British commentator, comedian, and author Russell Brand has presented a short summation of some benefits from legalizing currently illegal drugs. Brand, in a new video commentary, presents the summation in response to Stephen Glover’s Wednesday editorial in the Daily Mail that criticizes Britain’s Prince William for questioning publicly if drugs should be legalized while visiting with illegal drug users.
Speaking this month on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr. (R-TN) sharply criticized the Afghanistan War, declaring that the war “has always been about money — increased appropriations for the Defense Department and huge profits for the contractors, which hire retired admirals and generals.”
A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Saturday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
Listen to the new episode here:
Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.
Starting in five four three two one.
On Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) amendment that would repeal authorizations for use of military force (AUMFs) from 2001 and 2002 that successive presidents have perversely used to justify just about any military action a president wants to pursue across the world was tabled in the United States Senate by a vote of 61 to 36. This procedural vote prevented a vote on the actual bill and thus is in line with the Congress’ year-after-year practice of deferring to the executive branch regarding war instead of fulfilling the legislative branch’s constitutional power regarding the matter.
Interviewed Thursday at RT, Ron Paul, who is Rand Paul’s father and a former member of the US House of Representatives, commented that the amendment’s failure to pass was not a surprise. Yet, Paul says that he is “very pleased” that the amendment did as well as it did considering Rand Paul was taking on “the whole Senate and the establishment” that did not want the amendment to have any consideration whatsoever. Ron Paul further noted that he believes that pressure from Americans on their senators led to a vote total in support of the amendment that far exceeded what Ron Paul expected, though it still fell short of the vote total needed for passage.
On Monday, I visited an impressive statue in a Dallas, Texas city park. The statue depicts Robert E. Lee and a fellow soldier riding their horses next to each other.
Wednesday of last week, the Dallas city council voted to remove the statue from the park, which is named after Lee and also contains a building modeled after Lee’s Virginia home. The removal process began within an hour after the vote. But, after delays due to a temporary restraining order and a vehicular crash involving the crane intended to aid in removing the statue, the statue was still present in the park on Monday. Recently erected barriers, though, blocked approaching closer to the statue than, I estimate, about seventy feet in any direction.
A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Friday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
Listen to the new episode here:
Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.
Starting in five four three two one.
Documentarian Michael Moore, in a Friday post at Twitter, linked to video of Alex Wubbels, a nurse at a Salt Lake City, Utah hospital, being arrested for refusing to comply with a police demand that she draw blood from an unconscious patient at the hospital without first the patient consenting, the patient being arrested, or a warrant being issued. While Moore admirably alerted people to what he termed the “authoritarian police state” in America and provided them with a vivid example of that police state in action, he clouded the issue by wrongly suggesting that the police state is a new creation caused by Donald Trump being president of the United States.
A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Saturday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
Listen to the new episode here:
Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.
Starting in five four three two one.
In a new interview with host Tom Woods at the Tom Woods Show, libertarian communicator Lew Rockwell provided a fascinating critique of private technology companies such as PayPal and the Google subsidiary YouTube recently ending their provision of services to organizations they deem unworthy. Rockwell, chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and publisher of the popular website lewrockwell.com, identifies the companies’ decisions as part of the shift toward fascism in America.
“The professional predilection of military,” says retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson in a Thursday Real News Network interview with host Paul Jay regarding the Afghanistan War policy President Donald Trump announced last week, “is to keep the war going, not to end it, because that’s where you get your rank, that’s where you get your progression, your notoriety, your fame, your fortune, and so forth.” This has been the case, Wilkerson argues, for the last 5,000 years and has “just gotten a little more sophisticated” over time.
In Afghanistan, with Trump having put the generals in charge, Wilkerson says we should expect the military to be ”reinforcing strategic failure and thus deepening that failure” that has developed over the last sixteen years of US military action in the country.
