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                         May’s Asshat of the month!!!!

 

 

 

I have had a life altering experience due to this month’s winner. I will never eat at a McDonald’s again. You don’t realize what a sacrifice this is for somebody like me. I am a product of our generation. We eat the hell out of fast food and we enjoy it. There are three types of eaters in today’s world:

 

The healthy eater :

Yeah, you know who you are; Alf Alfa sprout eating freaks; you drink non-stop water and what’s with that? There is water in the process in making Mountain Dew. Why should I give up the caffeine and my glorious glorious sugar to drink more water? You eat tofu turkeys and look at us greasholics like there is something wrong with us for eating the Baconator!! 

 

The Greasoholic:

 Greasoholics are almost worse than the healthy eaters. We eat all of this crap that will either deteriorate our health to the point of an early grave or preserve us so well that we will have a shelf life of three thousand years from all of the preservatives. We eat anything and everything we can that comes from a drive thru. These fast food assholes could tell us that fried shit topped with ranch is the newest hottest thing and a greasoholic would try it as long as the fast food place was offering it at an introductory rate. Because then it is on sale and we must try this new great thing because it is on the 99 cent menu.

 

The Tweener Eater:

Ok you people kill me, decide already; do you hate the healthy eater for the self control  they have or do you envy them for the ability they have to stay nice and trim all the time? The tweener eaters are a group of eaters that eat healthy about 50% of the time and eat junk the other 50% of the time.

 

These are the three types of eaters and I am here to tell you if asked three hundred of these people to sit in a room and ask them questions, all three hundred would tell you that they have eaten at a McD’s. With a few choices on their menu and the addition of several salads, the McGrill and bottled water they have even landed the occasional health nut. It should truly bother us all McGrill was in my spell-check. I will now prepare you for the hurt I have felt this week. You will need to be sitting down it is tragic.

 

It had to have started just shortly after I was conceived. That is when the cravings started. My mother is rumored to have pounded away close to 15 big macs a week while she was pregnant with me. Now, you have to understand this is almost impossible considering my mother at her heaviest weight in her entire life was 114. She is and always has been rail thin so where she kept 15 big macs nobody knows. I was eating McDonald’s fries by the time I was six months old. Those healthy baby freaks are all dying right now. I know, I know, a six month old eating McD’s fries it’s a travesty. You know what? My parents didn’t cover their outlets either and I’m still alive.

 

As a small child my problems were big to me and I wasn’t like the grown ups. When my problems got bad I didn’t have the luxury of mixing a drink, I was 5 or 6. When my problems got big, I mean really big; like not being allowed to ride my bicycle around the block. You know the kind of problems that could possibly kill a child of that age. When my problems got huge like that there was nothing in the world like a Happy Meal. I would wait out that ride to that beautiful place that had that great red headed clown and a toy in every box. It was the greatest place on earth and I would vow each and every time that when I grew up I would eat a happy meal everyday and nobody could tell me NO!!!!

 

Then as I grew into a teenager I would meet friends at the local McDonalds and go out to hang out and party from there and everybody would meet back at the old McDonalds at the end of their nights of picking up stray cars and siblings along the way, saying goodnight to friends as we all went roaming home. While I was in high school we lost a classmate to a car wreck. It was a real bad car wreck and several people were involved but he was the one that died. Before the funeral we all met at McDonald’s. There had to have been 50 or 60 teenagers in that McDonalds that morning grieving. Then after the funeral as we all left the memorial service at different times we all ended up back at the McD’s.

 

When I became a young woman and had married my childhood sweet heart we were so excited to finally be married and we didn’t have much money for our honeymoon. We had allotted a specific amount each day for food, fun and lodging. We would catch ourselves bargaining with each other to eat McD’s so we would have more money to play on each day. After giving birth to our daughter I was on a dark night highway on my way home from a festival when I must have hit something in the road and blew all four tires. I walked with my 6 month old daughter to the next exit. There it was: McDonalds and open late. I used the phone to call my husband, he called a tow truck and he said to me before I hung up I needed to stay in that McDonald’s until he got there so he would know we were safe.

 

In my young adult hood on occasion I would leave the country on work and play. One of the things I would do before I left American soil would be to sit down for about three hours in McDonalds, just so I would remember the smell and bring back the memories in case I never made it home. 

 

McDonald’s has seen me through a lot in my life and I have seen it be a part of many others lives. It disgusts me to see it taken to the state it is in. I have been traveling to Raleigh, NC for a lot of my business lately. I am in Chapel Hill, NC, about an hour away from Raleigh. In the middle of that trip there is a McDonald’s and I generally stop at that McDonalds on the way back home so that I can pick up food for my crew. These guys work hard and by the time I get a chance to feed them each day it is about 1 or 2 AM and we have been going since about 10 AM. We are all putting in the hours it takes to make a new business work and even our diets are suffering but we are doing the job. Depending on how many of my crew are working I will spend anywhere from 20 to 50 dollars each night on McDonald’s for the crew. 

 

I went the McDonald’s in Cary, NC. It is a 24 hour McDonalds. My horrible experience started at the drive thru window. I was greeted with a computer voice asking me if I wanted to try a new ice latte. I said no and then a Hispanic male voice came on the line and asked me if I would like to order. This is the speaker encounter:

 

ME: “Yes, I need a big mac meal with a coke I also need a double quarter pounder with cheese and a medium fry, I also need a fried chicken wrap and I need two double cheeseburgers no onion no mustard”. 

