There Should be Zero Tolerance for Heroin in Law Enforcement

Cleveland.com -- Jeremy Pelzer
Ohio's heroin epidemic gets national exposure in new '60 Minutes' segment

“A record 2,482 Ohioans died of drug-related deaths in 2014, according to preliminary statistics from the Ohio Department of Health. About half of those deaths – 1,177 – involved heroin, which many addicts have turned to as a cheaper and more available alternative to prescription pain pills.”

When I was an orthopedic resident in New York City from 1969 until 1973 there was a heroin epidemic. The police station in the South Bronx was called “Fort Apache” because it was surround by crime and and communal decay. It was the subject of the movie Fort Apache: the Bronx. Ten years later President Carter visited this area which had burned out and been abandoned and the police station at that time was known as “the little house on the prairie.” A study during that time showed that a mainline heroin addict committed 250 felonies a year to support such their drug habit. Heroin addicts discard their needles and make parks and public green spaces for children unsafe. There were 1,177 heroin related deaths in just Ohio in 2014. There is a very clear health hazard with the risk of AIDS and hepatitis. The emergency rooms are now commonly treating infections and abscesses from heroin injections. There should be zero tolerance for for heroin in law enforcement for a heroin epidemic will destroy individual lives and and it has the potential to destroy a community.

Opinions Gradually Changing in Ohio on the Death Penalty

Columbus Dispatch
Worth the trouble?
Problems surrounding the death penalty show no sign of abating

"But how about the argument that the death penalty is just too difficult to impose and trying to make it work uses up too much time, energy and money to be worthwhile?"

Death Penalty Information Center
Florida Acquits Death Row Inmate

“On October 12, 2015, the Circuit Court for Pascal County, Florida, entered a judgment of acquittal and the Florida Department of Corrections released Derral Hodgkins from custody after the Florida Supreme Court denied the prosecution's motion to reconsider its June 18, 2015 decision acquitting Hodges of all charges in the stabbing death of his former girlfriend.”

Sen. Ted Cruz is Far from the Center

Politico -- By Burgess Everett
How McConnell outfoxed Ted Cruz
Cruz can't get the best of the GOP stalwart.

“The breaking point came in July, when Cruz called McConnell a liar for holding a vote on the Export-Import Bank, which many conservatives vehemently oppose.

Even then, McConnell bit his tongue, quietly urging senators not to take the floor in his defense, wary of giving Cruz a bigger platform for his GOP primary run.”

Real Clear Politics -- By Mark Salter
What Ted Cruz Really Stands For

“Then again, I can’t recall any senator who was as nearly universally loathed by his colleagues as Cruz. There have been others who weren’t likeable. There were plenty who were self-interested and who preened and blustered as often as Cruz does—and who routinely elicited senatorial smirks and rolled eyes. There have been senators who frequently forced their colleagues to cast difficult and unpopular votes. And, of course, there is a long list of senators who ran for president and treated the Senate floor as a campaign stop. (And for some of them it worked). But no senator in my memory did all that with such abandon and was disliked with as much intensity as is Ted Cruz.”

National Review -- ELIANA JOHNSON
When Cruz Makes His Move, Watch Out

“Cruz has proved to be an ambitious and serious campaigner, devoted to doing the hard and unglamorous work required of presidential candidates.”

An Interesting Juxtaposition

States Scramble for Drugs Used in Executions, Causing Delays
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

“death-penalty states are finding it harder to carry out executions as they struggle to obtain and properly use limited supplies of ever-changing combinations of suitable drugs.”

California governor signs bill legalizing physician-assisted suicide SACRAMENTO, CALIF. | BY SHARON BERNSTEIN

"There is a deadly mix when you combine our broken healthcare system with assisted suicide, which immediately becomes the cheapest treatment," said Marilyn Golden, a senior policy analyst at the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund in Berkeley. "The so-called protections written into the bill really amount to very little."

