Californians — it’s time to retire Feinstein. Seriously, vote for anybody but Feinstein. She’s got too much party clout and she’s a dinosaur. She’s probably also extraordinarily corrupt.
Her column today on The Hill is one of the worst things I’ve read in recent days. She actually channels the ghost of Nancy Reagan’s failed drug war slogan.
First, we should once again make anti-drug campaigns a priority. In the early 1980s, former first lady Nancy Reagan coined the now-famous slogan “Just say no†as part of her national anti-drug campaign.
Although her strategy was criticized, she was able to use the White House as a national platform to address these issues.
Next, Congress should refund the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s youth media campaign — the only national media campaign dedicated to reducing youth drug use. Funding for this program was eliminated last year in spite of the fact that 85 percent of teens are aware of the advertising campaign.
This campaign should be provided with the funding it deserves and expanded to make the connection between U.S. drug use and violence in Mexico.
She certainly won’t be getting this Californian’s vote.
Ugh… here’s the comment I just left:
“Rather than debate legalization and divide ourselves politically, let’s get to work on the heart of the problem.”
Sorry, but the calls for legalization will continue. And they’re only going to get louder. And we ARE working to get to the “heart of the problem.” It’s you. YOU are the problem. You and the warped mindset of other control freaks who endorse the use of state VIOLENCE to address what is really a medical and health issue (as well as a matter of personal choice). You’re a dinosaur, Dianne, and the asteroid just hit…
All incumbents should be voted out. Some of these fossil public trough feeders have been in that cesspool swamp the district of corruption for almost 40 years.
Bicycling somewhere Hulka? Have a nice ride! Here’s hoping we can send some of them pedaling back where they came from! (They are all corrupt, or they don’t get that far in the racket.)
She’s learnt how to use the drug war card from Nancy Reagan. Whenever Nancy’s aids needed to distract the public from her corrupt practices and tax evasion they sent her out on a Just Say No tour. It worked a charm and transformed her image.
Feinstein is standing for re-election in November and similarly needs to distract attention from her corrupt channeling billions of dollars to her husband’s companies. What better ruse than Just Say No?
She’s a neocon masquerading as a Democrat.
Just like Jello Biafra said in the early 80’s when he was running for mayor of S.F.
“Dianne Feinstein. Dragon lady with no fuckin heart”
Not the exact quote, but i heard him say it when he was cleaning up SF streets with a dustbroom during one of his ‘media photo op’s’
Too bad he didn’t make mayor (or gov)
There is a bootleg concert video of Jello saying that exact quote about D.F. during a Dead Kennedys gig back in the 80s. Check out Jello’s albums with D.O.A. and Mojo Nixon if you haven’t heard of those, great stuff. On the webtubes I found a demotivational poster of Nancy Reagan sitting on Mr. T’s lap during a christmas gift program for children.
Diane Feinstein needs to “Just Say No” to money from big pharma and alcohol. The following campaign money she has received throughout her Congressional career:
Beer, Wine & Liquor $405,462
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products $381,050
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/industries.php?cycle=Career&type=I&cid=N00007364&newMem=N&recs=0
Really good investment with great returns, cheap, too!
just say no…to drug whorriors.
There is a very interesting Super-PAC called the Campaign for Primary Accountability which is funding primary challengers in single-party Congressional districts where the incumbents have low approval ratings.
So far this year, CFPA has helped defeat Republicans Jean Schmidt (OH-2) and Don Manzullo (IL-16) and Democrat Tom Holden (PA-17). Although CFPA does not list any particular policy positions among its criteria for choosing targets, all three of these now ex-Representatives were avid drug warriors.
CFPA is also targeting Democrat Silvestre Reyes from Texas’s 16th Congressional District. Prohibition is a prominent issue in this race, with Reye’s challenger, Beto O’Rourke openly advocating marijuana legalization and Reyes, naturally, accusing his opponent of wanting to get high with pre-teens. O’Rourke would be a major asset in Congress. Just check out this column he wrote: http://www.campaign4primaryaccountability.org/2012/04/25/a-progressive-democrat-in-texas-meet-beto-orourke-whos-running-for-congress-to-represent-working-families-in-el-paso/
Money is a significantly corrupting influence in politics, but I have to say that it is very cool to see entrenched incumbents being put on notice like this.
It would be great if they could target Lamar Smith and James Sensenbrenner.
Er… so although her strategy was criticized… she did it anyway? Great argument. Very compelling. Definitely not a non sequitur.
Because obviously the best metric for evaluating the success of an ad campaign is how many people are aware of it. I mean, if you’re aware of an advertisement, that obviously means you’re going to buy whatever they’re trying to sell. That’s why my home contains (among many other quality products): a Jack LaLanne Power Juicer, an original Snuggie, a Snuggie for Dogs, a ShamWow, a Chuck Norris Total Gym, a Shake Weight, 2 Slap Chops, the complete Video Professor library (I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for their “Learn the Internet” tutorial), and enough OxiClean to keep my whites white and my colors bright well into the Zombie Apocalypse.