 

ASSHAT FROM MCDONALD’S: “I’m sorry you can only order off of the 1-11 board because we are on late night menu times”.

 

There is no late night menu posted. I’m even good with this, I am forced to wonder though why they can make me a big mac but not two double cheese burgers unless they are just so freaking greedy they don’t want to offer .99 menu items late night because you don’t have choice but to order from there. Also, the fried chicken wrap was not on the late night 1-11 but they could make it for me.

 

ME: “Ok, then give me two quarter pounders with cheese with no onion and no mustard instead of the two cheeseburgers”.

 

ASSHAT FROM MCDONALD’S:  “Ok, I have a big mac meal with a sprite, two double quarter pounders with cheese and a fry is that right?”

 

ME:  “No, it is a big mac meal with a Coke, a fried chicken wrap, a double quarter pounder with cheese and a medium fry with two quarter pounders with cheese. No mustard no onion. That’s it”.

 

ASSAHAT FROM MCDONALD’S: “Ok, I have a big mac meal with a sprite and two double quarter pounder with cheese and a medium fry your total will be 14.96 drive around”. 

 

At this point I have repeated the order twice and I am not even going to lie I was getting a little peeved, so I pull around at the drive through and we go through the whole thing again.

 

ASSHAT FROM MCDONALDS:  “Ok I have it now. Your total is 15.06 drive to the second window”.

 

I have a feeling that it is still not right, so when the food is rudely handed out the window to me I have the urge to check it. I look in the bag and there is one big Mac, a fried chicken wrap, two quarter pounders with cheese and two fries. Still no Double Quarter pounder with cheese. I knock on the window and am told that this is what I ordered. I say no this is not what I ordered. At this point a very confused non-English speaking young lady goes to find the manager on duty. He comes around the corner angry and it is the same non-English speaking guy that guy that took my order. He turns to the register and reprints my incorrect ticket and then proceeds to come to the window shove it at me and holler at me because I am trying to get free food. I then say ring up the missing food if you didn’t get it right the first time I am willing to pay for the food I just want what I ordered. This man then hollers at me that he has no more double quarter pounder with cheeses and slams the window shut. I’m livid but I go back to my office and my crew deals with what they were given and they take it like champs because that’s what we do in this business; we take the good days with the bad days and keep plugging. 

 

I get back to my office and we take everything out of the bag and I reach into my fry box to find a green slimy booger looking thing. I am angry but it is 1:30 A.M. at this point and nothing that I can do about it. The next day I call the McDonald’s to try to talk to a manager and I get an answering machine. I then call another McDonald’s only to hear that annoying bee bee bee lady telling me the number that I have called has been disconnected at the owners’ request. I then call a third McDonalds and I get a person that cannot speak English telling me that I would have to call back. I call a fourth McDonalds and I get a guy that is so eager to please it is a small relief that the entire world has not come completely undone. He willingly gives me McDonald’s corporate number and I thank him and call them. The guy I spoke with was appalled at the story that I have just relayed here and instantly offers me free food.” I don’t want free food” I tell him. I want Americans that work hard to be able to spend their hard earned dollars at an American owned business that also happens to be an American institution and actually get what they ordered and have the luxury of having people that speak the language to take the order to ensure that the order is taken properly. 

 

The next day I get a call and I am not sure if this is the owner of this particular franchise or just the store manager but he asks me to recount the entire story to him which I do. He sounds just as appalled as the first guy and asks me to email him a picture of the booger fries. I agree to email him a picture of the booger fries and he offers to give me free meals. I once again refuse the free meals and explain to the guy that part of the problem is this has become a business as usual type of environment and that’s what’s wrong with the company today. It’s all about numbers and volume and not about the customers anymore. 

 

I have figured out that in my business we work 5 sometimes 6 days a week and even at the modest number of 20 dollars a day and 5 days a week that is 100 dollars a week that I was spending at that McD’s. This comes out to 5200.00 dollars a year that I was spending at that McD’s. Not to mention the runs with the kids that I will no longer be making. I took part of that money and went to the grocery store. We are cooking at the office a lot now. The thing is we don’t have the time or the capacity some days to cook. We are doing it a lot more though because I refuse to go through McD’s drive thru ever again. I refuse to give McD’s another penny of my hard earned money. I will never again eat McD’s and I will spend the rest of my life showing people the evil that the golden arches have become. What is even more disturbing is the fact that they have made Ronald McDonald their bitch. They slap him on anything that they can to make a buck and make millions off of it.

This is the reason that this Month’s Asshat of May 7, 2009 is McDonalds Corporation. They will allow anybody to open a franchise and sacrifice the name that the founder of the company worked to build to make just one more buck.

 

 

 

 

This month's Asshat of the Month written by Sherry, Edited by Carl, BSP

I think that it is a fact that we are doing some damage to our globe that promotes global warming but I don't think that we make a significant enough mark on the globe at the point for us to be to blame for it. The real asshats that want us to believe this are the guys selling carbon credits.  If you have not read about these yet check them out.  Total scam.  What we do need to be looking at is that our globe throughout its history has seen huge and significant weather shifts.  I read three papers this week on global warming and the shocking thing is that none of them said a word about our planet being alive.  Our planet is a living thing we are taught that from the early years in grade school.

