​  With the impending criminal trial for Senator Ralph Shorty, I have to say that it doesn't have to be the final chapter in Ralph's public life. I want him to get a fair trial and a just verdict. And then I want him to be a better man.
  This is what I want for every fellow Oklahoman.  Yes, we need societal accountability and prudent discretion. But let's also look for ways to protect society, promote public safety, and still be hopeful & helpful. Simply locking up people for years on end, has cost us too much money. 

  Is there a better way? Do technology and innovation give us better and less costly options? Can house arrest and monitors give us cheaper options which still punish and protect, while allowing families to stay strong, independent, and positive influences for accountability?

Can a nonviolent offender work from home and still be a good parent, spouse, and neighbor?

  I hope the legislature takes a good look at the options. I'm not sure Ralph Shortey would have supported such options before, but I think he might be a poster child, now.

 Jesus said; "..and the floods came, and the winds blew, and smote upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall thereof." Matthew 7:27

  It wasn't until the Police of Moore, OK released the report, that we got a real picture of what Ralph Shorty was up to.  But now we see why the Oklahoma Senate all but expelled a powerful member.

  Essentially, Ralph Shorty was in a cheap hotel with a juvenile whom he had discussed "sexual stuff" with. the room was emmersed in the smell of marijuana.

  The boy's past history of sexual solicitation was known to the police. He was also an established friend of the senator. Ralph clearly lied to the police and now he's about to see all his lifelong accomplishments dissentegrate..

  Within hours we will see what law enforcement makes of this....

  A growing crowd of pop culture icons and public leaders are coming out as teetotalers.
  With GW Bush and several noted entertainers, living without recreational drugs(including booze) was a decidedly private matter. But Donald Trump is a bit more open about his lifestyle choice. 
  The old guard of Teetotalers were generally more judgmental and imposing, especially the religiously-motivated prohibition sympathizers.
   I recall, in high school, talking to some friends during lunch. Someone noticed a notebook with the phrase, "Panama Red" scrawled across the front. I asked my buddy if he knew what that was? "Yeah", he answered; "A pretty good imported pot.". "Do you smoke pot?", I asked. "Nah, not any more." He then paused a moment and added; "I like to have a clear mind or else I really can't enjoy it.".
  Those were my sentiments, exactly. It seems a person decidedly takes drugs because he wants an experimental kick, or else he deliberately wants at least a partial and momentary escape from undiluted reality.

  Donald Trump and George Bush did not rise to power by wasting their efforts. These are highly driven businessmen who later became political leaders.

  Some become teetotalers because their health does not afford them the luxury of any booze or narcotics. Some of them are in recovery from an addiction problem. Still others are dealing with mental health challenges which become unmanageable when drugs enter the equation. Even caffeine is a dangerous drug when you suffer a heart problem of Bipolar Disorder.
  Whatever the reason, the crowd is growing. Some want to impose more laws, stiffer penalties, and shut down industries (or really just create black markets and cartels).  But some are becoming more libertarian in their philosophy. Letting each individual be responsible for their own choices.
 I used to be a member of the former group. I felt that "If my convictions are good enough for me, then by golly gosh, they're good enough for you, too!". Now I just try to take care of me. Don't ask me to pay for your mistakes, unless you're ready for social redemption. But then it's incumbent upon you to pay it forward.  

Demi Lovato explains why she stays away from alcohol.

  In an unprecedented move, Tulsa County Chairman, Mike Ford, is now adding his own roster of delegates to the county convention, scheduled for March 25th.  The move clearly undermines the authority of the precinct committees to select their own delegates to the county convention.
  In a letter sent out within the past hours, Ford declares a major failure to organize the county's several hundred precincts. Participation is fair below any in recorded history for Tulsa County. Yet for this reason, he believes only he can fix it by picking a bunch of his own 'delegates' and imposing them upon the county GOP, in a clear violation of party structure, orderly process, and mandated deadlines. He does not require them to hold a precinct meeting and be elected properly. There will be no open vetting process. 

