Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia currently permit the use of medical marijuana, though Colorado and Washington no longer go through the charade of requiring sham prescriptions from graduates of Caribbean medical schools. So while it’s the chronic all around in the Mountain West, the middle of the country – especially the Bible Belt – remains zealously conservative. (In the main, the same states that prohibit medicinal cannabis also forbid same-sex unions.) Quizzically, law enforcement’s anti-drug crusade is hitting a fever pitch in the same red states where penurious Republican legislatures are reducing prison sentences for low-level drug possessions. To wit: In two separate incidents, female drivers were pulled over by Texas troopers for routine traffic violations and given full cavity searches on the side of the road, ostensibly in a quest for illegal drugs. But the facts simply don’t add up: “They didn’t even search my socks or my shoes,” recounted one exasperated victim. “I just couldn’t fathom how you could search someone’s butt and their vagina, and not search their socks or shoes.” Well, perhaps those cops just aren’t into that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, a thirty-one-year-old New Mexico man was pulled over and forced to strip from the waist down in public and then, in a hunt for non-existent contraband, submit his body to an X-ray and anal penetration at a nearby hospital. Timothy Young was finally discharged from the Gila Medical Center at 4:30 a.m. with soiled underwear and a bill for $600. But Young has no business complaining to David Eckert who was stopped by the same officers in a Walmart parking lot just a few months later. Over the course of 12 grueling hours, Eckert was forced to endure to an X-ray, CT scan, digital rectal exam, three enemas and a colonoscopy (thankfully) under anesthesia. Predictably, no drugs were recovered during the $6,000 saturnalia.
As news reports and court documents reveal an increasing number of cases with more or less similar details, one has to wonder if the sheer extent of the President’s domestic spying program has consecrated this kind of prosecutorial overreach. While it goes without question that each and every victim of such unwarranted violation deserves our sympathy, no one has been sodomized more vigorously by the government than Jamie Dimon.
JP Morgan Chase’s CEO has been bent over by the feds who are gloving up to extract $13 billion to settle civil charges that the bank sold securities comprised of unqualified mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the run up to 2008’s financial meltdown. The fine is separate from the four-and-a-half large the firm has agreed to pay to private investors, but in both instances, the vast majority of shoddy loans were originated or packaged by Bear Sterns and Washington Mutual, two failing financial institutions that both the Treasury and Federal Reserve had implored Dimon to rescue during the crisis. But it gets worse: not only was Morgan’s request for criminal immunity soundly rejected, but dozens of organizations, including a cabal of five Democratic senators, are petitioning the Justice Department to preclude the bank from writing off costs (up to $4 billion could be claimed as a tax deduction) related to the settlement. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Americans for Tax Fairness and 72 other advocacy groups collected 160,000 signatures and sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder: “As your enforcement actions unfold, it is important that the American people —already victimized once by Wall Street’s malfeasance — not be forced to pick up more of the tab.” Senator Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI) echoed the sentiment when he proclaimed, “Taxpayers should not be subsidizing more than $3 billion of JPMorgan’s penalties at a time when federal priorities like education, clean energy, infrastructure and other job creating investments are facing budget cuts.” Given that Dimon can’t turn to shareholders – they’re suing him, too – I guess he could use a bong hit right about now.
For as long as I can remember, the GOP has been clamoring for smaller government. Well, now it’s here. Fear mongering aside, the shutdown is anything but apocalyptic; it is merely one of 18 such lacunae since the current budgetary process was adopted in the 1970s. Moreover, federal employees in “essential” services will remain, with full recompense, on the job. To wit: The same Food Inspectors who habitually overlook