Artus Register
The AP is reporting that in the latest wave of violence eleven men were killed in the eastern Chihuahua state of Mexico. The response is typical of government: use force to “crackdown” on drug trafficking, which will result in arrests, seizures and ultimately higher prices for the increased risk and relative scarcity of product and therefore more profit for dealers. The higher profit will result in more jealously guarded territory which means more violence.
Since the US forced Mexico to abandon its drug decriminalization plan in the spring of 2006, the country has instead engaged in a massive crackdown on drug dealing. The result? 5,300 people were killed in drug-related attacks in 2008 alone, which was more than double the amount from the previous year.
Citizens and politicians alike in many Latin American countries are tiring of the incessant drug-violence and are considering the obvious: wiping away the profits with the stroke of a pen.
In the past few years governments in Mexico, Columbia, and Honduras have either seriously discussed or actually attempted drug decriminalization. Additionally, governments of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador seem to be tiring of the all-out drug war approach and may be warming to the idea of ending violence by ending prohibition.
Thus far the American government, ever the on-paper proponent of free enterprise, has imagined into being a mystical exception to simple economics for the drug trade, pretending that neither risk and reward, nor supply and demand have any bearing on the economy of drugs.
January 15th, 2009
Artus Register
It seems that Grammy award winning singer John Mayer is going to be getting his own show. This despite his outspoken support for Ron Paul and the Constitution.
The AP is reporting that CBS president Nina Tassler has spoken to the Television Critics Association saying Mayer’s music and variety show is in development and that an agreement is near. One must wonder how much leeway Mayer will have, and if his negotiations with the network include his freedom to push a pro-freedom agenda. If so, the safe money bets we’ll see a lot of Ron Paul and candidates who share his radical vision for a free and prosperous America.
January 14th, 2009
Artus Register
The Supreme Court has changed mightily since the appointment and confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts. Finally shed of the remaining illusion that the high court exists as part of the third triumvirate, allegedly assembled to protect individual rights and limit the state, the new court is at last both willing and able to focus on its true raison d’être: empowering government.
Anyone clinging to the sophomoric belief in separate powers effectively engaging in checking and balancing must be thoroughly nauseated by the court’s continued reliance on phantasmagoric findings and citations of the fabulous.
In the latest trampling of liberty, “Justice” Roberts again took the lead in stomping the individual with the heavy, allegedly righteous boot of the state. From his bully pulpit Roberts continued his preaching of the doctrine of government supremacy, this time assuring us all in Herring vs. US that evidence collected as the result of a warrant recalled five months prior (due to its original issuance having been in error) should not be suppressed.
In 2004, authorities in Coffee County Alabama arrested Bennie Dean Herring on a mistakenly issued, since-recalled, and severely outdated warrant from a neighboring county. The result of the arrest was discovery of an unloaded gun in his vehicle and methamphetamine in his pocket. As there was no legal reason for the arrest, Herring reasonably argued that evidence collected during the then-unlawful arrest should be suppressed.
The court decided in a 5-4 split with Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas siding with the state, to gift governments across the country the de facto power to write open-ended warrants. The abuse this tyrannical decision will doubtless lead to should frighten us all, especially as it is but a cog in a wheel the trident of state has been systematically constructing.
Justices Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Stevens seem to have possessed the ethical fortitude, or at least the requisite shame to dissent. Ginsburg wrote in the opinion against:
The arrest and ensuing search therefore violated Herring’s Fourth Amendment right “to be secure . . .against unreasonable searches and seizures”…the exclusionary rule provides redress for Fourth Amendment violations by placing the government in the position it would have been in had there been no unconstitutional arrest and search.
January 14th, 2009
Goathe