Capital Punishment's Fatal flaws

Aljazeera America -- Lauren Carasik
Glossip case highlights capotal punishment's fatal flaws

In denying his request for a reprieve on Sept. 28, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals was deeply divided. Three judges held that new evidence merely expanded on previous theories and did not warrant overriding the principle of final judgment. The panel’s remaining two judges supported a stay of execution and a hearing on Glossip’s innocence, with one arguing the state would not be harmed by a delay and that it had “no interest in executing an actually innocent man” and the other lamenting that his “trial was deeply flawed.” As his defense attorney Don Knight said, “We should all be deeply concerned about an execution under such circumstances.”

“Glossip’s conviction rested almost entirely on the testimony of Justin Sneed, a 19-year-old drug addict who worked at a hotel owned by Barry Van Treese, in exchange for room and board. Sneed confessed to murdering Van Treese but avoided the death penalty by implicating Glossip, a manager at the hotel, as the crime’s mastermind. Glossip was first convicted and sentenced to death in 1998, but the verdict was overturned on appeal in 2001 because he received ineffective assistance of counsel, including his attorney’s failure to show the jury the tape of Sneed’s interrogation, which would have provided ample fodder to impeach his credibility — an obvious blunder. Glossip was found guilty at a second trial in 2004 and sentenced to death again after his lawyers inexplicably failed to present the evidence whose egregious omission justified overturning his previous conviction.

A Climate of Blaming America First does not Provide a better Global Vision

The Orange County Register -- Joel Kotkin
Becoming America the not-so-beautiful

“Virtually all the leading reformers in our history – Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, the Roosevelts and Martin Luther King – couched their proposals in terms of fulfilling American ideals. Throw out the ideals, and those who originally formed them, and we lose the precious ability to meld our traditions with change. We are left simply with a postmodernist battle of interest groups, with no unifying or moderating principle.”

The Los Angeles Times -- Joseph J Ellis
Op-Ed -- The Founding Fathers: Demigods or scoundrels?

“In the case of the founders, such disavowals also provide therapeutic opportunities to transform U.S. history into a morality play with a ready-made cast of villainous dead white males, thereby obviating the need to encounter history's ironies and paradoxes or to comprehend its intractable tragedies.”

International New York Times -- GARDINER HARRIS and ERIC SCHMITT
Obama’s Call at U.N. to Fight ISIS With Ideas Is Largely Seen as Futile

“This means defeating their ideology,” he said. “Ideologies are not defeated with guns. They are defeated by better ideas — a more attractive and compelling vision.”

Equality as an Affirmation of our Common Humanity
James Rutherford -- The Far Center Blog

“We are missing a defining opportunity in the history of the moral and political philosophy of the liberal tradition; first, by not defining our primary moral value as equality, understood as a respect for the dignity and worth of our common humanity; and second, by not defining our government as a constitutional democracy, which is the only way to convey both the substantive and the procedural concepts of equality that it incorporates.”

Widespread Corporate Corruption is Just the Cost of Doing Business

If we are not going to bring criminal charges in these types of cases then personal fines or rescinding bonuses should maybe be part of these settlements.

Huffington Post -- Steven Brill
America’s Most Admired Lawbreaker

“It’s their cost of doing business,” the analyst added, perhaps unintentionally echoing the view of one senior J&J lawyer who told me that the cases against his company are the unavoidable price of dealing with a litigation system easily abused by those targeting big corporations.

“True, eight of the other nine largest pharmaceutical companies in the world have settled federal claims over the last decade related to allegations similar to what Johnson & Johnson was accused of in selling Risperdal”

Houston Chronicle -- Tom Hays and Tom Krisher, Associated Press GM will pay $900 million over ignition switch scandal

“The twin agreements bring to more than $5.3 billion the amount GM has spent on a problem authorities say could have been handled for less than a dollar per car. Those expenses include fines, compensation for victims and the recall of millions of vehicles.”

