In my constitutional law class, my professor always had a saying about how the Supreme Court's dicey decisions on issues such as obcsenity, torture, and segregation lead to bad outcomes. That saying was "bad cases lead to bad precedents."

There is no case that represents this saying better than Buck v. Bell. This now infamous case dealt with a Virginia eugenics laws in which the Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision upheld that states could forcibly sterilized "feeble minded" people from "polluting" the gene pool. This case in effect allowed for the states, through state-run eugenics laboratories to deem certain people a danger to the genetic purity of society, then have them sterilized as a matter of public health. In the decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up the decision by stating, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." It was later discovered that Carrie Buck, the defendant, had been raped by her foster' parents nephew. The designation of feeblemindness was given to her to delegitmize her claims.

Fast forward to today and we now have the case of 57-year old Elaine Riddick. At the age of 14, Riddick was raped, which led to her getting pregnant. The state of North Carolina determined that she was "feeble minded," a.k.a. a poor black girl, and on the day of her child's birth forcibly sterilized her.

On June 1st  Raymond Zack decided to drown himself in the San Francisco Bay. The story is made even more tragic by the fact that police and firefighters, those who have sworn an oath to protect and serve, sat idly by, watching him drown, later claiming that they could not act because their budget had been cut.  A civilian passerby was the only person to take any action, pulling his body from the surf after it was too late.

Here is a video from Cenk of the Young Turks about the story:

If we get in our time machine and go back to 2009, we hear the Obama Administration claiming that the drug war violence in Mexico is directly linked to gun sales in America, with 90% of the guns used by cartels being purchased and smuggled from the US. Now, this claim has been conclusively refuted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives' own numbers -- yet we still see the claim popping up everyday that American guns fuel Mexican drug  violence.

Because of this so-called epidemic we have seen calls for restrictions on gun sales here in America as a way to prevent the supposed spread into Mexico. Even Mexican President Felipe Calderon has urged the US to reinstitute the "Assault Weapons Ban" that was allowed to sunset under the Bush Administration (despite Bush's support of it).

Fastforward to 2011, and under a combination of the Federal "Project Gunrunner" and Arizona's "Operation Fast and Furious" local Arizona gun dealers were okayed by Arizona State and ATF officials to sell guns to known cartel members with the express purpose of letting them cross the border. We have now learned of an estimated 1,700 - 2,500 weapons that the ATF knowingly allowed to be sold to drug cartels. The plan was to let them cross the boarder with American serial numbers so once they were seized they could be traced back to America would have evidence of arms smuggling.

As we move into another election cycle, there are some major moves coming down the pipeline around marijuana legalization. Two states, California and Colorado, will push for full legalization this year with a ballot iniative, and Washington or Oregon may as well.

One point that all of these states have in common that activists will have to overcome the already-passed Medical Marijuana laws in each of these states.  One might think that simply because these laws are passed and marijuana is widely available, taking the next step should be easy. However, this state of affairs can actually hinder the legislative process for a number of reasons.

First and foremost (at least to the liberty-minded) is something that I covered in my piece on why Prop. 19 died in California:  embedded interests who enjoy government protection from competition.