Let's Keep Paving a Superhighway to Hell so that we can Feel Good about Ourselves

Here are two stories. Which one do YOU think comes closer to the truth?

from the AP...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Sean Penn remembers smelling dead bodies when he arrived in Haiti after the earthquake.

But the Academy Award-winning actor says there's now music in those same streets even as the country faces many years of rebuilding.

Penn says "extraordinary" changes have happened since the January 2010 natural disaster killed more than 300,000 people and left about 1.5 million homeless.

He spoke Tuesday at a forum at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

The actor is an ambassador-at-large for Haiti's president and CEO of an aid group.

It started with a goal of bringing painkillers to victims and became an agency that manages a camp for displaced people and works to resettle them.

Former Haitian Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis and Army official Ken Keen joined Penn as panelists.

from NPR:

After a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, governments and foundations from around the world pledged more than $9 billion to help get the country back on its feet.

Only a fraction of the money ever made it. And Haiti's President Michel Martelly says the funds aren't "showing results."

Roughly 350,000 people still live in camps. Many others simply moved back to the same shoddily built structures that proved so deadly during the disaster.

Martelly says the relief effort is uncoordinated and projects hatched from good intentions have undermined his government. "We don't just want the money to come to Haiti. Stop sending money," he tells Shots. "Let's fix it," he says, referring the international relief system. "Let's fix it."

Disaster specialist Dr. Tom Kirsch from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine agrees with Martelly. "Clearly we saved lives," he says. "Clearly we put people in tents. Clearly we did all kinds of stuff. But at the same time the level of chaos and the overall ability to reach needy people, we don't know how well we did."

Kirsch, who's been in Haiti several times since the quake, added, "We could have written a check to everyone in Haiti for — I don't know — $10,000 a piece, which would support them forever rather than the way we spent it."

Annapolis Will Strip Marylander's of their RIGHT to Bear Arms

...it will now require a state license to own a gun, and so become a government-granted "privilege", as opposed to an inalienable Constitutional "right"
from the Maryland Daily Record

Rejecting a proposal to remove a licensing requirement, the Maryland Senate has given preliminary approval to Gov. Martin O’Malley’s gun legislation by a vote of 28-19.

What part of the following isn't CLEAR in Annapolis?

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

in·fringe
1. To transgress or exceed the limits of; violate: infringe a contract; infringe a patent.
2. Obsolete To defeat; invalidate.
v.intr.
To encroach on someone or something; engage in trespassing: an increased workload that infringed on his personal life.

More Evidence of the Idiocy Bearing Currency in Annapolis

from the Baltimore Sun

Maryland senators alternatively questioned, challenged and heralded Gov. Martin O’Malley’s gun-control bill for more than two hours Tuesday, a prelude to a debate expected to stretch through the week as lawmakers wrestle over whether to enact some of the country’s strictest gun laws.

Senators argued at length over whether to require a license to buy a handgun — a provision gun-control experts consider essential to stemming gun violence in Maryland but that opponents find unfair.

While proponents say requiring fingerprints and training for a license makes it less likely someone would buy a gun only to pass it off to a criminal, Sen. E.J. Pipkin called licensing “a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist in Maryland.”

Pipkin, an Eastern Shore Republican, discounted research by a Johns Hopkins policy expert on whom Democratic leaders on gun control have relied. Pipkin said the $1 billion New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a gun-control advocate, has donated to the university should lead the public to question whether the research is neutral.

Sen. Thomas M. Middleton, a Charles County Democrat, asked whether it was worth imposing the inconvenience of requiring fingerprints to buy a handgun. “I don’t know if the juice is worth the squeeze,” he said.

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., a critic of fingerprinting, acknowledged later that Maryland already requires fingerprints for a host of other purposes — to get a child care license or, in his district of Calvert County, to tell someone’s fortunes.

Miller added that he expects the effort to remove fingerprinting from the law to be unsuccessful, and predicted that “people are going to consider it an obstruction.”

The two-hour discussion was the first floor debate of O’Malley’s gun control bill, which also calls for limiting magazines to 10 bullets and banning the sale of military-style assault rifles.

A Senate committee has already suggested 20 amendments to the bill, which drew more than 1,000 people to a hearing earlier this month. Senate leaders hope to take their final vote on the proposal by Friday, sending it to the House of Delegates. The House has its gun control hearing Friday.

The licensing provision has strong support among Maryland voters, according a Washington Post poll released Tuesday that found 85 percent of people back licensing.

Although Senate leaders were initially optimistic they could pass a gun bill and then turn attention to voting on death penalty repeal as early as Wednesday, they are now lining up votes to avoid a filibuster on the gun bill. Death penalty talks are expected to get pushed to Friday at the earliest.

Senators also discussed whether efforts to keep guns away from some people with mental illnesses go far enough to protect the public — or go too far, potentially discouraging people from seeking help.

“The question is, who among us should not have access to firearms because of a mental illness?” said Sen. Brian E. Frosh, a Democrat who is chair of the Judicial Proceedings Committee.

“We also don’t want barriers to people seeking treatment,” said Sen. David R. Brinkley, a Republican who said the prohibitions were too broad.

Debate is expected to resume early Wednesday and span at least two days.