As former Illinois Rod Balgojevich spends his first full day behind bars, contributing RP Jeff Smith offers him a few educated tips:
After spending a year in federal prison on an obstruction of justice charge stemming from a 2004 congressional campaign violation, I have a few tips for former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich as he heads for prison.
1. As your grandma probably taught you, God gave you two ears, two eyes and one mouth — use them in proportion.
• When you get to prison, listen, watch and learn. You’ll have a hundred questions on your first day and in one month you will know the answer to 90 of them without having to ask and risk looking stupid.
•Don’t ever ask anybody about their crime. If they want to tell you what they did, fine. But you won’t know if they’re telling the truth. And if you ask and strike a nerve with someone, the result may not be pretty.
•Don’t talk about how you got railroaded. So did everyone else.
•Don’t ask anything about anyone’s family; it will be a sore subject with many, especially those who have not seen or heard from their children or ex-wives in years.
•Don’t ever talk about how much time you have. Someone else has more.
Read the rest of… Jeff Smith: Advice for Blago on His First Day in Jail
By Krystal Ball, on Mon Feb 27, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET
Our own contributing Krystal Ball helped change an imminent government policy in Virginia last week. After helping expose the implications of a proposed state law that would have required transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortion, Governor McDonnell withdrew his support.
Here’s Krystal on MSNBC’s “Martin Bashir Show” last week:
MSNBC’s expert on abortion Krystal Ball: “So, Virginia is my home state and I actually ran for Congress there in 2010. So this hits very close to home for me also being a woman. What they are saying in Virginia is not only do women have to undergo an ultrasound, they have to undergo a trans-vaginal ultrasound. Mandatory state probing, okay. That’s what this legislation is talking about.”
“It actually meets the Virginia definition of rape.”
And here’s Krystal’s piece from last week’s The Recovering Politician:
State mandated-transvaginal probes!
Well Virginia, you certainly know how to get a gal’s attention. This weekend I went home to Virginia, partly to give my parents their granddaughter fix but partly to survey the political landscape. My home state has suddenly become the focus of national attention due to extreme anti-woman legislation that looks ready to be passed by the Republican legislature and could yet be signed into law by Republican Governor and vice presidential hopeful Bob McDonnell. The truth is that Virginia’s lady problems go way beyond what I like to call PAP (Probes and Personhood).
For years, a slim Democratic margin in the Virginia Senate and a hold on the governorship kept extreme legislation from becoming law. But since Republicans took over both chambers and the governor’s mansion, each bill has been more hard-edged than the last. With PAP, the Virginia GOP seem to finally have crossed a line — and it may well doom McDonnell’s national ambitions.
Read the rest of… Krystal Ball: Transvaginal Ultrasounds Are Akin to Rape
Our own contributing RP Jeff Smith recently appeared on The Brooklyn Politics Show to offer some advice to former New York State Senator Carl Kruger, who was recently sentenced to a hefty prison term for bribery.
Formerly incarcerated Missouri State Senator Jeff Smith appeared on The Brooklyn Politics Show to talk about his time in prison, and he offered a piece of advice to soon-to-be-sentenced Kruger.
“My main piece of advice for him would be to just go there and be positive and finds way he can help other inmates. There’s lots of ways you can help people and burnish your reputation in there so that you have an easier time and you can continue doing good,” said Smith. “I’m sure when he first got into public service, he did it probably for the right reason and then things got mixed up a little bit”…
Check out the interview – Smith is an entertaining speaker with insight into an experience few of us (hopefully) will share.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Feb 3, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET
In the wake of his notorious call to legalize marijuana, the RP is now taking up a much less controversial cause — that of legalizing the production and sale of pot’s non-narcotic cousin, industrial hemp. Because of public misunderstanding and stereotypes, a product that could be an enormous economic boon for America — and especially the RP’s home state of Kentucky — is the grossly unfair victim of the overreaching war on drugs.
