Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was the home of the Sikh Temple shooter in Cudahy, WI.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won milwhcky, with an assist from Roger Rabbit. It was Sammamish.

This week’s is related to something in the news from August, good luck!

Last week’s contest was #200, so here’s the winner tally from the last 100 contests (the winners from the first 100 were announced here). Everyone with more than 1 win is listed. Contests can have multiple winners, so the total will be over 100:

wes.in.wa – 24
milwhcky – 16
Liberal Scientist – 11
Brian – 5
Siberian Dog – 4
Darryl – 3
Poster Child – 3
waguy – 3
Deathfrogg – 2
Blue John – 2
Geoduck – 2
Coosboy – 2
Budget Wonk – 2
Roger Rabbit – 2
2cents – 2
Luigi Giovanni – 2
uptown – 2
16 people won 1 contest

Thanks for playing!

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was the Paris location of Jason Bourne’s apartment in the Bourne Identity.

This week’s contest is a location somewhere in Washington state, good luck!

If you didn’t see what happened at the anti I-502 press conference today, here’s what you missed:

The spokesman for a new Washington state medical marijuana organization is looking for work after being fired at his own inaugural press conference.

Philip Dawdy, a longtime figure in the state’s marijuana reform community, had invited reporters to the law offices of Seattle lawyer Kurt Boehl for the kickoff of the new trade group, called Safe Access Alliance. The purpose was to discuss opposition among medical marijuana patients to Initiative 502, which would legalize marijuana for recreational use in Washington.

Two members of the another group, the No on I-502 campaign, crashed the news conference and accused Safe Access Alliance of co-opting their message — and their donations.

After some minor theatrics by the protesters, Boehl, the president of Safe Access, escorted them to the door. As Dawdy continued speaking, Boehl grew frustrated and stepped to the microphone, announcing that Dawdy didn’t speak for the organization and that Boehl would be answering any further questions.

At the end of the news conference, he canned Dawdy within earshot of the reporters.

“You’re fired!” Boehl told him. “You embarrassed us.”

I’ve been vocal about the shortcomings of I-502 before and I still have concerns about its potential negative impacts, but if this is what the opposition has devolved to, filling in that Yes oval won’t be so tough for me in Nov. I’ve lost count of how many complete bullshit arguments I’ve seen by anti-502 folks, from claiming that it overrides our medical marijuana provisions (it doesn’t), to claiming that police will arrest people at next year’s Hempfest en masse for passing joints (seriously?), to knowingly making incorrect claims about how long active THC can stay in your system.

The most common argument I run across is the claim that it’s not legalization because possession of more than one ounce will remain illegal and you can’t grow your own plants. At a certain point, this does come down to semantics, but the reality is that establishing a legal marketplace for producing and selling marijuana is legalization enough that the federal government is expected to freak out and try to pre-empt it. And that’s the main point here. Of all of I-502’s flaws, the overriding factor for me is that its passage triggers that big conflict with one of the most misguided federal policies in the history of the United States, and that’s something that drug law reformers have been fighting to get to for years. I-502 will do that, even if it does leave a few more messes to clean up.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Dunkerton, Iowa.

This week’s contest is related to a TV show or a movie. Good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by Deathfrogg. It was Norwich, England.

This week’s is another random location somewhere on earth. Good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by don. It was the old GST Steel plant in Kansas City, closed after the company was acquired by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital in the 90s.

Here’s this week’s contest, a random location somewhere on earth. Good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by Darryl. It was on Whidbey Island.

This week’s contest is related to something in the news from July, good luck!

Scott Morgan writes in the Huffington Post about the Obama Administration’s continued war on medical marijuana:

I have no idea whether Obama himself is as enthusiastic about destroying medical marijuana as the folks at DOJ who’ve been doing the actual dirty work, but the answer to that question doesn’t matter. If Obama can blame Mitt Romney for what Bain Capital did while he was CEO, we can sure as hell blame Obama for what the Justice Department does when he’s the president.

He told us we could expect better than this. And yet the problem isn’t just that he failed to keep his word, or even that his attorney general rather blatantly lied to Congress about it, as awful as that is. The greatest disgrace in all of this is the perpetuation of a reprehensible policy that crushes the will of voters and the wisdom of legislatures, that stands between sick people and the medicine their doctors recommend, that hands control of cannabis back to cartels that kill people, and that creates a continuing war in our own communities when there could so easily be peace.

Obama once said that undermining medical marijuana laws was a poor use of resources, and he was right. But it’s not only a poor use of resources, it’s also just plain wrong. As a candidate, and as a leader, it’s time for our president to make things right.

Obama can start by replacing U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag, the most egregious of the DOJ officials undermining his previous promises to respect those who comply with state medical marijuana laws.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky for his second in a row. It was the Octopus Car Wash in Albuquerque, where scenes from Breaking Bad were filmed.

This week’s is a location somewhere in Washington state, good luck!