None of these papers stated that the Earth like any other living thing goes through changes.  Maybe not to be considered biological changes but still changes.  The changes in our weather patterns are not coincidence.  The thing that blows me away is that everybody is so busy trying to point the finger in one direction or the other and nobody is pinpointing how to help ease the shift that will undoubtedly take place.  Our weather is getting more severe and we are having climate changes in all parts of the world.  This can not be denied.  What we need to be doing is determining the rate at which it is happening.  What the final out come will be.  Also, how many of us will survive and how can we have a better chance at surviving change, if we are even going to see it in this lifetime.  If you listen to some they will tell you that we have nothing to worry about because December 21,2012 it will all end anyway.  This is not going to happen we are going to see a change of some kind in that time frame.  There is too much scientific proof that we will experience a solar event.  Now the reality is that the sun will rise in the middle of the milky way.  Will this change our weather we have no clue.  What will happen? We have no clue.  What we do know is that at some point as the time gets closer, lots of religious nuts will start mass suicides because their GOD is bringing them home.  You know how the real zealots are.  So our numbers will decrease, so will some of the   stupidity that runs rampant.  There will be people that will kill themselves out of fear of what is going to happen.  This will decrease some of our numbers as well.  Also, it will comtribute to less stupid.  The way I see it 2012 could end up being very good for the gene pool. I digress...

The Earth is warming
The Globe is changing
No, it is not us that is doing it

As I have had two people tell me in the last ten minutes the great George Carlin once said that the Earth would get sick of us and shake us off  like a bad case of fleas.

April's Asshat of the month is for sure and 100% Robert Powell.  This policeman was obviously on a power trip.  So the story goes something like this.  Ryan Moats a running back for the Houston Texans was rushing to the hospitol to say good bye to his dying mother in law.  When he encountered a red light.  He pulled up to the red light stopped and then cautiously rolled through the intersection.  At this point this asshat stops him, pulls his gun on him and proceeds to threaten he with jail.  Moats did not cash in on his fame not once the entire time.  The videos show that he not only acted reasonably calm considering the amount of crap he took off this guy.  On the video you can see his wife walking on into the hospitol and after having the policemans gun in her face.

This asshat has confirmed his asshattedness by coming out and apologizing and by resigning.  Her's what bothers me.  Yeah he's an asshat.  He should not be in that line of work anyway.  My problem is that if he felt compelled to act that way with sombody then why didn't he stick to his guns.  He caved, that bothers me.  This woman's family could be with her in her last dying moments because of this assholes actions.  Then in the end his actions weren't important enough to him for him to stand and fight on actions that he felt were right in the first place.  So it is for this reason Robert Powell you are the ASSHAT OF THE MONTH OF APRIL  we salute you. 

P.S. Robert Powell if you ever stumble upon this just know that we here at the Bullshit Press are profoundly upset by your resignation.  You have proven to not only be spineless but a power mongering horses ass.  Ryan Moats should file a civil suit on you and the compensation that he asks for should be the right to take you out and kick your ass.  

Ok, crew I am putting together a book and am very interested in using some of your stories.  I am looking for a collection of any and all drunk stories that you have to offer up.  It doesn't matter how big, how small or how much trouble you got into I want to know it all.  Now for this to work I need you to send me your drunk stories and at the bottom tell me that it is ok with you that I use your story for publication.  Withhold your name if you feel it is important.  I don't care I just want drunk stories as many as you can get to me and if need be put them in the form of messages to my in box or even as comments here.  I just want them.

I can recall being a whole lot younger than I am now and hearing people around me talking about this guy that was right on target with the way Americans think.  This man was Rush Limbaugh, and these adults in my life were so completely full of shit.  We all know many of the facts pertaining to Rush.  Let's take this chance to all state the thing that irritates us the most about him.  The thing that irritates me the most about Rush is his 90's statements about drugs in modern day society, yet the hypocrite is now out about his addictions and not only is he out and claiming to be clean but now once again stating that he is clean,  he is so clearly still having scripts filled weekly. 
Not to mention, instead of encouraging our president in his endeavors he has come right out and said that he hopes  that Obama fails.  The problem that I have with this is that I may not agree with any of the things that I am seeing out of this administration, but I am an American and we haveto stand behind the choices that are made in our government.  We may not have voted for him but we must support him.  It is our American duty.  Rush Limbaugh is a horrible excuse of a man and any moron that actually gives him any air time at all should be shot. 
This is very uninformative and doesn't even begin to state the most heinous of Rush's actions.  I would love to hear some of the veiws that the reader of this blog have to say about Rush and his self absorbed actions.  I am sorry that it took this long to get the AssHat out to you this month.  Rush is a sensitive issue for me and I am trying to stay neutral.

 I was told Sherry should post my latest blog here, I mentioned this to Sherry, and she agreed without even reading it. She is busy these days, so here it is, for those of you who don’t subscribe to me, and may have been waiting for something from BSP

Carl  BSP


SOCIALISM IS THE WORST THING SINCE SATAN, AND OUR PRESIDENT
IS A SOCIALIST!

At least if you listen to all the bullshit the Republicans are accusing him of, in order to cloud the main issue of trying to get the Country back on its feet, despite an overwhelming amount of bullshit leftover from bad ideas and corporate favoritism.