In this week’s edition of , the RP challenges the Kentucky business community to get behind bipartisan legislation to put the Commonwealth at the forefront of hemp legalization efforts. Here’s an excerpt:
When new Agriculture Commissioner Jamie Comer—a rising star of the Kentucky Republican Party—and State Senator Joey Pendleton—a long-time and well-respected Democratic leader—joined last week to endorse a major public policy proposal, political insiders took notice of the much-too-rare instance of bipartisanship.
But when the two mostly conservative politicians revealed that their common objective was the legalization of industrial hemp, the halls of Frankfort let out a collective gasp.
That’s because the subject of hemp legalization, while discussed and debated for decades, has been mostly seen as a cause célèbre of the political margins, either the “hippie” Far Left or the libertarian Far Right. And the politician most associated with hemp’s advocacy was the perennial candidate and courthouse jester of Kentucky politics, the recently deceased Gatewood Galbraith.
But as the Comer/Pendleton alliance reveals, public support for industrial hemp legalization—particularly within the agri-cultural community (both men are active farmers)—is reaching a tipping point.
And it’s time for Kentucky’s business community to shoulder-pad-up and push legalized industrial hemp across the goal line.
Given the RP Debate two weeks ago on legalizing marijuana, Jeff Smith advises the RP Nation to check out an excellent piece from this week’s The New Yorker: “Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in America”
A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.
Artur raises a crucial point, whether the money raised from gambling will really make that much of a difference, that I think deserves close attention.
As the proud product of parochial schools whose existence depended upon Bingo, I am well beyond worrying about the moral implications of using proceeds from vice to pursue virtuous ends. Considering how governments at various levels already derive revenue from other vices, such as tobacco and alcohol, as well as already existing lotteries, I view the moral debate on legalized and regulated gambling as forced and ultimately irrelevant. It is far too late for the brothel denizen known as the treasury to wish to regain its virginity.
I will say that I do not like the fact that the gambling industry has succeeded in re-christening (re-luciferizing?) itself as the “gaming” industry, which I consider a classic example of transparent mendacious marketing. It is supposed to make the activity appear somehow wholesome and entertaining, and to encourage us to avoid thinking about the whole, “most of the people who play lose their money” angle. Spare me. People play games like Missile Command (the greatest video game in the history of entertainment) for the fun of the game, and are happy to know that every quarter so spent is lost forever. Slot machines only exist because people are gambling on the hope of winning more money. To pretend otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of anything with a pulse.
To Artur: If there is any message where there is common ground in this debate, it’s been the one you’ve raised — it is critical that we revisit discriminatory enforcement practices against minorites. We may not all agree that the drug should be legalized; but all people of good faith should insist that we treat all Americans equally in the criminal justice syste,.
To Jeff: There is no denying that you are right that we have lost the War on Drugs, and I agree that we need a cease-fire when it comes to marijuana. I just can’t go as far as you do when it comes to harder drugs. Society has to draw a line somewhere when it writes laws, and I simply think that the dollars we could save in reducing enforcement of harder drug use and distribution are not sufficient to countenance the lives that would be destroyed if the drugs are made more available.
To David: I appreciate your conflict on this issue as you apply your conservative values to this debate, and applaud you for understanding the need to revisit the harsh prison terms applied to marijuana users and distributors. And no question, we can never lose the message that marijuana is terrible for kids. Where I disagree is that I believe that it will be very easy for law enforcement to distinguish between the drugs that do great harm to society and those that don’t, as we have since Prohibition. I also don’t think keeping marijuana illegal will do anything to help law enforcement crack down on the sale and distribution of harder drugs. My ultimate point is that society can and must draw a line between soft and hard drugs and develop policies that protect people on both sides of the line.
To Don: I’m very grateful to you for sharing your obviously very passionate and educated views on the subject, as well as stories of how the War on Drugs has gone tragically wrong at times. I also am fascinated by the Portgual example and want to investigate further. However, for reasons I have elaborated in earlier posts and in my response to Jeff above, I feel strongly that we must draw a line between marijuana and harder drugs; that as a society, we cannot countenance legalizing a drug whose very use — not abuse, but simply use — causes harm to its user, and which has been demonstrated to dramatically increase the propensity to violence.
