ss_blog_claim=1064e5373eb6c21ae67dafba4c8cf9a1

The things in my head go 'round and 'round

This is my life. You can't have it.

Archive for October 23rd, 2008


Sarah Palin rolls one for the road

Published October 23rd, 2008 in marijuana, my opinion, Politics | No Comments »

Palin’s Pot Problem
Why should other Alaskans be arrested for something Sarah Palin once did with impunity?

Jacob Sullum | September 17, 2008

When it comes to questions about youthful marijuana use, Sarah Palin is no Slick Willie. “I can’t claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled,” the Republican vice presidential candidate told the Anchorage Daily News in 2006, before she was elected governor of Alaska.

Although Palin’s handling of the issue scores higher on the candor meter than Clinton’s, she has the same difficulty reconciling her personal experience with her policy positions, a problem also shared by former pot smoker Barack Obama. None of them has a persuasive answer to the question of why other Americans should be arrested for something they did with impunity.

Pot smokers who are arrested do not typically spend much time in jail. But as a 2007 report from the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics noted, they pay a substantial cost that includes not only public humiliation and legal expenses but collateral sanctions such as “revocation or suspension of professional licenses, barriers to employment or promotion, loss of educational aid, driver’s license suspension, and bars on adoption, voting and jury service.”

According to figures released by the FBI this week, about 873,000 people were arrested on marijuana charges in the United States last year, a new record. Pot busts accounted for nearly half of the 1.8 million drug arrests; as usual, the vast majority, about 775,000, were for simple possession, as opposed to cultivation or sale.

This is the fifth year in a row that marijuana arrests have increased, but the upward trend began in the early 1990s. Three times as many people were arrested on marijuana charges last year as in 1991.

The increase in arrests does not correspond to an increase in use; instead, the chance that any given pot smoker will be busted (though still small) is much higher than it was two decades ago. It is also higher than when Palin attended college in the ’80s, which is presumably when she tried marijuana.

By way of extenuation, the Anchorage Daily News reported, Palin noted that marijuana “was legal under state law,” although “illegal under U.S. law.” In 1975 the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution, which says the “right of the people to privacy is recognized and shall not be infringed,” prohibits the government from punishing people for possessing small amounts of marijuana in their homes.

A 1990 ballot initiative ostensibly recriminalized all marijuana possession, but in 2003 the Alaska Court of Appeals ruled that “a statute which purports to attach criminal penalties to constitutionally protected conduct is void.” The following year, the Alaska Supreme Court declined to hear the state’s appeal of that decision.

In 2006 the state legislature, at the urging of Palin’s predecessor, Frank Murkowski, passed another law that supposedly made private possession of marijuana for personal use a crime. A judge found that law unconstitutional as well, and the Alaska Supreme Court is considering an appeal of her ruling.

The upshot is that smoking marijuana in the privacy of one’s home is just as legal in Alaska today as it was when Palin did it. Evidently she regrets this situation.

As mayor of Wasilla in 2000, Palin championed a city council resolution opposing a ballot initiative that would have legalized marijuana for adults. Last March her administration asked the Alaska Supreme Court to reverse its 1975 decision shielding private marijuana use, arguing that the drug is more dangerous than it used to be.

In other words, Palin got to smoke pot without worrying about legal consequences and now wants to deny that assurance to fellow Alaskans doing exactly the same thing. “Palin doesn’t support legalizing marijuana,” the Anchorage Daily News reported in 2006, because she worries about “the message it would send to her four kids.”

It’s Palin’s job to teach her children that certain pleasures are reserved for grownups. The government should not continue to arrest adults who are harming no one simply because her children are easily confused.

