Last week’s contest was won by Ludicrus Maximus. It was the office in Albuquerque, NM where a man went on a shooting spree and then killed himself.

Here’s this week’s photo. As always, it’s related to something in the news from the past week. Good luck!

Check out Jane Hamsher on MSNBC today, finally pointing out the elephant in the room on our immigration drug war problem in Arizona:

Earlier today, I leapt into the abyss and signed up for a Twitter account. I only have time to write about a small number of the articles that interest me, so Twitter seems like a great format for all those posts and news items that I want to share but don’t have time to write full posts about. As you’d imagine, I’ll be posting a lot about drug policy and civil liberties, but probably also about sports, working in the high-tech world, TV, and some other mundane shit I don’t often write about here.

A website has been set up to vote on ways to cut Washington’s budget.

If this sorry episode isn’t the end of Andrew Breitbart’s foray into the national media scene, we’re in more trouble than I imagined.

UPDATE: Joe Conason points out that it’s time to re-visit the ACORN smear job.

– Marc Lynch writes about the recently revived drumbeat for bombing Iran and why it’s still a bad idea.

– I’m still reading through the Washington Post’s report on the vast, secretive security bureaucracy that formed after 9/11. Greenwald does his thing.

– Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske may have said the single dumbest thing any Obama Administration official has said to date [emphasis mine, breathtaking cluelessness in the original]:

Well, we know that certainly California is poised to and will be voting on legalizing small amounts of marijuana. And that vote is scheduled for November of this year.

There are a number of studies and a number of pieces of information that really throw that into the light of saying that, look, California is not going to solve its budget problems, that they have more increase or availability if drugs were, or marijuana, was to become legalized. That in fact you would see more use. That you would also see a black market that would come into play. Because why wouldn’t in heaven’s name would somebody want to spend money on tax money for marijuana when they could either use the underground market or they could in fact grow their own.

I don’t even know where to start. The idea that you’re worried about legalizing marijuana because it might create a black market is like being worried about wearing a bicycle helmet because it might cause you to have a head injury.

– Marcy Wheeler writes about how our government interprets providing “material support” for terrorism so broadly that it can apply to journalists covering a story.

– Scott Morgan calls out DARE for their double-standard on recreational drug use.

– Alison Holcomb writes about Mexico and why what’s happening there is a good reason to support marijuana law reform.

– I don’t have much of the background here, but this letter appears to indicate that the Veterans Administration is no longer cracking down on veterans who use medical marijuana in compliance with state laws.

– The Seattle Times editorial board has some fans in North Dakota.

Mark Kleiman writes in the LA Times that even if voters in California approve Proposition 19 to create a regulated legal market for marijuana, it still won’t be legal:

Now that California’s billion-dollar ” medical marijuana” industry and its affiliated “recommendationists” have made marijuana legally available to any Californian with $75 and the willingness to tell a doctor that he sometimes has trouble sleeping, why not go all the way and just legalize the stuff for recreational use as proposed in Proposition 19 on the November ballot? Then we could tax it and regulate it, eliminating the illicit market and the need for law enforcement against pot growers. California would make a ton of money to help dig out of its fiscal hole, right?

Well, actually, no.

There’s one problem with legalizing, taxing and regulating cannabis at the state level: It can’t be done. The federal Controlled Substances Act makes it a felony to grow or sell cannabis. California can repeal its own marijuana laws, leaving enforcement to the feds. But it can’t legalize a federal felony. Therefore, any grower or seller paying California taxes on marijuana sales or filing pot-related California regulatory paperwork would be confessing, in writing, to multiple federal crimes. And that won’t happen.

From a purely technical standpoint, Kleiman is right. And from a purely technical standpoint, Dick Cheney should be behind bars. The problem with Kleiman’s argument is that when it comes to what the Obama Administration will and will not do, the letter of the law will take a backseat to political considerations. The Obama Administration already demonstrates this by choosing not to go after state medical marijuana providers (both growers and sellers). Despite a few recent raids, marijuana dispensaries are now operating in the open in many more places than they were only two years ago.

Kleiman’s attempt to differentiate this by pointing to international treaties that carve out exceptions for medical use is irrelevant. What the medical marijuana providers do is clearly against federal law, but the Obama Administration chooses not to enforce it. And it’s unrealistic to think that an international treaty that the United States years ago pressured the UN to pass will be used by the international community to force Obama to do something he doesn’t find politically expedient. It’ll never happen. If California passes Proposition 19, the Obama Administration’s hands won’t be tied by anyone or anything. If they think it’s politically expedient to shut it down, they’ll try to do it. If they think it’s not politically expedient, they won’t.

