scare tactics

President Obama has laid out more specifics than he has before about what he wants in a health overhaul bill. He tried to explain to the public what a reconfigured health system might look like.

And he called out those who he said were using scare-tactics to score short-term political points.

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In the regular course of relentlessly blogging sentencing law and policy issues Doug Berman has frequently wondered over the course of this presidential campaign why criminal justice issues

The New Yorker’s latest cover, illustrated by The Politics of Fear artist Barry Blitt, has everyone pretty much flipping out today.

Many, including both the Obama and McCain camps, say that the cover is just plain offensive and tasteless, but the New Yorker says it just “satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign.” July 21, 2008, issue of the New Yorker  What do you think?

So someone googled “marijuana is associated with other crimes” and this blog came up on the eighth page of the results. I’m tempted to say the searcher had a hard time finding good solid scientific support for his thesis, if Google couldn’t legitimize the theory in the first few pages.

Brian Williams had a scare piece on NBC Nightly News last night about the current ‘debate’ at the U.S.

Sentencing Commission regarding making the new Federal Sentencing Guidelines for crack cocaine retroactive. (Apologies: the only link I could find to the piece forces you to watch a 15 to 30 second commercial first.)

Williams starts off with: