Still deadlining. Picked up a couple more small assignments over the weekend. Sanity retreats again — but I shall chase it down and catch up with it!

• Dogs (and not wolves) use humans as tools. Every dog person knows that; now scientists do, too. (Tip o’ hat to MLS.)
• Yes. Really. The border fence is to keep the Mexicans IN.
• Methodists (good for them) demonstrate against private prisons. Would you like your state to make a deal with CCA guaranteeing to keep all its prisons at 90% occupancy for 20 years?
• Microsoft cautiously and wimpily begins to back away from CISPA.
• The consequences of printing money that nobody wants.
• Physicians aren’t just opposed to Obamacare; some are organizing to develop a “bottom-up,” market-driven alternative. Big meet this weekend.
• In news you can use, Survival Mom by Lisa Bedford is a seriously good book (and sometimes an amusingly good book) for anyone whose preparedness plans include children, elders, or pets — dependents of any sort.

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• That waitress who naively turned her $12k tip over to the cops? She’s getting her money back despite police claims that the cash … um, yeah, um … “smells like marijuana so we have to keep it, you know, for your own good.” (Amazing how self-congratulatory the jerks manage to be even after the whole country beat up on them for stealing from the poor woman.)
• Oh, Arizona, the silliness of your legislators never ends, does it? Now they’re trying to declare that you can be pregnant up to two weeks before having sex.
• Too late! Too late! You missed your chance to buy Buford, Wyoming.
• Did you know that (among other things) inability to think is now a federally protected disability? And it just gets weirder and weirder.
• If you liked Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games or Winter’s Bone you might like her even better in real life. :-) (Tip o’ hat to EN.)
• TaxKilla and Occupy the IRS. The aim: to teach the 99% how to use one of the tax advantages of the 1%. It’s just using Schedule C, which all us self-employed types already know. But it’s using it with Attitude. (You have to have JavaScript enabled to read the manifesto. Wish they wouldn’t do that, but it’s worth it.)
• I’m sorry the man’s dead. But he really was the George W. Bush of art.

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B&^%$#@s.

Obama could have stopped all these fed raids years ago with … what, a memo to each agency? One executive order? (Because one of the few legitimate purposes of EOs is to set executive policies and instruct federal agencies.) But nooooo.

Presidents come and go. Bureaucratic fiefdoms remain impregnable. And their minions grow ever-nastier.

ADDED: Mother Jones has a pretty good take on this, too. And they don’t spare Obama. In fact, they point out that he is actually outpacing the Busheviks in number of raids. Ain’t that just the way it goes? Ratcheting, ratcheting ever tighter.

Time once again to give a nod to old FPA:

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.
We like it.
It’s left a trail of graft and slime,
It don’t prohibit worth a dime,
It’s filled our land with vice and crime.*
Nevertheless, we’re for it.

* Much of which is now and was in FPA’s day committed by the enforcers.

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I just watched a 2009 indie called American Violet. If The Hunger Games (as Brian said in the comments on that film) might have been made by “a right-wing splinter group,” this one could have come from an ACLU production company.

But we’re talking about the good side of the ACLU here.

Do you remember the phony drug-war busts in Tulia and Hearne, Texas, a decade or so ago? Mass roundups of innocent blacks based on phony evidence? Cases that eventually fell apart en masse under national scrutiny?

Well, American Violet is a fictionalized version of the case that eventually became Regina Kelly v John Paschall (.pdf). Kelly was one of the innocent people targeted and she had the guts to fight back even though she had a lot to lose.

Here, she’s called Dee Roberts (played very well by first-timer Nicole Beharie), a single mother of four who gets arrested on trumped up charges and is relentlessly pressured to plea bargain — which she will not do.

The movie itself is a straightforward narrative. It’s good but not great — about on par with a decent TV movie, though it has pretty strong acting from the likes of Tim Blake Nelson as an ACLU lawyer and Alfre Woodard as Dee’s mother.

Where it shines is in its unflinching indictment of drug-war and justice-system abuses. It states openly that the feds provide financial incentive to encourage coerced pleas. It talks about the huge percentage of people who give up their rights to jury trials out of fear and pressure. It notes the shameful size of the U.S. prison population. Ultimately, it dwells on the racist aspects of the drug war — appropriate since the busts in Hearne and Tulia were blatantly race-based, as is so much of the awful WoD. Although it uses the 2000 presidential election to establish time and the “tough on crime” rhetoric of the moment, it never goes partisan; it just sticks to its issues.

