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We started this week with kudos for the president for his refusal to take part in the Olympics. Today we have more compliments. This time for his recent pardons. Debra Saunders has the story.
President Obama commuted the sentences of eight crack-cocaine offenders Thursday, including that of Clarence Aaron, who was serving a sentence of life without parole for a first-time nonviolent drug conviction when he was 23.
Aaron’s story represents the worst excesses of the federal criminal justice system. Aaron, of Mobile, Ala., had no criminal record. He had held jobs. In 1992, he was a college student who decided to address his money problems by acting as an intermediary between two career drug dealers. The dealers paid him $1,500 to set up two large cocaine deals. They got caught. The ringleaders knew how to game the system. They pleaded guilty and testified against Aaron.
Aaron wasn’t as savvy. He pleaded not guilty and lied on the stand — which enhanced his sentence. The buyer planned on converting powder cocaine to crack — that, too, enhanced Aaron’s sentence. One deal didn’t happen, but federal prosecutors charged Aaron for it anyway. Voila, he won the same sentence that was imposed on FBI agent-turned-Russian spy Robert Hanssen and now-deceased serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
Aaron knows he broke the law. He had earned prison time. But what does it say when federal prosecutors seek and win life without parole for a first-time offender while letting the big fish finagle lesser sentences? All but one of Aaron’s cohorts have been out of prison since 2000.
Aaron’s cousin, Aaron Martin, said the commutation made this season “the best Christmas ever.” Attorney Margaret C. Love said, “We are grateful to President Obama.” …
More on the pardons from Jacob Sullum in Forbes.
President Obama issued eight commutations today, which is eight times the number he issued in the first 58 months of his administration. The best-known prisoner who will be freed as a result of today’s clemency actions is Clarence Aaron, who was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in 1993 for his role in arranging a cocaine deal. Aaron’s case received a lot of publicity recently thanks to reporting by ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer, who revealed that his clemency petition probably would have been granted by George W. Bush if the Office of the Pardon Attorney had not omitted important information from its evaluation.
Another commutation beneficiary, Stephanie George, received a life sentence in 1997 for letting her boyfriend stash his crack at her house. New York Times reporter John Tierney highlighted her case in a front-page story last December. Thanks to Obama’s commutations, Aaron and George will both be released next April instead of spending the rest of their lives behind bars. …
John Podhoretz reviews the president’s terrible year.
When Barack Obama sings “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, he will have reason to think back, with a deep sense of nostalgia and not a small amount of regret, on the last time he sang the song.
If he gets a lump in his throat as he recollects that glorious night one year ago, who would blame him? After all, he was riding about as high as a man can ride on New Year’s Eve 2012.
There he was, almost literally the master of the universe — the canny victor of the 2012 election, having run what was instantly regarded as the most brilliant technical campaign in American history. He used that victory to prevail in a “fiscal cliff” showdown with Republicans the last week of December that led to the significant tax increases on the well-to-do he had sought since the beginning of his first term. He had a 53% approval rating; only 40% disapproved.
In a few weeks, he would be inaugurated for a second term and, liberated from the demands of running again and emboldened by his win, he would that day offer the country an unabashedly and unapologetically left-wing vision of the American future toward which he was guiding it.
“Preserving our individual freedoms,” he said in a startling turn of phrase, “ultimately requires collective action.” …
Glenn Reynolds thinks 2014 will be even worse. Condign punishment is what we say.
A lot of people are saying that 2013 was President Obama’s worst year. Roll Call headlined, “Subdued Obama Hopes For Better 2014.” The Hill reported, “Obama names health care rollout his biggest mistake of dismal year.” Most people seem to think it was. But I think it was average, in the manner of the old Soviet joke:
Ivan: So how was your day?
Boris: Average.
Ivan: What do you mean, average?
Boris: Worse than yesterday, better than tomorrow. So, average.
Unless something turns around, Obama’s 2013 is likely to be similarly “average”: Worse than 2012, but better than 2014.
It’s true that Obamacare has been a debacle, wrapped in a catastrophe, shrouded in a disaster. But it’s also become clear that it was founded upon a lie: …
We were going to ignore the Duck Dynasty flap, but Mark Steyn wrote his weekly column on it. So, here we go.
Last week, following the public apology of an English comedian and the arrest of a fellow British subject both for making somewhat feeble Mandela gags, I noted that supposedly free societies were increasingly perilous places for those who make an infelicitous remark. So let’s pick up where we left off:
Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:
“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”
For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.
Second joke from the archives: Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept this one in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dean would say, “Be nice to him.”
But no matter how nice you are, it’s never enough. …
Now, for the important stuff. According to Nautilus, it was beer that civilized the world.
The domestication of wild grains has played a major role in human evolution, facilitating the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture. You might think that the grains were used for bread, which today represents a basic staple. But some scientists argue that it wasn’t bread that motivated our ancestors to start grain farming. It was beer. Man, they say, chose pints over pastry.
Beer has plenty to recommend it over bread. First, and most obviously, it is pleasant to drink. “Beer had all the same nutrients as bread, and it had one additional advantage,” argues Solomon H. Katz, an anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Namely, it gave early humans the same pleasant buzz it gives us. Patrick E. McGovern, the director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania, goes even further. Beer, he says, was more nutritious than bread. It contains “more B vitamins and [more of the] essential amino acid lysine,” McGovern writes in his book, Uncorking the Past: the Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages. It was also safer to drink than water, because the fermentation process killed pathogenic microorganisms. “With a four to five percent alcohol content, beer is a potent mind-altering and medicinal substance,” McGovern says, adding that ancient brewers acted as medicine men.
In fact, McGovern has found that the ancients used beer as medicine.
John Hinderaker points out 2013 was one of the ten coldest years on record in the U. S.
2013 will go down in the record books as one of the 10 coldest years in the U.S. since 1895. This chart, from Real Science, shows the average temperatures recorded at all NOAA USHCN stations from 1895 to the present: …
This is our last post for a few days. As a parting gift, here is the story of Twas The Night Before Christmas by Sal Monella.