Free Republic

Connecticut will fall to the onrushing darkness of firearms prohibition, and the rest of America will too, in time. The prohibition package up for a vote in the Connecticut State Senate April 3 is a doozie: serialization and registration of commonly-available magazines, bans on magazines exceeding a paltry 10-round capacity, and prohibition by name and model of over 100 different guns. Worst of all, full registration of all firearms transfers will be required in CT; this is the Orwellian-named "universal background checks." If you want to know more about this mess, there's better reporting than mine. There are firearms owners...

Alcohol occupies a peculiar position in the culture of the United States. Like so much else besides, it is subject to the ongoing brawl between puritanism and libertarianism, two philosophies that have long jockeyed for dominance here. Americans have made many contributions to the bar — including the perfection and popularization of the cocktail. But puritanism has survived, enjoying a rich history of its own. Benjamin Rush’s inquiries into alcoholism spawned a variety of anti-alcohol movements at the outset of the new republic; in the 1850s, “temperance” overlapped uncomfortably with the Know Nothing movement’s distaste for secular principles; and...

Faced with the high cost of caring for smokers and overeaters, experts say society must grapple with a blunt question: Instead of trying to penalize them and change their ways, why not just let these health sinners die? Annual health care costs are roughly $96 billion for smokers and $147 billion for the obese, the government says. These costs accompany sometimes heroic attempts to prolong lives, including surgery, chemotherapy and other measures. But despite these rescue attempts, smokers tend to die 10 years earlier on average, and the obese die five to 12 years prematurely, according to various researchers’ estimates....

We have had the “War on Drugs” since the 70’s. In the 80’s, the “War” went from just skirmishes to an all out nuclear war on drugs. Now, thirty years later what have we accomplished? Has the “War on Drugs” become just another epic government failure like the “War on Poverty” with the only thing accomplished being massive government spending and an equally massive erosion of our Constitutional Rights? My perspective on the “War on Drugs” is a little different from most people. I practiced law for 24 years. Ten of those years were as a prosecutor. The rest were...

"WE WANT BEER PARADE" It was a sign of the times when the Mayor is the one leading protesters down Fifth Avenue. On May 14, 1932 Jimmy Walker, then the Mayor of New York City, organized a daylong “Beer for Taxation” parade (later known as the “We Want Beer” parade) in objection to the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, transport, import, or export of alcoholic beverages.

Tunisia’s western city of Sidi Bouzid is now dry... Chanting “al-Charab haram” (“alcohol is sin”), dozens of Salafists burst into Sidi Bouzid’s Horchani hotel on Monday, September 3. The throng of men quickly homed in on the hotel’s liquor stock, seizing bottles of alcohol and throwing them against the walls or smashing them on the floor. The incident comes around four months after the city’s Salafist community first launched a war against alcohol consumption, pressuring or intimidating several bars into shutting down. Those who tried to resist saw their businesses come under attack, much like the Horchani hotel. ... I...

It’s a watershed moment for Concord residents as single-serve plastic water bottles will be officially banned in the town, effective Jan. 1....state Attorney General Martha Coakley ruled that the controversial bylaw...does not violate state or constitutional law in any way.

What if candy stores were closed on Sundays? What if you needed a license to open a doughnut shop? As America's weight problem gets bigger, some health researchers say instead of relying on individual willpower alone, it may be time for some new community-level policies. Deborah Cohen, a physician and public health researcher with the RAND Corporation, suggests that some of the policies we use to control alcohol consumption could help beat back obesity. "People realized this a couple hundred years ago, that alcohol was a problem," Cohen said. "So they developed all kinds of regulations to make it less...

Reality star Joey Kovar, who appeared on "The Real World: Hollywood" and "Celebrity Rehab," was found dead at a friend's home near Chicago on Friday (Aug. 17) morning, reports TMZ.

US Senators accuse HSBC of ‘letting Mexican gangs launder $7 billion and working with Saudi bank linked to terrorism’ * HSBC moved huge sum from Mexico into the U.S. between 2007 and 2008 * Provided services for Saudi Arabia’s Al Rajhi Bank linked to financing terrorism * Senate investigation suggests they also moved money tied to Iran * Accuses bank of ‘pervasively polluted’ culture * Another hammer blow to the credibility of British banking system after Barclays was fined for allegedly rigging LIBOR interest rate HSBC has been accused of handling money from Mexican drugs cartels and working alongside a...

