http://www.dailynebraskan.com/opinion/hale-legalizing-marijuana-would-benefit-nebraska-1.2383284

http://www.dailynebraskan.com/opinion/hale-legalizing-marijuana-would-benefit-nebraska-1.2383284

http://www.dailynebraskan.com/opinion/hale-snow-booze-football-embody-nebraska-life-1.2315151

Protip -
Reuben Kulakofsky invented the sandwich at a poker game in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925. He was a local grocer at the time and dreamed up the combination to feed participants in a late-night poker game at the Blackstone Hotel in downtown Omaha when short on other supplies.

Fern Snider, a one-time waitress at the Blackstone Hotel, entered the Reuben in a national sandwich competition in 1956; her entry won--hence one of the earliest pieces of documentation for the name of the sandwich.

nebraska's new state slogan - see, we're not so bad after all

Our judicial system needs a face-lift. Her splendor has been mangled by injustice as the U.S. leads the world in caging its citizens. Legislators need to reverse our imprisonment trends and stop building prisons. Repealing life-without-parole sentences for non-homicidal criminals would be a good start.
In Lincoln last month, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Kopf sentenced Jaktine Moore to life in prison for conspiring to distribute cocaine and crack cocaine* in the Lincoln area. It was his third felony drug conviction, and the court entered the statutorily mandated sentence: life with no chance of parole.
The three strikes law—coining its name from baseball—is one of a handful which force state and federal judges to hand down life sentences, regardless of the circumstances. The intention was to make punishment severe enough that no one would dare err. The result is that many Americans are now serving more time for drug offences than murder. It reflects poorly on society’s values.
Skeptic? Here’s a sad story: My cousin was murdered when I was 12 (she was 17). She was strangled. It was my first funeral, and I cried like a baby. Her killer rots in a Texas prison. But he did not get the death penalty. And he did not get a life-time bid. And the fact that a three time punk drug dealer in Lincoln, Nebraska did, is a travesty of justice. It’s like a punch to the gut.
The message is clear. Selling crack thrice is worse than murdering once. Fortunately, the majority of messages—owing to blatant hypocrisy—fall on deaf ears.
When punishments for drugs outweigh murder, it fails to make drugs the worst evil, it makes justice impossible. Crack cocaine is a wretched drug. But Americans shouldn’t get life for selling or smoking it, any other drug, and most non-violent crimes.
The Eighth Amendment states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
Last term the Supreme Court agreed, at least with respect to juveniles. NPR reports: “By a 6-3 vote, the court ruled it is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a juvenile convicted of a non-homicide crime to life in prison without the possibility of parole.”
This ruling should apply to adults as well.
Some politicians will argue that our current system is too lenient. They will say too many offenders get away with just a slap on the wrist. They may suggest we need more prisons in order to keep our kids safe. They will roar, “What kind of a message would decriminalization send to our children?” Fear is always potent come election time.
Cost alone should be deterrent enough. The average annual cost of incarceration in a federal prison is $25,895 per inmate, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The Pew Center on the States pegs the average annual cost of housing an inmate in a state prison at $29,000. States would be foolish not to take action. Imprisonment alternatives are fiscally responsible.
America is in denial. It is high time she realized she has a problem. She is an incarceration addict. Once she learns to accept the things she cannot change (legislating morality), she’ll have the courage to change the things she can—and the wisdom to know the difference.
The race to lock up the most citizens is one we shouldn’t strive to win.
*Penalties for crack cocaine are exceptionally harsh when compared with powdered cocaine. It would be like paying a $50 MIP for beer, or a $5000 MIP for whiskey. In March, the Senate unanimously approved the Fair Sentencing Act, legislation that reduces the disparity in sentences for crack and powdered cocaine possession, from 100 to 1, to 18 to 1. The House has yet to approve the bill.

edit: http://www.dailynebraskan.com/hale-judicial-system-requires-revamp-on-drug-laws-1.2280845

*quality

Edit: Though no one cared when a couple probies from Nebraska held a Sift-up.

"Nebraska finally has a starting quarterback heading into next fall. Visit our website at www.doubletakesports.com (youtube)."

I gotta say, I have a real love/hate relationship with the way liberals refuse to unify.

Psychologic is right. Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson deserve the credit for what became the final demise of the public option. They're the ones who committed to joining a Republican filibuster of the Senate bill until it was stripped.

It's true that if there had been even one Republican who came out in favor of it, it would've been passed (probably only 61-39, but it'd pass), but that's a fantasy universe where good policy ideas on the left attract votes from the Republican side of the aisle.

I'm not sure that Obama being more engaged about the public option would've gotten it through. Maybe if we had some way of making Obama angry, and getting him to turn into The Rock Obama, he could have played hardball with Democrats, and threatened them with primary challengers, stripping them of chairmanships, etc. Ultimately though, I'm not convinced he really had any stick to wield against either Nelson or Lieberman. There's no other Democrat who could hold onto a Senate seat in Nebraska other than Nelson, and Lieberman seems to have simply been looking for an excuse to join the Republican party ever since the netroots successfully helped Ned Lamont beat him in the Democratic primary in 2006.

I'm honestly not sure there are 51 votes for it in the Senate. That campaign to get signatories to a letter for passing the public option under reconciliation petered out around 40 or so Democrats, and that was counting a lot of people who didn't actually sign the letter, just people who made approving noises about the idea. That makes me think that whether or not there are 51 Democrats who wanted the public option, there weren't 51 willing to try to use reconciliation to pass it.

It's my opinion, as a really, really avid follower of all this, that we just didn't have the votes for the public option.