  Ford came to power by promising to call County Committee Meetings every 3 months. that County Committee is the supreme authority of the Tulsa GOP, whenever the convention is not assembled. Yet this was a complete lie and never attempted. Ford has waited until the last minute to declare this latest round of dictatorial acts.
​
   Ford initially undermined and usurped the authority of the precincts to organize their own biennial precinct meetings within each precinct. It is a move that has decimated the participation in Oklahoma City and led to a series of losses both in grass roots organization and electoral losses in the November general election. The Democrat Party won 2 house seats which were historically Republican.

  Springdale, NC (AP)-  Matthew Fenner said he was leaving a Word of Faith prayer service on Jan. 27, 2013, when nearly two dozen people held him captive for two hours, slapping, punching, choking and blasting him to expel his "homosexual demons."
  For nearly two years, Fenner said he waged battle with various law enforcement agencies until the five congregants he said administered the worst beatings were charged with kidnapping and assault.
  Nearly two more years later, no trial date has been set because of persistent legal wrangling, mostly by defense lawyers who also are Word of Faith members.
  Meantime, former congregants say, Pastor Jane Whaley has been working to sabotage the case, holding meetings with congregants to make sure their stories match her narrative: Fenner is a liar.
  Jane Whaley reportedly manipulated the narrative of members even in official investigations, subverting government investigations through the influence her network has within government agencies, like the District Attorney's office and state social services.
Read the AP report, here.

Never mind how the 51 'yea' votes plans to pay for the new law; they just voted to override the 'ignorant' voters who returned them to office just last November.

HB1482 is a bill which creates felonies where there used to be misdemeanors. To simply possess a controlled substance without proof of a valid prescription, is now punishable by 5 years in prison, where there used to be a 1 year incarceration cap.

  What's more troubling is that the "Felony Zones" are hardly recognizable in many of the situations where it would be prosecuted.

  Aside from the fact that this measure insults and undermines the voters who overwhelmingly approved SQ780, on the same November day that they elected these lawmakers; the weakness of the bill is in the application.

  HB1482 sets up thousands of invisible  "Felony Zones" where penalties jump to 5 times as much prison time.
  The bill sailed through Rep. Scott Biggs' Judiciary Committee on an 11-1 vote. It passed the House floor vote on a slimmest 51 vote majority.

  No lobbying group is more effective than the pharmaceutical industry.
Well, maybe the big liquor industry comes close. The point is, both legislative and state regulatory agencies are setting public policy and ruining peoples' lives with prison sentences and lifetime felony records. They do so with the affirmation of their own consciences, because they reason that they are saving us from ourselves.
  But they all seem to exempt their won patented products from any criminal ban.
  Individuals can often produce or acquire their own remedies for many maladies, but the legal code still requires that we all go through the properly licensed issuers and dispensers of the licensed few products that the law allows us to turn to for treatment.
  Many veterans are discovering the tragedy of PTSD in their own debilitated lives. But with horribly poor services at the Veterans Administration hospitals, some are seeking temporal relief with cannabis, while seeking their own sources of therapy and coping skills. this is leading to precious lives being further ruined with criminal records and even long term incarceration. Never mind that liquor is far more harmful to the veterans.
  Our veterans organizations even openly advocate liquor. Many VFW and American Legion posts feature a tavern as the center of their operations.
Sources.

  Perhaps one of the worst policies of Gov. Frank Keating (and most controversial at the time) was the idea of shipping out our massively growing prison population to businessmen who set up corporate prison compounds.
  Keating was a former FBI agent and he had all the mindset of a "get tough" authoritarian.  He was convinced that Oklahoma would be a far safer and more civil society if we just had the determination to use massive prison sentences to "scare them straight".

  A conservative pioneer of Oklahoma journalism has died. Mike McCarville spent the last 35 years as a publisher. Many of those years he was an associate of Neva Hill's organization.  Part of that time, the McCarville report was a contributor to SoonerPolitics.org. More recently McCarville was a passionate voice for ending the corrupt and anti-constitutional practice of Civil Asset Forfeiture.  
​  The associates at McCarville Report posted the following announcement:

​Dr. Carson is one of the world's greatest surgeons. And speaking logically and accurately is common among physicians.
For instance. The medical classification for a miscarriage is "inevitable abortion". 
Cold sores are classified as "Herpes simplex One".
The problem is the poorly educated public. People are far too connotative in their perceptions. We are taught to worship our own feelings. And we even enslave others' speech to conform to our feelings.