Kerry Kennedy in hiding after drug-related driving arrestBy Henrick Karoliszyn AND Larry Mcshane / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, July 15, 2012, 10:43 AM Kerry Kennedy steered clear of the public eye Saturday after her shocking arrest for drugged driving near her Westchester County home. There was no answer at the 52-year-old Kennedy’s home in Bedford, and neighbors said they had not seen the human rights activist and ex-wife of Gov. Cuomo. **SNIP** The News reported exclusively that her brother RFK Jr. had his estranged wife’s casket illegally exhumed and moved to another plot in a cemetery near the family’s...

More bad news for the Kennedys: Kerry Kennedy, the ex-wife of Gov. Cuomo and daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, was arrested Friday morning on drug-related charges. Kennedy was nabbed by State Police after taking off following a collision with a tractor-trailer on I-684 in the town of North Castle in Westchester County. State Police said they found Kennedy, 52, sitting behind the wheel of her disabled 2008 Lexus RS 350 on state Route 22. The car had sustained damage, including a flat tire. An investigation is said to have found Kennedy had been operating the car while her...

MIAMI (CBS Tampa) – If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then Rudy Eugene, the Miami cannibal who chewed off a homeless man’s face while reportedly high on bath salts, has an admirer in his own neighborhood. Brandon De Leon, 21, was arrested Saturday after getting into a fight at a local Boston Market and resisting arrest, but his threats of wanting to eat a Miami police officer followed by his attempt to bite the officer have raised more concern following the recent act of cannibalism in the Miami area that has made international headlines. CBS News reports that...

These are the places in America where alcohol is still banned The year was 1933. America's fourteen-year experiment in sobriety was over; the federally mandated ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol had been lifted. All across the U.S., people welcomed the repeal of prohibition with open arms and flowing taps. Or rather, most of them did. Meet the counties where America's "noble experiment" never died. When prohibition lifted almost eighty years ago, many communities (particularly in the Bible Belt) voted to keep alcohol bans in place at the local level. Today, there are still more than 200 "dry"...

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/15/time-for-a-new-approach-to-alcohol/ "Material from independent.co.uk cannot be posted to FR per publisher’s copyright complaint," but see link. In Firefox you can select url and right click choose "Open in new tab." It is very relevant to the Nat. health care mandate

Since President Nixon declared war on drugs in 1971 the United States has jailed tens of million of its' citizens. In 2008 alone 1.5 million American were arrested and 500,000 were imprisoned. At a cost of $45,000 per prisoner per year over 22 billion dollars were spent in prison costs alone for just those busted in 2008. I would imagine the costs to the courts, parole officers and police departments are equally large. And then there is the unmeasurable societal cost of a lost income to a community and the breakup of families effected should it be a mom or...

Over 12,000 people died in drug-related violence in 2011 in Mexico, and about 50,000 have been killed since the start of president Felipe Calderon's crackdown on drug gangs in 2006, media reported on Monday. The reports came out as brutal violence continued to rock parts of Mexico amid a military crackdown on organised crime involving tens of thousands of troops. Reforma daily counted 12,539 drug-related killings in 2011, which it said was a 6.3 per cent increase on the previous year. It said the violence had become more brutal with increases in beheadings - to almost 600 - and more...

Yesterday, my entire afternoon got eaten by my panic over shortages of Adderall, the drug that changed my writing life from daily torture that I slogged through because I'm a hard worker to sometimes-hard work I love. Instead of writing, I wasted my time on the phone to a bunch of local pharmacies, and emailing my very good-natured doctor multiple times ("Can you prescribe in Mexico?"), and searching for Canadian pharmacies -- maybe one in Windsor where maybe I could get Gregg to pick me up 10 or 20 or maybe even 30 pills...in all the spare time he has....

Absurd Laws: The nannies of San Francisco tried to take the fun out of McDonald's Happy Meal. But enterprising managers found a way to bring joy to the kids anyway. A city ordinance that prohibits fast-food restaurants from giving away toys with children's meals went into effect Thursday. San Francisco — of course — was the first big city in the country to pass such a law. The intent, according to the supervisor who sponsored the prohibition, was to increase awareness of the nutritional makeup of children's meals. That's Eric Mar's story and it seems he's sticking with it. But...

Please don’t think this is easy for me. I’m one of those crazed Americans who can’t walk into Home Depot, Target or my local grocery store right now without wanting to grab one of those king-sized shopping carts and stuff it to the gunwales with 100-watt incandescent light bulbs. Maybe it’s the sheer thrill of buying bulbs that in just over a month, as of Jan. 1, 2012, will be banned for sale in America. What fun, in this incandescent twilight, to acquire legally what the federal government will soon treat as contraband, should it appear in any American marketplace....