In the latest in wooly thinking, we get a study claiming that the reason poor kids are obese is because they have no public places to get mugged parks.
Uh-huh. It wouldn’t have anything to do with tendencies to eat at McDonald’s and park in front of the TV.
The latest crime? pretending to take drugs.
Uh, yeah:
The US prison population has risen eight-fold since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to the taxpayer, researchers say.
There are more than 1.5 million people in US state and federal jails, a report by a Washington-based criminal justice research group, the JFA Institute says.Inmate numbers are projected to rise by 192,000 in five years, costing $27.5bn (£13.44bn) to build and run jails.
The JFA recommends reducing the number and length of sentences.
The Unlocking America report, which was published on Monday, also advocated changing terms of parole and finding alternatives to prison as part of a major overhaul of the US justice system.
“There is no evidence that keeping people in prison longer makes us any safer,” said JFA president James Austin.
Here are the crime statistics. What they say is literally true but intellectually stupid.
The violent crime rate started rising in the mid-1960’s, the same time at which — in must certainly be an amazing coincidence — the welfare state began and prison began to wane. By 1980, the crime rate was up 266%, from the 160 per 100,000 to almost 600. It dropped after Reagan took office to the low 500’s. Then, bouyed by the crack explosion, it rose to the 750’s, 380% above the level of the 1960’s. I was in a rural college at the time, so I didn’t appreciate how dangerous things had gotten.
And then? Clinton became President and was the first Democrat in years to be tough on crime, supporting tough sentences and more cops. Gun control laws were loosened. Welfare reform hit in 1996, which I’m sure was just another strange coincidence. And by 2006, the violent crime rate had plunged by 1/3 down below 500. That’s not a coincidence. And every longitudinal study has confirmed that putting people in jail drops the violent crime rate.
(A lot of people are noting smugly that our murder rate is down to 1966 levels. This means nothing — it’s because our emergency and trauma care have improve drastically).
Interestingly, the trend have leveled off a bit under Bush and even risen slightly the last two years. Between 1992 and 2000, the violent crime rate dropped from 757.5 per 100,000 to 506.5. Since then, it has only dropped another 30 points. I’m not sure if you can blame this on Bush since the first steps of progress are always the easiest. But he certainly hasn’t made things noticeably better.
I do agree with these idiots on one thing. Throwing people in prison for stupid things like simple possession, throwing coffee at a car or downloading videos is ridiculous and counter-productive. Prison should be reserved for the violent. Putting non-violent people in prison only ruins lives and creates more criminals.
When our crime rate gets back down to 1960 levels (which would be 1/3 of where they are now), we can start talking about jailing people for playing online poker.
Thank goodness:
New York is rejecting millions of dollars in federal grants for abstinence-only sex education, the state health commissioner, Dr. Richard F. Daines, announced yesterday. The decision puts New York in line with at least 10 other states that have decided to forgo the federal money in recent years.
There is abundant evidence that this garbage is, at best, ineffective. No all we have to do is stop the federal government paying for religion-based anti-sex-education.
“So they don’t have to make a choice between their birth control and their cell phone bill or their birth control and their gym membership and their birth control,” Ortiz sad.”.
You said birth control three times, asshole. Life is about making choices. I have to make a choice between feeding my daughter and buying a new bigscreen TV. Oh, the humanity!
Well, I just addressed publius “not accusing” the Republicans of being racist. So now Podhoretz doesn’t accuse Ron Paul of being anti-semitic.
(As a Jew, I’m getting sick of the neocon horseshit of accusing any critic of anti-semitism. Or not accusing them, as the case may be.)
These two articles are backhanded smears. “I’m not saying Reagan was a racist, I’m just saying he had racist views”; “I’m not saying that Ron Paul is an anti-semite; I’m just saying his views appeal to anti-semites”. This is just libel control. You accuse someone of vile thoughts and deeds without actually accusing them of it.
Well, I can play this game, too. I certainly don’t think that John Podhoretz dances to Celine Deion while wearing women’s underwear and watching Gilmore Girls. He seems to be a morally upstanding mensch. But there are people who attack Ron Paul who are into that sort of thing.
I’m just sayin’.
I was too busy with grants to respond, but I’ll now get on this nonsense.
Modern conservatives – the majority of which are certainly not racist – have successfully ignored the racist foundations of much of modern conservative political power and even thought. It’s not so much that the doctrines remain racist today – or that they lack non-racist interpretations. It’s that they are historically rooted in racist backlash. In this respect, Reagan’s dark side is simply one part of a much larger pattern.
Always be leery of something that goes so far out of its away to back off from acccusing its opponents of racism.
Ahem.
It is certainly true that Reagan and the Republicans used language to support conservative views that appealed to racists. But it’s not because law and order was a racist thing or that Republicans were racist. They were politicians and if they could support sensible things like law-and-order with a race-baiting Willy Horton ad, that was fine by them. It was lamentable — and they are still paying for it at the pollls. But it was hardly unusual.
Race was not, however, the primary reason people backed Republicans on these issues. I hate to break to publius, but when Nixon came to office, we were in the middle of a national crime wave. People were getting mugged outside the Capitol. When Reagan came to office, we’d just “enjoyed” four years of massive federal bloat. These were real issues, independent of anyone’s racial take on them.
One thing I want to address specifically is the “welfare queen” comments and the idea that Republicans were opposing welfare out of racism. We’ve forgotten this, but liberals were the first to racialize welfare. Welfare programs were retooled in the 1960’s specifically to address black poverty and anyone who opposed them was branded a racist. The reason Republicans opposed them, at least initially, was not because they were a bunch of racist crackers but because they thought, correctly as it happens, that it would be an expensive disaster that would create a class of people wholly dependent on the government.
Moreover, why do only Republicans have something to apologize for? The Democrats continue to race-bait today. For God’s sake, liberals ran an anti-Bush commercial in 2000 that simulated a man being dragged to death behind a truck. And they have continued (as publius does) to try to make Katrina about race instead of incompetence. The reason that Barack Obama is so popular is that, despite being black, he is the first Democrat in decades who isn’t trying to racialize every issue.
That’s why the term “Reagan Democrats” should actually be “Wallace Democrats.”
Garbage. Utter garbage. I grew up with Southern racists and Wallace supporters. They always voted Democrat. Because their “deadies” had. It was not until the 90’s that the South really went Republican. State legislatures and governships were still controlled by Democrats when Reagan was in office. Did you miss all those announcements in the 90’s about how states were going Republican for the first time since Reconstruction?
Moreover, the Democrats had a “southern strategy” of their own which was very effective. They would race-bait to blacks in the cities, and race-bait to whites in the country. The reason they stopped doing it is not because they wised up or purged the racists or that Reagan stole their message. It was because mass media made it impossible for them to talk out of both sides of their mouth.
The roots of modern conservatism are not in George Wallace. They are in Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley and George Will. Saying George Wallace invented federalism is like saying Leni Riefenstahl invented documentaries.
Brooks’ column attempts to help otherwise good, non-racist people avoid nasty cognitive dissonance about St. Reagan. But acknowledging the source of this cognitive dissonance would be a welcome first step. Much better than ignoring it, anyway.
In other words, when conservatives espouse conservative views, they always need to acknowledge that some of those views were held by racist shitheads. This is nonsense. Whenever a general talks about mechanized warfare, does he need to acknowledge that its foundations were laid by Hitler? Whenever a Christian talks about his faith, does he need to acknowledge the Inquisition? What the hell does it have to do with anything that racist glommed onto ideas like federalism and law-and-order? When Democrats talk about welfare, do they need to acknowledge that part of its origin was in white Northern racists who, like Jefferson, thought blacks incapable of taking care of themselves?
This is pure guilt by association. Just because someone is an idiot on one issue does not invalidate his view on other issues. Many of the people talking global warming today are former socialists who see it as a path to marxism. That doesn’t make global warming bullshit. It just makes their proposed solutions bullshit.
Moreover, why isn’t publius demanding that Democrats acknowledge their racist history? I’ve never understood why the Democratic Party gets off so easy when they have whole-heartedly supported the four things — slavery, Jim Crowe, welfare and publicly-controlled schools — that have done the most harm to black people. Yeah, they passed the Civil Rights Act. But over their own party’s record-setting filibuster.
