Archives for February 2009

Who knew?

Also on Monday, the House passed a bill that would increase the amount of damages that landowners can collect for stolen Christmas trees.

Under present law, the state and private landowners can’t collect more than $3 per tree in a civil lawsuit if someone cuts, breaks or removes a Christmas tree from public or private land.

But when it comes to other kinds of timber or trees, landowners presently can collect three times the actual value of trees that are cut, damaged or removed. Someone also can be convicted of theft if he or she intentionally trespasses on public land and removes trees.

You mean current law provides an exemption for tree theft, as long as it was stolen to be used as a Christmas tree?  WTF?

Over at Publicola, Josh says “it’s looking likelier that Seattle City Council Member Tim Burgess is going to run against Mayor Greg Nickels,” an assertion supported, I suppose, by Burgess’ official exploratory committee filing.

Huh.  Hard to believe, considering that in my personal experience, when a politician or his office says he is not a candidate (or is not being appointed to some plum position in the Obama administration), his word is as good as gold… and just a couple weeks ago on our podcast, Burgess insisted he most definitely was not running for mayor:

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/timburgess.mp3]

Of course, that was February 10, whereas Burgess didn’t file for his exploratory committee until February 20th. I guess a lot can change in ten days.

Apparently the Murcan People Who Play By The Rules, which is most of us, are Furious At Those Who Live Beyond Their Means.

Those people being, of course, the working poor and middle class who got ripped off with variable interest mortgages, outright fraud and assorted criminality. They are The Undeserving Who Must Be Blamed As a Class, because Grandma Millie should have realized her mortgage agent might forge her signature and stick her with an ARM, and she really should have realized that the whole tranche thing was a house of cards supported by the ratings agencies, and unless she’s a complete moron she should have known that Uncle Allen was creating cheap money to make up for the tech bubble bust, thus creating a classic bubble in housing.

I don’t know about you, but I freakin’ hate Grandma Millie, she’s scum and I don’t want to help her because you know I am one heartless bastard. Plus she didn’t learn a damn thing eight years ago when we shut off her electricity, the poor old dear.

Tranches, even though rarely discussed, are very very cool though. The Tranche Class will now be put in charge of saving all of us, live on CNBC.

It’s not class warfare if the sewage flows downhill.

Yesterday, Mark Kleiman, a California-based professor who occasionally discusses drug policy, wrote about the shifting tides on marijuana:

Obviously, this isn’t something the Obama Administration is going to jump on, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a big move late in a second Obama term or sometime in the term of his successor (assuming the Democrats keep winning elections). If I had to quote odds, I’d say about even money on legalization within fifteen years. As with the repeal of alcohol prohibition and the creeping legalization of gambling, I’d expect it to be presented at least in part as a revenue-raising measure.

And today, a member of the California State Assembly, Tom Ammiano, introduced a bill to do just that. His bill would regulate sales of marijuana the same as alcohol, with a 21 year old age limit and fairly substantial ($50 per ounce) taxes on both growers and sellers.

While I’m not optimistic that this particular bill will pass, I think that legalization is bound to happen on the west coast well within fifteen years. As Kleiman predicted, though, it’s being presented in part as a revenue-raising measure:

It also has the backing of Betty Yee, who chairs the state Board of Equalization, which collects taxes in California. An analysis by the agency concluded the state would collect $1.3 billion a year in tax revenue and a $50-an-ounce levy on retail sales if marijuana were legal.

But the next part in that article is the subject of more heated debate:

The analysis also concluded that legalizing marijuana would drop its street value by 50 percent and increase consumption of the substance by 40 percent.

Kleiman tends to agree with the latter part of that assessment:

Substantively, I’m not a big fan of legalization on the alcohol model; a legal pot industry, like the legal booze and gambling industries, would depend for the bulk of its sales on excessive use, which would provide a strong incentive for the marketing effort to aim at creating and maintaining addiction. (Cannabis abuse is somewhat less common, and tends to be somewhat less long-lasting, than alcohol abuse, and the physiological and behavioral effects tend to be less dramatic, but about 11% of those who smoke a fifth lifetime joint go on to a period of heavy daily use measured in months.) So I’d expect outright legalization to lead to a substantial increase in the prevalence of cannabis-related drug abuse disorder: I’d regard an increase of only 50% as a pleasant surprise, and if I had to guess I’d guess at something like a doubling.