The Republican Primary Rules May Favor Donald Trump

International New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JONATHAN MARTIN

Party Rules to Streamline Race May Backfire for G.O.P

“If Mr. Trump draws one-third of the Republican primary vote, as recent polls suggest he will, that could be enough to win in a crowded field. After March 15, he could begin amassing all the delegates in a given state even if he carried it with only a third of the vote. And the later it gets, the harder it becomes for a lead in delegates to be overcome, with fewer state contests remaining in which trailing candidates can attempt comebacks.”

The Syrian Refugee Crisis

The Guardian
Patrick Kingsley Migration correspondent, Mark Rice-Oxley and Alberto Nardelli
Syrian refugee crisis: why has it become so bad?

“It is hard to find definitive reasons, but conversations with Syrians across the migration trail and a survey of recently available data suggest a mixture of the following.”

BBC News -- Michael Stephens
Migrant crisis: Why the Gulf states are not letting Syrians in

“For example, citizens in the UAE and Qatar number a little over 10% of the resident populations in their respective countries. The vast majority of residents are transitory economic workers.”

Real Clear Politics -- Thomas Sowell
The Past and Future of the Refugee Crisis

“No nation has an unlimited capacity to absorb immigrants of any sort, and especially immigrants whose cultures are not simply different, but antagonistic, to the values of the society in which they settle.”

llinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York

Market watch -- Sue Chang
Unlucky lottery winner gets IOU from state of Illinois

Of the 50 states, Illinois ranked dead last in fiscal health, according to a report in July from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

“Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York rank [as] the bottom five states, largely owing to low amounts of cash on hand and large debt obligations,”

What else do these states have in common?

Death Penalty Ruling May Pave Way for National Abolitionists

ABC News -- PAT EATON-ROBB Associated Press

Connecticut Court Strikes Down State Death Penalty

A sweeping decision this week by the Connecticut Supreme Court that found the death penalty no longer meets society's evolving standards of decency could be influential across a nation that is increasingly questioning the practice, legal experts said.

What the pundits miss about Donald Trump

Most of the media have recognized that those who are being supported in the Republican primary polls are outsiders, such as Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina. This is understandable, when Congress has an approval rating of much less than 20%.

What is not generally recognized is that almost all of Trump’s policies whether on immigration or the Middle East are someway tied into improving the economy and increasing jobs. This is also the major concern of the voters in the presidential election.

North Korea

WP -- Blaine Harden -- Can we believe all the horrors described by North Korean escapees?

“Perhaps the greatest value of these new memoirs is to show the nuttiness of life under a family dictatorship that survives by spying upon, terrorizing and imprisoning its 24.9 million people, many of whom are chronically malnourished.”

Yahoo News -- North Korea threatens imminent strikes against South, warns US

“North Korea on Saturday threatened South Korea with "indiscriminate" military strikes unless it halts cross-border propaganda broadcasts, and issued fresh nuclear weapons warnings against the United States.”

Donald Trump has published his immigration policy

Donald Trump has published a white paper outlining his immigration policy.

It can be viewed or downloaded here.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/immigration-reform

This is one of the more aggressive policies to on issues related to immigration and it will surely be a center of discussions in the primary election campaigns and debates.

John Kasich

A lot of attention has been paid to the remarkable success of Donald Trump in the polling for the Republican primary election. I think that the best explanation for this success is to simply look at not only the approval rating of the policies of President Obama with the Republican primary voters, but also the dismal approval rating of the Congress, which is often in single digits, with all of the voters.

I think that the ability of Gov.john Kasich to make it into the top 10 in the polls for the 1st debate, however, should also be receiving more attention. I think that Gov. Kasich will climb in the polls and do well in the initial primaries the better he and his policy positions are known. His experience and the success of his record both in Congress and as Governor of Ohio can match or exceed that of all of the other contenders. He general approach of pragmatism and a goal of just making things better and going in the right direction should resonate with a lot of the electorate and especially with the independent voters and even some Democrats. This is true at least in Ohio. The demographics also indicate that the Republicans cannot win the national presidential election without winning both Florida and Ohio. I would predict that Governor Kasich will be one of the last ones standing in the Republican primary elections and that he will be on the Republican ticket for 2016.

