What was the Noose for? A Goose / Gander Principle

   

    Are we a nation of laws?     

    Rules and guidelines have been set down and as a society, we have agreed to abide by them for community safety and stability. When rabble-rousers succeed in inciting a riot, justice in stable societies is usually fairly swift. They round up the trouble-makers, find out who the ringleaders were, and arrest them. But in the case of January 6, those that encouraged the crowd to take the law into their own hands, so far, have avoided justice. 

    There is an old proverb that dates from at least 1670 - its true origin stretches back much further - that declares "what is good for the goose is good for the gander." It was an early example of equal application of justice. If something is just for this group for doing this thing, then it certainly applies to that group doing it as well.

    It's time these treason enthusiasts get a taste of the justice they demanded of others, because who was on the correct side of the law on January 6, 2021? 

    What did the insurrectionists assemble a gallows with a noose on it for? Was that just decoration, a mild threat, or a working model that they intended to use? 

    These insurrectionists are the 'ants'. They are the foot soldiers, not the ringleaders. That is who justice needs to seek out immediately. Those who worked up, incited, and directed the foot soldiers into attack mode, all the way up to and including Donald Trump who encouraged them to march on the Capitol and fight like hell. There should be no avoiding justice on this issue. Insurrection attempts must be dealt with in a manner that will cause great discomfort... just as it did for the rest of America that watched in horror as the rioters carried out their assault on democracy.

    Those that committed these acts should have seriously considered whether it was worth their lives. Less than a century ago - they would have faced nothing short of a firing squad or a hangman’s noose. Five hundred years before that it would have been an ax slicing through their neck. They are escaping the justice they truly and historically deserve. All they're facing today is the boredom of sitting behind metal bars for a few years, and we'll even pay for their incarceration at taxpayers' expense. Lucky us.

    The rioters demanded to HANG Mike Pence. In my view, "what was good for the goose..." 

Every person in the above picture should be subjected to the same if they believed Pence deserved it.

The Vice President was doing his Constitutional duty. 

Were the insurrectionists? 

Was Donald Trump?

    It's hard not to agree with the sentiment of Game of Thrones' Tyrion Lannister about his reaction if he were to get so much as a whiff of treason... 

Well said!

The insurrectionists and every leader should face that fate.

Trump Re-shuffles the Drug War Deck of Cards

On Monday, March 19, 2018, Trump will release his plan to combat the opioid epidemic with a call to Stop Opioid Abuse. The plan includes law enforcement measures that allow the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty for some drug dealers “where appropriate under current law.”  Trump will also call on Congress to pass legislation reducing the threshold amount of drugs sold that are required to invoke mandatory minimum sentences for drug traffickers and trigger the application of the death penalty in certain other cases. Those are actually two old ideas that have, to date, jammed our prisons past full capacity. In true Trump fashion, if it didn’t work before, just double down on it.

 This is what happens when you let people who don’t understand the problem come up with a simple (or rather simple-minded) solution, because Trump’s plan to include the death penalty for drug offenses is a “might-makes-right” approach and is no different than the way drug lords handle drug turf disputes, Also of note is that these offenses are ill-defined and likely to be interpreted any way a Trump-appointed judge wishes to interpret them. It will no longer be the rule-of-law in this country but the rule-of-Trump.

The opioid commission, chaired by Jared Kushner, was supposed to introduce its recommendations on ways to curb the epidemic November 1, 2017, but we can see Jared has been as effective at that job as he has been at bringing peace to the Middle East.

In late October, Trump and his administration finally got around to…declaring the opioid epidemic a “national public health emergency,” not a crisis, in order to buy extra time to come up with something…ANYTHING. In the meantime Trump went around bragging at his staged pep rallies that he liked the solutions of thugs and foreign leaders like Duterte of the Philippines, Xi of China, and Loong of Singapore. They claimed to have ended the drug problem in their countries by liberally applying the death penalty. So naturally Trump now thinks the best course of action is killing drug offenders, specifically people pedaling opioids.

But we know opioids are not plants grown in secret indoor gardens or cooked up in mom-and-pop meth labs. They are the result of pharmaceutical companies creating powerful pain killers as medicine, for a profit of course. How many pharmaceutical CEOs or lobbyists will be executed for manufacturing the opioid pills that are at the heart of the crisis? For example, will Trump demand death for Dr. Craig Landau the current CEO of Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, Oxycodone and Hydrocodone? If not, why not? If Trump is looking for the biggest “pusher” of opioids, you can’t get any higher. (Pun intended.)

How about executing Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, and Paul Ryan, three of the biggest recipients of Big Pharma lobbying dollars? These are people who have used their positions to ram through legislation benefiting Big Pharma financially, as well as generously lining their own pockets, and to hell with the people who get hooked on Big Pharma’s products.

Will doctors be subject to the death penalty for simply prescribing an opioid medication to a patient in pain because later on some bureaucrat looking through the doctor’s notes decided the person had been prescribed too many? Will this be a new avenue for the DEA to apply their military approach to the Drug War? Shoot first; ask questions later. (It’s a variation on Trump’s approach to gun violence; take the guns first, apply due process later.)

Has it ever occurred to Trump that maybe people are deliberately overdosing on opioids because they are so embarrassed he is the president?

Applying the death penalty is such a revolutionary idea; let’s apply it to other crimes that indirectly harm people. Like money laundering. If someone…anyone…is even suggested to be engaged in money laundering, give them the death penalty. And apply it the way the Chinese do; 24 hours after conviction, the sentence is carried out.

Another area might be ethics violations. If any member of the White House is charged with an ethics violation, have them executed on the front lawn of the White House. There must be zero tolerance. That would be one way to stop people like Kellyanne Conway from thumbing their nose at the Hatch Act.

Where's a wooden stake when you need it?

          In Trump’s grandiose plan to sentence drug dealers to death, he seems to forget just how much money drug companies, the biggest drug dealers in the world, pour into in American politics. Pharmaceutical companies were among the biggest donors to Trump's inauguration, right up there with Big Tobacco and Big Oil companies. Is Trump really going to cut into Big Pharma’s profits by threatening to kill its users and sales force?

Watch for the sun to rise in the west first.