Here is the reply I received, 58 minutes later:

“Dear Ms [Libertarian Girl]

Thank you for your note and POV but given how grossly misrepresented this situation has become I would like to reply
We did not drop M Phelps we simply chose not renew his contract which expired in February. This was no different to the other group of Olympic athletes whose contracts expired. In recent months we have scaled back our NASCAR sponsorship and many other activitites that showed a low return on our investment. This had nothing to with his widely publicized incident but purely to do with business
Both of us have been the victims of misinformation by people who have their own agenda. Michael phelps contract would have ended regardless of his behaviour.
I hope this gives you another view of the subject.

Yours sincerely

Mark Baynes
Sent from my mobile device”

According to the headers, the email came from Baynes’ iPhone.

Tonight on Bill O’Reilly’s show, Diane Brady from BusinessWeek said: “They did absolutely the right thing. If you had to choose between 10,000 parents e-mailing you or 10,000 pot smokers, I think I’d alienate the pot smokers. So I think they did the right thing.”

In many cases, parents and pot smokers are the same people, Diane. Rob Kampia thinks it’s despicable:

“”Kellogg’s had no problem signing up Phelps when he had a conviction for drunk driving, an illegal act that could actually have killed someone. To drop him for choosing to relax with a substance that’s safer than beer is an outrage, and it sends a dangerous message to young people.”

In a case that has “long legal battle” written all over it, Sausalito, California might just find out. It’s banned medical marijuana dispensaries, establishments approved by both state and city voters by referendum– a referendum which of course goes against the DEA.

There is no doubt that Joe Biden is more articulate than Sarah Palin. However, almost nothing he says makes any actual sense.

Biden doesn’t know basic economics, history and doesn’t give a donkey’s arse about the Constitution. Biden misrepresents himself and what he stands for habitually: this is a guy who was all for invading Iraq if the UN had gone for it (and cheered Bush on with early invasion plans) and now pretends he’s Bush’s worst enemy and implies he was against it all along. This is the Joe Biden who created the completely unconstitutional position of the drug czar, which has spurred the growth of an agency which takes billions from those middle-class people Biden says he loves so much. It’s also put many of them in jail. This is the guy who may want to keep the vice-president’s office in the executive branch, but doesn’t care about expanding federal power over everything in your life under the auspices of “interstate commerce.”

As I always say, if you’re articulate and can speak well, you can get elected to office in this country even if you’re mentally insane, a habitual liar, a serial exaggerator or even a murderer. Voters simply go by what feels good to them at the moment, and a good speaker will fool them every time. Someone with real intellect and substance but no speaking ability won’t get out of the gate. Biden is a plagiarist, but it doesn’t matter because he’s “cool, calm and collected” after 30 years of taxpayer-funded practice, and his staffers can filter the facts on Wikipedia.

I also object to those who have stated that Gwen Ifill was perfectly objective despite her forthcoming Obama book. One of her first questions concerned whether “greedy lenders” or “risky homebuyers” contributed more to the subprime mortgage mess. That is a Hillary Clinton stump line if I’ve ever heard one. The home buyers who were buying houses way out of their leagues were also quite greedy in wanting to live in McMansions they couldn’t afford, and the lenders who were “trying to let people live the American Dream” (as Obama and Biden would put it) were also just being “risky.” That wasn’t the only completely partisan question she asked that night, although she did criticize Joe Biden at one point, a decision I’m sure came into play after she received so much criticism in the run-up to the debate. Another question talked about “debt-strapped mortageholders” and “some people have said that mortgageholders paid the price”– in other words, people who (like the Wall Street billionaires) made bad decisions and are now suffering for it who want other people who didn’t make those bad decisions to give them money.

Palin was excellent in her answer to that question, using a light touch to tell people that they need to learn lessons and not be taken advantage of again and pay attention to their parents’ admonitions to not live beyond their means. She also said that government needed to be more efficient, something Obama is big on but Biden didn’t mention this time around. Tax raises mean that jobs will be cut and the private economy will suffer as the public sector becomes more bloated and inefficient.

Biden’s mantra for the night was “John said, ‘Deregulate, deregulate.’” That alone is quite enough to turn someone away from voting for his ticket, as if deregulation is the problem and as if deregulation is a bad thing. Obama says the same thing, but not to this extent.

Biden did get one hit in when he said that he agreed with Palin’s tax raises on oil companies and McCain wanted to get them tax breaks. I give him props for that, but she got back at him when she said that Biden had offered to run on McCain’s ticket. She made the point that raising taxes on oil companies was good and set Biden up to hit his home run. Palin missed a chance to deliver a knockout when she talked about what she’d done in Wasilla, Alaska to improve it and Biden talked about how Wilmington, Delaware was hurting right now. She could’ve pointed out that she’d improved her hometown but after 30 years in Congress, he hadn’t done much to help his.

I am starting to finally buy into this “liberal media bias” thing. Here are two egregious examples from a quick search of the news.

According to The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Biden provided “oodles of details, numbers and records in his answers” which “might win over intellects,” which ignores the fact that many of his “oodles of numbers and records” were completely wrong. Why would intellects fall for that, and why would intellects be any less into Palin’s arguing that people, for instance, should be smart enough next time not to fall for predatory lenders, rather than flocking for Biden’s argument that these mortgage-holders were too dumb to figure it out for themselves and therefore need to be “saved” by taxpayers?

The Baltimore Sun television critic believes it “is hard to imagine any rational human being not thinking Joe Biden delivered one of the most solid and winning debate performances in recent presidential history… the question is whether facts, reason and logic can win out on TV over attitude and image, which is what Palin’s performance was all about.” Hmm, so Biden is all facts, reason and logic while Palin is all image? I’m beginning to believe that there is a mainstream media liberal bias. Rather than even giving Palin credit for being tolerant of same-sex couples, he says she doesn’t know the Republican position on gays and that evengelicals must have fallen “right out of their seats” when they heard. What the hell?

Ways in which Biden stretched the truth (and ways in which they both did):

McCain did not say he was “surprised” by subprime mortgages last December.
McCain did not say he wants the health care deregulated, only that insurance should be allowed to be bought over state lines.
McCain did not vote the same way Obama did on the tax-raising vote– he didn’t vote at all.
McCain does not only want to give Exxon Mobil a tax cut, but he wants to cut the general business tax rate for all corporations.
Obama has said that he would consider meeting with Iran’s president without precondition; Biden claimed Obama had not said this. It’s not a bad thing, anyway.
We didn’t kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon, and neither did France. Nobody has.

I first noticed this shoddy journalism a few months ago with the story of the breastfeeding medical student who got a court to rule that she needed extra break times during a board exam to be on an “equal footing” with men, who did not have to breastfeed during the exam. The Times finally got around to mentioning in the last sentence of their article that this particular student, Sophie Currier, already had the special concession of being allowed to take the exam over two days instead of the one day that everyone else has, due to her ADHD.

Now, the Times reports on the saga of 25-year-old Ryan Holle, who allowed a friend to borrow his car to rob a marijuana dealer’s house. The robbery turned into a murder (of the dealer’s daughter), and Holle is now in prison for life with no possibility of parole, because he knew his buddies were going to use his car for a burglary. In America, when a murder is committed during a felony, all accomplices and accessories are treated as participating equally in the murder. This is different than most other countries’ murder laws.

After two pages going over the sorrow of the young man’s plight, the Times finally sees fit to mention in the final paragraphs that the prosecutor offered Holle a 10-year plea bargain and he refused to take it, despite previously admitting to police that he knew about the robbery when he lent his car– which surely meant that a jury would convict him.

I know that defendants in murder trials often have poor legal representation, but in this particular case, Holle himself made two colossal mistakes: he lent his car to people who were going to commit an armed robbery of another person, and he then refused to accept a fair plea deal from the prosecutor for his role in the girl’s death. I’m not versed in Florida’s laws, but in most states, with a 10-year sentence and good behavior, he would have been out in five years or so. That’s certainly a fair punishment. It doesn’t seem that he was trying to avoid prison by saying he was completely innocent, either, since he himself told police that he knew what his friends were up to. He probably would not have been a suspect otherwise.