I recently watched Michael Moore’s Documentary “Sicko” in which he addresses the health care problem here, and that many other nations have socialized medicine which works very well. I already knew about this, but one other thing he pointed out is the fact we have socialized systems here ALREADY, in Fire Departments, Police, and Public Schools. In the case of the latter two, there may be a case to be made against the efficiency of such programs in that Law Enforcement has turned into a BUSINESS, and the Schools have gone consistently downhill since I was there in the seventies which was, in my opinion, when the decline of the U.S. education system started.

 At the risk of sounding like a broken record, broken record, broken record, broken record, the Republicans are playing on the old Cold-War fear mongering when they cry SOCIALIST!, and people are falling for this without THINKING about the possibility of the government actually being able to TAKE CARE OF IT’S CITIZENS!

In countries where the Government takes care of it’s people by not permitting business to take advantage of the majority of the people upon whom the economy depends, there is less crime because there is less poverty, and therefore less NEED for crime. Here crime is encouraged by default, because the social conditions have been allowed to devolve to the point where many people have no other choice, or are made criminals for no reason.

The “WAR ON DRUGS” has resulted in many people having their lives destroyed by the Prison Industry and subsequent social stigma placed on them as a result of being arrested for Marijuana, which has never been proven to be dangerous and is in fact less harmful than Alcohol, a substance our Government legalized after a failed attempt to wipe it out in the 1920’s, which led to an INCREASE in crime brought on by Special Interest  Groups (Mainly Religion) forcing the issue alcohol was “Evil”, just like the Government is pushing the drug issue now. The difference is NOW there is MONEY TO BE MADE from anti-drug laws, in the form of employment in the Law Enforcement Industry, actually a small part of our society as a whole. In Countries where Drugs are treated as a Social Problem not a Law Enforcement Problem, people are allowed to continue their lives as productive members of society instead of being made unemployable as they are here, due to having a “Criminal Record”. This ridiculous stigma is reinforced in some areas buy requiring people to register as “Drug Offenders”, thereby giving anybody who wishes to further denigrate them for no reason other than a false belief the “Right” to violate their personal privacy. Granted, hard drugs such as Methamphetamine Cocaine, and Heroin should be illegal, but Pot and Hashish aren’t the threat they are made out to be; they are actually a social drug the same as Alcohol, and over use or public nuisance created from their use should be treated in the same fashion.

The Public School System here has degenerated to the point where a High School Student may not have the ability to distinguish between an ounce, a pound, or a Liter because they have not been taught the difference. I actually witnessed this a few years ago while on vacation with some friends when the topic came up during a conversation about cooking. I was told “They don’t teach us the English system”. While I agree we should have adjusted to the Metric system it the seventies instead of foolishly hanging on to the English system all these years, this example points out on a basic level the shortfall of the School System’s ability to prepare students for things they will have to know for everyday life.

Another example of this stubborn hanging-on to the English system of measurement is the American Automobile Manufacturers putting English size heads on metric-thread nuts as if mechanics don’t have the common sense to know IT SHOULD BE METRIC if it was built after1980! (Excuse me while I digress, this is a pet peeve of mine. If you are reading this Paul, you know EXACTLY what I’m talking about.)

So the Republicans want everyone to believe Social Programs are a threat to “Our way of life”? What IS that exactly, Our Way of Life? The highest Crime rate in the world? We wouldn’t want to do anything about THAT now would we? If somehow people could get a good education and there were jobs HERE instead of overseas, would the Crime Rate go down?

Putting people out on the street without care because they don’t have Health Insurance, while the Insurance Companies have turned what used to be a Noble Profession into a profit-based industry which promotes over-priced drugs(Many of which cause more harm) instead of  compassion for your fellow man? They say the Government has no business in the Health Care Industry. I say the INSURANCE COMPANIES created the problem, and the Government should PUNISH the insurance companies for irresponsible practices (Perhaps racketeering?*)
 
*–noun
“The practice of conducting or engaging in a racket, as extortion or bootlegging.”
Somehow this seems applicable.

How about the fact our High School Graduates fall behind many other Countries? That certainly should work in our favor. We don’t need any more smart people when all the jobs we have left will be mindless do-what-you-are-told-and-don’t-have-any-good-ideas-for-improvment types. Uneducated, blindly following workers are the stereotype in the “Socialist” societies we are supposed to be afraid of, yet this seems to be the status quo Republicans want to maintain, when they criticize any attempt to improve our Schools by funding Teachers and Maintenance.

We don’t make anything here anymore, and why should we? Let’s just let other Countries continue to profit off us, while we sit back and watch what’s left of our Manufacturing Base fall apart, along with our infrastructure. We won’t need good roads and bridges when we don’t have any money to buy things anyway, and who needs a reliable electrical network? (Remember when the East Coast went dark a few years ago? I was cutting a board with my hand held when that happened, the power “burped” and I was hundreds of miles from the main affected area).

Our new President has not been in office for two months, and all we hear is how BAD he is making things. Things are ALREADY BAD, and have been for some time. My question is: How bad do the republicans want it to get in order to promote their interests at the expense of the American People? It seems to me they want it to get REALLY BAD, so they can get more of their Big-Business, Insurance Company, Health Care Industry favoring people elected in two years in order to continue screwing the American People until there is nothing left to screw over. This is after all “The American Way” as they would have us believe.

