The Obama administration has established an undeniably harsh record on immigration and border enforcement, including:
- Record-breaking deportations of more than 1.5 million individuals in his first term (more than in any other single presidential term), almost half of whom had no criminal records, leaving hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizen children without parents and in foster care
- Unprecedented detention levels of immigrants (429,000 in the last fiscal year), using a record number of detention beds (34,000) – without individualized assessment of who requires jail-like detention – at a wasteful cost of $2 billion annually
- Nationwide deployment of the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Communities program, despite opposition of many state and local leaders based on damage to community policing and public safety, rising fear among victims and witnesses of crime, and racial profiling.
- Continuation of the controversial DHS 287(g) program that deputizes state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws when immigration enforcement is a federal matter, as the litigation against Arizona’s racial profiling law SB 1070 reinforced.
- Historically high enforcement resources along the Southwest border, leading to manifold abuses by Customs and Border Protection including a series of fatal shootings
- Record spending on border and interior enforcement such that Rep. Hal Rogers, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, identified a “mini industrial complex” of bloated border spending
The ACLU has strongly criticized the administration’s record in this area, including our full-page New York Times ad published following the president’s re-election. As a result of the administration’s harsh enforcement policies, immigrant communities nationwide have suffered permanent deportation and family separation.
This has occurred despite these policies being unnecessary – unauthorized immigration rates and border apprehensions have plummeted to the lowest level in 40 years, and new census data released last week confirm a sustained drop in unauthorized immigration. Furthermore, as we highlighted in an earlier post, these enforcement policies are fiscally irresponsible.
It’s important that we all understand the truth about the administration’s record on immigration enforcement and call on it to end its abusive, discriminatory, and wasteful programs.
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New Spaceship For Asteroid Missions
As of 2010, Obama has challenged NASA to get astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, and on to Mars by the mid-2030s. Whether or not the space agency can stick to that schedule largely depends on itsfuture budget, experts say, but regardless of the pace, work on the asteroid mission is already under way.
The Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (SEV) is a prototype that began its design life as a wheeled moon rover. When the president shifted NASA’s focus from the moon-oriented Constellation program set up by the Bush administration, the space agency adapted the SEV to meet the needs of an asteroid mission instead.
That meant taking off the wheels and converting the vehicle into two parts: a robotic sled that will be used for propulsion and guidance, and a detachable crew cabin that can be fitted on top.
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The White House’s attempt to censor popular questions about marijuana policy was foiled.
Obama’s Opportunity: Will the White House Snub Marijuana Yet Again? | NORML
Last week, the White House launched the next in its long line of social media engagement initiatives, this one entitled “Your Interview With the President.” The concept was simple, anyone could upload their question to the President on YouTube, others would vote on them, and the highest rated ones would be posed to the Commander in Chief in a Google+ Hangout on January 30th.
This seemed to be a logical opportunity to ask the administration about marijuana legalization. Last Tuesday, I posted NORML’s question to the White House YouTube page for consideration. We asked, “With over 850,000 Americans arrested in 2010, on marijuana charges alone, and tens of billions of tax dollars being spent locking up marijuana users, isn’t it time to regulate and tax marijuana?”
The reception was overwhelmingly positive, in just several hours the question received over 4,000 “thumbs up” votes and was one of, if not the, most popular question on the service. Then a peculiar thing happened, the question was removed. After becoming the most positively voted upon question in less than a day, the White House removed the question, deeming it “inappropriate.”
We informed our audience of the censorship and encouraged them to engage the White House on their own, using our question or a one of their own choosing. Over the next several days the program was inundated with marijuana law reform questions. At first, many met the same fate as our original question and were removed from the site. It seems our persistence ended up paying off and the page administrator finally gave up trying to censor the incoming questions and most marijuana inquiries have remained up since.