The prosecutor at Holle’s trial told the jury, “No car, no crime. No car, no consequences. No car, no murder.” That’s what people say about guns as well, and they sue the gun manufacturers. Using that twisted logic, why doesn’t the prosecutor sue Chevrolet for making the Chevy Metro, a car which Holle was able to buy and use to perpetuate a robbery and then murder? It’s interesting how people never blame cars for anything, because we all have them and see them as innocuous objects. More people get killed in cars than almost any other cause of death. Most murders wouldn’t be able to happen without cars, and how many times have escaped fugitives taken off in their cars? The most dangerous thing you may ever do in your life is drive down a highway, yet no one calls for the banning of cars because that would be inconvenient.

The Times also ignores perhaps the worst injustice in the case, that of the mother of the murder victim. The marijuana dealer, Christine Snyder, was booked after her daughter’s funeral for possession of a pound of marijuana and sentenced to three years in prison. Three years in prison for marijuana possession after a woman’s daughter is brutally murdered? Perhaps the police simply thought she needed full-time, supervised, in-house grief counseling provided by the state for the next three years or perhaps they just have no violent criminals to fill the prisons in Florida.

Why focus on the guy who helped with this woman’s daughter’s murder– what about an article detailing how completely messed up our society is that it would imprison a grieving mother for three years for possession of a plant?

Tags: Ryan Holle, New York Times, felony murder law, Christine Snyder, Ryan Holle trial, marijuana, murder laws

The obvious solution is to legalize marijuana.

Why legalize marijuana? Why not just make it illegal and attempt to arrest all these renegade marijuana growers and throw them in prison? Well, since that’s the status quo, and it doesn’t solve anything and in fact makes it worse, the only suitable alternative is to legalize marijuana. Reasons?

• With illegal marijuana, the taxpayers get hit multiple times–
  • no taxes on a product sold,
  • millions spent on police to combat that product,
  • harm to society with the crimes that are not prevented or solved while police instead chase marijuana users and growers,
  • millions on prison systems to hold those who sell this product,
  • and as the above article details, huge amounts in taxpayer dollars wasted to clean up the remnants of the diesel generators from these illegal growing sites–
  • not to mention the health effects suffered by those drinking the diesel-contaminated groundwater.

Illegal marijuana (and the black market that currently comes with it) also carries a risk of violence for the public; California’s large-scale ad hoc marijuana fields are built by Mexican drug cartels who helicopter Mexican migrants in to take care of them and depend on the profits from the marijuana to do God knows what back in Mexico. When a product is relegated to the black market only, it’s going to attract loathsome types to its black market profits. Those in pursuit of black market profits are not going to care about any sideline damage, of humans, animals, or the environment, but responsible marijuana growers (as most would be in a society with legalized marijuana) do. The Sheriff of Mendocino County, California realizes this:

“There is a serious distinction to be made. Many medical [legal] marijuana growers are some of the most responsible citizens around. They buy soil in bulk, use rat traps instead of poison, water with timers and drip systems. They have very little physical impact on the land. I’m not up against legal growers. The ones I’m concerned with are the ones polluting the environment in the name of huge profits. The plants are seasonal, but the environmental damage lasts forever.”

With legal marijuana, the public would benefit so much.

• Mexican drug cartels would have no reason to bring their violence and tactics to our country, because the entrepreneur down the street would be able to sell legal marijuana at the local drugstore.
• I’m no fan of taxes, but think of the billions in taxes that would be generated from a free market of marijuana users– and what education, health care, roads and bridges that those billions (currently going to drug cartels) could provide under our current system of providing these types of things.
• Police officers could stop searching for minor drugs and focus more on, for example, investigating the 30% of murders that go unsolved in the US.
• We wouldn’t have overcrowded prisons and the spiraling costs for construction and AIDS treatment that result from them.
• Our court systems would be freed up from all these petty criminals and able to better tackle more important cases for public safety, such as prosecutions of murder and rape.

Good results for the environment would just be icing on the cake.

Tags: marijuana, legalize marijuana, marijuana environment, illegal marijuana, decriminalize marijuana, legalise marijuana, decriminalise marijuana, help the environment, help environment, environment