© Copyright 2008 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

From The Washington Post

Published October 23rd, 2008 in Blogging, my opinion, Politics | No Comments »

And I know that not everyone likes the Washington Post, but this is interesting to read:

Party Like It’s 1964
by Richard Cohen
Tuesday, October 21, 2008;

A column, like a good movie, should have an arc — start here, end there and somehow connect the two points. So this column will begin with the speech Condi Rice made to the Republican National Convention in 2000 in praise of George W. Bush and end with Colin Powell’s appearance Sunday on “Meet the Press” in praise of Barack Obama. Between the first and the second lie the ruins of the GOP, a party gone very, very wrong.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Bush and now John McCain have constructed a mean, grumpy, exclusive, narrow-minded and altogether retrograde Republican Party. It has the sharp scent of the old Barry Goldwater GOP — the angry one of 1964 and not the one perfumed by nostalgia — that is home, by design or mere dumb luck, to those who think that Obama is “The Madrassian Candidate.” Karl Rove, take a bow.

It is worth remembering that both Rice and Powell spoke at that Philadelphia convention. And it is worth recalling, too, that Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative” and had compiled a record as Texas governor to warrant the hope, if not the belief, that he was indeed a different sort of Republican. When he ran for reelection as governor in 1998, he went from 15 percent of the black vote to 27 percent, and from 28 percent of the Hispanic vote to an astounding 49 percent. Here was a coalition-builder of considerable achievement.

Now, all this is rubble. It is not merely that Barack Obama was always going to garner the vast majority of the black vote. It is also that the GOP, under Rove and his disciples in the McCain campaign, has not only driven out ethnic and racial minorities but a vast bloc of voters who, quite bluntly, want nothing to do with Sarah Palin. For moderates everywhere, she remains the single best reason to vote against McCain.
ad_icon

But the GOP’s tropism toward its furiously angry base, its tolerance and currying of anti-immigrant sentiment, its flattering of the ignorant on matters of undisputed scientific consensus — evolution, for instance — and, from the mouth of Palin, its celebration of drab provincialism, have sharpened the division between red and blue. Red is the color of yesterday.

Ah, I know, the blues are not all virtuous. They are supine before self-serving unions, particularly in education, and they are knee-jerk opponents of offshore drilling, mostly, it seems, because they don’t like Big Oil. They cannot face the challenge of the Third World within us — the ghetto with its appalling social and cultural ills — lest realism be called racism. Sometimes, too, they seem to criticize American foreign policy simply because it is American.

Still, a Democrat can remain a Democrat — or at least vote as one — without compromising basic intellectual or cultural values. That, though, is not what Colin Powell was saying Sunday about his own party. “I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years,” Powell said. “It has moved more to the right than I would like.” He cited McCain’s harping on that “washed-out terrorist” Bill Ayers as an effort to exploit fears that Obama is a Muslim (so what if he were? Powell rightly asked) and mentioned how Palin’s presence on the ticket raised grave questions about McCain’s judgment. In effect — and at least for the time being — Powell was out of the GOP. S’long, guys.

Those of us who traveled with Bush in the 2000 campaign could tell that when he spoke of education, of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” he meant it. Education, along with racial and ethnic reconciliation, was going to be his legacy. Then came Sept. 11, Afghanistan and finally the misbegotten war in Iraq. After that, nothing else really mattered. But just as Bush could not manage the wars, he could not manage his own party. His legacy is not merely in tatters. It does not even exist.

In the end, Powell was determined not to be one of the GOP’s useful idiots. Those moderates willing to overlook the choice of Palin, those capable of staying in a party where, soon enough, she could be an important or dominant force, retain the intellectual nimbleness that enabled them to persist in championing a war fought for duplicitous reasons and extol cultural values they do not for a minute share. Powell walked away from that, and others will follow — the second time that a senator from Arizona has led the GOP into the political wilderness.

You have to admit that THAT is pretty damning for the Republican Party.

Namaste.

Vote on November 4th.

New Medical Marijuana Ads in Michigan

Published October 23rd, 2008 in marijuana, Michigan, my opinion, Politics | No Comments »

It is getting closer and closer to election day. Two ads for Proposal 1, to legalize the cultivation and use of marijuana for medical purposes, feature a West Michigan woman describing how marijuana gave her relief during cancer treatment, and a retired obstetrician who said marijuana was the only thing that helped his cancer-stricken and now deceased wife of 51 years.

Both, now airing statewide, are the first of the marijuana campaign by either side. They can be seen here: http://stoparrestingpatients.org/

Vote on Tuesday, November 4th!

namaste.