Bruce Mirken from the Marijuana Policy Project disagrees:

A spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, which advocates for reform in marijuana laws and is backing Ammiano’s proposal, said any expected increase in consumption is a “false notion.”

“They are making an intuitive assumption that a lot of people make that really does not have that much evidence behind it,” said Bruce Mirken, the group’s spokesman

Mirken is absolutely correct here. Anyone who confidently says that marijuana abuse (or even marijuana use) will go up substantially in an environment where sales are legal is far more certain than they should be.

The first problematic assumption that leads to that unwarranted certainty is a belief there are large numbers of people in California who would start using marijuana if only it were sold legally. I’ve certainly met people (generally older people) who’ve used marijuana in the past, but have found it difficult to obtain due to its illegality, and who would probably buy it if it were legal. So in that respect, I could see an increase in use. However, this is a subset of the population who has already proven to be extremely unlikely to develop problems with marijuana abuse.

Young people, on the other hand, don’t have problems finding marijuana. The idea that marijuana prohibition is actually working as a firewall to keep young people from obtaining it is utterly ridiculous. Establishing a legal market with an age restriction of 21 will actually make it harder for young people to obtain it than it is now (although it likely still won’t be that hard). Because abuse problems are most profound in people who begin using it early, there’s a logical basis to expect abuse problems to decline in a post-Prohibition environment. One could also look towards Holland, where sales of marijuana to adults have been allowed for over 30 years, yet the use of marijuana among teens there is far lower than it is here.

Again, there are a lot of factors at play here, but my own guess is that in whatever state legalizes marijuana first, use will go up by less than 10%, and the prevalence of abuse will stay about the same or go down. Marijuana abuse, as a societal problem, will still remain miniscule when compared to harder drugs like meth, or even alcohol.

The biggest question for me is how the legal market will develop, and how we’ll deal with things like advertising and taxation. The tax being proposed in the California bill is pretty big. An ounce generally doesn’t cost more than $300 on the black market, so a $50 tax on that is not chump change, especially if legalization cuts the black market prices in half. Would that drive people back to the black market? Or would the growers (who have a history of begging to be taxed) be happy to yield a big chunk of their potential profit in exchange for legal status? I have no idea.

Kleiman, on the other hand, wants to take a different approach:

So I continue to favor a “grow your own” policy, under which it would be legal to grow, possess, and use cannabis and to give it away, but illegal to sell it. Of course there would be sales, and law enforcement agencies would properly mostly ignore those sales. But there wouldn’t be billboards.

There are a couple of very big problems with this proposal. Scott Morgan discusses some of the problems here. Another major reason why this approach won’t work is because it’s not trivial to grow high quality marijuana. It’s much more than just throwing some seeds in dirt and putting it under a light. It’s arguably far harder and more time consuming than homebrewing beer. And if you’re just growing for yourself, you’d end up spending a lot of money just to produce a single plant. People would naturally gravitate towards larger scale growers and distributors who know how to produce a higher quality product. It’s an unrealistic proposal, and it’s not at all clear why Kleiman thinks we can’t allow sales but just ban certain types of advertising.

At the end of Kleiman’s post, though, there’s something that he and I agree on:

I just hope the sellers are required to measure the cannabinoid profiles of their products and put those measurements on the label.

Ending prohibition doesn’t have to be synonymous with unfettered free markets. It should be about smart regulations for an activity that millions of Americans are going to partake in whether it’s legal or not. I hope that as we move closer to the post-Prohibition world, we begin to think about (and study) the real effects of setting up newly legal markets in various ways.

Some scientist says social networking causes lack

‘My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.’

Oh I dont thin k thats realy very true—omg an ambulance just went bye…..

Di you see Hell’s Kitchen last week?Mises cuz basketball game.

Then they got up and were like “oh, no, that is so totally

Oscars!

Bloggers, on the other hand, are relentlessly focused. s Miss you! Happy b-day cutey 3.14!

The world needs more social networking. And cheese. Definitely more cheeses.

Aardvark.

That’s what the AP is reporting:

A senior administration official says that President Barack Obama’s likely third pick for Commerce secretary is former Washington Gov. Gary Locke.

Huh.  Locke isn’t exactly a lot of folks’ favorite governor, though apart from his conventional approach to trade issues it’s hard to argue that he’s a bad choice for Commerce.

Washington is one of our nation’s most export dependent states, consistently ranking fourth overall in total exports behind California, Texas and New York, and first in exports per capita.  And as our nation’s first Chinese-American governor Locke is uniquely positioned to bridge the cultural gap with one our most important trading partners.

