Senator Rand Paul says Edward J. Snowden does not deserve the death penalty or life in prison for exposing NSA abuses, but that James Clapper should face trial and prison time for lying to Congress. Meanwhile, scumbag Democrat Chuck Schumer urges Snowden to turn himself in, and lies (his claim that NSA info would come out at trial is patently ridiculous as it would be deemed “classified.”)
Why Cambodia is instructive to Americans, or at least it should be
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The authoritarian government of Cambodia is currently cracking down on dissidents. They have suspended the right to assemble in public, rounded up political leaders that opposed the current government, in other words, the usual grab bag of repression.
I wish that people who don’t worry about the NSA, drones, indefinite detention, legalize torture, Guantánamo, and so on would consider how the Cambodian experience supplies to them.
It is, after all, only a matter of time before the US government faces some sort of challenge to its authority. Nobody knows how or when, but the fact is, civilians need the right to challenge or even change their government from time to time. Without that right, there is no freedom, and the government does not represent them in the least.
Even if you believe that the Obama administration or the next president or the one after that would never use tools like the NSA or drones or indefinite detention against American citizens – even though, in fact, they already have – what about the future?
The only way that we can protect our children and grandchildren’s generations from the kind of crackdown that we are seeing in Cambodia – amped up by awesome technology – is to make sure that that technology isn’t available to the government now.
As we are seeing currently in Cambodia, and have seen countless times before and will many times in the future, fighting back against a repressive regime is hard enough.
The last thing the revolutionaries and political dissidents of the future need are killer flying robots blowing them up with missiles as they march down the street. Or a government able to track them down with ruthless efficiency with the push of a button.
What is the point of the Second Amendment if there is no First Amendment?
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As an unwavering left of center supporter of Americans’ right to bear arms, I nevertheless am disgusted by Guns and Ammo magazine’s censorship of their columnist. I’ve been there: this guy had his column approved by his editors, and then, after the shit hit the fan, the editors backed away. Also, this is brazen caving into major advertisers. Better that a magazine should go out of business man to let its advertisers dictate its editorial content. Again, I disagree with what these so-called moderate supporters of the Second Amendment wrote. But they should have had the right to their freedom of speech without being crushed by well-heeled advertisers and cowardly editors and publishers. If Americans are in danger because of threats to the Second Amendment, they are also in danger due to these threats to the First Amendment.(Yes, I know that the First Amendment does not apply legally here. But it does in spirit.)
Only the warmongers can restore peace and stability in the Middle East
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Get ready for more analysis like this. The irony is self-evident: the mainstream media is implying that American power is a force for good. That these countries are falling apart in the absence of a strong American political and military presence. What they leave out, of course, is that all of these countries were radically destabilized by American foreign policy: invasions, propping up corrupt, unpopular dictatorships, funneling arms in civil conflicts, sometimes to both sides, and so on.
This narrative is interestingly analogous to the rise of the Nazis in Germany during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Nazis would brawl in the streets, disturbing the public order. Then they would tell the authorities that only they could restore peace in the streets. The peace that they themselves had destroyed.
Time to Join? The Ted Rall Subscription Service
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Happy New Year!
This is the time of year when I ask readers to consider supporting the Ted Rall Subscription Service. You receive my cartoons, columns, freelance illustrations and everything else I do before everyone else, delivered directly to your inbox, for just $30 per year.
In addition, you can buy original artwork at discounted rates, as well as get copies of books, autographed, shipping free within the United States.
Click the link if you’re interested, and thanks for reading my work.
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Where You Can Put Your Groceries
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I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week:
On New Year’s Day, Los Angeles became the biggest city in the United States to ban plastic bags.
Mayhem was anticipated. OK, not mayhem. Just extreme agitas. “If they don’t give me a bag, what am I going to do?” the Times quoted an “incredulous” William Macary at a Wal-Mart back in June. “If I pay money, I want a bag.”
I feel him. If I pay money, I want a pony. And a car. And those $350 Italian shirts I lust for when I go to Vegas.
Believe it or not, plastic bags were originally introduced as the eco-friendly alternative to paper bags. No more chopping trees, etc. Now they’re widely viewed as a scourge.
But even treehuggers hate inconvenience. I caught a sneak preview to how some entitled Angeleno consumers might greet a plastic-free 2014 last year, when I visited Washington. The nation’s capital requires merchants to charge shoppers five cents per plastic bag.
