Courtesy Alternet:

You might remember Robert McNamara’s stunning mea culpa, delivered a quarter century after his Vietnam War policies sent some 50,000 Americans (and even more horrendous numbers of Vietnamese) to their deaths in that disastrous war. In his 1995 memoir, the man who had been a cold, calculating secretary of defense for both Kennedy and Johnson belatedly confessed that he and other top officials had long known that the war was an unwinnable, ideologically driven mistake. “We were wrong,” he wrote, almost tearfully begging in print for public forgiveness. “We were terribly wrong.”

Yes, they were, and so are today’s leaders (from the White House to nearly all local governments), who are keeping us mired in the longest, most costly, and most futile war in U.S. history: the drug war. As one adamant opponent of this ongoing madness put it, “I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara admits what is plain for all to see: the War on Drugs is a failure. Americans are paying too high a price in lives and liberty for a failing War on Drugs, about which our leaders have lost all sense of proportion.”

That was no ex-hippie stoner expressing himself through a haze of herbal smoke. It was America’s “Uncle Walter,” the journalistic icon Walter Cronkite, calling earlier this year for a new truthfulness and sanity in American drug policy.

The drug war is rife with major failures and absurdities, including the rise of a vast, murderous narco-state within Mexico, caused by U.S. consumer demand for drugs outlawed by our government; Plan Colombia, a secretive, multibillion-dollar U.S. military operation started by Bill Clinton in 2000 to eradicate coca production in that country, which now produces 15% more coca than it did before the plan was launched; the racist and grossly unjust sentencing disparity, established by lawmakers in the 1980s, between crack-cocaine users (mostly black) and powder snorters (mostly white); and the ridiculous refusal by pious federal authorities to allow our farmers to grow hemp–a useful, profitable, sustainable, and historic crop (see Lowdown, May 1999).

Here we focus on one particular piece of policy insanity that has afflicted our country for nearly 100 years and was foisted on us by political demagogues, power-hungry police agencies, fire-breathing preachers, fear-mongering media moguls, self-appointed moralists, and other forces of ignorance and arrogance. Thanks to them, America is mired in–get this–a war on a weed. Marijuana is the foe, and after a century of battle, the weed is winning!

A painful price

-Article continues at Source.

NY Times

WASHINGTON — On Jan. 23, 1973, when the Supreme Court struck down state criminal abortion laws in Roe v. Wade, President Richard M. Nixon made no public statement. But privately, newly released tapes reveal, he expressed ambivalence.

Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases, such as interracial pregnancies.

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding: “Or a rape.”  Source Article

by Brasch

www.opednews.com

June 18, 2009 at 15:02:00

by Walter Brasch

The Schuylkill County, Pa., justice system managed to do something that insurance actuaries do with mixed results—it has determined not only the penalty for threats to a human life, but also the value of a human life.

● Norman E. Nickle, 54, who lived in Pottsville, the county seat, was sentenced in April to two life terms, without possibility of parole after he pled no contest to killing two teens the previous year. Nickle’s only defense was that he was high on drugs and alcohol at the time of the murders. Source Article

NY Times

WASHINGTON — Elected judges must disqualify themselves from cases involving people who spent exceptionally large sums to put them on the bench, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a 5-to-4 decision.

The decision, the first to say the Constitution’s due process clause has a role to play in policing the role of money in judicial elections, ordered the chief justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court to recuse himself from a $50 million case against a coal company whose chief executive had spent $3 million to elect him.  Source Article

Former AL Governor Don Siegelman appears to be headed back to Jail now that the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has declined to hear his appeal:

“[Siegelman] goes back for re-sentencing now. It will be difficult for him to stay out of jail because it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will hear this case,” Horton said.

Courtesy Rawstory.