Category: Politics

It isn’t the War on Christmas, the right to abortion or the threat of gay marriage that is destroying America, it’s the 36 percent of “dead-enders” who still support George W. Bush. What is it with these folks — and what will it take to open their eyes to the truth about the worst leader this country has ever had?

Even some of these same idiots don’t like the way the boy king is running his war of whim, however:

The survey … found support for Bush’s handling of the Iraq conflict has decreased to 28 percent from 34 percent in a poll taken October 13-15.

And a record 70 percent of respondents said they disapproved of Bush’s war management, up from 64 percent in the October poll…

Meanwhile, Bush’s overall job approval was 36 percent — down only 1 percentage point from the previous CNN poll to pose that question December 5-7.

Sixty-two percent said they disapproved of his performance in office, up from 57 percent in the early December poll.

The boy was 17 and the girl was 15. They were videotaped while she was performing oral sex on him, apparently quite willingly. Now he’s two years into a 10 year stretch, with no parole — and his appeal was just denied:

Genarlow Wilson, 20, is serving a prison sentence that shocked his jury, elicited charges of racism from critics of the justice system and that even prosecutors and the State Legislature acknowledge is unjust.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison without parole for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl at a New Year’s Eve party, an offense that constituted aggravated child molesting, even though Mr. Wilson himself was only 17.

With Mr. Wilson — a football player, honor student and the first homecoming king at Douglas County High School — nearing two years in prison, the Georgia Supreme Court declined last Friday to hear his appeal.

Mr. Wilson, who is black, is trapped in a legal vise intended to ensure severe penalties for child molesters and other sex offenders, navigating a maze of legal technicalities that for him seems to hold nothing but dead ends. Some critics of the sentence also say Mr. Wilson is caught in a system that metes out disproportionately harsh sentences to black defendants.

Among the factors giving this matter the not-so-faint odor of racism are these:

1. The age of consent in Georgia is 16.
2. In 2006, the Georgia Legislature amended the statute to provide that oral sex between an under-18-year-old and a 13-to-15-year-old is only a misdemeanor, with a maximum penalty of a year in jail. This revised statute would have thus made the defendant’s conduct a misdemeanor had he committed his crime after the statute’s enactment, but the statute expressly provided that it wasn’t retroactive.
3. Even at the time the act occurred, genital sex between an under-18-year-old and a 14-or-15-year-old was also a misdemeanor.
4. This defendant had no criminal record that would justify an especially long sentence.

It’s a good thing they didn’t have these laws in Shakespeare’s time, or Romeo and Juliet, who were both underage, would have been in big trouble. (And Shakespeare might have been accused of writing child porn.)

1998 – Impeachment of Pres. Clinton

Pres. Clinton was impeached on December 19, 1998, by the House of Representatives and subsequently acquitted by the Senate on February 12, 1999. The charges were perjury and obstruction of justice, arising from the Lewinsky scandal. After a 21-day trial, the Senate vote fell short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction and removal from office under the Constitution. The impeachment proceedings were largely party-line, with no Democratic Senators voting for conviction and only three Democratic Representatives voting for impeachment.

In all, 55 senators voted “not guilty,” and 45 voted “guilty” on the charge of perjury. The Senate also acquitted on the obstruction charge with 50 votes cast each way. While the impeachment process dominated American politics for the better part of the year and took up much of the energy of the Clinton administration as it ran its course, it also failed to win the president’s opponents much of the political advantage that they sought. Opinion polls throughout the trial illustrated that the public opposed impeaching the president by margins of 65–70 percent and may have contributed to the subsequent loss of seats suffered by the Republican party in the United States House of Representatives and the Senate.

[Wiki]

In the early 1980s, when I lived in Charlotte, agricultural statistics were released that left a lot of straight-laced North Carolinians in shock: the state’s number one cash crop was not tobacco, which brought in $1 billion in revenue annually, it was homegrown marijuana, which produced upwards of $2 billion for Tarheel growers.

What trendsetters we were. New figures out from pot advocates indicate that marijuana is the number one cash crop in the country:

U.S. growers produce nearly $35 billion worth of marijuana annually, making the illegal drug the country’s largest cash crop, bigger than corn and wheat combined, an advocate of medical marijuana use said in a study released on Monday.

The report, conducted by Jon Gettman, a public policy analyst and former head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, also concluded that five U.S. states produce more than $1 billion worth of marijuana apiece: California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Hawaii and Washington.

California’s production alone was about $13.8 billion, according to Gettman, who waged an unsuccessful six-year legal battle to force the government to remove marijuana from a list of drugs deemed to have no medical value.

Also heard but can’t confirm that the average age of pot-smokers is now 45 years old and older.