When it comes down to what is in the best interest of the Country, it is NOT what’s in the best interest of greed and profit at the expense of the PEOPLE. We should take a look at some of the other countries who have had success with “Socialist Programs”, get our heads out of our asses, and join the world again. “Our Way of Life” needs to be changed. Look where it’s gotten us. To refuse to realize this is the REAL Anti-American attitude, and to promote irrational fear is Anti-Patriotic.

Carl BSP

War on Drugs: The Price Tag

America can’t afford marijuana prohibition – it’s a matter of dollars and sense.

By Anita Bartholomew,  January 14, 2009 [Editor's note: This is one of three pieces Culture11 is publishing on the War on Drugs. See Radley Balko's piece on collateral damage in the drug war here, and David Fredosso on the case against legalization here. And see David and Radley debate their respective pieces here.]


With
our economy going to pot, President-elect Obama has promised a
“top-to-bottom audit to eliminate spending for programs that don’t
work.” So, here’s a sane, simple proposal to save the country billions
of dollars a year: end the war on marijuana users.

This failed
and counter-productive program is an assault on people who pose
virtually no threat to themselves or anyone else, certainly no more
than that all-American "Joe Sixpack" revered in our recent presidential
election.

Yet, getting caught with a few seeds or trace marijuana residue on a pipe is enough in some jurisdictions to trigger an arrest.
Most who favor continuing the war assume that law enforcement focuses
on sweeping up kingpins and members of cartels. But, here’s a sobering
statistic. Of the 872,000 arrests
in 2007 for marijuana-related offenses, almost 90 percent were for
simple possession of the dried vegetation in question. The typical
arrestee is younger than 30.
Think college-age kid caught lighting up a joint. Now, multiply that by
775,000 — that’s where a significant chunk of your drug war dollars are
going.

The price of deploying an army of local, state and
federal cops, prosecutors and guards to arrest, try and imprison the
perpetrators of this non-scourge? Using data from 2000, Harvard
economist Jeffrey Miron estimated it as $7.7 billion4 per year while a
2007 study, by public policy expert Jon Gettman, figured it closer to
$10.7 billion 5 per year.

Most of that money is eaten up by
law enforcement according to Miron, with $2.94 billion going to
prosecution costs in 2000, and less than half a billion toward
incarceration.

Add in the revenue we’d eventually gain if marijuana were regulated and taxed like alcohol and tobacco (from $6.2 billion to as much as $31.1 billion per year), and you’re talking real money.

EX-COPS EXPRESS REGRETS ABOUT A FAILED WAR

David
Doddridge took pride in his work for most of his 21-year career with
the LAPD. But when, five years before his retirement, he got
transferred into narcotics, he began to feel he was doing more harm
than good.

Cops see the collateral damage done by the drug war,
costs that don’t show up on anyone’s budget analysis and are paid, not
just by those arrested for the high crime of preferring a doobie to a
Bud Lite, but by their families: The father whose car is confiscated
when junior gets pulled over by an officer with a nose for burnt herb.
The daughter who tries to buy medical marijuana – because it’s the only
medicine that relieves her parent’s chemotherapy-induced nausea – and
gets arrested in the process. The children who get shuffled from foster
home to foster home while mom serves time.

“One of the first
things that struck me as a narcotics officer was the tremendous amount
of damage we were doing to the social structure – homes, families,
children, parents,” says Doddridge. “I look back and still see the
faces of the people I arrested and threw in jail.”

He recalls
a young mother he busted who had been working her way through college.
“Her boyfriend left her and she was trying to make a better life for
herself and raise two children at the same time. All of that was gone
now. All of it was gone.

“I got to thinking, what are we doing? I’d been thinking it for a while but that just made it worse.”

When
I ask him to give me the positive side of prohibition, Doddridge’s
usually soft, thoughtful voice betrays anger. “It’s really helped out
the drug cartels. It’s created lots of new jobs, building new prisons,
hiring new guards.” Doddridge also decries how, under the guise of
protecting us from ourselves, the government has enacted laws that
ignore the fourth amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable search
and seizure.

And there are practical considerations even the
fiercest anti-drug crusader should take into account. When law
enforcement agencies allocate more time, money and officers to drug
task forces, those resources aren’t available to fight crimes against
people and property.

“The homicide clearance rate today is
less than it was in 1950,” says Doddridge. “Today we have all the DNA
and all the electronic stuff and CSI and all these other people. But we
can’t clear as many because serious investigative resources, that could
go into clearing homicides, rapes, robberies and other things are now
being diverted into this war on drugs.”

After leaving the LAPD,
Doddridge joined Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), the only
drug reform organization representing those in law enforcement. LEAP,
founded by five former police officers in 2002, now has 10,000 members,
including current and former judges, cops, DEA officers, prosecutors,
and others. By giving the law enforcement perspective in media
interviews, in talks to groups such as Rotary, Lions, and Kiwanis
clubs, and testifying before legislatures, LEAP has helped to bring
about incremental changes in some state and local laws, such as
decriminalization of possession of small amounts of pot. It’s one
battalion in the army of reform organizations that includes NORML, the
Marijuana Policy Project, the Drug Policy Alliance, and others.

Now
one of LEAP’s spokespeople, Doddridge says he expected at first to get
“a lot of hoots and howls” when he spoke to an audience. Instead,
almost everyone has been receptive to his message.

“It’s almost
like they’re waking up from a dream. You can just see them, click,
click click,” he says, as the arguments against prohibition break
through preconceptions.

