Heroin use has exploded across the American northeast, and, according to Governor Paul LePage of Maine, men with names like “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” are to blame.
Beginning next month, 6,000 federal inmates, mostly drug offenders, will be released from prison early. You might believe that this is good reason to be afraid—wild men and addicts running loose on the street! But it will be just fine. Last time it happened, it was just fine, too.
The Wall Street Journal today states that roughly 30 percent of Americans have a criminal record of some sort. We’ve been over this before, but let’s take this opportunity to discuss exactly why the figure is so horrible. No matter how many times you’ve heard it, 30 percent of 318 million people may feel like an abstract concept, difficult to wrap your head around. The havoc wreaked upon those tens of millions of lives, however, couldn’t be more concrete.
On Sunday, Mexico’s top police official, Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido, announced that drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, kingpin of the Sinaloa Cartel, had escaped from maximum security prison through a hatch in his cell’s shower that opened to a mile-long tunnel.
As if all the mayoral-campaign-season tributes to the corrupt and monstrous reign of Rudolph Giuliani weren't enough, now Bernard Kerik—the one actual convicted felon among the city's recent run of lawless and unethical police commissioners—has crawled back into the light of freedom after three years in prison, and he wants to talk. He learned things in the correctional system, he told Matt Lauer. Things that America's Cop (not to be confused with America's Top Cop) had never imagined. Such as?
Sometimes when you wake up in your nice comfortable (or at least reasonably comfortable) bed in your nice (or at least moderately serviceable) house or apartment here in the United States of America, it is useful to take a moment to reflect upon how fortunate we all are, by comparing ourselves to those in countries that may be our geographic neighbors, but whose state of life is quite different. One good way to do this is simply by taking in this, the very first paragraph from a Washington Post story by William Booth today:
Reps. Ron Paul and Barney Frank introduced a bill yesterday that, for the first time, would end the federal ban on marijuana, leaving it to the states. CNN covered the news appropriately, by having a erudite debate between an old stoner actor and some asshole former g-man.
Kimberly "Butterbean" Meadows is a great mom, in some ways. After her son was busted for allegedly attempting to deal some Vicodin—a plot that failed when he accidentally texted his plan to cops—she tried to take responsibility for the botched sale. Sadly, her plan backfired.
Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson (R) declared his candidacy for President Thursday morning, adding a libertarian voice to the emerging GOP field.
Shocking fact: in New York City, "arrests for marijuana possession began skyrocketing in the late 1990s during the Giuliani administration." Oh, and that's "a trend that continued under Mayor Michael Bloomberg," the responsible soft-spoken billionaire who's continued many of the grossest aspects of Giulinai's reign of terror, just without the blustery hardman talk. And thanks to their team effort, New York now leads the world in marijuana arrests! But you probably don't need to worry, stoner—the vast majority of these arrests were of poor black people, because when they "decriminialized" possession of small stashes in the '70s they only meant it for like college grads and other responsible types. [WCBS]
