US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2382

An Arkansas judge has halted the executions of eight death row inmates, dealing a blow to the state's efforts to begin putting prisoners to death for the first time in a decade.

Pulaski County Circuit Court Judge Wendell Griffen's ruling Friday came in a case in which the inmates are challenging a new Arkansas law allowing the state to withhold any information that could publicly identify the manufacturers or sellers of its execution drugs.

A lawyer for the inmates argued that the new secrecy law put them at risk of enduring unconstitutional suffering during their executions because the drugs' safety and effectiveness couldn't be vetted. He also said the state agreed in a prior settlement to reveal the drug information to the inmates before their executions.

Three bills aimed at bringing order and oversight to California’s medical marijuana industry nearly 20 years after the state became the first to legalise the drug for medical use have won Governor Jerry Brown’s signature, his office said on Friday.

The Democratic governor’s endorsement of the 70-page Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act hammered out by lawmakers in the closing hours of the legislative session was expected – because his office crafted many of the exhaustive details.

The bills create the first statewide licensing and operating rules for pot growers, manufacturers of cannabis-infused products and retail weed outlets since California voters legalised medical marijuana in 1996.

A number of groups are trying to qualify voter initiatives for the November 2016 ballot that would legalise recreational marijuana in California.

Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, who unlike Brown has endorsed the idea of allowing adults to use marijuana for fun, said getting the state’s freewheeling medical marijuana industry under control would ease the transition to a system that also addressed recreational use.

“Given the history and complexity of California’s market, achieving the people’s will and responsibly regulating marijuana will be a process that unfolds over many years, requiring sustained attention to implementation,” Newsom, a candidate for governor in 2018, said after the legislative vote.

The package seeks to manage medical marijuana by requiring individuals or companies engaged in any aspect of the industry to obtain at least one of 17 different licenses. It restricts the number of licenses one company can have.

I'm pretty sure an armed population with guns did stop Hitler. Admittedly they were Russians but still, the main thing is that an armed population works.

On October 10 2015 08:37 m4ini wrote:


.. eh?

What? You must've learned something entirely different in school than i did then. Because in reality, it wasn't an armed population stopping Hitler in russia, but their winter.

Just as a sidenote though.

On Thursday, the most successful land conservation program in U.S. history is set to expire. Despite bipartisan support for the program in both the Senate and House of Representatives, congressional leaders have neglected to include the program in recent budget negotiations and are letting it die.

It’s not like Congress didn’t see this deadline coming. For three years, conservation groups have been warning lawmakers about the expiration of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a program that provides grants to buy up private land and make it available to the public. Since President Johnson signed it into law in 1964, the LWCF has pumped almost $17 billion into federal, state, and local parks. It has protected more than 500 million acres of land, ranging from neighborhood playgrounds to dramatic basalt cliffs in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. The program also paid for almost two-thirds of the Appalachian Trail.

The LWCF did all this without costing taxpayers a dime: It’s funded entirely by royalties from the offshore oil and gas industry, a symmetry that conservation advocates have lauded. If the program expires, this funding will be cut off. Congress could vote to reauthorize LWCF at a later date, but advocates think that’s unlikely.

One of the fund’s major contributions has been to smooth out boundaries and patch up holes in parks. Just because a piece of land is a designated park or wilderness area doesn’t mean the government owns every piece of it. Many began as checkerboards, with parcels of public land adjacent to private ones.

Tom Cors of the Nature Conservancy says these “doughnut holes” are tough to manage. Planning trails and roads can be challenging, as can fighting forest fires. He says the LWCF’s success in filling in those doughnut holes—providing means for buying the land from private sellers—is why the program has been so potent. “The majority of [conservationists’] work is to complete the vision that we started many years ago in these federal areas,” he says.

The program is about more than land acquisition, says Elizabeth Goldstein of the California State Parks Foundation. Browsing the list of funded projects, she says, “you see walking trails, bridges that make walking trails complete; you see projects that create playgrounds and signage systems in picnic areas.” She points to a pier in the San Francisco Bay that a LWCF project restored and a languishing state beach near Santa Barbara that was reopened after LWCF money fixed its broken sewage system.

On October 10 2015 08:37 m4ini wrote:


.. eh?

What? You must've learned something entirely different in school than i did then. Because in reality, it wasn't an armed population stopping Hitler in russia, but their winter.

Just as a sidenote though.

On October 10 2015 08:06 Mohdoo wrote:
I still don't understand the death penalty at all. We use weird ways to kill people instead of just letting them slowly pass from nitrogen inhalation and we talk it up as if it is worse than dying in solitary confinement.

On October 10 2015 11:44 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Actually, in some cases, proper background checks would have prevented plenty of mass shootings. You say "legally", but one of the issues is the huge level of leniency with countless background checks that still allow shifty people to buy guns.

For example, the Charleston, SC church massacre... Dylann Roof bought his .45-caliber Glock at a gun store in Charleston, where he would/ should have been required to pass a thorough background check. He was arrested earlier this year for trespassing and drug possession, yet apparently he was still able to buy a gun. You're not supposed to be able to purchase a gun if the FBI/ NICS database picks up felonies and certain misdemeanors... so when background checks end up equating to waiting 5 minutes for no one to catch anything suspicious about you- regardless of your criminal history- then criminals fall through the (huge) cracks and you get additional mass shootings.

I'm not particularly surprised that background checks are frequently bullshit, because rigorous processing would be a conflict of interest for that gun shop... people would be less likely to buy products there if they were more likely to be turned away. So the solution is to not waste additional time and money on a proper background check, and not risk losing sales. And the customers get their guns. Everyone wins... except for the eventual victims to that eventual shooter.

And this doesn't even account for the multitude of gun shows that occur nearly every weekend all over the country, which explicitly don't require you to have a background check anyway. It'd be nice if background checks were always required, and always thorough.

On October 10 2015 12:04 heliusx wrote:
Roof got his gun because his check wasn't processed within 72 hours which is the law, which is stupid af.

On October 10 2015 12:23 heliusx wrote:
No it was not someone else. His background check wasn't completed within 72 hours therefore he was legally sold a gun.

p.s. I don't want to take your guns. I want sick people to be prevented from purchasing guns.