Like Doddridge, Earl Barnett is a
retired law enforcement officer – he was on a force of about 500 in
Greenville, South Carolina – whose experiences soured him on the drug
war. In his view, law enforcement needs to get out of the business of
policing drug users. “The fact of the matter is, the large majority of
the people who use drugs are not a threat to the community.”

Barnett,
who is also a spokesperson for LEAP, points to Prohibition, the U.S.’s
last failed attempt at keeping people from choosing their own
intoxicants. “They preached that we would turn into a nation of
alcoholic zombies if we repealed Prohibition.”

Today’s prohibitionists warn that marijuana legalization would lead to a nation of drug-addled zombies.

Barnett
believes we should take the lessons of history to heart and feels
frustrated that we haven’t as yet. “We are still enthralled with
politicians who preach fear in this country. The only thing our country
has done very well in the war on drugs is that we have created such
fear, we’re reluctant to consider any alternative.

“There has to be a different way because what we’ve been doing has absolutely squandered our resources. And for what?”

PROHIBITION THEN AND NOW

On
January 16,1920, the eve of Prohibition, the flamboyant evangelist
Billy Sunday (himself, a reformed drinker), staged a mock funeral for
John Barleycorn, complete with a grief-stricken Satan marching behind
the casket. Sunday preached that demon rum was at the root of all crime
and, without it, there would be no more need for jails. To an audience
of 10,000 celebrants, Sunday proclaimed, “We will turn our prisons into
factories and our jails into storehouses and corn cribs.”

This belief, shared by many Prohibitionists, prompted some towns to close their jails and sell off the buildings.

Drinking and crime did take a dive for a couple of years but neither ended. By 1923, people were drinking more than they had in 1918 to 1919, prior to the passage of the 18th amendment that banned alcohol. Homicide rates spiked.

Prohibition had created a distribution vacuum that organized crime quickly filled, operating much like today’s drug cartels.

With
the double-whammy of the Great Depression hitting at the same time
Prohibition-associated crime was burning a hole in the law enforcement
budget, voters clamored for repeal.

So will a deep recession
lead us to reconsider pot prohibition? Jeffrey A. Miron, a Senior
Lecturer in the Department of Economics at Harvard, authored one of the
many studies that calculated the billions we’d save each year if we
stopped prosecuting marijuana users. In June 2005, more than 500
economists, including the late Milton Friedman, signed a letter in support of the study, urging repeal of marijuana prohibition.

Miron
isn’t sanguine about the war on weed ending any time soon, but he
believes that, in a free society, the government has no business
protecting us from ourselves — especially when it makes arbitrary
choices about which risks it’s going to prevent us from taking.

“Any
argument one could make for keeping marijuana illegal would apply at
least as strongly for tobacco and alcohol and many other things which
carry risks,” says Miron, “driving on a highway, downhill skiing, Ben
and Jerry’s ice cream, you name it.”

THE POLITICS OF POT

Why
do we spend billions per year on enforcement, judicial costs, and
imprisonment of people whose only crime is to prefer a relatively mild,
non-government-sanctioned intoxicant over more addictive, more health-damaging government-approved ones?
Why is the government so intent on protecting me from me – and you from
you? Isn’t its rightful role to protect us from outside threats against
our persons and property?

Drug czar John Walters heads the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP),
a federal agency that establishes drug war objectives and priorities
throughout the U.S. I made several attempts to reach Walters, or a
representative, so I could ask these and other questions, but was
unsuccessful.

So, we’re left to public statements made by
Walters and others in his office, such as those from a press conference
in September, when Walters was campaigning against a ballot initiative
to legalize medical marijuana in the state of Michigan, which has since
passed. Walters claimed
that marijuana is “dangerous” an “addictive substance” and that
proponents of legalizing marijuana for medical use are promoting
“poisoning on a wider scale.” A blog entry from the office of the drug
czar suggests that marijuana use leads to schizophrenia.

How
dangerous is pot, really? There are no records of anyone having died
from smoking marijuana, ever, nor has anyone overdosed on it, or been
poisoned by it, unlike over-the-counter remedies such as, say, aspirin
and similar pain relievers, which kill approximately 7,600 people per year.
Medical researchers tell us that the potential for marijuana to be
habit-forming is equal to or less than the habit-forming potential of caffeine.
But we haven’t outlawed coffee, tea or chocolate. In the seemingly
endless search for some justification for the war on weed, researchers
have looked for a cause-and-effect connection between marijuana and
schizophrenia.

And they did discover that those with
schizophrenia are more likely to smoke marijuana than are other people.
However, they also found that those with schizophrenia are even more likely to drink alcohol. No one’s suggesting we again ban alcohol.

When
all else fails, the drug czar’s fallback argument is that marijuana is
a “gateway drug” that leads young people to try more potent stuff. The
Institute of Medicine is a non-government body commissioned by the drug
czar’s office in 1999 to weigh the value of marijuana as medicine. It
found that “most drug users begin with alcohol and nicotine before
marijuana” and that “marijuana is not the most common, and is rarely
the first, ‘gateway’ to illicit drug use.” In other words, the drug
czar’s last, best argument had been debunked by his own office before
Walters took over.

