Hendrik Hertzberg writes about the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from Ground Zero:

Like many New Yorkers, the people in charge of Park51, a married couple, are from somewhere else—he from Kuwait, she from Kashmir. Feisal Abdul Rauf is a Columbia grad. He has been the imam of a mosque in Tribeca for close to thirty years. He is the author of a book called “What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America.” He is a vice-chair of the Interfaith Center of New York. “My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists,” he wrote recently—in the Daily News, no less. He denounces terrorism in general and the 9/11 attacks in particular, often and at length. The F.B.I. tapped him to conduct “sensitivity training” for agents and cops. His wife, Daisy Khan, runs the American Society for Muslim Advancement, which she co-founded with him. It promotes “cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women’s empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange.”

As someone who often trolls the right-wing blogs, this proposed center (which sounds a lot like the Jewish Community Center where I used to go to day camp when I was 6) is seen by many as some kind of threat. Coincidentally, these are the same people who talk about how Obama is going to take away their “freedom” and how much they care about the Constitution. Every day that goes by and every issue that comes up just lifts the veil on that charade. America’s right wing is motivated primarily by one thing – an irrational fear of our multicultural society. Everything else is just talk.

I will donate money to Rand Paul’s campaign if he promises to kidnap GOP Senators and force them to take bong hits.

UPDATE: The General suggests a campaign sign:

UPDATE 2: In more important news today, Google and Verizon have proposed a framework that attempts to eliminate the principle of net neutrality for wireless broadband networks. The key issue is over whether the internet will function the same on your portable device as it does on your home network. This agreement would open the door to having the the internet on your cell phone function more like cable TV – with content limited to those who can pay to have their content carried, rather than like the rest of the internet where everyone’s webpage is treated equally. Joan McCarter and Andrew Villeneuve write more.

Jane Hamsher from Firedoglake.com and the national organization Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) have launched a new project called Just Say Now, focused on supporting marijuana law reform around the country, particularly in California where voters will be voting on making it the first state to allow legal sales for non-medical use.

The effort includes an impressive Advisory Board, including former Reagan Administration attorney Bruce Fein, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, former Baltimore anti-narcotics officer Neill Franklin, and University of Vermont College of Medicine professor Dr. Joe McSherry. The organization is quickly becoming a presence within the national media, something that previous campaigns of this nature have never had the connections or resources to accomplish.

I’m often challenged in the comment threads of my posts about why I put so much emphasis on this issue. People often dismiss it as a fringe cause that doesn’t matter. And even worse, they assume that my advocacy for the issue is rooted merely in a desire to buy pot. The latter accusation is the most ridiculous and insulting considering that not only have I had no desire to buy pot since I became a father last year, but even if I did, the current prohibition doesn’t prevent me from buying it. It only forces me to buy it from a person who’s willing to break the law to do so. And there’s no shortage of those people here – or in any other American city. People in this country who want to buy pot can already buy pot.

The reason that former government attorneys and police chiefs are going on TV right now in an effort to end marijuana prohibition is because the issue has become important, even if many of us don’t recognize its importance.

Friday night, I was watching the NBC Nightly News and they reported on the violence in Mexico, where drug cartels are now using car bombs as a way to protect their profits. But in that entire report, it was never explained to the viewer why there’s so much violence. The connection between the billions of dollars in marijuana profits and the cartel’s military and operational superiority was never made. There was no mention of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s call to have a debate about drug legalization. The most dire impact of our marijuana laws – the deaths of tens of thousands of people south of the border – is effectively hidden from the average viewer by the inability of our traditional news outlets to provide context for the stories they report on.

America’s brief experiment with alcohol prohibition came to a crashing halt after only a decade. By the end of the 1920s, with organized crime making astronomical profits and wielding enormous power over major cities, few would have argued that the issue of alcohol prohibition had no impact. But with marijuana prohibition, much of the impact has been outside of the U.S., making it easier to pretend that the dynamics aren’t the same and the impact isn’t as severe.

