speech. They banter. What they say is not nearly as important as how it is said. Their comments fly back and forth. I suppose they are meaningful to them but to me it's just so much noise. I gave up trying to understand their conversations some time ago. I got tired of asking them to repeat themselves and getting responses that implied I was old and hard of hearing. I had my hearing checked, it's just fine. Doc told me it's a common affliction among older men. There's nothing wrong with the ears, it's the sound processing part of the brain that's not keeping up. I suspect it's because it doesn't get as much use as it used to because I quit listening to people talk because I never heard anything worth hearing. It's all just noise. I've got better things to think about. Yes, I'm a grumpy old fart.
    I've been making an effort the last few years to pay attention to politics, but I have decided it's a lost cause. There's too much money promoting unknown agendas. Media coverage follows whoever is making the biggest stink, regardless of how important it is. Actual, real important things are buried, never to be heard about, much less discussed. It's like my family's bantering, played on a grand scale. It's okay, it gives people something to do, and that more than anything is what we all need.
    The only organizations I trust are the NRA and the ACLU (the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union). The NRA seems to be doing fine without me, and the ACLU is such a weak sister I'm not sure anything I could do would make any difference. I trust these two because one, they have a very narrow focus, and two, they have been around for a long time and they have stuck to their guns, so to speak.

Regarding the photo: I did a search on the title and this picture was the coolest one that popped up.

Asset Forfeiture

NOTE: Records are current through mid-2015. The records understate the extent of airport seizures because they do not include cases in places such as San Diego and Sacramento. SOURCE: USA TODAY analysis of Justice Department seizure records. Credit: Karl Gelles, USA TODAY

USA Today has a story about how the DEA regularly confiscates big bankrolls from travelers. Nobody gets arrested, and the DEA, being all benevolent and all, hands the cash to the local police department. Just who are the criminals here?

    This shit has been going of for years, which makes me wonder where the hell has the ACLU been? After I figured out how to spell forfeiture (it has two f's), I found this item (last one on the page):

The DUE PROCESS Act (H.R. 5283, S. 3045) is a response to the controversial practice of civil asset forfeiture from Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). The bill levels the playing field for individuals who want to challenge law enforcement’s seizure of their property by providing access to counsel, an increased burden of proof for the government, and other procedural protections. 

But why hasn't the Supreme Court put a stop to it? Possibly because no case has made it that far, which makes me wonder why not. So now I'm thinking that the tips the DEA is getting on these travelers (who are carrying these big wads of cash) are coming from the drug dealers, and the cash caches they are 'confiscating' are nothing more than bribes to keep them from disrupting the drug trade. Or am I being too cynical?

If drugs were legal, all these kind of problems ought to go away. They wouldn't of course, because there is no shortage of stupid, vicious and cruel people. But making drugs legal would be a good start. We might get a few more cases of people running amuck on drugs, or committing suicide, but that would still be better than the criminality we have institutionalized in our justice system.

The common opinion of suicide is that it is terrible. It is terrible for people who know the person, but for the person committing the act it might be the best thing. If you are in constant excruciating pain and the medical establishment can't help, suicide might be an attractive choice.

And then there is the 'problem' with people accidentally committing suicide by taking too much of a prescription pain killer. If it's a prescription painkiller, we know how much of the drug is in there. We aren't talking about street corner heroin which have anywhere from zero to 100% active ingredients. If people are dying from taking too much Oxycodone, it's either because they want to die, or they don't know what a fatal dose is. And why is that? I'll bet it's because 'nobody needs to know' that kind of information.

USA Today story via Detroit Steve.

Clinton's Blacklist

Envigado F.C.

Looking for pictures to go with my last post, I stumble over this article about how a Colombian football club (soccer to US'uns) has managed to get themselves on Clinton's backlist because they are suspected of laundering drug money for the evil drug cartels.
   The Clinton List? That would be Bill Clinton, who set up this list back when he was President. It is apparently still hanging around despite a couple of Federal courts declaring it unconstitutional. (At least I think it's Bill, or Will, not Hill. I couldn't find the origin, The best I could find was a list of revisions going back to 1994, which, along with rumor and innuendo, kind of points to Willy.) Is the ACLU working on this? If not, why not?