Ordinary people are getting wise to the
realities and pot won’t be our boogey man forever just as demon rum has
lost its ability to instill fear. As it was before the repeal of
alcohol Prohibition, average Americans of all stripes are ahead of the
politicians on the learning curve. A Zogby poll
of 4,730 people nationwide, conducted in September 2008, found that 76
percent surveyed believed the war on drugs was a failure. And 54.4
percent overall believed that the solution to drug abuse should not be
law enforcement-related, but either education/treatment, legalization
of some drugs, or ending the war on drugs all together.

Twenty-one states
have now decriminalized marijuana possession for personal use, medical
use or both, most often by ballot initiative — demonstrating that a
majority of voters favored relaxing the law. On Tuesday, November 4,
2008, Massachusetts’s voters became the latest to decriminalize
possession of up to an ounce of marijuana and Michigan voters legalized
medical marijuana. Both measures passed with more than 60 percent
approval.

But as long as there are any criminal penalties
attached to marijuana use, we will continue enriching the violent
cartels and gangs that grow, harvest and distribute pot. They thrive
for the same reasons the Al Capones of the alcohol Prohibition era
thrived: prohibition throws all the business their way.

As
long as marijuana is illegal, we’ll still be directing billions to
enforcement, prosecution and incarceration. And we still won’t realize
the revenues that regulation and taxation can bring.

We could
use those lost billions right now. Estimates of the combined savings
from legalizing marijuana, and revenues from taxing it like alcohol or
tobacco, range from $13.94 to $41.8 billion per year. That’s enough to
pay for all or most of President-elect Obama’s proposed ten-year, $150
billion alternative energy investment. Or it could contribute roughly
one-fifth to one-half of the $75 billion per year estimated cost of
Obama’s proposal to extend health insurance to all.

We can’t
know yet where an Obama administration will take us but, Candidate
Obama gave a few clues about how President Obama may look upon the war
on weed. Obama and his spokespeople have said that he would respect the
medical marijuana laws passed by local and state governments and end
the Clinton and Bush era DEA raids on medical marijuana providers.

It’s
less clear how receptive he’ll be to either legalization or
decriminalization. Although he backtracked once he became a
presidential candidate, Obama agreed with decriminalization in 2004. And, like the majority of Americans polled by Zogby, Obama has called the drug war an utter failure.

It’s
a start. Alcohol Prohibition didn’t end all at once. At the dawn of
Prohibition, doctors lobbied to retain the ability to prescribe liquor
for medicinal purposes. Toward the end, low alcohol content beer was
re-introduced. And with economic collapse and bootleg alcohol gang
violence out of control, the U.S. reached a tipping point; the 21st
Amendment repealed the 18th.

It’s time to reassess marijuana
prohibition with clear minds, the way that our ancestors eventually
viewed repeal of alcohol Prohibition, to get past the fear-based and
moralistic misinformation. Do we really want to keep spending insane
amounts of our dwindling government funds on tracking down, arresting
and imprisoning the hundreds of thousands of hapless Harolds and Kumars
who then can no longer contribute to our faltering economy by
overeating at White Castle? Is this where we want to focus our law
enforcement resources when we’re entering a deep recession that’s
likely to produce an increase in property crime?

Going back to
President-elect Obama’s promise to “eliminate spending for programs
that don’t work,” it’s clear that the war on marijuana users hasn’t
worked. It’s not just a failure, it’s a disgrace, on every level, and
it’s time to end it. Not only to save money or to stop punishing
non-criminals, but to fulfill a promise made long ago, about
inalienable American rights to liberty, the most basic of which is,
quite obviously, the freedom to do what you choose with your own body
in the privacy of your own home.

I want everybody to know that I think it shows great class and determination on my part to let everybody know today of all days. The day before one of the biggest days in our history.  In 2012 I will be running for president.  I know many of you are going to read this and say what kind of half cocked idea is Sherry playing with this time.  First of all I am still playing with the rules of the whole thing, but I do believe that the rules are that I have to be 35.  I will be.  I have to have lived in the U.S. for 14 years. I have.  That I was born in the U.S. I was.  I'm also pretty sure that I have enough Native American in me that I would never be mistaken as anything other than American. 

Now don't get me wrong people.  I am not telling you that I am going to be the next elected President but what I am telling you that you don't want to vote for me.  You do however want to look at what your other options are.  My platform is simple, Yeah I did it.  I did it all and most of it I would do again if given half a chance.I smoke on occasion I drink and I use all of those words that you can't say on public television and have your bleepers ready because I sometimes put those words together in complete sentences.  Also, don't expect me to give two shits about any body's starving children until ours are fed. I intend on making right some of the crooked shit that is going on inside of our borders before I worry about the crooked shit going on elsewhere.  Americans are getting FUCKED.  I'm sick of it so it's about time that we Americans said NO MORE.  I have decided that We the People is going to mean something again and I'm here to tell you it will.  By the time we reach the next election We the People will have spoken.  We are once again in a situation where we have taxation without representation.  We have elected officials but what are they doing?  They are representing themselves.  We are living in a cover your ass America and it's time that we be accountable for what we are doing. 

So seriously ya'll I am going to do this and I hope that I have the support of the B.S.Press readers and if I don't then I can respect that to but just so you know the sentence that will be heard for the next three years is:

AMERICANS FOR AMERICANS:WE ARE TAKING IT BACK

I'm sorry if this sounds a little militant.  Fuck sakes though let's cut through the Bullshit already.  I will allow them to produce all of my dirty laundry and there is plenty.  I am also willing to cop to all of it.  Hell I may create more just so they have something to do, no I've done quite enough to keep them busy I would think.  After I have copped to it then it's out in the open and we can get to the real issues.  The real problems that face America.  Does it not bother anybody that we have not seen blatant honesty since our 16th president and I have my doubts about him.

