(And I also posted here).Former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie kept gubernatorial politics out of his initial statement on the resignation of First Assistant U.S. Attorney Michele Brown, leaving the task to his running mate for lieutenant governor, Monmouth County Sheriff Kim Guadagno.Cue the obligatory umbrage over the rough-and-tumble political stuff…
Brown resigned a week after her ongoing repayment of a $46,000 loan Christie gave her two years ago was first reported.
It was Guadagno who blamed Governor Corzine for impugning Brown and forcing her to end "an acclaimed career."And…
"It is despicable that Jon Corzine has stooped so low to try to win re-election that he's aimed the negative attacks of his hired guns on a dedicated public servant who made it her life's mission to serve the people of New Jersey as a corruption-fighter," she said.
State Sen. Diane Allen (R-Edgewater Park, pictured), who was a finalist to be Christie's running mate, furthered Guadagno's message.Well well, it seems that Diane Allen, after lo these many years, has finally realized that any path to national Repug electoral success lies in partisanship and demagoguery.
"Jon Corzine earned a reputation that he was willing to spend millions on negative attacks and play down and dirty in order to win. He has certainly lived up to that reputation with his most recent target - a career prosecutor who has made it her life's work to end New Jersey's culture of corruption," she said. "Apparently a nearly 20 year commitment serving the public doesn't matter to Jon Corzine if you are a means to his political end. It's shameful that a female prosecutor who has clearly proven her talent and ability to get the job done is no longer able to do the job she has done so well for nearly two decades."
And that’s a shame, really, because she has cast generally moderate votes, though Blue Jersey noted a lip-flop here where Allen was in favor of leasing the NJ Turnpike before she was against it, and here, where Allen voted against a needle exchange program in her state (as of the post date, New Jersey was the only state in the country without a needle exchange program).
And in terms of national politics, Allen has been a “bridesmaid, but never a bride,” even though Repug strategist Bill Pascoe noted here that Allen was “knocking the snot” out of Doug Forrester in the Repug primary during the ’02 Senate race before Forrester ended up outspending Allen and winning the nomination to run against Dem Bob “The Torch” Torricelli, who of course bailed over some rather tawdry office-selling in favor of Frank Lautenberg, the eventual winner.
So we’ll see if the Jersey statehouse goes “red” in the fall (hope not), and if it does, don’t be surprised if Diane Allen emerges with a key role in a Christie administration as a reward for speaking out on behalf of her would-be boss (feigning offense while trying to mask a rather startling financial misjudgment by “Mr. Repug Law and Order”).
Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision late yesterday to launch a potential criminal investigation of how terror suspects were treated by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration couldn’t have come at a better time for the White House. As the president’s health reform initiative continues to take a shellacking throughout the country, followed by more bad news today of a swelling national deficit and debt, and seemingly no end in sight for the slow, plodding economic recovery, Barack Obama desperately needs a game-changer.As far as I’m concerned, Williams is afflicted with either willful arrogance, invincible stupidity or both for invoking No Child Left Behind, given his own shilling for this underfunded Bush mandate here (and on the matter of approval numbers for health care, this, as an FYI, is ancient history...and the numbers for Obama have slipped since this poll, but not by much).
So what does he do? He turned to page one of the Democratic playbook: “When in trouble, blame Bush.” It’s the eternal M.O. of this administration. Can’t turn the economy around? Bush put us in this ditch. Deficit even larger than you expected? Don’t look at my spending habits, Bush was just as bad. Kids having trouble at school? It’s that damned No Child Left Behind!
However, I wanted to point out that, in the matter of the Holder interrogation investigation (with "harsh methods" such as waterboarding depicted above), it turns out that loyal Bushie Frances Townsend (here), while not endorsing the investigation, also would not
Welcome to the warm, fuzzy glow of the reality-based community, Fran.
MEXICO CITY – Mexico now has one of the world's most liberal laws for drug users after eliminating jail time for small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and even heroin, LSD and methamphetamine.Let me ask you what poses a more lethal threat to the people of this country – guns or drugs?
"All right!" said a grinning Ivan Rojas, a rail-thin 20-year-old addict who endured police harassment during the decade he has spent sleeping in Mexico City's gritty streets and subway stations.
But stunned police on the U.S. side of the border say the law contradicts President Felipe Calderon's drug war, and some fear it could make Mexico a destination for drug-fueled spring breaks and tourism.
Tens of thousands of American college students flock to Cancun and Acapulco each year to party at beachside discos offering wet T-shirt contests and all-you-can-drink deals.
