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[T]he film is beautifully composed. There are seductive inserts of bottling machinery and a perfect whiskey old fashioned cocktail being made. Some sequences border upon being high quality advertising agency pornography produced for a liquor industry client. There are no laborers ordering Boilermakers in the final cut... Burns knows his real audience, his business partners at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (your tax dollars at work) prefer sophisticated cocktails rather than canned beer and pork rinds. The documentary praises Frances Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as a feminist heroine while ignoring...

I am watching the Ken Burns Prohibition documentary and am learning a lot from it. For instance, Progressives, who were for the redistribution of wealth (stated in the film) knew they could institute the graduated income tax to replace the excise tax that would be lost once Prohibition became legal. The progressives, not the conservatives, were behind the temperance leagues.

If Ken Burns ever decides to stop making documentaries, he could always go into comedy . . . On today's Morning Joe, Burns claimed he was non-political, despite repeatedly attempting to draw parallels between Prohibition, the subject of his current film, and themes in current conservatism, particularly immigration. At the same time, Burns ignored the modern-day prohibitionist sitting right across the table from him--Mika Brzezinski--the neo-Carrie Nation who would ban everything from cigarettes to soft drinks, transfats to fast food. View the video here.

For an issue that’s usually relegated to a few paragraphs in history books, Prohibition sure has become a hot topic on TV. The 18th Amendment — that “Noble Experiment” that turned out to be one of the country’s biggest civic failures — is the subject of a fascinating new documentary by Ken Burns. “Prohibition” chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of a constitutional amendment that tried to legislate human behavior and, along the way, unleashed a slew of unintended consequences. The first episode of Burns’ three-part series debuts on PBS Sunday, the same night HBO’s hit series “Boardwalk Empire” airs...

JACKSON COUNTY, W.Va. (WSAZ) -- A couple has been arrested for running a bar in their garage and dealing drugs. Sheriff's deputies tell WSAZ.com Gary Frontz, and his wife, Lisa Frontz ,both 42, of Ripley, were arrested Friday and charged with delivery of a controlled substance and possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver. Click here to find out more! For several weeks, deputies were investigating, with the help of an informant, to make several controlled buys from the Frontz home along Carnian Road. Investigators say the couple was dealing prescription medication, marijuana and alcohol shots without a...

….But temperance Chicago never created Capone…. To paint Prohibition as a failure is rather simplistic, because it was always a mixed bag. As author Daniel Okrent (no Prohibition lover) explained to Life.com, “People don't realize how much drinking there was in this country before Prohibition. We were awash in booze. In 1830, for example, the per capita consumption of alcohol was three times what it is today -- 90 bottles of booze per year per person over the age of 15. By 1933, drinking was around 70 percent of pre-Prohibition.” Change isn’t always a straight road. Again, Prohibition was a...

I oppose Prohibition in my kitchen. But – there is often a but - I’m also against professional libertarians and drunks making stuff up. Were American Prohibitionists really complete failures? You see, when a questioner proposes a few laws to curb drug addiction, your hysterical libertarian will unthinkingly scream, “Prohibition failed!” Or cry like a baby. Critical thinkers armed with primary sources, by way of contrast, beg to differ. And we’ve known this for decades: Prohibition was far more moderate and successful than what some libertarians imagine. It wasn’t pure socialism or pure lassie-faire romanticism. On the one hand, mainstream...

The Center for Disease Control has prophesied that by 2020 every state in the union will have indoor smoking bans. There are three bans in the prediction: restaurants, bars and workplace. Of course you canÂ’t smoke in federal buildings but these do not fall under state jurisdiction. Texas just happens be one of seven states that still believes in individual freedom and we have no indoor state smoking ban. Unfortunately, cities do have the right to pass smoking bans. In 2000, there were no state bans on indoor smoking. By 2010, fifty states have all three bans. By 2020, it...

Alaska state representative Bob Lynn (R., Anchorage) is asking the long overdue question: Why do we consider 18-year-olds old enough to join the military, to fight and die for our country, but not to have a drink with their friends before they ship out or while they’re home on leave? Lynn has introduced a bill that would allow anyone 18 years and older with a military ID to drink alcohol in Alaska. The bill is already facing strong opposition from self-styled public-health advocates. However, the data indicate that the 21-minimum drinking age has not only done zero good, it may...