The violence and chaos in Mexico alone is a sufficient reason to regard marijuana prohibition as an important issue that needs to be discussed and dealt with, but that’s only part of the overall impact that this insane policy has had. The economic impact is also wide-ranging and difficult to quantify. The enforcement of marijuana laws runs into the billions of dollars per year – and does absolutely nothing to impact the willingness or the ability of Americans to buy marijuana.

And beyond the massive cost of enforcement, arrests, and incarceration for marijuana offenses, the effect on the economy of having a legal and regulated market for the drug – similar to alcohol, would be substantial. Not only could you tax it, but taking the control of the industry away from the cartels and handing it over to organizations who can compete and win in a well-regulated environment is a tremendous way to create new jobs all over the country. Think about alcohol, and the amount of people that are employed, from truck drivers to bartenders to brewery workers. Granted, more people use alcohol than marijuana, but it’s still a drug enjoyed by over 20 million Americans.

The reality is that no one knows the exact amount that marijuana prohibition costs us. Beyond the obvious things that I’ve already mentioned, it’s difficult to measure how much it affects us when police officers across the country bust into homes with guns blazing in the name of stopping the “evil weed”. It’s difficult to measure the impact it has when thousands upon thousands of promising young college students are arrested and forced to carry a criminal record that makes it impossible for them to get further along in their studies – or to step into certain jobs. It’s difficult to measure how much safer we’d all be if police officers dedicated to marijuana law enforcement were focused on far more threatening things like identity theft or child pornography. It’s difficult to measure the damage being done to the environment by having marijuana supplies grown clandestinely in national forests. And it’s difficult to measure how much the prohibition-fueled crisis in Mexico impacts the willingness of those living there to buck our immigration laws and cross the border seeking out work.

One of the most ingrained myths of our nearly 75 year war on marijuana (it was made illegal at the federal level in 1937) is that keeping it illegal for adults is the most effective way to keep it away from children. Anyone arguing in favor of removing the criminal penalties for marijuana will inevitably be accused to putting our young people at risk. And for years, that emotional argument often trumped any attempt at reason. Having been a child in the “Just Say No” era, however, it’s hard to put into words how incredibly flawed that belief is. Not only did marijuana prohibition make it easier for young people to get their hands on marijuana, but the overwrought hysteria over the dangers of marijuana actually reduced the credibility of those warning us about far more dangerous drugs.

Today, I find myself with a child of my own, and with as strong a desire as any parent to keep my child from being exposed to potentially addictive substances (whether its alcohol or pot) before he’s old enough to understand the responsibility of being an adult. But unlike my parents’ generation, I have no illusions about what’s the most effective method for doing so. The “Just Say No” era believed that government-mandated abstinence by adults was the most effective way. Instead, that merely handed over the distribution to people who had minimal interest in the welfare of young people. It had the opposite of its intended effect, moving sales of marijuana away from a regulated environment where a young person could be prevented from buying it to locations where they couldn’t – and where young people themselves often became part of the distribution chain. If there’s one purely selfish reason I have for my advocacy on this issue, it’s precisely that. I don’t want the schoolyard to still be the local drug store when my son goes to school.

Finally, we often toss around the words “freedom” and “liberty” as we discuss politics and demand things be done accordingly. People clearly have their own notions of what those two words mean, but I find it very difficult to define them in any way that doesn’t boil down to a belief that government should not exist to protect us – as adults – from our own moral choices. Marijuana prohibition has long been premised on the idea that it’s necessary for our own well-being, the well-being of our children, and the well-being of our nation as a whole, to do exactly that. And after all of these years, it should be painfully obvious that this premise is tragically flawed. No one’s well-being is served by this policy. It has left in its wake an enormous path of misery, failure, and destruction, and the only sane response at this point is to speak up and demand that it ends.

Just Say Now.

UPDATE: Philip Smith writes about the monumental waste of resources that has become a yearly ritual in California.

