After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
Sign up for email alerts, from breaking news to weekly commentary:
Find more content in these topics: Civil rights, Common good
Visit Hightower's General Store, to buy high-power Hightower books and other goodies like that.
Home | Contact | RSS | Privacy policy | Copyright Public Intelligence, Inc., all rights reserved 2003-2007
More drug-war insanity
President Compassion—the guy who concedes that he "may or may not have committed" drug crimes of "youthful indiscretion" in his thirties—now is pushing a drug policy of squinty-eyed intolerance, inflexibility, and proven stupidity.
To put the hammer to the policy, George W. has chosen John Walters as his "drug czar." Walters is a hard-line, shoot-'em-down, lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key drug hawk who doesn't want to hear any wimpy talk about constitutional rights or drug- treatment programs.
He's the Dr. Strangelove of our absurd drug war. Walters dismisses anyone who says that our prisons are too full; he favors longer jail sentences for marijuana users; he has declared that there's too much "treatment capacity" in the U.S.; he opposes efforts to address the racial discrepancies in drug enforcement; he wants more militarization of the drug war at home and abroad; he'd like to expand our government's war in Colombia; and he's been a noisy opponent of state initiatives to allow the medical use of marijuana.
Ironically, Walters was a deputy drug czar in Daddy Bush's administration, where he was in charge of reducing the supply of narcotics flowing into our country. Remember what a roaring success that was?