Voting closed last night at midnight and I made some rough calculations of the final results to see how we performed. Of the top 160 questions asked, marijuana reform questions accounted for 105 of them. Reposts of our question brought in an estimated 17,524 up-votes in addition to the 4,028 the original received before being removed. Combined, that is over 21,000 votes for one question, which is 5 times as many votes as any other question on the page. The 105 marijuana reform questions in the top 160 brought in over 74,000 votes, dwarfing any other topic. Our friends at LEAP posted a question as well and it ended as one of the top rated questions. You can read their coverage here.
Now, we wait. “Your Interview With the President” is scheduled to take place tomorrow, January 30th. Considering this is the same individual who previously stated that, “we need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws” and that legalization is a “perfectly legitimate topic for debate,” maybe he will take this opportunity to address the issue seriously for once. In an election year, this could go a long way towards winning back those who feel disenfranchised with the administration over a perceived lack of progress on the issue and amped up raids on medical programs in states such as California and Colorado.
The American people are ready for our debate Mr. President, are you?
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The problem is that the policy makers the world over are paying more attention to the fossil fuel lobbyists than they are to the well being of young people and nature, as my colleagues and I have described in the paper “The Case for Young People and Nature”.
Until the public demands otherwise, the policy makers will continue to serve their financiers.
That’s the point of the present action — to draw attention to the inter-generational injustice of current policies — our children and grandchildren are getting shafted by our well-oiled coal-fired politicians who do not look beyond their next election.
The tar sands verdict will show whether he really intends to move us to clean energy or whether he will instead support going after dirtier and dirtier fuels (tar sands, oil shale, mountaintop removal, long-wall coal mining, hydro-fracking, deep ocean and Arctic exploration, etc.).
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"In an encouraging sign, the administration does appear to at least acknowledge the emerging political consensus that the “drug war” is a failure and that a new direction is severely needed. To wit, the [ONDCP] interview contains glossy rhetoric about our inability to arrest our way out of the drug problem and the “balanced” approach that the Obama team is taking. But nobody should be fooled. The Obama administration’s own drug control budgets show that it, like every recent one before it, is all-in with a punishment-oriented drug policy in which “victory” is impossible, “defeat” is unthinkable and evidence, science, common sense and compassion can take a hike."
Neill Franklin, Understanding Obama’s “War on Drugs” (via fuckyeahdrugpolicy)
Thisssssssssssssss! Times 100
NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre on yesterday’s Twitter Town Hall.
“According to TwitSprout’s #AskObama Twitter Dashboard, the most retweeted question asked: ‘Would you consider legalizing marijuana to increase revenue and save tax dollars by freeing up crowded prisons, court rooms.’ The President did not address that tweet.”
"Over the past few weeks, us cops who have been on the front lines of the ‘war on drugs’ have made numerous attempts to schedule a meeting with the drug czar to share our concerns about the harms these drug laws are causing. The fact that he refused to sit down with us and discuss these issues – even when we went directly to his doorstep – speaks volumes about how much the Obama administration would rather ignore the failed ‘war on drugs’ than do anything to actually address it."
Neill Franklin, former Baltimore narcotics cop and executive director of LEAP | Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (via fuckyeahdrugpolicy)
Can everyone who follows me just please reblog this bit of juicy information? You read that right, Cops themselves, the good ones, they want to stop this but our President prefers to ignore it. And yes, they are downright ignoring it. The numbers speak too loudly for anyone to ignore. At this point everyone wants this to end.
"The threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing. Our generation’s response to this challenge will be judged by history, for if we fail to meet it—boldly, swiftly, and together—we risk consigning future generations to an irreversible catastrophe."
- President Barack Obama, September 22, 2009. United Nations Summit on Climate Change COP15, Copenhagen, Denmark (via climateadaptation)
Fox News Targets Common [LOL]:
Common? Really? No one is safe. They stay hatin’.This reporter is ridiculous :(
The girl in the opposing argument had solid logic, so much logic that I may want to marry her. Fuck that idiotic reporter and her nonsensical patronizing.