Kleiman makes the case – based on the RAND study from earlier this week saying that marijuana prices in California might plummet – that the Obama Administration would find it politically expedient to shut down any regulated market in California. As he sees it, people will flock to California to buy marijuana on the cheap and re-sell it for higher profits across the country. And as a result, the Obama Administration will have no choice but to shut it down.

On the other hand, California still happens to be the biggest state in the country, and one that Obama would need to win in 2012 to stay in the White House. Having the federal government come in to forcibly overturn a voter-initiative wouldn’t be the smartest move on his part, and it’s one I personally have trouble believing he’d do.

Last week’s contest was won by Bax. It was the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland, where Oscar Grant was killed by police officer Johannes Mehserle on New Year’s Day 2009. Last week, Mehserle was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, but not guilty of voluntary manslaughter and second-degree murder.

As always, each picture will be related to something in the news from the past week. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Last week, the NAACP called on Tea Party groups to repudiate the racism within its ranks. Dave Weigel, writing at The Daily Dish, dismissed the idea as foolish, while elsewhere at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote several good posts explaining why the NAACP was right to raise their concerns about some of the racially charged things that have been seen and heard at Tea Party rallies.

What this exchange reminded me of was a post from a couple of weeks ago from Weigel’s former colleague at Reason Magazine, Radley Balko, at his personal blog The Agitator:

Dear Tea Partiers,

Ask Joe Arpaio to be your keynote speaker, and you’ve lost me.

He’s a power-mad thug with a badge, the walking, mouth-breathing antithesis of the phrase “limited government.”

Yes, this is but one state chapter in your movement. So distance yourself from them.

It’s one thing to have a few idiots and nutjobs show up at your rallies.

It’s quite another to invite one to speak.

John Cole has written a few times about the effort among the staff at Reason to continually dismiss the idea that there’s racism in the Tea Party movement. Balko’s post above should be a clue that what the Tea Partiers are about isn’t quite what the folks at Reason imagine them to be about. Polls on Tea Party members illustrate this:

While big government is a favorite tea party target, several bloggers were surprised by the results of the poll question about whether the benefits of government programs such as Social Security and Medicare are worth the costs to taxpayers. Sixty-two percent of tea party supporters said yes. In follow-up interviews, they favored a focus on “waste” instead of slashing the programs.

“Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits. Others could not explain the contradiction,” the Times reported.

The Tea Party movement isn’t a movement about limited government and it never has been. They may make signs and shout slogans against “socialism”, but as surveys like that one show, they have no problem with things like Medicare or Social Security, or tightly regulating Wall Street. When they talk about socialism, they’re talking about something else. They’re expressing their anxieties about multiculturalism. They’re expressing a belief that our increasingly diverse society is becoming an economic burden to what they perceive as “real Americans”. To them, socialism is the idea that America is becoming more and more inundated with those who will mooch off the rest of us. And their reaction to that is to decry the kinds of government expenditures that many of them continue to rely on:

Liberal pundits like Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen seized on a comment by Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif., as evidence that tea partiers are “a confused group of misled people.”

“Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security. I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind,” White told the Times.

“These folks claim to be motivated by concerns over taxes, but tea partiers tend not to know anything about the subject. … They claim to hate expensive government programs, except for all the expensive government programs that benefit them and their families,” Benen charged.

The staff at Reason have had a natural desire to believe that the Tea Party folks are their fellow travelers – intellectually consistent free-market libertarians whose opposition to big government comes from a firm understanding of the writings of Bastiat and Hayek. But that’s just not who most of the Tea Partiers are.

They’re more often than not folks who think that Barack Obama is cynically trying to steal their money and give it to people who refuse to work hard and who don’t care about America as much as them. They’re more often than not willing to believe that illegal immigrants are coming here because our government entices them to come with endless giveaways, rather than because of free market forces of supply and demand in the labor markets. And this is why they’re demanding to hear from big government authoritarian thugs like Joe Arpaio at their meetings and not from Reason staff members.

Even a politician like Rand Paul, who’s considered a free-market libertarian, knows that he can’t keep Tea Party support without rejecting that philosophy when it comes to illegal immigration. Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate for Senate in Nevada, once expressed support for the reinstatement of alcohol prohibition. This only happens because the Tea Partiers are far more concerned about the culture war than about economic philosophy. They’re for limited government when it comes to things they perceive as encouraging our multicultural society and they’re for big government when it comes to things they perceive as threats from that multicultural society.

