Stephen C. Webster — Drug war’s racial disparity moves NAACP to embrace marijuana legalization

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the nation’s oldest civil rights groups, said at its Colorado-Montana-Wyoming state conference on Thursday that its members support Colorado’s marijuana legalization ballot initiative.

“We are committed to changing policies that result in a disproportionate number of African-Americans and other people of color being introduced into the criminal justice system,” NAACP chapter president Rosemary Harris Lytle said, according to a media advisory.

“With this endorsement, NAACP activists in Colorado take a significant step: calling for equity, justice and more effective policy — such as the proposal to regulate marijuana like alcohol in our state,” she added. “The flawed drug policies that so negatively impact our communities must be replaced with policy that is not disproportionately punitive based on race but that helps us get to the root causes of drug use and abuse in America.”

The Raw Story
Drug war’s racial disparity moves NAACP to embrace marijuana legalization
Stephen C. Webster

Prohibition failed and in the process created a well-financed criminal underground. Why did anyone expect anything different from the war on drugs? Or now the war on sex?

GOP's demographic problem

Women and Latinos decisively reject the party, but that isn’t the worst of Republicans’ problems....

But those voting blocs are barely the beginning of the GOP’s problems.

The most startling revelation from the June poll in Colorado is that Romney leads Obama among senior citizens by 14 points—but loses among everyone else by 12 points. Voters under 30 prefer Obama by a margin of 30 percent. This means the elderly, particularly older white males, are the GOP’s savior. The sole reason that Romney has any chance of winning this fall is that elderly vote in greater numbers than any other voting bloc. In the 2010 mid-term election, 61 percent of the population over the age of 64 voted—compared with just 37 percent of citizens between 25 and 44, and 21 percent of the voting-age population under 25. The GOP would be on the edge of oblivion if the percentage of young and middle-aged people who vote were equal to that of seniors.

The fact that the elderly are a pillar of the GOP’s base poses a delicate problem. Seniors are, by definition, nearing the end of their lives. So the most important pillar of party’s base is gradually disappearing. 

Read it at In These Times
Romney 2012: It’s the End of the GOP as We Know It
by Theo Anderson