US Embassy in Lima, Peru

Short refresher on South America:

• Brazil is the big country with Rio de Janeiro and the big fuss about the World Cup.
• Venezuela elected chubby Chavez, a populist who made friends with Cuba and pissed off everyone who had any money. He's dead but his policies live on.
• Peru, a poor mountainous country famous for being the home of Peruvian Marching Powder. The US Embassy is the biggest building in the capital, funded almost entirely by the DEA.
• Argentina and Chile are back to back across the Andes mountains. They are the southernmost countries, have temperate climates as opposed to tropical, and might almost be considered first world countries. They both also have a history of mass-murder carried out by right wing death squads. That seems to have gone away, but it's still a feature on most of the rest of the continent.
• Columbia is trying hard to be a first world country, mostly by emulating the USA by fighting the commies (FARC) and the druggies, which may be the same thing. They pursue this course because we give them a lot of money to do so.
• Bolivia, which is also famous for Peruvian Marching Powder, probably because both here and Peru are mostly high elevation mountains, and coca leaves are what people use to in order to function at 15,000 feet without oxygen.
• Uraguay and Paraguay are smaller countries on the border between Argentina and Brazil. Uraguay is on the Atlantic Ocean, Paraguay is land-locked.
• Ecuador is a small country on the Pacific Ocean.
• The Guinea states, three small countries on the northeast coast. France has a space launch port there.

So once again the War On Drugs is distorting world affairs like nothing since the U.S.S.R. collapsed, or the Saudi Oil Embargo, which got me to wondering why, if the War On Drugs is so manifestly evil, do we continue to pursue it? Which brings me to money, movies and conspiracy theories.

    There are people in the USA who are making billions of dollars off of the illicit drug trade. I'm not talking about the gang bangers shooting each other on downtown street corners, or flashy blacks with their gold chains and their pimped out Escalades. I'm talking about the guy in the big house. He wears a gray suit, drives a Mercedes, might have an office somewhere, but he doesn't conduct any real business in it. He is totally invisible. Might even have friends on Capital Hill. I mean what better way to influence legislation?

    This-guy / these-people really like having all that money coming in and if anyone even thinks about changing the law I'll bet they get a visit, a very discreet visit from a nobody who manages to convey the message that they should drop any attempt to change the law or . . .  Whatever-it-is is left unsaid, but you can bet that the message is crystal clear, something along the lines of "nice kids you got there, shame if sumthin' were to happen to 'em". Now they might get all self-righteous and call the cops. That might protect his family, for the moment, but all it really means is that a little more political arm twisting will need to be done to see that no reform bill ever makes it to the floor.

Update November 2016 added caption to top picture so that we have a reference to the name of the club. Wikipedia has an article about the Envigado F.C. (Football Club), but it does not mention being blacklisted.

Addiction

So there's a new campaign in the press to stampede the public into doing something about the evil menace of pain killers (OxyContin, et al.). Last year it was the horror of meth, or maybe that was five years ago. Anyway, they (the ever ubiquitous "they") got cold remedies locked up, but that is old hat, so now "they" need a new campaign. Who the fuck are these people anyway? Somebody ought to lock them up.

Drug addiction is not a good thing. No right thinking person would voluntarily sign up to be a drug addict. But not everyone can think rightly all the time. Pain, be it physical or mental, can skew your thinking. If you think mental pain is not real, please explain the vast the quantity of alcohol consumed in this country and the large number of suicides. If you can stand a bit of anti-Muslim humor, you might consider that most suicide bombers come from countries where alcohol is prohibited. Coincidence? I think not. Too much pain and no alcohol to alleviate it drives them insane.

Most of the horror stories attributed to drug addicted people are due to the high cost of the drugs. The cost is high because they are restricted. If the drugs were not restricted, they would be cheap, and most of these horror stories would go away.

There is another side to this story. Drugs can be insidious, and some people are more susceptible to their effects than others. Someone who is taking pain killers on an ongoing basis simply to cope with chronic pain could become addicted without even being aware of it, at least not until they run short of pills.

Yes, I know suffering is noble. Go ahead and suffer all you want. I want my codeine, and I'll shoot anybody who gets in my way.

Where the hell is the ACLU?

Update:

Salon, April 9 2012
Salon, April 11, 2012
The Oregonian, April 14, 2012
The New York Times, April 8, 2012
WALB, April 4, 2012
ABC News, April 5, 2012

Harney County Wildlife Refuge

Steen Mountains seen from Malheur Lake

It's on the front page everywhere, lots of people have got something to say about it. The problem I have is that I haven't been able to find out just how this blew up. What I did find was that a couple of ranchers were convicted of setting fires on federal land, for which they served moderate prison terms. The news reports I have seen call it arson, but what did they actually burn? A thousand acres of primeval forest? Or a couple of acres of sagebrush? Given the location, I tend toward the later. Fires burn out in the wilds all the time.
    How is it that these two cases ended up in Federal court? I smell something fishy. Perhaps we have a rancher who is chafing under rules of the Federal Bureaucracy and sets about to tweak their collective noses. Or maybe we have a prosecutor who is trying to make a name for himself. And if the new prison terms are so egregious, where is the ACLU?