United Liberty

Here is a look at prison populations around the world according to the latest issue of The Economist. Only communist China, the scourge of many right-winged Americans, holds a candle to the US where numbers are concerned. I guess that means the US drug war is working. Somehow.

Over at Michelle Malkin’s group blog Hot Air an informal poll was taken of readers, asking their views on whether or not the federal government should legalize marijuana. The results were a little surprising to me. 48% said yes, 13% said yes but that states should ban or put limits of their own on the drug and 39% said no. While a substantial amount opposed legalization, altogether 61% said they support reform of some kind.

While the drug war takes a hefty toll on those who are incarcerated stateside for drug-related offenses, it takes an even more gruesome toll for victims of drug cartels south of the border:

Nine men’s heads were found in plastic bags in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero early Sunday. Eight of them were eventually identified as belonging to soldiers, and the ninth was a lawyer.

Residents of Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero, found the heads before dawn, and hours later located the bodies elsewhere, local police said. They also discovered a message containing a reference to the country’s illegal drug trade, a local official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

From Reason comes the story of a man arrested for buying “too much” allergy medication:

(I was) made to feel like a criminal – Made to feel low, dirty. Just totally degraded,” recalled Tim Naveau, who says he’ll never forget the hours he spent in Rock Island County Jail – he says all because of his allergies.

“They searched me, made me take my shirt off, my shoes off,” he recounted.

Tim takes one 24-hour Claritin-D tablet just about every day. That puts him just under the legal limit of 75-hundred milligrams of pseudo ephedrine a month. The limit is part of a new law that Quad Cities authorities are beginning to strictly enforce.

It is natural, in an age of bailouts and government intervention, to denounce the actions being taken “for our own good” by the President and Congress, and write at length about what we shouldn’t be doing. It is my view that people look entirely too much to the government in general and the President in particular to solve problems and fix things. However, with the prevelance of that mindset, I would like to submit some ideas, for a change of pace, about what positive things a new President of the United States could and should do, given how little power under the Constitution the President has to make bold changes in policy. We can call this “what I would do if I were the new President”.

I found this video by way of the libertarian magazine Reason. Obama’s stance on medical marijuana, as espoused here, is the most rational of any president or major general election presidential candidate in recent memory.