Last week’s contest had two winners and one big loser. That one big loser was me, because after Liberal Scientist correctly guessed that the view was related to the German Love Parade tragedy and identified the matching link, commenter Don pointed out that the tunnel where the tragedy happened was a different tunnel less than a kilometer away.

Here’s this week’s, which I’m far more certain is the correct location for its corresponding news story. Good luck!

Arthur Silber has a great post up dealing with Wikileaks and how it confounds those who seek a level of control that can never be obtained:

Wikileaks has taken the only weapon it has — its ability to make information freely available to anyone and everyone — and aimed it directly at the heart of those who seek control and demand obedience. It has scored an immensely powerful hit. No wonder States and those who advance their policies are so panic-stricken. They’re powerless, and they know it.

I’ve often defined a neocon as someone who overestimates the power he has to use fear and intimidation to influence the behaviors and actions of others. And the hallmark of our neocon-inspired foreign policy is that we convince ourselves that we can succeed if only we control the flow of information and the messages that people hear. But unless you’re someplace like North Korea – where free technology is completely absent – that level of control is unattainable.

That doesn’t mean that we’re not trying in Afghanistan. This editorial from an American intelligence analyst who’d served in Afghanistan demonstrates how truly lost we are:

The Taliban’s media machine runs circles around our public information operations in Afghanistan. Using newspapers, radio broadcasts, the Internet and word of mouth, it puts out messages far faster than we can, exaggerating the effectiveness of its attacks, creating the illusion of a unified insurgency and criticizing the (real and imagined) failings of the Kabul government. To undermine support for United States troops, the Taliban insistently remind the people that America has committed to a withdrawal beginning next summer, they jump on any announcement of our Western allies pulling out troops and they publicize polls that show declining domestic American support for the war.

To counter the spin, we need to add the Taliban’s top propagandists to the high-value-target list and direct military operations at the insurgents’ media nerve centers. A major reason that people in rural areas are so reluctant to help us is that Taliban propaganda and intimidation have created an atmosphere of fear.

With a straight face, the individuals directing our mission in Afghanistan say that in order to combat a climate where dishonest propagandists create an atmosphere of fear among the public, that we must militarily attack those people. And somehow this will lead to the people of Afghanistan being less afraid of us. What?

Our entire mission there is premised on the ability to control the uncontrollable and silence the unsilenceable. And even in one of the least technologically advanced countries on Earth, we can’t do it. That should give you a pretty good idea of how much luck the Pentagon will have in stopping Wikileaks. Even if they’re successful at going after the individuals who maintain the site, it only emphasizes to more of the world why they too need to be wary of what those with power are capable of doing.

Here’s Bob Inglis, South Carolina Republican House member who got slaughtered in his primary for standing up to Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, on CNN:

I believe that this is the definition of the term “freak show”.

UDPATE: And there’s more.

PubliCola picks Republican Patrick Reed for the 31st LD House of Representatives Position 2. Here’s what they had to say:

We wanted to hold our noses and endorse incumbent [Christopher] Hurst, but the more we dug in to his record, the less we could justify telling the 31st District (Auburn, Bonney Lake, Buckley, Edgewood, Enumclaw, Sumner) to support this anti-environmental, anti-public-disclosure, anti-jobs, anti-transit, pro-Tim Eyman “Democrat.”

Hurst was the prime sponsor of legislation restoring a Tim Eyman-backed measure limiting property tax growth to one percent a year; supported changing state law that allows criminals to plead not guilty by reason of insanity; voted against transit, clean energy, and green jobs, earning him the ranking of “Green Dud” from the Washington Conservation Voters; supported legislation blocking inmate access to certain public records; and supported a slate of anti-terrorism provisions that were strongly opposed by the ACLU.

Hurst is simply the worst Democrat in the state. And on top of the laundry list above, he’s also used his chairmanship of the Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Committee to kill off even the mildest attempts to reform our state’s draconian drug laws.

