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Locked on 01/15/2014 11:23:33 AM PST by Jim Robinson, reason:
Enough already! |
Posted on 01/13/2014 11:39:29 AM PST by Kaslin
Right now, China and Russia are having a great laugh at America’s expense. For a once proud country with strong moral character and intellectual ambition, we have become a nation intent on destroying itself from within. The publicly sanctioned and widespread celebration of indolent potheads toking themselves into oblivion in Colorado is only the latest example.
We have come a long way from Nancy Reagan’s largely successful “Just Say No” campaign to educate students on the dangers of drugs and their consequences. Call it “You Can Say Yes. “
In the minds of many conservatives, the lines are becoming quickly blurred on the legalization of mind-altering substances as well as the punishment of drug offenders. Libertarians are taking up the cause to push for universal legalization of marijuana around the country. Some are doing this because of Americans’ growing fear of our government’s intrusion into our private lives while others are doing it because of easier access to their favorite recreational pastime. Indeed, the latter motivation seems to be so popular, that it quickly turned into one of the most popular battle cries amongst the young adults for the election of Rep. Ron Paul in the 2012 Republican Primary.
Unfortunately, many traditional Conservatives are also getting on the drug bus because they have bought the Democrat lie that the money collected by drug users could be fiscally beneficial. In the most recent year, Colorado generated $9.1 million in retail sales tax from the sale of medical marijuana. This figure is bound to grow with the introduction of recreational sales and the additional 25% in excise and sales taxes since becoming legal on January 1st.
Looking beyond just the tax revenue, the industry generates millions of dollars every year for the state from licensing and application fees. To apply for and obtain a license to run a medical marijuana facility serving more than 500 patients, for instance, the necessary application and license fees alone approach $40,000. Colorado has agreed to take this new revenue and use it for the education of its children and construction of new schools. Does this mean at 18 every high school graduate will be handed their diploma and a doobie with the instructions to get addicted in order to help fund future generations’ educations?
We are now seeing a very odd mix of bedfellows. One of my favorite Tea Party Senators, Mike Lee of Utah, and one of the most odious liberals in the Senate today, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, both are now in agreement to reduce the mandatory jail sentence time on non-violent drug offenses in hopes of reducing prison expenses. A federal inmate’s yearly cost for one inmate ranges from $21,000 to $33,000 depending on the prison's level of security. Because of the current system, about half of the nation's more than 218,000 federal inmates are serving time for drug crimes with virtually all of them subjected by some form of mandatory minimum sentencing.
Am I living in the twilight zone right now? Has our country become so ignorant that we have abandoned one of the few positive goals of eliminating substances from our cultural landscape? Drugs that have reduced the productivity, health and advancement of our society? Don’t think drugs have a negative effect on the community? Just look to Washington State, where within the first 6 months of pot being legalized, 745 drivers stopped by the police tested positive for marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient THC and over half of those tested were over the state’s legal limit of 5 nanograms. This means there are more impaired drivers on the roads of Washington and now Colorado driving alongside families on their way to school and people on their way to work. Please tell me how a price can be put on their safety or tell me that drugs cannot hurt innocent bystanders? Please go ask a family who has lost a loved one to drug use or more importantly whose family was affected by someone under the influence.
We are witnessing the steady decline and intentional corrosion of America’s social structure. This is the ultimate goal of leftists: total control of the state that would make middle and lower class its feudal subjects. What better way to destroy a culture then to encourage mind altering substance use by the general public?
Ronald Reagan often quoted John Winthrop’s shining “City upon a Hill” but ultimately under these types of legislative policy, we might suffer more the fate as predicted by Alexis de Toqueville who said “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
Yeah crap.
The conservative wants the federal government to do nothing more than is outlined in the Constitution, and leave everything else up to the states or local governments.
If you oppose drugs, gay marriage, abortion, and gays in the military, and polygamy, you sure hide it well, since you want to make them legal, and keep them legal.
Do you think the laws about marriage and military service, and immigration, and State department policy, and federal employment and benefits, are somehow not supposed to involve law?
Do you think conservatives merely want laws allowing someone to not agree with abortion, or gay marriage?
The federal government has laws for itself, for instance involving marriage, abortion, employment, immigration, military service, and contrary to what you claim, conservatives do care about those laws and policies.
Remove that government, and watch how quickly gays go back in the closet. Remove government enabling of sloth and hedonism, and watch drug/alcohol abuse shrink. I am saying shrink the government, shrink the problem.
In principle and in practice, you are saying replace their government with "our" government, and you're calling that government "conservative."