ESPN Radio’s Mike Salk continues to unload on the Seattle Times over the incoherent nonsense they’ve been writing about the proposed arena deal.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Montpellier, France.

This week’s contest is related to a TV show or a movie, good luck!

Jacob Sullum writes in Reason about the reasons to be skeptical of the recent reports claiming that Obama will have a shift in drug policy in his second term. Jesse Walker has also written about it here and Mike Riggs here. The reality is that Obama could be doing more to move us away from waging a war on drugs, but he’s not. He hasn’t even been able to keep the promise he made on the campaign trail about respecting state medical marijuana laws.

These “leaked reports” feel like a half-assed attempt to pander to the left-leaning folks like myself who are considering supporting Gary Johnson over Obama’s horrendous record on all types of civil liberty issues. And they’re also very detached from what the reality is very likely to be in November. Both Washington and Colorado have full legalization initiatives on the ballot, and both are ahead in the polls. And Oregon may join them.

If any of these initiatives pass – and Obama wins a second term – we’ll know pretty quickly whether or not he’s going to “pivot” on the drug war. The federal government has the power to shut down any state marijuana regulations, but despite what Marc Ambinder claims about Obama’s powerlessness, his DOJ clearly has some discretion about what it considers a priority, and Obama is certainly free to appoint someone to head up the DEA who actually knows if heroin is a more dangerous drug than marijuana. Even if Obama doesn’t take a position in favor of legalizing marijuana at the federal level, he can take the position that he’ll tolerate a state’s voters making it the law. If he’s not taking that position, there’s no pivot.

Last week’s contest was won by Blue John (with Liberal Scientist getting the actual link). It was (I think) the Wawa in Quakertown, PA where Mitt Romney showed up unannounced to avoid protesters at a different Quakertown Wawa.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

Within a very good post on the consequences of today’s SCOTUS ruling, Adam Serwer writes:

In the court battle over Obamacare, the government had argued that the individual mandate—the part of the health care law that requires Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a fine—was constitutional because the Commerce Clause gives Congress the authority to regulate interstate commerce. The government’s lawyers said that without the mandate, the health care law wouldn’t work, and because not having health insurance substantially affects the health insurance market (i.e., it affects interstate commerce), it was okay to fine people for not buying insurance. Conservatives argued that the mandate was not really regulating commerce, but forcing people to engage in it. They claimed the Commerce Clause allowed Congress to regulate “activity” but not “inactivity”—a distinction found nowhere in the Constitution itself.

The “activity/inactivity” distinction went from being a laughable attempt to try to distinguish this case from the previous Raich ruling to a serious argument adopted by 5 of the 9 Supreme Court justices. But despite the fact that this ruling has weakened the Federal government’s powers under the Commerce Clause, this distinction between Raich case and the ACA is still imaginary.

In the Raich decision, a person growing a marijuana plant was automatically participating in interstate commerce, regardless of his/her “activity”. If a person grew a plant, harvested it, and consumed it entirely himself/herself, it was still considered part of interstate commerce. Their activity or inactivity with respect to any actual marketplace was never the issue, but the commodity itself. With health care, the same situation existed, except that it didn’t just cover a subset of the population. Every single person in America is potentially part of that market on any day – even if they desired not to be – and therefore most people looked at the decision in Raich and concluded that it was well with the Commerce Clause to require folks to either insure themselves or pay a penalty.

There are certainly a number of conservatives who’ve been consistent in their views on the Commerce Clause, and to some extent I’ve been swayed by their arguments. But the intellectual inconsistency of Scalia and Kennedy (and of course Rob McKenna) for supporting Raich, but fighting to have the ACA overturned is appalling.

Later in the post, Serwer also notes that the majority ruling that the mandate is a constitutional tax on individuals potentially leads to the infamous “broccoli scenario” being carried out through a tax. What’s stopping the Federal Government from imposing a tax penalty over any number of consumer choices? Serwer argues that this is a reason for liberals to breathe easier about progressives’ ability to craft good regulations in the marketplace, but I’m somewhat skeptical.

The aspect of this that concerns me the most is the shift from allowing for the regulation of systems and institutions to the regulation of individual behavior. Regulating individual actions is generally an ineffective way to regulate any system. Climate change is a great example. Trying to solve our climate crisis merely by using taxes to influence individual consumer choices isn’t going to have anywhere near the impact of being able to impose strong regulations on the industries that contribute to high CO2 levels in the atmosphere. We’re not anywhere near the point where this is a real legislation-inhibiting concern, but the current court seems inclined to push us in that direction.

I don’t want to be too negative about all this. I was relieved that the ACA was allowed to stand this morning. It certainly wasn’t perfect legislation, but it was a small first step towards moving us towards more cost effective health care in this country. And hell, this decision today – especially with its modified view of the Commerce Clause – might be reversed again the next time to court sees it. Especially if it involves allowing the feds to go after some potheads.