I’d say this is a safe appointment for Obama, one that will generate little excitement and little controversy.  Locke is honest, workmanlike, and socially progressive (by national standards) if politically cautious, and while I’d prefer a Commerce Secretary who might at least challenge the current orthodoxy on trade, given his tenure in the governor’s mansion I wouldn’t expect much leadership from him on these issues one way or the other.

Unless he’s got some tax or nanny issue I’m unaware of, this should be an easy confirmation.

UPDATE:
A reliable source has confirmed that Locke received the call from President Obama at 1:30PM Pacific this afternoon.

In their latest monthly newsletter, the BIAW touts their recent “political successes,” including, apparently, the alleged 2004 election of Dino Rossi.

What a bunch of poor losers.

See, this is the type of Seattle Times editorial that really pisses me off, not so much because I disagree with the opinion expressed (and I sure as hell do), but because I find its rhetoric shallow, insulting and intentionally misleading… the type of piece we’re told we should expect from a lowly blogger, not the editorial board of a major daily newspaper.

The issue is taxes, which the Times once again opposes, but the premise is absolute bullshit, simplistically framing the budget debate as an either/or between budget cuts or tax increases:

So according to Glenn Greenwald the lovely Fox Noise channel is going to “war game” a possible civil war this week. Nice.

They discuss a coming “civil war” led by American “Bubba” militias — Beck says he “believes we’re on this road” — and they contemplate whether the U.S. military would follow the President’s orders to subdue civil unrest or would instead join with “the people” in defense of their Constitutional rights against the Government (they agree that the U.S. military would be with “the people”):

I really don’t have much comment other than to offer an image. It’s one painted onto the wall of the state capital in Topeka, Kansas. This is my cultural heritage, if the “Bubbas” want to start in with waving the bloody shirt after 144 years.

Fun times.

At least 618,000 Americans died in the Civil War, and some experts say the toll reached 700,000. The number that is most often quoted is 620,000. At any rate, these casualties exceed the nation’s loss in all its other wars, from the Revolution through Vietnam.
The Union armies had from 2,500,000 to 2,750,000 men. Their losses, by the best estimates:
Battle deaths: 110,070
Disease, etc.: 250,152
Total 360,222

The Confederate strength, known less accurately because of missing records, was from 750,000 to 1,250,000. Its estimated losses:
Battle deaths: 94,000
Disease, etc.: 164,000
Total 258,000

Oh, and BTW, the Union won. Funny how the “Bubbas” always seem to forget that part. The South was destroyed by military force, occupied, and then ultimately (after another 100 years) forced to submit to the rules of civilization.

They can bitch and moan about it all they want on AM radio, but they still lost. You don’t see me putting pictures of John Brown on my pickup truck and calling for neo-Reconstruction, now, do you? Although I will still argue that Florida should have lost some Congress-critters after the 2000 election debacle….

A few items of interest:

– Glenn Greenwald has a couple of tremendous posts this week, taking on the Obama Administration’s reluctance to give up numerous aspects of the Bush Administration’s attempts to expand the power of the executive, and on the flip side, looking at the right wing loonies who are now beginning to talk about Civil War against Obama, only weeks after finishing their 8-year stint crying about how it’s unpatriotic to question the President.

– CNBC recently aired a good hour-long special on the economic aspects of northern California’s marijuana industry. It can now be seen in its entirety on Hulu. A Zogby poll this week showed that 58% of west coast residents believe that marijuana should be regulated and taxed like alcohol and cigarettes.

– I also recently watched a documentary on the case from Tulia, Texas, where a corrupt cop named Tom Coleman working for a drug task force managed to get over 10% of the town’s black population in jail before lawyers were able to prove that he was lying. I don’t think it’s being shown again on PBS, but hopefully it’ll be online soon.

– The story about the corrupt judges in Northeastern Pennsylvania who were getting kickbacks to funnel kids into private detention facilities is just amazing. This is stuff that would be shocking in the third-world, let alone America. And there are now allegations that one of the judges has been closely linked with mob figures for whom he used his position on the bench to extort money from journalists who’d been investigating them.

– Neal Peirce has a good editorial in the Denver Post today on Obama and the drug war.

And one Democrat, Jim Hargrove of Hoquiam. Here are some highlights and lowlights from Wednesday’s hearing on the marijuana decriminalization bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Well, at least one of them….

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqkMfToY9Pk[/youtube]