I’m writing this post from the new SoDo office of the Cannabis Defense Coalition. The CDC recently moved from its old office in South Park up to this new location right next to Showbox SoDo. The inside of this place needs a ton of work, but folks in the organization are thrilled to be moving into a more visible location within the city.

Tomorrow night, the CDC is planning to take part in the Seattle Police Department’s Night Out with their own gathering behind the office along Occidental, just south of Safeco Field (the M’s play Texas at 7:10pm).

Time to vote on July’s “Golden Goat”

Last week’s contest was a tough one, but it was eventually won by mlc1us. It was Tiffany’s Cocktails in San Antonio, TX, where “Big Mexican Women” are allegedly (according to Fox News) helping Afghan soldiers who are here to learn English go AWOL from nearby Lackland Air Force Base.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

I’ve recently gotten into Mike and Mike on ESPN Radio, Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic’s sports-talk morning show. Now that I’m driving into work every day, it’s been my regular morning listen in the car. Earlier this week, they were discussing the report about the health violations at America’s sports venues. Greenberg was bothered by it, but Golic, their in-studio guest, and the vast majority of people writing emails into the show were largely ambivalent. Most people had the attitude that they’d rather not know what goes on on the other side of that counter. As long as the nachos taste ok, it doesn’t matter if there’d been rat feces in the box or if the employees didn’t wash their hands.

After listening to it, it made me realize that there’s an interesting parallel between that and how Americans in general have reacted to two far bigger news stories. The first was the Washington Post’s impressive expose of America’s bloated and disorganized intelligence bureaucracy that’s developed since 9/11. The second was the revealing of tens of thousands of secret documents on the progress of the war in Afghanistan.

Both of these stories are of huge importance. America’s expanding intelligence bureaucracy has no oversight, no organization, and is so unwieldy it does more to keep us from identifying and stopping actual terrorist threats than it does to actually stop them. The war in Afghanistan has been nothing but an unmitigated disaster for a number of years. It has no clear goal, no clear path to any improvement, and no easy way for us to get ourselves out without leaving behind a terrible situation.

But by and large, Americans shrugged off both stories. No one marched on the Capitol demanding that we stop wasting so much money on our various intelligence gathering operations. And Congressmen and Congresswomen who will mostly be re-elected in November dutifully voted to continue funding our occupation of Afghanistan, despite the fact that the public was reminded yet again that elements within Pakistan’s own intelligence services are actively supporting our enemy; and that the longer we stay there and keep killing civilians, the more we destabilize the region and minimize our influence.

Both of these stories (and the administration’s attempts to lash out at Wikileaks for releasing the documents) are certainly part of a pattern. The government, in its publicly stated desire to give Americans security, are doing so – whether foolishly or disingenuously – by following a totalitarian impulse. By believing that the normal mechanisms that restrain governments are a threat in and of themselves, we’ve allowed ourselves to go down a path towards an environment where government can’t be restrained at all. Students of history and those who’ve lived in other parts of the world understand the value of resisting this, but America still unfortunately has too many people who are neither.

As a result, we’ve reacted to these stories with a shrug and a “why should I care?” To a great extent, we’ve lost something that used to be central to American culture. The world has become so small and our view of its many complexities so all-encompassing, that far too many of us have become believers in predestination over free will. The idea that we have the power to affect changes has given way to a belief that we have no real control over the vast array of forces around us. The only thing that seems to trigger the opposite impulse is a terrorist attack or anything else that might kill us. That gets us off the couch and screaming for action, but it’s still not enough to get us angry when that action isn’t the right one. We’ve conceded our ability to control anything less than blindly allowing our government to do whatever it wants when it comes to fighting terrorism.

