Posted on 04/11/2015 9:38:43 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., formally launched his presidential campaign Tuesday with a speech in Louisville. Among the notable quotes from Paul's speech was a comment seemingly meant to raise minority support by calling for reform of federal drug laws that disproportionately lead to incarceration of black Americans.
"I see an America where criminal justice is applied equally and any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed," Paul said.
Paul went on to address other topics without expanding much on what kinds of laws he meant. But given his past comments, it's not hard to guess he was talking about the war on drugs. "The war on drugs has become the most racially disparate outcome that you have in the entire country," Paul said in November 2014. "Our prisons are full of black and brown kids. Three-fourths of the people in prison are black or brown."
Lauren Galik, the Director of Criminal Justice Reform at Reason Foundation, said she was excited to hear a Republican presidential candidate campaigning on drug reform. "More than half of our federal prison population right now is there for drugs, many of which are African-American," Galik told the Washington Examiner. "African Americans are more likely to receive a sentence that carries a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment than white individuals."
Mandatory minimums disproportionately affect African American criminals compared to whites and Hispanics. "Although Black offenders in 2012 made up 26.3 percent of drug offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty, they accounted for 35.2 percent of the drug offenders still subject to that mandatory minimum at sentencing," according to the United States Sentencing Commission, an independent federal agency.
(Excerpt) Read more at m.washingtonexaminer.com ...
I didn’t give my opinion, I wasn’t even around in the 1800s.
You seem to think that polygamy and full term abortions are a problem, judging from your post, I guess that means they need laws against them.
Yes you did: "The drug laws started getting passed when they became a problem, for instance Opium in San Francisco."
You seem to think that polygamy and full term abortions are a problem, judging from your post, I guess that means they need laws against them.
Abortion is always a violation of rights; in my state polygamous marriage has never been legal and I'd vote against it if it came up.
Drugs were never a violation of rights, nor any more of a problem than alcohol - and like alcohol, the effects of banning them were a worse problem.
That wasn’t my opinion, that was the opinion of the Americans at the time who were passing the anti-drug, and drug safety laws.
You want to believe polls, guess you believe the polls when it came to Bibi and other issues too LOL.
I have teens, do you, can you ask them, I have?
I will believe them instead of a poll by a strangers or strangers not knowing who they asked, but then again you bask in your ignorance and keep wanting your drugs legal.
Seeing as you have not been on here for even a year then maybe you should have found yourself a liberal-tarian website as this is a conservative one.
Beginning to think the poster is another liberal-tarian freeper or a retread.
Works for me. Randy Pander Paul.
If you weren't too lazy to click the link I posted, you could have read all about their methodology. Instead you double down on your ignorance.
We see it from time to time, obsessed with drugs, they live and breathe it all day long, every day.
It’s all they care about is drugs and getting it legal.
They then call themselves conservatives when infact they are more to the left than liberals .
Even minarchists believe in moral based laws to control those who cannot control themselves and put others at risk. Libertarians, those moral-minarchists, must be a bunch of phony conservatives, too.
Your definition of minarchist sounds identical to libertarian to me - so what does the "moral-" modifier convey?
must be a bunch of phony conservatives, too.
True American conservatives wish to conserve the founding principle of our nation: "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men".
If you want to act like you didn’t understand the point of my post, then go ahead and feign ignorance and I’ll just move along. :)
Wow, you aren’t feigning ignorance. I didn’t see that coming.
If you are implying that a minarchist isn’t a statist, then you take my breath away. A minarchist might believe in giving minimal power to the State, but nonetheless, they would give power to the central government to control “we, the People” under the moral based laws that they deem necessary. They might not be anarchist, but they are moral statists - minimal moral statists, if that makes you feel better.
Agree some appear to change when the chips are down they want to please all and it can’t be done.
Laughable nonsense. Here is the definition of statism, from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/statism:
statism
noun
1. the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty.
"Extensive" is very different from "minimal."
Greetings, manc - I hope you and your family are doing well and health has improved a lot!
Me? The “fun” never stops....
Busy with lots of things and lately bad back/pinched nerve rendering me only 1/2 or less useful - not pleasant but many people have it much worse...everything takes much more time.
I’ll be around...
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