Police at the University of Central Florida are looking into claims that members of a fraternity bragged about a game involving drugging random women at a fraternity function in February. University spokesman Chad Binette said Friday that UCF's Office of Student Conduct and the UCF Police Department "will be conducting reviews of the incident." "Our No. 1 priority is to provide a safe environment for the entire university community," including our Greek organizations," Binette said. The fraternity denied the allegations and said it welcomes the reviews. The controversy stems from a Feb. 10 event, in which documents released by UCF...

The "war on drugs" has failed and should be abandoned in favour of evidence-based policies that treat addiction as a health problem, according to prominent public figures including former heads of MI5 and the Crown Prosecution Service. Leading peers – including prominent Tories – say that despite governments worldwide drawing up tough laws against dealers and users over the past 50 years, illegal drugs have become more accessible. Vast amounts of money have been wasted on unsuccessful crackdowns, while criminals have made fortunes importing drugs into this country. The increasing use of the most harmful drugs such as heroin has...

Sometimes I drink Scotch and then, to wake myself up, I drink coffee. So what? Many people consume mixtures of caffeine and alcohol in drinks like rum and Coke. Again, so what? But recently some college kids started drinking pre-mixed combos of alcohol and caffeine with names like Four Loko and Moonshot '69. Moonshot '69 is a pilsner beer with less than a coffee cup's worth of caffeine. Until recently, Four Loko contained 12 percent alcohol -- about the same as wine -- and as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. A few students, after drinking Four Loko, landed...

HBO’s Atlantic City gangster drama ends its first season tonight—Allen Barra argues that its excellence is unrivaled in TV history, and has only seldom been achieved in film. In the first episode of Boardwalk Empire, directed by Martin Scorsese, Atlantic City political boss “Nucky” Thompson, played by Steve Buscemi, pensively gazes into a fortuneteller’s parlor. A short time later, we see the reverse shot—Nucky staring through the door’s oval window as seen from the inside. The shot replicates the double burn insert popular in newspapers in the 1910s and 1920s where a photo of a famous person was set in...

The California State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) announced their “unconditional support” of Prop 19, the initiative to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana, at a news conference last week.

On Jan. 16, 1920, the United States went dry. On that day 90 years ago, the 18th Amendment went into effect, making the buying and selling of alcohol illegal. This period of Prohibition lasted for nearly 14 years in the United States. Then, in 1933, America's dry spell ended when the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th and the United States was able to once again legally pursue its love affair with alcohol -- including beer. As America marks the 90th anniversary of the start of Prohibition, its affection for beer is still strong. But while many drink the beverage, how...

In the Donald E. Westlake novel Drowned Hopes, character Tom Jimson says Oklahoma remained dry following the repeal of Prohibition and was so feisty about it that officials arrested a bartender serving drinks on a through train. In revenge, the passenger railroads pulled their trains out of Oklahoma, with the result that old railroad towns became ghost towns-even Amtrak didn't provide service. Is there anything to this?  -- Anthony CreechOklahoma and its idiosyncratic liquor laws give the imaginatively inclined a lot to work with. There's a kernel of truth to the tale.Oklahoma, admitted to the union in 1907, long prided...

IN 1971 a group of teenagers in San Rafael, north of San Francisco, started meeting after school, at 4:20PM, to get high. The habit spread, and 420 became code for fun time among potheads worldwide. Ever since, California has remained in the vanguard of global cannabis culture. Oaksterdam University in Oakland is today unique in the world as a sort of Aristotelian lyceum for the study of all aspects—horticultural, scientific, historical—of the weed. Legally, California has also been a pioneer, at least within America. In 1996 it was the first state to allow marijuana to be grown and consumed for...

The evening of Jan. 16, 1920, hours before Prohibition descended on America, while the young assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt, drank champagne in Washington with other members of Harvard's Class of 1904, evangelist Billy Sunday preached to 10,000 celebrants in Norfolk, Va., : "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. . . ." Not exactly. Daniel Okrent's darkly hilarious "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" recounts how Americans abolished a widely exercised private right -- and condemned the nation's fifth-largest industry -- in order to make the nation more...

This pile of cash before it was counted was estimated to be approximately 18 Million Dollars! Scroll down on the link and look at all the pics

Thirsty residents of one of Australia's hottest towns face a 400-mile round trip to get a beer after they drank their local pub dry. Last weekend, The Ironclad Hotel, the only pub in Marble Bar, Western Australia, closed its doors for good. The town, with a population of just 300, is barely a dot on the map of the vast Pilbara region, and has no dedicated off-licence. Supermarkets in Australia are not allowed to sell liquor. Temperatures in the town regularly top 113F and the average maximum temperature exceeds normal human body temperature for six months of the year. So...