(Click the picture to enlarge) I feel like a lot of Republicans need to be reminded of this. It seems like as the years go by, Ronald Reagan’s legacy has become more and more a fantasy rather than reality. So, to all you republicans who think Reagan was Jesus reincarnated, please read a history book.
Shakira was one year old when Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama ordered the 2009 drone strike in Pakistan’s Taliban-infested Swat valley that nearly killed her. With two other burned little girls, she was put in a trash bin to die. A volunteer doctor with House of Charity discovered the three babies and attempted to save them. Two of the little girls died from their injuries, but Shakira, who is now four, lived to be disfigured.
CNN reports that Shakira arrived in Houston last week with her caretaker for a series of surgeries that “will make it easier for Shakira to grow older.” (“She will never look fully normal,” CNN adds.)Just to put this in context: In August 2010, TIME magazine featured a mutilated Afghanistan woman on its cover to illustrate the misogynist horrors visited on Afghan women by the religious zealots in the Taliban. The story made the explicit case that U.S. troops were necessary for protecting women from the Taliban. How things have changed since then! “Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical,” Vice President Joe Biden recently told Newsweek.
Perhaps TIME should plaster Shakira on its cover—alongside sixteen-year-old Muhammad Tariq, the Pakistani anti-war protester who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in late October—for a story about Pakistani children and the horrors of murder-drones. Or does that not fit the liberation narrative?
A “real” crime is a crime that has a victim: A rape, a burglary, a mugging, or a murder. Those crimes deserve proper consideration by the justice system, and people who commit such crimes are precisely the kind of people society can justifiably put behind bars. But carrying a few ounces of marijuana in your pocket — or even lighting up a smoke — violates no person or property. Nor does it violate any moral or ethical principle. It is, in every way, an act that is improperly and unjustifiably criminalized through legal fictions engineered by the state.
This is almost too surreal to be true. According to the Reauthorization Act of 1998, it is illegal for the president-appointed “Drug Czar” to even discuss the possibility of drug legalization or decriminalization. No seriously, read it.
This means, that no sane drug policy can be established in the US because the person most responsible for enforcing our drug policy is bound by law to defend unreasonable and frankly idiotic ideas. Who the hell wrote this nonsense? (Sorry, I know it was Congress.) You can fall anywhere you want on the issue of our actual drug policy, but there’s no way a healthy democracy can function when our appointed officials are barred from even discussing the nature of the laws they’re required to enforce. You can’t just bury your head in the sand and pretend that the “war on drugs” isn’t a complete failure with an ever-increasing number of drug addicts, a sky-rocketing price tag for failed enforcement efforts and a massive upsurge in drug-related violence at our borders. It is inevitable that the violence south of the border will spread northward into the US (fences be damned) and our drug policy is the primary driver behind that violence.
When will we wake up to the realization that Nancy’s “Just Say No” did not actually work and that criminalization is increasing the cost of the drug problem without actually doing anything to solve it? When will facts and evidence finally take precedence over dogma and fear?
If I can give you only one reason why public transportation is awesome, it’s that you could converse for half an hour with a stranger about the soothing comedy of political memes (because talking about the weather gets boring after a while).
During our conversation this evening, we decided the only good way to understand memes is in the context of understanding how this circus functions.