One of the things that bothers me the most is that I have spent the last several months hearing about how America is getting it's first African American President.  NO WE ARE NOT!!!!! We are getting our first multi-racial president and shouldn't that be progress enough.  That is a huge step for Americans it's the first progressive step since Kennedy and nobody seems to care.  It seem to be so much more important that he be African American and he is not.  He is both and how fitting is that.  The melting pot has a president that is direct proof of how far we have come. Who knows if he will be any good you might find me throwing all of my support at him by 2012 but,  in the mean time he's just one of them.  The people that cover their own asses and leave the little people the common man out to dry.  I'm not old enough to remember "A chicken in every pot" but I have read the books and I do know the history and I do know that at one time the American public meant something to those who made the big decisions. We are at a stage in our nations existence that this has to be the way it is again.  We have to start caring about each other we have to start loving each other and we have to once again make us what we once were and that was GREAT.  We are a nation of the greatest humans in existence and we allow such a low world opinion of us.  It's because we have gotten fat and lazy in our ways and we cannot accept this any longer.

AMERICANS FOR AMERICANS:WE ARE TAKING IT BACK

Any and all comments and ideas would be greatly welcomed.  I am throwing myself on the stake for the rights and beliefs that we all hold so very dear all I need is a select few to stand there and blow out the matches as they are trying to light the stake. This is me telling all of you that I am doing it for good or bad.  Let the chips fall where they may.

www.creationzrelationz.webs.com is our new website if you try to link it myspace will say that it is disabled but it is not.  It is a new site and we are building on it daily.  I encourage all that read the B.S.Press to go to the new site and check it out and thanks again to all of you who read me.  By the Way I have asked Carl to be my running mate.  We are all aware Judging by available evidence would have to be my Greenspan.  That man squeezes a penny until Abe himself screams from the grave.  With that trio how could we go wrong????

I am seeing red and I have a feeling that this blog will spark a lot of debate.  As you all know I spent a few years working at Bob Evans Restaurant.  During my time at Bob Evan's I was there and constantly heard people bitching and moaning about the smoking section and how they wanted to be seated as far away from the smoking section as possible.  Then the restaurant went to non-smoking and I had to listen to people bitch because there wasn't a smoking section.  You can't please all of the people all of the time. 

So I open my own business it is Creationz Relationz and it is a personal services company.  I go 4 months without a customer complaint.  So yesterday I finally got my first complaint and it was that there was a smell of smoke in my office.  Not in my massage room and not anywhere else in the place just in the main office area.  Well, I told this gentleman that he could leave.  I was born in America and as a small business owner it is my George given right to smoke in my office.  I don't give two shits what the surgeon general has to say about the ill effects of smoking.  If I quit doing everything that was supposed to be bad for me then I would die of starvation.  Not to mention I would live a very unhappy life.  Now for the benefit of my customers I have made sure that the smell of smoke is not so strong in the air.  This will be the only measure that I take to make that happen.  I opened a business that takes care of people and makes it so that other people have it easier in thier lives.  This is not an easy task.  Aside from my massages and a few of my other services I take a lot of weight off of peoples shoulders and it would appear to me that they would be greatful and not bitch about a small amount of smoke in the office area. 

I am doing everything that I can to make my customer's, my family, my business partners, and everybody else in my life happy.  I need my smokes for christs sakes and if that is to much for some people they can EAT ME!!!!  For obvious reasons I will not post this on my business blog but this is how I am feeling this morning and damnit when did it become a federal fucking case to have a smoke when you wake up in the mornings.  My business is my business with the exception of the other two that have a stake in this and to be real honest one of them smokes and the other we just don't smoke when he's around.  For the love of all that it unholy in this world if you are one of these people that bitch about smoke get the fuck over yourself.  If you are one of these people that smoke have enough respect for those that don't not to intentionally make them smell it.  There has to be some kind of compromise because if not, I'm just going to start flipping buts at people at random. 

It makes me think of living in Daytona Beach years ago during an event that they call BCR now I tell you BCR get's way out of control and the business owners look for reasons to go out of business that week not to have to deal with it.  I was working on the beach side and I would not lie to you there were people having sex in the bushes in broad daylight.  I flipped my cigarette out the window and damned if I didn't get a ticket but all the naked little jay birds out there were ignored why is that? 

I smoke and I will continue to smoke even if they outlaw it.  Our founding fathers made thier living as tobacco farmers and who the hell are these tight asses to come into my palce of business and bitch about the smoke.  If you don't like it don't come back.  I have never been able to say that until now but now as a business owner with a decent client base it is imperitive that I say I SMOKE AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT THEN BITE ME.  O.K. Carl go ahead play devils advocate and all that other crap go for it.  It won't change my mind but I am willing to listen.  By the way everybody go and check out our new web site www.  creationzrelationz.com now don't use those spaces we just do that because myspace is gay and says that my link has been disabled.  DICKHEADS 

Alot of people are having a hard time connecting to our new page because myspace blocks anything that might be not them so please try again using your browser

www.creationzrelationz.webs.com