On election night (Nov. 8th), there were millions of stunned and troubled faces. There were also multitudes of panicked operatives seeking to shut down and wipe their operations clean, before enough new members of the administration could get confirmed and start investigating past operations.

This week we're seeing new evidence of many plots to secretly fund political operations via unauthorized sources. For decades we've heard rumors of CIA drug smuggling operations. Now we see that the Justice department has been swooping down on corporations and alleging unfair practices whereby consumers were harmed. The Justice department fined them and collected billions. Much of that money bankrupted corporations and prevented consumers from collecting damages for their own losses.

But some of that money went unreported to congress and landed in agency slush funds whereby political entities were funded secretly. Last week we found out that the Justice Department hid several millions. Recently we found out that the ATF had also run a smuggling operation in tobacco. The New York Times caught wind of it last Summer and the Boston Globe is staying hot on the trail... if we can trust them to uncover the real truth on their fellow liberals?

 The National Sheriff's Association says; "In the 1990s, Deinstitutionalization drew enthusiastic support from fiscal conservatives interested primarily in saving funds by shutting state hospitals, as well as from civil rights advocates who believed that mental patients needed to be “liberated.”

 This merging of the political right and left has made for strange—indeed, bizarre—bedfellows but has been a political juggernaut, ensuring that deinstitutionalization will continue to take place, as it does even today, despite clear evidence that for many patients it has been a disaster.
​
  In 1992 a jail survey was sent to each of the 3,353 jails in the United States. Jail personnel were asked to assess what percentage of their inmates were seriously mentally
ill, defined as including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, “and related conditions,” and the questionnaire included representative vignettes. A total of 1,391 usable responses were returned. The average number of seriously mentally ill inmates was 7.2 percent, with a range from 2 percent (jails in Wyoming) to 11 percent (jails in Connecticut, Colorado, and Hawaii).

  The fiscal stupidity of Oklahoma's state dereliction of duty has cost our taxpayers an insane amount of money. Money which could have prevented the budget crises of the past 10 years.
  It started with the decision of the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse (ODMHSAS), to shut down the mental health inpatient bed capacity, in 2010-12. This was the result of a massive budget disaster from worldwide financial forces. The public didn't stop suffering serious mental illness, but their capacity to get private sector treatment was severely diminished. Since unemployment skyrocketed, many lost the workplace health insurance which would have allowed them a better option in private hospitals. Then the public beds were the first thing cut when state agency budgets were slashed.
 20 years ago, Oklahoma had about 2000 beds available to diagnose & treat serious mental illness. Now there are little more than 300 beds which cops and judges can access for emergency acute inpatient care.
  The crisis was borne on the backs of our law enforcement agencies. And at a far more expensive price. As the behavior of the seriously mental ill population progressively collapsed, they were continually swept off the streets by the local cops. Our vastly growing legal code of law provided the excuse cops needed to incarcerate thousands and label them as a dangerous threat to society.
  But the average daily cost of  housing the mentally ill in the county jail is about $130 per day. And none of the inmates at the county jail can be forcibly medicated with psychotropic drugs. They are the most vulnerable in the jail population. 

  The Spirit Of America Rally was attended by hundreds of Tulsa area enthusiasts, today. Several area, state, national political leaders were on hand, along with many folks who self identify as non-political and just recently interested in civic issues. Oklahoma City had a similar, if smaller rally. It has become common that Tulsa's grassroots responds more passionately to these rallies.

  The event started shortly after 12pm and included several area legislators. Then some congressional candidates introduced themselves. 

  Two noted attendees were Gary Richardson (seriously considering a run for governor), and Matt Pinnell (transition chairman for the RNC & exploring a bid for Oklahoma Lt. Governor).

  Several veterans were taking part in the rally. The themes of national security, public safety, individual liberty, and traditional values were oft expressed.

  The Facebook page for the event has several in-depth news reports and photos.