And that’s creating a major distortion in our ability to deal with what actually threatens us. The way that we’re responding to terrorism – by wasting trillions of dollars on futile wars and on vast government bureaucracies that inefficiently gobble up all of our communications – will actually harm us far more than any unstable religious fanatic with a grudge against American foreign policy ever will. And of course, the more American foreign policy follows a totalitarian mindset without Americans giving a fuck, the more unstable religious fanatics there will be with a grudge against our foreign policy. The money spent on that never worries us in the same way that money spent on safety regulations or infrastructure or education worries us. Even though that’s the kind of stuff that’s far more likely to affect us.

But as long as the nachos don’t kill us, we’ll keep buying them.

[via here]

Earlier this week, Nate Silver coined the term “Broadus Effect” to describe a phenomenon he was seeing with the polling on California’s Proposition 19. He noticed that polls done via automated polling were showing higher support for marijuana legalization than polling done via live operator. The difference was particularly stark for minority groups.

This got me thinking back to some of the discussions that were happening late last year around pushing a ballot initiative for 2010. At the time, the ACLU (and Alison Holcomb specifically) was arguing against putting a full legalization initiative on the ballot this year. Their rationale was that the internal polling they’d done was not showing strong enough support for it. In an email to me, Holcomb indicated that their polling showed support for legalization was only between 33-40%. I found that figure to be hard to believe (considering that 44% of Nevada voters supported legalization at the ballot box in 2006) and wrote up a post about it.

As I-1068 was formed, Holcomb and the ACLU remained convinced that a marijuana legalization initiative couldn’t pass. The I-1068 folks largely left them out of the planning and then later requests for their support ended with them making a public refusal to endorse it. This lack of support eventually doomed the initiative’s ability to raise money from other Democratic groups who otherwise saw big benefits from getting it on the ballot.

So this week, I emailed Holcomb about Silver’s post. And it looks like the ACLU is now re-evaluating their previous pessimism over their internal polling in light of the “Broadus Effect”.

UDPATE: Governor Gregoire’s office responds to the fact that legalizing marijuana is still the top vote getter on the website they launched last week to take suggestion on how to fix the state budget.

UDPATE 2: Alison Holcomb wrote to me directly complaining that I didn’t properly characterize her email response that spurred this post, so I’m posting her follow-up email right here:

Your question was, “I’m curious if you’ve thought about the ACLU’s previous polling on marijuana legalization with respect to what Nate Silver has dubbed ‘The Broadus Effect.'” Indeed I have, and I’ve compared the margins our polls show on hypothetical proposals to WA voters with those described in Silver’s piece on the CA polling of Prop 19. What I’ve seen hasn’t given the ACLU reason to “re-evaluat[e our] previous pessimism.” Instead, we are thinking about how best to do necessary follow-up research that might, in part, test the existence and extent of a “Broadus Effect” in Washington – assuming the actual vote in CA provides additional support for the theory. This is what I meant when I said in that same email, “And it’s figuring prominently in thinking about future qualitative and quantitative research.”

I’ve also been examining our crosstabs to see whether sufficient samples of various races existed to draw any conclusions as to where, for example, African Americans were as a group on the questions we asked. I’m interested in testing messages about the racially disparate enforcement of marijuana laws, how that contributes to the shame and stigma Silver identifies, and whether we can do effective public education around this issue in a way that helps us build a broader coalition of support that includes our communities of color.

Polls should always be taken with a grain of salt, but it’s hard not to be optimistic about Proposition 19 after a PPP poll has it ahead by a wide margin, 52% to 36%. This is after Survey USA had it ahead 50% to 40%.

Of course, there are still special interests and other political dinosaurs who will fight this initiative, but so far their efforts have been less than inspiring. And I’m not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea to start a No on Prop 19 Facebook page, as it’s already overrun with a fascinating mix of legalization supporters debunking the silly arguments and jokesters pretending to be clueless prohibitionists.

All that said, the voting in November won’t be done on the internet, so it’s best not to be too confident just yet.

UDPATE: Nate Silver coins a new phrase, the “Broadus Effect”, to describe a discrepancy he’s seeing with minority voters between automated polls and live operator polls on Prop 19.