Turkey and the Kurds

Spiegel Online- By Maximilian Popp and Christoph Reuter
Erdogan's Cynical Game: Is Turkey Creeping Toward Civil War?

“Turkish President Erdogan claims to be battling the terrorist Islamic State, but in reality he is mainly fighting against the Kurdish PKK militia. By doing so, he has shown that he is willing to derail the peace process in his country for the sake of clinging to power.”

“But Erdogan's true intentions quickly became clear. He wanted to use the opportunity to fight what he and the other hardliners in his party felt was the greater evil: the PKK. This has created an absurd situation in which Turkey is now striking at both IS and its most effective and toughest opponents.”

Why Is Obama Going After the Kurds?

Real Clear Politics -- By Caroline Glick Obama Strikes Again

Erdogan has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. He is sectarian and thus in opposition to the Kurds and Israel. He has aspirations of changing the Constitution to give him more authoritarian power.

“The YPG’s victories similarly enhanced the Kurds’ standing inside Turkey itself. In the June elections to the Turkish parliament, the Kurdish HDP party won 12 percent of the vote nationally, and so blocked Erdogan’s AKP party from winning a parliamentary majority.”

“Without that majority Erdogan’s plan of reforming the constitution to transform Turkey into a presidential republic and secure his dictatorship for the long run has been jeopardized.”

“Then, too, Erdogan has called on AKP lawmakers to begin criminalizing their counterparts from the HDP. Kurdish lawmakers, he urged them, must be stripped of their parliamentary immunity to enable their arrests.”

“As Erdogan apparently sees things, by going to war against the Kurds, he will be able to reestablish the AKP’s parliamentary majority. Within a few weeks, if the AKP fails to form a governing coalition – and it will – then new elections will be held. The nationalists, who abandoned the AKP in June, will return to the party to reward Erdogan for fighting the Kurds.”

A Quick Preview of the Start of World War III

What Russia's newest ICBM looks like when it takes off.

Power politics reaches an absurdity in which that power cannot be used without mutual assured destruction and the destruction of most of the foundations for life on earth. The alternative is a moral consensus based on a respect for human dignity and our common humanity. This can be based on the concept of universal equality, the UN Declaration of human rights or medical ethics. Even in the face of current atrocities, ethnic cleansing, and genocide our leaders have not been capable or inclined to put forward these values.

“The Yars and Topol-M, along with America's own state-of-the-art ICBMs, the LGM-30G Minuteman-III and UGM-133 Trident II, are stark reminders that mutually assured destruction continues to define nuclear warfare, despite various nuclear arms treaties. It's easier to add more warheads to an ICBM than to build a missile defense system that can effectively shoot down those additional warheads, meaning there isn't much either side can hope to do once a nuclear power decides to launch—except fling off their own set of ICBMs and irradiate the other side of the globe as well.”

Stealing $500 is a felony.

A settlement for fraudulent behavior which cost billions of dollars is just the cost of doing business.

Rolling Stone -- Matt Taibbi
Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold
Barack Obama's former top cop cashes in after six years of letting banks run wild.

“Here's a man who just spent six years handing out soft-touch settlements to practically every Too Big to Fail bank in the world. Now he returns to a firm that represents many of those same companies: Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, to name a few”.

“Holder doesn't look it, but he was a revolutionary. He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world's richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated.”

Previous Blogs on this topic

• Just the Cost of Doing Business
• Too Big to Jail

Judge Thomas on the Declaration of Independence

Whether or not you agree with Justice Thomas's opinion in the same sex marriage case, his opinion is worth reading. This is important because at a time when not only autocracy but an inhuman carnage and ethnic cleaning are being not only practiced but promoted in world affairs, the United States has had trouble conveying our own values in a battle of Ideas.