American Violet never appeared on more than 61 screens during its theatrical release, so it was basically an invisible movie and probably didn’t even make back its production budget. But it’s worth a look.

Especially when you know that the corrupt District Attorney behind the real Hearne busts was so upset by it he tried to suppress it when it showed locally.

That makes it worth something right there. :-)

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• Average cost of living $150,000/year? I freaking don’t believe it.
• Not sure I believe this, either. But it makes me all the more grateful for that freezer full of grass-fed beef. (H/T PT.)
• Now, this I definitely believe: Having power makes you stupid.
• Something actually good about Rick Santorum.
• I try not to lift too much from Radley Balko, since I figure a lot of the same people read his blog and mine, but this was too good: Why you can’t smoke pot. (Because there’s sooooooo much money and lobbying for the drug warriors.)
• “10 Rules for a Literary Feud.” No, seriously. It’s not some intellectual snoot piece. Rule 5! It’s SO true! And for that matter, so are 4 and 3. (Tip o’ hat to JS.)
• Speaking of sources I normally don’t believe, that fundraising monster (and champion hate group) the Southern Poverty Law Center is right up there at the top of the “take with entire truckload of salt” list. Still, I’m considering this to be good news.
• Best comment on Holder’s pro-murder speech. (A cartoon, of course; via Wendy.)
• “The cost of America’s police state.” Yeah, that about begins to describe the situation. Notable: even the MSM admits what the U.S. has become.
• But it’s an easily outsmarted police state.
• Survivalist magazine is now available for Kindle.

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• Recreational cannabis soon to see widespread legalization? Let’s hope Time magazine isn’t as wrong on this as it often is on so many other things.
• “We the People” is rapidly losing its appeal around the world. No surprise. (Tip o’ hat to MtK.)
• Can’t you just picture Obama in a Joe Arpaio jail? Chortle. (And thanks, JS.)
• Poetic justice.
• Obama vs the Catholic church. And vice versa.
• If you had any doubt that copyright overreach had sunk to absurd lows, you can become a true believer now.
• Another state legislature takes on the NDAA. (How much would you like to bet that these guys wouldn’t have done it had the NDAA been signed by their president?)
• Shouting lampposts and shouting cameras. Only in the world’s foremost nanny state …
• “How Once Great Empires End.” Aside from the fact that “great empire” is an oxymoron, Charles Hugh Smith says this very well.
• But once again, enough of the bad news. Here’s your Awwwwww moment for the day — and this time it doesn’t involve dogs! Seems a couple of months ago, the Toronto, Ontario, zoo found itself with a newborn polar bear that couldn’t be kept with its mother. So it’s being hand-raised by humans. Just watch that baby eat! And he’s even cuter when he tries to crawl.

(As so often lately, another tip o’ hat to MJR.)

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Meant to put this up Saturday morning as a weekend read. It’s a bit long, though a good one even for those of us who already know too much about the prison-state: “The Caging of America.”

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• What happens when a corporation gets just a bit too uppity in its definition of IP.
• I suppose as times get harder, we can expect more of this sort of thing. Shudder.
• But if it can be made harder on the forces of tyranny … (Some notes on guerrilla warfare)
• “Complex Systems, Dysfunctional Industries, and Catastrophic Collapse.”
• Preparedness. Basic.
• Fascinating. They haven’t found the suspect, two decades later. But they’ve found his seventeenth century ancestor.
• Yeah. Right. According to this I’m supposed to go to either Switzerland … or the U.S. How about you?
• Good going. Excellent calm way to challenge a cop who thinks the law doesn’t apply to him.
• Have you ever seen — even once in your life — anybody in the media ask ask a question like this about any candidate other than Ron Paul? After spending months reporting around Paul (“Candidate Fatass came in first in the poll, while Candidate Bigmouth was third …”) it’s about time he’s getting “too much attention.”
• Just so you’ll know what your masters have in store for you. And how judiciously they’ll use it, of course.
• Snort. Chortle.
• Inhale.

(More thanks to The Usual Suspect(s). :-) )

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