The Republican Party did some dumb things in the 70’s and 80’s, such as welcoming segregationists like Trent Lott, David Duke and Strom Thurmond into the party (although the Dems *still* admire Robert “Sheets” Byrd). But what publius is doing is basically smearing conservatism — saying that because some of its views were once agreed upon (not thought up by) racists, the Party has to acknowledge this.
Garbage.
I blogged a couple of weeks ago about how this “growing wealth disparity” is a bunch of crap. Well, it’s even more crappy than we thought.
Those who start at the bottom but hold full-time jobs nonetheless enjoyed steady income gains. The Treasury study found that those tax filers who were in the poorest income quintile in 1996 saw a near doubling of their incomes (90.5%) over the subsequent decade. Those in the highest quintile, on the other hand, saw only modest income gains (10%). The nearby table tells the story, which is that the poorer an individual or household was in 1996 the greater the percentage income gain after 10 years.
Only one income group experienced an absolute decline in real income–the richest 1% in 1996. Those households lost 25.8% of their income. Moreover, more than half (57.4%) of the richest 1% in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005. Some of these people might have been “rich” merely for one year, or perhaps for several, as they hit their peak earning years or had some capital gains windfall. Others may simply have not been able to keep up with new entrepreneurs and wealth creators.
Interesting, isn’t it, that so-called “conservative” Mike Huckabee is one of the people ranting about the income gap.
Boortz was talking Huckabee again today because Thompson got the National Right to Life endorsement. Of course, Huckabee wants abortion outlawed to — at the federal level, not the state level. But he likes the Fair Tax, so that excuses every sin, including being a religious right big-government nanny-state “conservative”.
If Mike Huckabee is elected president and enacts the Fair Tax, I will personally eat my copy of the Fair Tax book. He doesn’t support the Fair Tax. He supports getting votes from the Fair Tax Movementarians.
Jewcy piles on Murdock’s lamentable defense of torture.
Secondly, of course Khalid Sheik Muhammad sang when he was waterboarded. That is what happens when you torture people — they’ll tell you whatever they think you want to hear. No one, however, by dint of being tortured, magically becomes disposed to giving his or her interrogators reliable, accurate information; all that one hopes to achieve by confessing in the face of torture is to make the torture stop. It is up to interrogators to sort out useful information from non-useful, and doing so requires doing precisely the hard intelligence work that would obviate the need for torture as a means of extracting information in the first place. If the goal of an intelligence policy is to garner, well, intelligence, adding torture to the toolkit yields either zero or negative utility. (For an example of the latter, have a gander at the case of Ibn al Sheik al Libi, who is, yes, a Very Bad Man, who was tortured by the CIA at a black site near Kabul and “confessed” to his captors that Saddam Hussein had been providing training and materiel to al Qaeda fighters. God knows how al Libi might have gotten the notion that US intelligence services were seeking evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. One way or another, al Libi’s testimony made its way into Colin Powell’s infamous February 2003 presentation to the UN. Funny, that.)
The worst thing about torture may be that it makes us less safe.
Mike Huckabee. Choice of the Christian Right. Choice of the Fair Tax Movementarians. Likely nominee. And, in the words of one man, “more ethically challenged” than Bill Clinton.
Some former staffers of then-Gov. Mike Huckabee and one current employee of the office that did some of the destruction are saying that the media shouldn’t assume that all computer data and other documents were destroyed in the aftermath of Huckabee’s order to literally wipe the slate clean after he left office.
Huckabee had ordered that the hard drives in 83 personal computers and four servers be destroyed. That equipment and data resided in the state Capitol, a state office in Washington, D.C., the Arkansas State Police airport hangar, the governor’s mansion, and the Arkansas State Police drug office. Additionally a number of paper documents were shredded and burned.
If this twerp is the GOP nominee and Clinton is the Dem, I’m voting third party. I’m not going to join in a contest to see which corrupt Nanny-state, big government, secretive Arkansas twerp gets to shred the Constitution for the next four years.
Over at the conspiracy, Volokh makes the case that Fred Phelps shouldn’t have been found liable for picketing military funerals. He makes some good points, although I stand my impression that politics should not intrude on a private event. I oppose speech codes and am a big supporter of free speech, so my stance is not set in stone.