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I also think we should demand a refund from the ONDCP. But I’ll bet “all sales are final” is their return policy. Your money back if you’re not satisfied” likely isn’t in their vocabulary.
Get her out before she closes all the public lands in the state of california
Ok, I want to register my thoughts on the HOPE program because the drug warriors seem to be in love with it. According to Angela Hawken, the program “relies on a regimen of regular, random drug testing tied to swift and certain—but relatively mild—sanctions to motivate probationer compliance.” Drug offenders on probation are required to call a hotline every weekday morning to learn if they’ve been selected for a random drug test that day. If they are selected, they must appear at the probation office before 2 pm for a drug test. Failing the test or not showing up results in a short (several day) jail stay. Also from Hawken:
Feinstein highlights the program in her column:
Pretty impressive, right? What’s not to love? Well, let me start by saying that I’m somewhat sympathetic to the idea of requiring abstinence from certain drugs as a condition of probation where the probationer’s use of those drugs appears to have been a causal factor in their victimization of others. (Of course, alcohol is the drug that is by far the most likely to fall into this category.) On the other end of the spectrum, requiring a probationer to abstain from cannabis seems not only unnecessary, but quite possibly counterproductive. But, of course, the program is not so limited. And I find the celebratory tone of the drug warriors just a little bit obnoxious when they discuss the HOPE program’s “success.” For example, here’s Kleiman in his most recent column: “if subjected to the right kinds of pressure, however, even most heavy users can and do stop using drugs.” Well, yeah, no doubt about it. We could probably also get a handle on the “obesity epidemic” if we required daily weigh-ins for all Americans with “swift and certain sanctions” for anyone not hitting their target, you know, to “motivate compliance.” Maybe a 5-hour forced march? (I was going to say 10, but then I remembered I’m supposed to keep the sanction “relatively mild.”) But while violence (excuse me, “pressure”) can be an effective tool for imposing your will on another human being (excuse me, “behavior modification”), that doesn’t make it a legitimate one.
Something else I don’t like about it is they tout it as a way of dealing with “heavy drug users”, or “problem drug users”, or “those who are bound to run into the law at some point”, and they keep using ambiguous concepts like that interchangeably without ever specifying who they intend the HOPE program to be used for. They then use it as an excuse not to embrace a model like Portugal’s, or to at least consider mixing them (so that if you don’t hurt anyone else you don’t have the program forced on you).
Well said!
Good, blunt assessment of the driving factors behind the War on (some)Drugs over at Firedoglake:
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2012/04/27/the-smoke-and-mirrors-of-the-legalization-debate/
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I think she’s trying to out do Strom Thurmond. That excremental piece of white trash was an old man when he ran for POTUS in 1948. He’s at least partially responsible for giving dimwits the idea that claiming the protection of the 9th and 10th Amendments is somehow racist because he was in the States Rights Democratic Party (AKA Dixiecrats). This particular cocksucker served in the Senate until he was 101 years old. Ms. Feinstien will turn 79 in June.
Thinking of Mr. Thurmond makes me wax nostalgic for the good old days when life was so good in America:
During his 1948 campaign Strom Thurmond said, “there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”
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A little ditty called “Just Say Yo” written by a local band in response to Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” stupidity. They burned her at the stake in effigy in their mildly amusing video:
Feinstein: “prohibition today, prohibition tomorrow, prohibition forever.”
Feinstein’s op-ed is chock-full of the usual prohibitionist fail:
Sustained insistence on policies which have never worked;
The real answer lies in our ability to aggressively reduce the U.S. demand for illegal drugs.
Re-shuffling of priorities as the answer to a history of complete failure;
We must prioritize federal drug prevention programs for youth and ensure that all Americans struggling with addiction have access to drug-treatment programs.
Describing policies which stand scant chances of significant positive outcome as “solutions”;
Our solutions should focus specifically on what the United States can do to eliminate the constant demand for illegal drugs.
I’m all for rational improvements in addiction treatment and probation enforcement as well as honest public-service messages about the dangers of drug addiction and promotion of peer pressure resistance techniques, but her proposed three-prong strategy of “Just say no”, the “Office of National Drug Control Policy’s youth media campaign” (isn’t that basically the same thing as the first prong — and what happened to “access to drug-treatment programs”?) and HOPE has practically zero chance of achieving the stated objective of reducing demand significantly enough to be called a “solution” to the violence of the black market.
HOPE can only be practically applied to probationers and parolees, unless one HOPES there’s some way to get the general public to submit to such a program. How much impact on the overall demand for drugs can that have? While I am duly impressed with it’s success within the scope of it’s practical application, I’m duly unimpressed with it’s misuse as a drug-compliance study to cite as evidence of a successful demand reduction technique, with it’s limited scope of practical application and it’s data-collection term of only one year. I should be more interested in data on the compliance rate for several years following successful completion of the program and it’s applicable scope when evaluating it’s effectiveness in overall drug demand reduction.