Library of Law and Liberty - Ken Magugi
Confederate flag waving at the Supreme Court

“Human dignity has long been understood in this country to be innate. When the Framers proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,’ they referred to a vision of mankind in which all humans are created in the image of God and therefore of inherent worth. That vision is the foundation upon which this Nation was built. The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.”

Real Clear Politics -- Rich Lowry
What Clarence Thomas Can (Still) Teach George “Sulu” Takei

As Thomas writes, “Our Constitution — like the Declaration of Independence before it — was predicated on a simple truth: One’s liberty, not to mention one’s dignity, was something to be shielded from — not provided by — the State.”

Supreme Court Ruling Won’t Stop Search for Execution Drugs

Time -- Josh Sanburn

Supreme Court Ruling Won’t Stop Search for Execution Drugs

Breyer and Ginsberg oppose the death penalty

"Death penalty opponents, however, found one thing to applaud on Monday. In a lengthy dissent written by Justice Stephen Breyer and joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the justices called into question the entire death penalty system and whether it violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Breyer wrote that the delays involved in actually executing death row inmates along with the arbitrariness of sentences over the last few decades has led to the practice of capital punishment in the U.S. to be unconstitutional." “Justice Breyer asked, ‘How long are we going to have this conversation?’ By any measure, we’ve essentially abandoned the death penalty as a society,”

Different Views on the Supreme Court’s Decision on Same Sex Marriage

The Atlantic -- Andrew Sullivan

It is Accomplished

“But some things you know deep in your heart: that all human beings are made in the image of God; that their loves and lives are equally precious; that the pursuit of happiness promised in the Declaration of Independence has no meaning if it does not include the right to marry the person you love; and has no force if it denies that fundamental human freedom to a portion of its citizens.”

SCOTUSblog -- Ryan Anderson

Symposium: Judicial activism on marriage causes harm: What does the future hold?

“This ruling will likely cause harm to the body politic: to constitutional democratic self-government, to marriage itself, to civil harmony, and to religious liberty.”

SCOTUSblog -- Erwin Chemerinsky

Symposium: A landmark victory for civil rights

“The Court’s decision striking down laws prohibiting same-sex marriage will be regarded as a landmark ruling advancing equality and liberty. It is the Court playing exactly the role that it should in society: protecting those who have been traditionally discriminated against and extending to them a right long regarded as fundamental.”

The Confederate Flag

The Atlantic -- Ta-Nehisi Coates

What This Cruel War Was Over
The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it.

"It is difficult for modern Americans to understand such militant commitment to the bondage of others. But at $3.5 billion, the four million enslaved African Americans in the South represented the country’s greatest financial asset. And the dollar amount does not hint at the force of enslavement as a social institution. By the onset of the Civil War, Southern slaveholders believed that African slavery was one of the great organizing institutions in world history, superior to the “free society” of the North."

Chicago Sun Times -- Mary Mitchell -- Mitchell: South Carolina moves to shed itself of symbol of 'hurt, pain and humiliation'

I disagree strongly with those who claim the Confederate Flag is not a racist symbol. Slavery was a racist institution, and the manifestation of white supremacy.

Washington Post -- Karen Tumulty and Robert CostaOnce politically sacrosanct, Confederate flag moves toward an end

The banner was long considered politically sacrosanct in the South, at least among conservative whites. It now appears that a rush is on to banish it, along with other images that evoke the Confederacy and sow racial divisiveness.

The Daily Beast -- Jack Hunter -- The ‘Southern Avenger’ Repents: I Was Wrong About the Confederate Flag

Putting people before an agenda or broad prejudices puts us all in a much better place. It can, and should, make us repentant of our past behavior. It did for me.

Maybe the primary campaigns won’t just be dull

Fox news -- Jeb on the Tonight Show

Fallon noted that "Tonight" had a lot of younger viewers, and wondered what type of message Bush would offer them.

"I think we need high, sustained economic growth so they can get jobs," he replied.

“Fallon wondered what his message would be to older voters.

"I think we need high, sustained economic growth," he said. "To them, I would just say it louder."