On the other hand, as noted by Overlawyered, Fred Phelps is vicious psychopath who has no problem abusing the law to get his way.
And then there are the lawsuits. Phelps himself is a disbarred attorney who was long known for massive litigation; at one point, he personally had almost 200 lawsuits pending in federal court. Although his congregation includes only about 22 adults, at least 14 of those have law degrees.
The church has its own law firm, Phelps Chartered, which is staffed by church members and which has repeatedly filed suit against its perceived enemies (see Halting Abusive Lawyers).
In addition to suing the chief of police and various Kansas judges and politicians, it has sued one district attorney three times for “malicious prosecution.” Even private citizens who filed criminal complaints against the picketers found themselves embroiled in lawsuits — or, perhaps by coincidence, with roofing nails littering their driveways.
Maybe $11 million is a bit much for this specific sin, but when you include things like this:
WBC members have picketed the funerals of Bill Clinton’s mother, Sonny Bono and Frank Sinatra. Even Bob Dole, Jerry Falwell, the Ku Klux Klan, Santa Claus and the 17 sailors killed aboard the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen last October have been attacked as “fags” or “supporters of the fag agenda.”
One little girl, going with her parents to see the “Nutcracker” ballet in a Topeka hall, had WBC pickets hiss at her: “Did your Daddy stick in his prick in your ass last night?”
I think it becomes apparent that this lawsuit is about the sum total of hatred and abuse they have heaped on anyone and everyone.
“There was a woman working at my restaurant who was gay,” says Jerry Berger, an attorney and owner of Topeka’s Vintage Restaurant. “Phelps told me, ‘If you don’t fire her, we’re going to put you out of business.'” The Westboro Baptists proceeded to picket the Restaurant “literally every day” for about three years. Berger eventually sold the restaurant and the woman quit.
Phelps didn’t. He followed the unfortunate woman, picketing at her new job, and “he still pickets the restaurant all the time,” Berger said in a recent interview. “And now, he pickets my law offices every Tuesday.”
Can we not declare insane and lock up a group of people who do things like this?
The article goes into the depressing amount of support this creep has gotten; but also into the people uniting against him.
A simple Q&A on the history and practice of this barbarism. Anyone who says this is fine with them has absolutely no business being in a position of power.
Programs that focus exclusively on abstinence have not been shown to affect teenager sexual behavior, although they are eligible for tens of mil lions of dollars in federal grants, according to a study released by a nonpartisan group that seeks to reduce teen pregnancies.
…
The study found that while abstinence-only efforts appear to have little positive impact, more comprehensive sex education programs were having “positive outcomes” including teenagers “delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use.”
“Two-thirds of the 48 comprehensive programs that supported both abstinence and the use of condoms and contraceptives for sexually active teens had positive behavior effect,” said the report.
Abstinence and condoms. Abstinence and condoms! Abstinence AND condoms, you microcephalic Religious Right twerps!
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again:
TMQ urged drivers’ ed teachers to teach young people not to drive in caravans, which cause distractions and crashes. Daniel Barbour of Richmond, Va., notes in a comment that could apply to the laws of many states, “Virginia’s new laws regarding the number of passengers new drivers are allowed to have in their cars actually promote caravan driving by young drivers. Virginia’s laws state that: ‘If you are under 18 and hold a learner’s permit or a driver’s license, Virginia law says you may only carry one passenger who is under age 18 while you hold a permit and during the first year that you drive. After that, you may only carry three passengers who are under age 18, until you reach age 18.’ While the obvious intent of this law is to help prevent the new driver from becoming distracted by passengers, my personal experience with this a few years ago while I was that age is that this law indirectly promotes caravan driving, which as you pointed out is a very big distraction, especially for the lead driver. For example, if a group of six friends under the age of roughly 18 — it depends on how old they were when they obtained their licenses, otherwise the three-passenger rule might be in effect — want to drive somewhere, they are essentially legally required to take three separate cars, all of which will inevitably follow each other around town, caravan-style. By trying to remove one distraction from teen drivers, state legislatures have practically mandated another.”