I'm shocked and pissed about that, and I definitely think the nearly 20 Dems who were only for the public option when it was subject to the filibuster need to be ran through the wringer, but we go into these things with the Democrats we have, not the ones we wish we had. I'm all for a Congress entirely composed of Graysons, Weiners, Sherrod Browns, with a couple Sanders and Kuciniches, but we're a long way from that now.

I think this bill was the best deal we could have gotten in the 111th Congress.

It does not implement any level of government price setting (i.e. its 0% socialist). However, it does collect taxes from the rich, and uses the money to buy insurance for the poor.

It puts lots of new restrictions on insurance companies to make sure their profits come from serving their customers well, not from denying them care. Same for doctors and hospitals, it will make an attempt to change their incentives towards being based on patient outcomes, and not number & size of procedures done.

It does not, and will not solve every health care problem in the country, but it's going to vastly improve the state of our health care system, and provide care to a huge number of people who didn't have access to it, or who couldn't afford it until now.

It's not perfect, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

I think the main effect this bill will have is that we'll keep reforming our health care system as we go. The public option isn't dead, it just didn't get baked in from the start. We can keep pushing for it, and working to elect people who will fight for it, and working to defeat people who helped kill it...like Joe Lieberman.

It all depends on your location. The municipal tap water in Nebraska tests positive, at levels way above WHO recommendations, for various pesticides and fertilizers.

I think he misspoke. He said "hottubbing with a girl nearly half my age" but meant "nearly half as young as I". If he meant under half his age, he would have said "less than half". The phrase he was probably looking for is "barely half my age" meaning just over half. Looking into the story, she was in fact 15.

I don't know much about the story, and I'm not defending his actions, but I feel this is important information no one has contributed (and info that has been contradicted in some comments).

The age of consent is defined on a state by state basis in the US. It ranges from 16-18, with the mode (most commonly occurring number) being 16. The breakdown (according to Wikipedia) is:

16 years old in 31 states + the District of Columbia
17 years old in 7 states
18 years old in 12 states

According to 4parents.gov, there are 32 states @16 years old (+DC). Nebraska is the discrepancy (list found here).

If you want to defend him, 15 is not a far cry from 16, which is overwhelmingly the age of consent by state (over 60% of states). If you want to admonish him, the age in the US is never below 16 and is 18 in Utah.

EDIT: Apparently I wandered off and finished writing this a long time after I started it. DirePickle did bring this up, all the while having an awesome handle.>> ^burdturgler:
"I was 28 yrs old" ... "with a young woman nearly half my age".
Now, I'm no mathematician but I'm pretty sure that "nearly half" of 28 is somewhere beneath 14. Maybe it's 10. I don't know. But the most it could be is 13. So a 28 yr old man and a 13 yr old girl are having a supposedly "non-sexual" experience, naked, in a hot tub. Yet, somehow, he is the victim. He decides to run for congress and his ugly secret comes back to haunt him, so he tries to pay off the woman. "She agreed to keep this 25 yr old secret confidential." And apparently, since he wrote the check, that seemed like money well spent to him. Now the payment is a "mistake" because his pedophilia is being exposed anyway. So, having no other choice, he comes out and admits it, and receives applause and hugs all around.

Hey, Texas is a big fucking state-We grows some smart motherfuckers here as well-the stereotypical Texan to the Brits and Japanese still involves horses and six-shooters, longhorns and oil derricks. You wanna rip on a state fulla wankers, try Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky....fuck, Ever been to Montana or Nebraska?? Central Kansas??

Let's try California-As a transplant to that flaky, fucking wonderland, I encountered day after day after day the most gullible, self-absorbed idgits imaginable, bereft of common sense and practical life skills, with a glazed look in the eyes reminiscent of so many white-tailed deer frolicking on Texas highways with headlights-in-eyes. For christ sakes, they elected a no-acting hack more than once, to govern the motherfucker. Remember Jerry Brown??? Fuck man, Arnold's goddamn family had positions of power in Nazi Germany....real fucking bright those fault-dwellers-Zappa said it best-

"California's got the most of them
Boy, they got a host of them....

"You might call us Flakes
Or something else you might coin us
But we know you're so greedy
That you'll probably join us
We're comin' to get you, we're comin' to get you
We're comin' to get you, we're comin' to get you"

-Flakes

Apparently a deal was reached. Here's a DKos diary running down the changes.

For people allergic to the great orange devil, it includes:

• Annual and lifetime benefit caps are banned
  
• Insurance companies will be required to spend at least 80% of their revenue on medical costs (85% for large group/corporate plans)
  
• States may opt to ban abortion coverage from their state's exchange
  
• Public option is now a framework for privately run non-profit plans which can operate across state lines (but has to comply with the regulations in all client states simultaneously)
  
• People meeting certain income/cost requirements may be able to use exchanges, even if they have an employer plan available (big improvement, IMHO)
  
• A bribe to Ben Nelson, in the form of federal money to Nebraska's Medicaid program.
  
• Penalties for not carrying insurance are increased slightly for those making more than $37,500/yr.
  
• Lots of tax breaks/extra funding for adoption and teenage pregnancy programs
  
• Dropped provisions which would have revoked health insurance companies' anti-trust exemption (not sure if that was for Nelson or Lieberman, maybe some Republicans could offer that as an amendment *guffaw*)
  
• Most everything else like subsidy levels, bans on denials for preexisting conditions and recissions are still in place.
  

Fisk! Puttin' Nebraska on da map, one controversy at a time! Congrats to you, Mr. !!!

Grats Mr. Fisk!! From another Nebraska native!