"Now they will go because they can get drugs," said San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne. "For a country that has experienced thousands of deaths from warring drug cartels for many years, it defies logic why they would pass a law that will clearly encourage drug use."
…
"It provides an officially sanctioned market for the consumption of the world's most dangerous drugs," San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said. "For the people of San Diego the risk is direct and lethal. There are those who will drive to Mexico to use drugs and return to the U.S. under their influence."
If your answer, like mine, is guns, then why on earth aren’t they regulated as least as much as drugs, particularly when, as noted here, Mexican president Felipe Calderon has called for an assault weapons ban?
As noted here…
The US bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) estimates that 90% of firearms seized in Mexico come from north of the border. Of the 2,400 weapons traced back to the US, 1,800 came from dealers in the four US border states, where more than 6,500 gun dealers operate.I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to get scared about an illegal element from “south of the border,” it’s much more likely to be a drug trafficker armed with an assault rifle than a college student who’s had one too many bong hits.
The scale of the arms trade can be shocking. On 7 November last year, Jaime González Durán - known as El Hummer - a leading member of a Mexican drug cartel, was arrested in Reynosa. A day earlier, police raided a safe house belonging to El Hummer and made the largest weapons seizure in Mexican history.
Homeland security and the ATF say that the Mexican cartels bypass gun control laws in Mexico by paying US citizens to buy guns for them.
(By the way, the above pic shows federal versus local Mexican law enforcement combating each other, with the "feds" trying to locate and bust "local officers and politicians accused of collaborating with brutal drug cartels.")
Decriminalizing the consumption of drugs (as opposed to the trafficking of same) makes so much sense in this day and age that it’s almost too obvious to be pointed out. And while we engage in “values voter” shouting matches on the subject, kudos to Mexico for acting with the common sense that we apparently do not possess.
5 comments:
The fact that you find it necessary to parrot a thoroughly debunked talking point in support of your position speaks volumes about the validity of said position.
I will grant you your point somewhat (didn’t think I had to troubleshoot information from the ATF, but I guess I do), but as FactCheck.org noted, “Fox News has put the percentage of guns that have been traced to U.S. sources at only 17 percent, but we find that to be based on a mistaken assumption that throws its figure way off.” However, FactCheck didn’t side completely with the Obama Administration either, saying that the correct way to put it would be that “90 percent of the guns submitted for tracing by Mexican authorities were then traced to the U.S. The percentage of all recovered guns that came from the U.S. is unknown.”
I give you significant credit for simply checking on it. The fallacy has been pointed out time and time again, but the same 90% canard keeps being repeated.
It's difficult for those of us who pay attention to this issue to believe that anyone repeating the 90% claim could possibly be unaware of the rebuttal, but apparently there are still some out there for whom it is an honest mistake.
I agree completely with the assessment that we don't really know for sure what the correct number is, there is no way to know it with total certainty and some estimation is inevitable...but the 90% claim is ridiculous on its face to anyone who follows these issues.
I would say that the actual percentage falls somewhere between the 17% figure that the Fox News correspondent came up with, and the 36% arrived at by Factcheck...neither of which is anywhere NEAR the 90% number that is still repeated by the Brady Campaign, government officials, and many in the media...in spite of the overwhelming evidence that it is patently false.
I especially liked this characterization.
Homeland security and the ATF say that the Mexican cartels bypass gun control laws in Mexico by paying US citizens to buy guns for them.
I suppose it's accurate in the sense that bashing in someone's skull with a ball peen hammer is simply "bypassing" the laws against murder.
Generally, though, the practice of "straw purchasing" is more correctly described as "BREAKING" the law, rather than "bypassing" it.
Isn't it interesting that stopping the flow of illegals and drugs north from Mexico into the US is our responsibility, but stopping the flow of drug money and guns south from the US to Mexico is...our responsibility?
Funny how that works.
In the case of Homeland Security and the ATF, I’m mainly just trying to highlight what they’re saying without trying to draw a comparison directly between Mexico’s gun laws and ours. I would suspect that Mexico’s gun laws are stricter, but I don’t know for certain so I’m not making that claim.
Also, I would only say that there are shared responsibilities between our two countries. I recently heard Janet Napolitano say that Mexico has a responsibility to cut off the guns and we have a responsibility to cut off the drugs, or words to that effect, and I thought that she had it exactly backwards. But again, I’m not trying to draw a comparison – at the moment, I don’t have the time to do the research on that or rebut the likely pro-gun comments full of data that I can’t independently verify also.
And thanks for the good words – I don’t claim to know everything, but I try to do the right thing.
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