“Want a bag? It’s a nickel,” the guy at the sandwich shop told me. It’s a nominal fee, but I said no. I’m typical. Most Washingtonians prefer to bring their own bag or do without. The bag fee is a big success, having greatly reduced litter in the D.C. area.
Why not cough up the nickel? It’s inconsequential.
It’s not the disposability factor. You can use plastic bags for your trash. To pick up after your dog. Whatever. Anyway, much of the stuff you carry in plastic bags is essentially disposable too. Groceries don’t last forever.
Washington’s fee makes people realize that plastic bags are worth nothing. And no one wants to pay something for nothing. It may be hard to believe, but Washington’s experience is clear: in a few short months, we’re going to wonder why we ever wanted plastic bags in the first place.
I like Los Angeles’ approach better. There’s nothing grosser than plastic bags hanging from tree branches, blowing in the breeze. Why tolerate even one? An outright ban is better. But we’re missing out on D.C.’s game-theory economic experiment.
Or maybe not.
We’ll have the option of paying ten cents for a paper bag that isn’t as hard on the environment. Will we? I’m betting the answer is no.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Will Polygamy, Adult Incest, Prostitution, Masturbation, Adultery and Obscenity Be Legalized Next? Let’s Hope So.
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Privacy is a basic human right. Yet, for 200+ years, Americans have tolerated “morals laws” that told us who we could marry and what sexual positions they were allowed to enjoy.
You couldn’t marry outside your “race” in every state until 1967. Oral and anal sex were illegal until 2003. But morals laws are doomed. Courts are throwing the government out of our bedrooms.
Puritanism is dying hard. Some people still want the police to regulate our sex lives. In his dissent to the 2003 Supreme Court decision striking down anti-sodomy laws in Texas, right-wing Justice Antonin Scalia complained that the SCOTUS had undermined “the ancient proposition that a governing majority’s belief that certain sexual behavior is ‘immoral and unacceptable’ constitutes a rational basis for regulation.”
The ancient stupid proposition.
Agonizing about an imminent “massive disruption of the current social order,” Scalia predicted ten years ago that, after the government relinquishes its power to govern personal sexual behavior and accepts that what happens between consenting adults in Americans’ bedrooms is their own damned business, “every single…law” against “bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity” would fall in the wake of Lawrence v. Texas.
“This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation,” Scalia said.
It looks like Scalia was right about that. Bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication and obscenity will likely be legalized in the near future. (But not bestiality. Animals can’t consent, so hands off Fido and Mittens.)
Thank God!
Lawrence has been repeatedly cited by judges ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.
Next to go: Laws against polygamy and bigamy.
Citing Lawrence, a federal judge recently declared parts of Utah’s anti-polygamy statutes unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution, Judge Clark Waddoups ruled, protects Americans from “unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places” and allows “an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression and certain intimate conduct.” Which includes butt sex. And having multiple spouses. Assuming you can handle them.
Legal experts say though the politics are different than they are for gay marriage — there isn’t a big, well-funded polygamist-rights movement — it’s only a matter of time before anti-polygamy laws get thrown out. Right-wingers, reeling from the fact that gay marriage has been made legal in 14 states, are freaking out about polygamy.
“Same-sex marriage advocates have told us that people ought to be able to ‘marry who they love’ but have also always downplayed the idea that this would lead to legalized polygamy, a practice that very often victimizes women and children,” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a Christianist group, said in a statement. “But if love and mutual consent become the definition of what the boundaries of marriage are, can we as a society any longer even define marriage coherently?”
Heaven forbid that “love and mutual consent” become the defining requirements for marriage!
Nothing lasts forever — not in a nation with a 50% divorce rate — but it’s clear that same-sex marriage will eventually be the law of the land.
Polygamy logically follows. “Liberals and libertarians tend to believe private sexual conduct between consenting adults ought to be beyond the reach of the law,” as Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic. “Applying that principle consistently would seem to carve out a decriminalized sphere for polygamous families.” Also, one assumes, for those organized around polyandry (one wife, multiple husbands).
It is estimated that there are 30,000 to 50,000 polygamous families living in the United States.
When gays and lesbians began agitating for the right to be married, I didn’t understand why they’d want to. Obviously, the legal protections, tax benefits and healthcare advantages are nice. But wasn’t one of the best parts about being gay that you couldn’t get married?