We already have a good sense of the long-term impact of “Just say no” and ONDCP’s youth media campaign. It’s not that these policies don’t all promote positive outcomes (especially when compared to all-out war-on-drugs), it’s that they produce tiny positives up against huge negatives, with little probability of significant impact. Ever.
It’s just not enough — it’ll never be enough. Demand for drugs has been a large part of the human condition for all of history and we simply must accept the fact that there’s really nothing we can do to change that in our fellow humans within any conceivably practical time-frame or scope.
Leaving aside for the moment the somewhat pointless argument over which is to blame (prohibition, demand, or both), since we all seem to agree that demand for illegal drugs is resulting in unacceptable levels of violence, it should be obvious that any rational solution seeking any probability of success in significantly reducing that violence must address the legality issue. We need look no further than the Juan Valdez cartel to see that provision of an abusable mind-altering drug in high demand with the capacity to kill need not result in violence.
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They’re never going to talk people out of giving cannabis for enjoyment a try as long as they continue to use the platform of bald faced lies, half truths and hysterical rhetoric. Months and months ago I started calling them Know Nothing prohibitionists and that’s simply because they know nothing of the reality of our world. It only takes school children less than 5 minutes inside of our world to realize that they’re being lied to. At that point the Know Nothings lose any and all credibility. When I was a high school lad they were still warning that cannabis will make you grow man teats. How hard is it to determine that to be a load of hogwash? The really heinous thing about the Know Nothing strategy is that when people realize they’re being so blatantly fed a pile of fetid horse spit the natural progression is to believe that they’re being lied to about the drugs that have real, not imagined dangers.
Honesty is the better policy indeed. Why would we listen to their litany of lies about cannabis when it doesn’t even bear a passing resemblance to our reality? Like Mrs. Gump said, “stupid is as stupid does.”
When I was a high school lad they were still warning that cannabis will make you grow man teats.
Me too. I like to joke that I’m finally getting what I was promised so long ago, but I’m still disappointed because I thought they would be perkier!
Weird. According to that George Mason University marijuana “fact sheet,” cannabis makes women’s breasts smaller:
Of course, students of Francis’ Law will understood the real-world implications of that claim.
i don’t know if anyone commented on it at the time but the recent debate with paul chabot and a guy from LEAP had chabot repeating the old lie about testicular cancer….once these lies get out there they just keep repeating them, oblivious to logic and fact
When I was in grade 10 in 1959 my health and physical education teacher taught us that a marijuana cigarette was really an ordinary cigarette dipped in heroin.
And I believed that till 1970 when I got to check out marijuana for real.
I still remember the impact of those mysterious and frightening sounding words: heroin and marijuana.
Anyway it’s 2012 and still haven’t grown any man tits.
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Sounds like Thai stick to me. Gosh I’d like to be able to enjoy that pleasure again.
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You’ve reminded me of my 10th grade history teacher, who was the first person that I heard say that “this is a free country as long as you do what your told by authorities.” She also taught us about the qualifications required by the law in order to become POTUS which includes being white, male and not suffering from pattern baldness. Neither would a toupee mitigate the last requirement. I did point out that that part of the Constitution must have been written with invisible ink. She didn’t miss a beat and fired back, “of course it doesn’t, it goes without saying.” So why the heck did you say it lady? Man that lady gave me a severe case of cognitive dissonance. When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school it’s a wonder I can think at all, no doubt.
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So I guess that senator Feinstein is against firing Michele Leonhart.
She’s only 78. She has as least three more terms in her. (Change is harder when half the population makes it to their 90’s.)
Anyone who wants to know what Diane Feinstein stands for need only look at her “Combat Meth Act”…which, once agreed to by Republicans, brought broad support from the Democratic party for the Patriot Act II. Essentially, all medical privacy was stripped from those who suffer from sinusitis and they are now labeled as criminals if they require consistent doses of Pseudoephedrine or have minors in their households who require consistent doses and cannot afford an expensive doctor. Now, the act that is supposed to fight terrorism is an act of terrorism against the very small minority who must constantly do battle against micro-organisms for which there is no other effective treatment. Even if you can prove that you are buying pseudoephedrine for the purpose of treating an acute, life-threatening sinus infection, you are still likely to be convicted as a drug trafficker, as the law requires no intent of wrongdoing and therefore intent is not even presented to or considered by the Jury as criteria when you go to court. All of this by someone, Diane Feinstein, who claims to support those who need mind altering, addictive drugs, which pseudoephedrine is not. Why would Feinstein victimize those who are at risk for a sinusitis over which they have no control? To protect those who’ve chosen to use methamphetamine from themselves. The fact is, that there are hundreds of thousands of methamphetamine using voters in California, and only a few thousand who suffer from sinusitis of a vision-, life-, or respiratory-threatening level. This is what the real Diane Feinstein stands for-all you need to know is in the Combat Meth Act of Patriot Act II