All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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America’s Not Ready for Hillary

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Before the release, American Secretary of Stat...
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hillary Rodham Clinton will not be the next president of the United States. She won’t even be the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee. Risky as it is to place one’s bets 18 months ahead of an election, I’m confident in those two predictions.

Why?

Well, the scandals, real and imagined, that have dogged her and her husband’s heels at every turn since the 1992 election cycle — from Whitewater to Vince Foster’s death to “bimbo eruptions” — don’t help.  Her handling of them helps even less, and the fuse is burning down on a big one: A forthcoming book by Peter Schweizer on the Clinton family foundation’s finances.

The charity is hard at work right now, massaging its old tax returns to correct “errors in reporting donations from foreign governments.” Good luck “correcting” what looks a lot like a straightforward $2.3 million bribe from Russia (with love) to then Secretary of State Clinton for approval of a sensitive uranium deal.

But it’s not financial hijinks, tall tales about Bosnian sniper fire, shrugging deflections of responsibility for American deaths in Benghazi, or even her Nixonian, and undeniably criminal, actions in controlling, concealing and destroying official emails as Secretary of State that sound the death knell for her presidential aspirations.

The real problem is that nobody seems to be able to think of any good reason why she should be elected president. Even among those Americans who are okay with politicians running their lives, there’s no great stampede on to let THIS politician run their lives. Maybe that’s because she so clearly relishes the idea.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is famous for being famous. “Power behind the throne” talk aside, she married a future president, rode his coattails to a safe Democrat US Senate seat in which she served without distinction (other than voting for the USA PATRIOT ACT and the invasion of Iraq, neither of which are exactly high points on a presidential resume these days), lost her “inevitable” 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to a freshman US Senator virtually unknown four years before, and kept the needle on her tenure as Secretary of State floating between lackluster and embarrassing.

America has a bad case of Hillary fatigue. And where her presidential ambitions are concerned, the affliction is terminal.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the alternatives, Democrat and Republican alike, aren’t any better. Even the most allegedly “libertarian” of the pack, US Senator Rand Paul, seems a lot more interested in power than in freedom.

If we all write in “None of the Above” a year from this coming November, will the politicians leave us alone for four years? Of course they won’t. But we can daydream, can’t we?

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

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RGBStock White House

Presidential candidates work hard to convince ordinary Americans that they’re just like us. Regular folks. Put their pants on one leg at a time, you betcha.

But nobody clears the airspace for me when I fly into a city.

Nor, I bet, do federal agents cordon off several blocks around venues in which you’re scheduled to speak, restricting  people who don’t like you to “free speech zones” for the duration of your visit.

And if either of us puts the pedal to the metal and flies down Interstate 89 at more than 90 miles per hour to keep appointments in Keene, Claremont and Concord, New Hampshire, we’ll be lucky if we get off with stern lectures and expensive tickets.

Hillary Clinton gets a Secret Service escort. The police don’t even consider pulling her over for a ticket. They’re there to make sure all us regular people — you know, the ones she’s just like — keep ourselves out of her way.

No, I’m not picking on Hillary. It’s all of them. I can cite experiences, my own and those of friends, going back to 1992 revealing the same disregard for the rules that bind everyone else.

In 1992, the Secret Service searched the apartment of a friend of mine for no other reason than that it happened to overlook president George H.W. Bush’s motorcade route. Later that fall, my future wife was ordered to finish her meal and clear out of a restaurant immediately. Because Bush wanted to eat there.

In 2000, police ordered me to walk about three miles out of my way to reach a “free speech zone.” Mere mortals were excluded from the streets surrounding the building where vice president Al Gore and presidential candidate George W. Bush were scheduled to “debate” (read: Tell us how much like us they are, just regular folks, folks).

In 2008, US Highway 65 between Springfield and Branson, Missouri was cleared of mere mundanes so presidential candidate John McCain’s motorcade could pass through. The local newspaper dutifully noted its police-escorted speed of 100 miles per hour.

These things aren’t the exceptions. They’re the rule. The political class is not like the rest of us. They’re not regular folks.

And I guess that’s OK. It would be a shame for any of them to be late to the microphones from which they lecture us on the importance of the rule of law.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The Problem Isn’t Synthetic Marijuana. The Problem Is Prohibition.

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A WVPD vehicle, outfitted for the D.A.R.E. pro...
A WVPD vehicle, outfitted for the D.A.R.E. program. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Per CNN, New York governor Andrew Cuomo attributes 160 emergency room visits in his state, over a period of only nine days, to “synthetic marijuana” use. Alabama’s Department of Public Health claims 98 overdoses statewide in March.

The chemical stew — sold under the fiction that it’s to be used as incense or in some other innocuous way , but well-known as a substitute drug for those seeking a recreational, marijuana-like high — reportedly comes with side effects ranging from confusion and headaches to seizures and even death.

Is this latest drug scare a real problem, or just another instance of the hysterical propaganda used to justify marijuana prohibition for 80 years or so? It’s hard to tell. I’m inclined to think that it’s for real and that “spice” is some bad stuff. But either way, the real problem is prohibition itself.

Synthetic marijuana users would probably rather have the real thing. Unfortunately, it’s harder to find. Unlike “synthetic marijuana,” it isn’t sold openly in stores except in a few states. And it too comes with a major side effect: The possibility of going to jail.

In fact, that’s its ONLY major side effect. Marijuana is among the safest drugs around. It’s pretty much impossible to overdose on. It doesn’t impair judgment, motor skills or reaction times as badly as alcohol does. And while smoking it may be bad for the lungs, its users normally don’t go through two packs a day as tobacco users do.

As a public health matter, the obvious answer to the “synthetic marijuana” problem is to end the government’s war on real marijuana. And that’s been the correct answer to all supposed “marijuana problems” since marijuana prohibition came into vogue in the 1930s.

Starting with California in the 1990s, states began legalizing medical marijuana use.  So far 24 have done so. Only four states (Colorado, Washington, Alaska and Oregon) and the District of Columbia have moved to decriminalize possession of small quantities of this relatively benign plant.

Why are things moving so slowly? If you have to ask “why,” the answer is almost always “money.”  Prohibition is a major industry.

The US government spends tens of billions of dollars per year providing “war on drugs” employment to cops and bureaucrats who might otherwise have to find real jobs. Local police departments count on drug busts (and associated property seizures) to pad their own payrolls. The American prison-industrial complex lobbies hard for laws that keep its cells filled. And assorted “non-profits” like Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) rake in tens of millions of dollars annually by pitching anti-drug propaganda at a captive audience — our kids.

The war on drugs benefits the prohibition industry. But where the public’s health and freedom are concerned, its costs — people jailed, people killed, sick people denied real medicine, well people made sick by inferior recreational substitutes — far outweigh any benefits, real or imagined.

The war on drugs is a national nightmare. Time to wake up and end it.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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