After mulling it over, same-sex marriage passed my one-question test for proposed changes: What harm might result? I couldn’t think of any. The best argument against same-gender that it “violates the sanctity of marriage.” Which is a set of words strung into a meaningless phrase. What sanctity? How does gay marriage hurt straight marriage? It can’t. It doesn’t. The same is true of polygamy and Scalia’s other bugaboos.
Same-sex marriage has been a rapid, and radical, change. Yet now, most Americans agree with me that it’s a good idea.
Let freedom march on. Including the freedom to jerk off.
As Justice Scalia said, there is no longer a constitutional basis for laws against masturbation. In Connecticut, where prisoners are banned from self-pleasure, it is time to let inmates touch their nutmegs. In Alabama, where you can yank it with your bare hands but not with the aid of a device, let a thousand Fleshlights sing.
Let us join the civilized world by decriminalizing the 50% to 70% of married Americans who have sex with people who are not their spouse. “In nearly the entire rest of the industrialized world, adultery is not covered by the criminal code,” The New York Times reported in 2012. In the U.S., on the other hand, cheating is a crime in 23 states, and, for members of the military, grounds for court-martial.
In Minnesota, single women who have sex at all are subject to one year in prison plus a $3000 fine.
Prosecutions for adultery are rare but not unheard of. “Just a year after the Lawrence decision, John R. Bushey Jr., then 66, the town attorney for Luray, Va., was prosecuted for adultery and agreed to a plea bargain of community service. A year later, Lucius James Penn, then 29, was charged with adultery in Fargo, N.D. In 2007, a Michigan appellate court ruled that adultery can still support a life sentence in that state,” reported USA Today.
Many arguments in support of moralizing legislation focus on the effect of targeted behavior on the vulnerable, including women and children. Moralizers miss that their proscriptions increase abuse by driving victims underground. For example, polygamous religious cults use their illegal status to isolate children, forcing some to marry against their will. Because they’re in secret compounds, they can’t call the police. Prostitution is most dangerous in states and countries where the oldest profession is illegal.
As gays and lesbians marry, there is zero sign of Scalia’s “massive disruption of the current social order.” To the contrary: morals laws are the disruptive force. Laws against victimless crimes subvert the primary purpose of law: to promote the common good. Laws that ban behavior that is widespread (such as adultery and masturbation) effectively criminalize the majority of citizens, which undermines respect for government.
Society can and will debate morality. It should not enforce moral judgments about personal behavior through the courts.
Moral laws are immoral.
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COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
This is what you are up against when you criticize President Obama from the left
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Check out this screenshot. Someone at the website-that-cannot-be-named posted this Saturday. I don’t know who posted it. It has since been deleted. Again, I don’t know by whom – the original poster or by the website’s management? But it has left traces all over the Internet. Anyone who searches my name, years from now, might find it. It damages me. It is irresponsible. And needless to say, every single word is untrue.
“I literally cried when I read this,” my ass. You cried over something that you couldn’t have read because no one ever wrote it? Literally?
Things have gone too far. Criticism is one thing, libel is another. The owner of that website has been irresponsible and has encouraged this by his statements and his actions throughout this mess. I had hoped that this whole thing was over, but unless immediate meeting full concrete action is forthcoming, clearly more significant remedies are called for.
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Regifting for Politicians
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I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week:
After learning that elected officials in the state of California collected over two hundred grand in gifts during 2012 — which doesn’t include the $6.7 million donated solicited by officials on behalf of their favorite charities and causes — the group Common Cause issued a report calling for tighter limits on this potentially corrupting influence.
One suggestion: “Apply the $10-per-month limit on gifts from lobbyists to also include gifts from the lobbyists’ clients. Currently, clients can give up to $440 per year to public officials.”
$10?
What is this, Secret Santa?
Even more depressing than the thought that our public servants can be bought is the notion that they’re selling themselves so cheaply. $440 a year? These guys aren’t call girls. They’re not streetwalkers. Even crack hos charge more. (Are there still crack hos? Meth hos? Anyway.) Hard times, it seems, have spread through the political class.
On the other hand, if I’d known that I could buy a state senator for the spare change in my couch cushions, there would be a Ted Rall Freeway Interchange by now.
The idea of pols and political appointees getting their relatively minor gifties further austeritized is inherently amusing, making this week’s cartoon one of those pretty-much-writes-itself deals. Given the time of year, jokes about regifting, stupid gufts and pets you don’t want but feel guilty about getting rid of seemed too easy to pass up.
It’s enough to make you feel sorry for a politician.
Almost.
Happy what’s left of the holidays, everyone.
