Adam Dick

No wonder Americans have such disdain for Congress. On Thursday, a bipartisan group of nine United States senators joined together to introduce the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. In a press release heralding the bill’s introduction, sponsor Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and several of the bill’s cosponsors commend the bill as mitigating overly-harsh aspects of the US criminal justice system, including mandatory minimum sentences. Left unmentioned is the fact that the bill, should it become law, would actually create new mandatory minimum sentences while lengthening existing maximum sentences.

Say one thing and do another. The deception continues on Capitol Hill.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Legal marijuana in Colorado has been a boon for freedom, allowing people to make, transfer, and consume marijuana products free from the threat of arrest by state or local police. At the same time, there is an unfortunate side-effect of the liberalization of marijuana laws in the state — the government scooping up great amounts of money via marijuana “sin taxes.”

The high marijuana taxes punish people who purchase marijuana by depriving them of money to save, to give away, or to spend on other goods or services. The sin taxes also are a means of controlling people’s behavior. Facing high taxes, some people will forgo or reduce their purchases of products containing the plant.

Proponents of the sin taxes claim the taxes are justified because using marijuana is a sin that should be discouraged. But, even if it is granted that there is some truth in that claim, a much greater sin is the use of government force via taxation to control people’s nonviolent activities.

There is plenty of marijuana sin tax to roll back in Colorado. Ethan Wolff-Mann calculates in Money magazine that sales and excise taxes increase the price of marijuana by 27.9% in the state.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the United States government’s war on drugs, and especially its war on marijuana, is being torn down by state and local governments choosing to move in a less punitive direction. But, drug warriors, in and out of government, are trying their best to keep the war going and the casualty count increasing. From Rep. John Flemming (R-LA) promoting misinformation about marijuana in the US House of Representatives to former “Drug Czars” William J. Bennett and John P. Walters writing nostalgically in the Boston Globe about the drug war that they assert “worked,” the drug warriors are refusing to just fade away.

In an insightful USA Today editorial “Bitter-end drug warriors do more damage than weed” published Friday, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) dresses down the drug war promoters, whom he terms “bitter-enders.” Rohrabacher devotes substantial attention in the editorial to criticizing marijuana prohibition in particular. Still, much of his critique extends to the entire war on drugs.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Many people are framing the arrest of student Ahmed Mohamed at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas on Monday in terms of Mohamed’s race and religion. The argument goes that a white and non-Muslim student would not have been arrested as was Mohamed for bringing to school a home-assembled clock that school workers and police say looks like a bomb.

Even if convincing evidence does come to light indicating Mohamed’s race or religion was the determining factor leading to his arrest, which is not the case of yet, it is a mistake to think that other students are immune from such treatment because they are white or non-Muslim. Such thinking will also stand in the way of ending the systematic abuse of students that allowed Mohamed’s arrest to occur.

The race and religion framing of Mohamed’s abuse has been pushed much in the media since Mohamed was arrested, irrespective of whether there is any evidence supporting the characterization. For example, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, in an MSNBC interview, asserted “the clear understanding that this would not have happened to somebody who wasn’t named ‘Ahmed Mohamed,’ who didn’t have brown skin, who wasn’t of Sudanese heritage.”

And what is the basis for this conclusion? A “gut level” understanding. Continues Hooper, “I mean, we just at a gut level understand that that would not have occurred the way it occurred if the circumstances or if his background had been different.”

Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director and co-founder, interviewed Thursday on the PBS Newshour, provided a prime example of the jump by many people to characterize Mohamed’s abuse with the label “Islamophobia.” In response to interviewer Hari Sreenivasen’s first question of “So tell me about your contact with the family,” Awad answers in part:

When this happened to the family, the family contacted our office in Dallas, and we recognized that this was another case of unfortunate Islamophobia and targeting of young people just because of their faith tradition, not because of their deeds or their behavior.

This characterization is in line with CAIR’s new 25-second promotional video that couples the popular hashtag #IStandWithAhmed and CAIR’s islamophobia.org website.

CAIR has significantly contributed to disseminating information and opinion regarding Mohamed’s abuse, even holding the Wednesday press conference featuring Mohamed, members of his family, and his lawyer on the front lawn of Mohamed’s Irving home.

Writing in The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald made an effort to present some actual reasoning, instead of just hurled assertions, to support the belief that Mohamed’s abuse, or at least some extent of his abuse, is due to some or all of his abusers’ perception of Mohamed’s religion. Greenwald presents the demonization of Muslims that has come with the United States government’s wars in Muslim-majority countries across the world, as well as negative attitudes toward Muslims held by some Americans and, he suggests, by the mayor and some city council members of Irving, to support the contention that Mohamed was targeted because of Mohamed’s religion.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

The whistleblowers and government secrets revealers Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden are not free to travel. But, this week — in the form of a sculpture including their life-size bronze statues — they are standing in a Geneva, Switzerland plaza near the European headquarters of the United Nations. The sculpture’s message is antiwar, says its Italian sculptor Davide Dormino.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.