NO SALE for this conservative.
To: Finny
Only authoritarians think government laws "forbidding" moral weaknesses and failings can cure anything. Ansel, WHY didn't the Constitution state that drunkenness, gambling, prostitution, abortion (yes, it was around then), and homosexuality were banned? Why does government need to do it now?
Wow, you and your pro-abortion arguments, you think the founders of this nation deliberately left it as some sort of constitutional right?
156 posted on 1/13/2014 7:34:37 PM by ansel12
Very nice, but aside from military and immigration issues, conservatives should worry about them at the state level.
You see that as a pro-abortion argument? You need your glasses changed up!
What a goofy post, if you don’t want homosexuality legal in the military, then you have to change the law.
If you want abortion illegal, then it has to be against the law.
When you find ways to oppose pro-lifers, as you have in post after post, yeah, I know why you are arguing with conservatives and calling us “authoritarian”.
LIMITED GOVERNMENT enables moral societies. "Compassionate" and "moral" government enables the America we see today!!!
You never answer any of my questions! It’s like corresponding with a parakeet.
Conservative should care about law at all levels, this is just an example of the areas that the feds have to deal with law involving “social issues” gay marriage, abortion, homosexuality.
Libertarians play a game as they fight for the left, but their goals are the same, at the city level, county, state, federal, their social liberalism is in force at all levels.
Well, you have legal abortion, legal gay marriage at the federal level, the feds have to deal with those issues, you seem determined to force arguments to keep the current laws in place.
Yeah, I need a better source.
As far as I know marijuana became legal on January 1st, not six months ago.
That THC test sounds bogus, too.
5 nanograms are a unit of weight, 5 billionths of one gram.
Trying to locate 5 nanograms of THC in a blood drop would be a good trick, and trying to weigh it would be an even better trick.
I do not think smoking marijuana and flying helicopters is an exercise in freedom with responsibility. A person who engages in this activity is falling down on the responsibility end of the equation.
There are certain activities (e.g. alcohol, marijuana) in which a responsible person will not engage when they choose to be a pilot, police officer, fireman, bus driver, etc. A person who believes in freedom with responsibility will recognize that and act accordingly. But, as I have already stated, the fact that some people do not behave responsibly is not a justification to limit the freedoms of people who do.
CUT AND PASTE EXAMPLES of where I do that Ansel, or be an honorable, righteous conservative and delete your libelous posts.
CUT AND PASTE EXAMPLES OF MY WORDS "opposing pro lifers" and "promoting drugs" and "siding with liberals" and all the rest of your hysterical imaginations, or admit that what you write here about me is PURE LIBEL. DO ONE OR THE OTHER, if you have the integrity and honor. If you lack integrity and honor, go on libeling me.
Ansel and Admin Moderator, look at Ansel's posts 128, 131, 133, 138, 141, 145, 147, 153, 156, 162, 165, 169, 170, and 174. FOURTEEN POSTS Ansel declines to debate or discuss, but instead LIBELS me pure and simple, and if it had been once or twice, who cares? But this guy has done it in fourteen posts, enough repetition to hurt my reputation on FR. THAT IS WRONG.
If you were an honorable person with ethics, a true conservative, Ansel, you would ask the Admin Mod to delete those posts.
And by the way, YOU HAVE NOT ANSWERED ONE SINGLE SIMPLE QUESTION I HAVE PUT FORTH TO YOU. Not one.
Ansel:
1. Please advise how my opposing laws that punish bakers for refusing to cook wedding cakes for homosexual "weddings," and how opposing laws that punish the military for (rightly!)discriminating against folks they know are homosexuals in their ranks, and how opposing laws that punish companies for refusing to extend spousal benefits to "gay" spouses, is siding with the left.
2. Do you think the Federal government should have law punishing two guys who hold a private ceremony in which they pretend to get married, and do you think Federal government should have law punishing a baker for baking a cake for that ceremony? Yes or no?
Amen!
Well, you have legal abortion, legal gay marriage at the federal level, the feds have to deal with those issues ...
Hello, KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK, anybody home??
Ansel, none of those social issues became "issues" at all because the majority of states and free Americans rejected abortion and open homosexuality on their own, without needing laws to tell them to do that. It was ONLY when the Federal Government stepped in and said, "You'd better keep abortion LEGAL, you'd better honor 'gay marriage,' or else!" that things started to go sideways. HELLO??????????????? Anybody there?
Government is the path to amoral tyranny. LIMITED GOVERNMENT is the path to morality.
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