I’m Not The Only One

On my personal MySpace page some left-wing organization called United for a Better America requested to be added to my friends’ list. I hastily decided to add them and only today did I actually check this organization’s page. I’m not too surprised by what I saw; I pretty much knew what UBA’s political views were. After all, the page’s main photo is a gif file of a red stick figure and a blue stick figure with a red check mark under the blue, and if you wait a second the image changes to read “Vote Democrat”.

But this passage on the page really got to me.

We believe that healthcare is a right. We are the richest country in the world, yet over 47 million Americans have no health insurance — that’s nearly one in six Americans. As a result, over 18,000 people die per year.

Our nation is ranked 23rd in infant mortality, 20th in life expectancy for women, and 21st in life expectancy for men. Relative to other industrialized nations with universal health care, the United States ranks poorly; all while the Republicans stand on the side of big insurance companies.

Using a country’s life expectancy as an indicator of the quality of that nation’s healthcare system is a joke. This is a hollow argument that has been waged by almost every proponent of universal healthcare and was mentioned by Michael Moore in his movie Sicko, (saw the movie on bootleg) who claims that since Canadians live on average three years longer than Americans, their socialist health insurance system must be superior. (more…)

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) reported on the findings of Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population, a study released this week by the JFA Institute, a criminal justice think tank in Washington D.C.  The study found that decriminalizing drug crimes can significantly reduce the U.S. prison population without affecting public safety.

Keep those incarceration rates in mind as you sit down to your delicious Thanksgiving feast tomorrow with the people you love.  Think of all those inmates sitting in federal prison on drug charges despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution says absolutely nothing about drugs.

“According to the US Department of Justice, approximately 30-40 percent of all current prison admissions involve crimes that have no direct or obvious victim other than the perpetrator,” the report finds.  “The drug category constitutes the largest offense category, with 31 percent of all prison admissions resulting from such crimes.”

Previous data released last year by the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug violations are serving time for marijuana offenses.

 

The report states, “[V]iolence that surrounds drug trafficking in the United States is largely absent” in Western European countries that have liberalized their drug possession policies.  The authors further note that the decriminalization of drugs, particularly marijuana, in regions that have enacted such reforms has not been associated with an increase in crime rates.

 

The report speculates that decriminalizing illicit drugs, along with enacting modest reforms in sentencing and parole, would save taxpayers an estimated $20 billion per year and reduce the prison population from 1.5 million to below 700,000.

 

Bon appetit, buen provecho.

For those who have read my previous post regarding Presidential candidate Rudy Ghouliani’s 12 Commitments, I will continue to critique the next three of his commitments. For those who are not familiar with this, the 12 Commitments are according to Ghouliani’s campaign web site, 12 things Americans can expect from a-wrecccch!-President Ghouliani.

As I said before, the length of my critiques are the reason this subject has been broken up into several posts over a period of time.

5. I will impose accountability on Washington.

Ghouliani’s web site offers no link to explain how he plans to accomplish this, but as a New Yorker who lived under the Ghouliani regime, I never felt that Rudy was ever an accountable Mayor. Rudy was notorious for shouting down dissenters, even in his daily press conferences. He would often shout down people who called in on his morning radio show who didn’t kiss his ass. One famous Ghouliani moment was when he told an elderly woman who called the station to “drop dead”. His favorite person to harass was Mark Green, who at the time served as Public Advocate. (more…)

In an effort to further promote I’m Not The Only One, I decided to create a MySpace page.  All the Presidential candidates have a MySpace page, and so do various companies and organizations to compliment their primary web site.  I figured, why the hell not?  It won’t cost me anything to try.

So if you have your own MySpace page, or are considering creating a MySpace account, feel free to add INTOO on your friends list.

http://www.myspace.com/imnottheonly1

I don’t know about anybody else, but Election Day came and went last Tuesday and I didn’t even notice until yesterday.

In New York City, where I live, elections (especially in slow election cycles) are particularly dull and undemocratic. Check out this lead from an article in Gotham Gazette, an online magazine dedicated to New York City news and public policy:

In recent memory, most advocates and political observers cannot recall a sleepier election year. There are no citywide races. There are no real contests in the City Council. The ballot question doesn’t even affect New York City residents.

Every three or four years, there is an off-election year, where voters are left to ponder judicial races with candidates handpicked by party bosses and large conventions. But this year, political observers said, there seems to be even less than usual. (more…)

For those who have read my previous post regarding Presidential candidate Rudy Ghouliani’s 12 Commitments, I will continue to critique the next two of his commitments.

As I said before the length of my critiques are the reason this subject has been broken up into several posts over a period of time.

3. I will restore fiscal discipline and cut wasteful Washington spending.

Click on this sentence on Ghouliani’s web site and it will feature the following quote: “This is what I did in

This first quote, which according to his own web site was stated in June of this year to an audience in New Hampshire, is an outright lie. As I have often mentioned before, New York City was home to a corrupt, inefficient public school system for three decades. The two previous Mayors before Rudy did absolutely nothing to streamline inefficiencies or seek private partnerships, both of which would have allowed the school system to reduce its costs.

Just like his predecessors, Ghouliani did absolutely nothing to restore any sort of fiscal discipline to the Board of Education, the largest public school system in the United States and between the 70s and 90s, one of the city’s most bloated bureaucracies. Instead, as more kids dropped out of school during his term as Mayor, Rudy’s solution to the problem was to allocate more funds to the NYPD so these children could more easily be arrested. He even proposed putting armed police officers in elementary, junior high and high schools, a move which was quickly shot down by the City Council. So here we have someone who is attacking a problem based on hindsight instead of foresight. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which approach, on average, is more expensive. (more…)

I was pleased to read in Fox News and the Cincinnati Post about college students at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio protesting the university’s policy of banning concealed firearms on campus. This protest, demonstrated by scores of college students carrying empty gun holsters, was held in response to the Virginia Tech shooting, with students pointing out that an armed student could have easily taken out the shooter and prevented the tragic massacre that took place there.

I was pleased to see this kind of demonstration from college students, especially since I am so used to seeing students staging protests for less significant or even wrongheaded leftist causes.

I most certainly support the Second Amendment, which grants Americans the right to carry firearms. Such a ban prohibiting anyone from carrying a concealed weapon is unconstitutional. As a college student myself, the constant liberal rhetoric I’ve heard for the years is, unfortunately, commonplace in modern-day American academia. Gun control is one of the flimsy arguments I’ve been forced to hear from professors as well as class-required lectures featuring fools bleating the same nonsense about gun control. (more…)