Welcome to the home of the very worst of the meretricious poetasters!
number 27 for 8-14-05:
Justice League
American justice needs to get its act straight.
We give our cops extraordinary power, and at the same time, we force them to obey strict, rigid, stupid rules.
We make laws against things that hurt no one. Like pot. At the same time, we allow things that hurt many to go unpunished. Like bad parenting.
Our system of self-sustaining punishment for those who break rules that hurt society as a whole needs a renovation. The reasoning being that many who do terrible things get slaps on the wrist, while others who do so little receive such great punishments, often just for being black or being poor.
I see cases every day of people who did hardly anything who are popped in jail eternally because of bureaucratic laws.
I have a simplification for you.
If you murder (first degree, second degree, doesn't matter), if you kill another human being intentionally, in the heat of anger or not, you go to jail for the rest of your life. No parole.
If you rape someone, and that rape is proven with DNA testing, you are shot dead.
If you steal something, you have to pay back that theft ten times more than the item that you took's worth. Until you have earned that much money, you stay in jail working a forty hour week at minimum wage.
If you are guilty of doing something that harms the life of a child (IE, if you do something that is bad enough to get your kids taken away), you never leave jail.
If you beat another person in anger, you get ten years in jail.
No appeals. You get a trial. That's your appeal.
Drugs are not a crime unless you use them and hurt a kid, which is covered above, or to murder or rape someone else, also covered above.
That covers, if I'm not mistaken, all crime. There would be shades of gray, like what the worth of a bashed out taillight is, but hey, that's what a judge is for.
They problem of the poor being fucked is easily solved. Simply take all the money that WAS fighting drugs, and put it into employing tens of thousands of well paid and well trained public defenders.
Instead of this, however, we have miscarriages of justice. A man is arrested while intoxicated for side-swiping a vehicle, and police handcuff him, pull him into a room, break his ribs, sprain his wrist, cut him open, and beat his 100 pound self so hard that he literally shits himself.
Citation
And in another part of the country, a 23-year-old gets drunk, goes driving, and kills a 70-year-old man on the way to a Fourth of July celebration. His punishment?
52 weekends of jail (not weeks…WEEKENDS) and 20,000 in fines.
Citation
Tell me this is justice. I dare you.
ANCILLARY
Apparently we are winning the war in Iraq, so the administration would have you feel.
Explain to me why, if we are winning, there is absolutely zero progress in terms of the Iraqis taking their country into their own hands, explain why the casualty rate is increasing rather than decreasing.
Citation
And explain, while you're at it, why instead of figuring out how to stabilize Iraq, the administration is already starting to build a case against Iran?
Citation