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The Liberty Committee - Medical Privacy - Stop National Medical I.D.: hidden inside the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 was a provision for a national medical ID card. The only reason you don't have this new National ID in your wallet is that congress has withheld funding. Ron Paul has added an amendment to the Labor-H.H.S.-Education appropriations bill that would continue the moratorium on funding. The Liberty Committee is asking people to contact their congress critters to support Dr. Paul's amendment.
Arthur Allen at Salon - Drug War Politics: GW and algore are being strangely silent during the campaign about their drug war policies. Could it be because of their "youthful indiscretions", behavior that would land anyone else in the slammer for a long time? Guess it's time for me to trot out my Vin Suprynowicz quote again. Drug abuse is the responsibility of the drug abuser. It is none of the government's business. Drugs should be legalized. All drugs.
This does not mean that "Marijuana should be available by prescription." It means that morphine sulfate should be available in five pound bags at the supermarket for a couple of bucks, like sugar... but probably in a different aisle, to avoid confusion.
The Week Online with DRCNET - Interview with Governor Gary Johnson: Unfortunately, Mr. Johnson has backed off on his proposal to legalize heroin. Couldn't sell it. He wants to climb Mt. Everest.
Gov. Johnson: ...The first thing I'm going to do, though, is climb Mt. Everest.WOL: Seriously?
Gov. Johnson: Oh, yes. Before I was governor, I started and owned a construction company. I sold it a year ago, so I'm in the enviable position of not having to work. We have to ask ourselves what are our goals in life, and I say it is to be happy. For happiness, the bottom line is freedom. That's what it is about for me: life, liberty, the pursuit of freedom. I've charted my own course, I'll be a free individual.
Gary Kamiya at Salon - Reefer Madness: A great rant on the absurdity of the drug laws, especially the marijuana laws. I think that public sentiment is changing on this, but I also think that if every cop who arrested someone on a drug charge, and every politician who voted for a drug criminalization law, ended up at the bottom of the river, things would change pretty quickly. I'm half joking here, but only half. The drug war is a crime against humanity. The drug warriors are dangerous armed felons.
We're all used to stomaching a little political hypocrisy in the United States, and around election time we have to gag down more than usual. But there are times when the gap between reality and rhetoric, between what we know to be true and what our leaders say, becomes so outrageous as to feel positively surreal. And the war on drugs -- specifically, the campaign against marijuana use which makes up a major portion of that war -- has now gone beyond the tolerable Magritte phase and into full-blown, hideous, melted-watches Dali.Wednesday night, two men who everybody knows spent portions of their youth toking deeply on large spliffs -- Al Gore has essentially admitted it; George W. Bush will only say he's been drug-free since his late 20s, and won't talk about the years before that -- are appearing in front of the American people and asking to be elected president. If the subject of drugs comes up -- and unbelievably, it rarely does along the campaign trail -- hardliner Bush will call for offenders to be drawn and quartered, while bleeding-heart Gore will propose that they be impaled on sharpened spikes.
Libertarian Party - Tragic bombing in Yemen was result of our interventionist foreign policy: Why did the terrorist attack in Yemen happen? Because the U.S. sent a warship to a place where it was not welcome and had no business being, that's why. Return to America's roots of strict non-interventionism.
AP via the LA Times - Mother to Fight School's Action Over Race Slur: A black student in Clovis, CA was suspended for addressing another black student with a "racial epithet". The article doesn't say what the actual word was, but I'll bet he said something like, "Hey, nigger," a common way for black friends to address each other, last I looked. He was suspended because a white student overheard them and reported it to the "school officials". [unknown]
The George W. Dance: "dance and snort the night away." Hehe. [script]