To the RP Nation: Thank you for joining us in what has turned out to be one of the most excited and most trafficked days of the site. I promise many more debates like these as the weeks progress,a nd I look forward to your opinions and input on topics.
The author is an Oscar(TM) and Emmy(TM) award-winning sound engineer, as well and a student of metaphysics and reason for more than two decades.
On March 26, 2009, in a CNN town hall meeting, President Obama stated (slightly edited), “There was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high, and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation, [and I don’t know what this says about the online audience, but this was a fairly popular question], and the answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.”
On the campaign trail a couple of years earlier, our President admitted that there was a time when he smoked cannabis, and when asked if he inhaled, he said he did, that was the point.
Obviously no one would suggest that President Obama has been stunted in his personal or political aspirations as a result of engaging in this (by federal definitions) immoral, illegal, and criminal activity: indeed, we elected him to the highest office in the land.
So what is the story with criminality and drugs? People take drugs, and take them for all kinds of reasons; and I think it’s safe to say, there has never been a point in history when there have been so many drugs to choose from.
Read the rest of… The RPs Debate Legalizing Marijuana: Don Digirolamo Rebuts
The author is the CEO of Host Strategic Resources, LLC, a firm specializing in strategic and crisis communications, speechwriting, web development and open source software implementation. He was the former Communications Director for Congresswoman Katherine Harris (R-FL)
A very thoughtful piece, Jonathan. I have become more open to the case for legalization in recent years, though I’m far from convinced.
First, the notion that pot is “harmless” is far from proven. Perhaps the best characterization of the evidence I have seen is that – like tobacco – the cumulative impact varies from person to person. For example, George Burns smoked cigars and lived to be 100. Likewise, there are plenty of “casual” pot users who don’t experience significant health effects.
Yet, according to a Scientific American article detailing the same peer review study you cited, “[c]hronic marijuana use has been associated with anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders and depression.” Given the role of such mental disorders in violent crime, I respectfully disagree with how you dismiss the potential links between marijuana abuse and violent crime – not to mention the risks associated with impaired driving, heavy equipment operation, etc. Moreover, while marijuana may not have the addictive characteristics of cocaine, there is plenty of evidence that it can be addictive, at least for some individuals.
Thus, it appears as though one’s understanding of one’s own physiology, family health history (particularly instances of addiction) might be the most important consideration in deciding whether pot use is safe (just as it is in the case of alcohol and tobacco). This decision relies upon the judgment that comes with age. So, as part of a legalization regime, would we establish minimum age requirements – a “pot smoking age”?
Under this scenario, won’t we have the same problem all over again – kids grasping for the “forbidden fruit” – and won’t the same criminal elements hang around to meet this demand? For me, the “gateway drug” argument retains particular salience in this case. Kids will find it easier to deal with pushers than trying to obtain the drug through legal channels via a fake ID or other means. The legal availability of marijuana will certainly depress the “street price” – but pushers will still deal the drug in order to continue developing their market for harder drugs.
Read the rest of… The RPs Debate Marijuana Legalization: David Host Rebuts
Some interesting points from Jonathan and Artur, and some fancy philosophy as well.
And I grant Artur’s point – having represented some of the nation’s poorest and violent census tracts I agree that people just want the dealers off the streets.
And when our nation has the political will to make that happen instead of spending a trillion dollars in the Middle East this past decade, then I’m prepared to entertain arguments about reforming the criminal justice system.
Read the rest of… The RPs Debate Legalizing Marijuana: Jeff Smith Responds
After spending a year in federal prison on an obstruction of justice charge stemming from a 2004 congressional campaign violation, I have a few tips for former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich as he heads for prison.
•Don’t ever ask anybody about their crime. If they want to tell you what they did, fine. But you won’t know if they’re telling the truth. And if you ask and strike a nerve with someone, the result may not be pretty.