Racism has changed a bit since the 1960s. Racism was overt back then – a belief in the necessity of segregation and for preserving separate sets of rules for people of different groups. Today, racism is somewhat different and more subtle. It’s a belief that certain groups of people are an economic burden on society due to our cultural differences. It’s a belief that it’s wasteful when government does things to improve the lot of poor minority groups or to help immigrants assimilate into American society, but not wasteful when it does things that benefit the more privileged classes. Media charlatans like Glenn Beck are masterful at transforming these types of nationalistic impulses into economic theories with fully-developed alternate American histories to go along with them. And it’s foolish to believe that the Tea Party movement isn’t being driven in a significant way by this sleight of hand.

– Tom Schaller has a post at FiveThirtyEight comparing the 1994 midterm election with the 2010 midterm election. This chart tells a very interesting story:

It seems hard to fathom that only 16 years ago the South had a higher percentage of Democrats than the Northeast.

– I’ve started watching the recent National Geographic series on the drug war, Drugs Inc. The first episode was about cocaine. It’s a timely topic since this week marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Plan Colombia. The Drug War Chronicle discusses the successes and failures of our attempts to stop the flow of cocaine from Colombia. We’ve managed to weaken organizations like FARC that have long profited from the trade, but the overall amount of cocaine coming from that part of the world remains unchanged.

– Mike Konczal points out the inherent contradiction between the Broken Windows philosophy and the libertarian view on marijuana laws.

– Dave Weigel calls out Megyn Kelly’s race-baiting.

– Another ugly Taser incident.

– Someone posted Mr. Cynical’s old schoolwork on the web.

I’ve been following a sad story out of Las Vegas this week. A man by the name of Erik Scott, a 38-year-old (some articles say 39) highly-respected West Point graduate and businessman, was gunned down by police outside a suburban Costco.

It appears to have started when Scott, who has a concealed weapons permit, was taking metal water bottles out of their packaging to see if they’d fit in his cooler. After a store employee confronted him about taking merchandise out of the packaging and noticed his gun, he called 911 and the store was evacuated. Police arrived at the store as it was being evacuated and shot Scott to death while yelling at him to drop his weapon.

There’s a very wide discrepancy between what the police are saying, what witnesses are saying (including Scott’s girlfriend), and what people who know Scott are capable of believing. The police claim that Scott was acting erratically in the store and then pointed his weapon at them. But a number of witnesses say that Scott never pulled his weapon and that the police just started shooting as they yelled commands. Las Vegas police are withholding the surveillance video and the 911 recordings until September, after the coroner’s inquest.

Proponents of gun permits are quick to argue that carrying a gun makes you safer. But this incident highlights an important counterargument to that. Sometimes carrying a gun makes you a target as well. Anyone who has read my thoughts on this subject know that I’m not some radical gun control proponent. In fact, I was happy to see the Supreme Court rule that Chicago’s gun ban was unconstitutional. Too often, cities with a lot of crime use gun bans as feel-good fixes that don’t actually address the underlying causes of violence within their communities.

But in this incident, Scott likely became a victim because the gun he was carrying made him appear to be a threat. Even if Scott did absolutely nothing wrong (and from what I’ve read so far, that’s likely true), his not-quite-concealed weapon was likely the reason he ended up the victim of trigger-happy cops. I’m still comfortable with the idea of registered citizens having the ability to carry guns in public, but the added security of doing so is not without its risks.

Joshua Green at The Atlantic writes about the impact that marijuana legalization initiatives will have on partisan races:

I have a short piece in the current Atlantic about the marijuana ballot initiatives sweeping the country. (Paul Starobin also has an excellent cover story in National Journal.) But one issue nobody has examined is what effect these initiatives have on candidates’ performance at the polls. Acting on a tip from an Obama official, I found a few Democratic consultants who have become convinced that ballot initiatives legalizing marijuana, like the one Californians will vote on in November, actually help Democrats in the same way that gay marriage bans were supposed to have helped Republicans. They are similarly popular, with medical marijuana having passed in 14 states (and the District of Columbia) where it has appeared on the ballot. In a recent poll, 56 percent of Californians said they favor the upcoming initiative to legalize and tax pot.

The idea that this helps Democrats is based on the demographic profile of who shows up to vote for marijuana initiatives–and wouldn’t show up otherwise. “If you look at who turns out to vote for marijuana,” says Jim Merlino, a consultant in Colorado, which passed initiatives in 2000 and 2006, “they’re generally under 35. And young people tend to vote Democratic.” This influx of new voters, he believes, helps Democrats up and down the ticket.

I think it’s hard to argue with that. Younger people today are voting overwhelmingly for Democrats, so if you have an initiative that motivates more young people to vote, Democrats on the ballot will get a boost. But in California, where Proposition 19 will be voted on this fall, the picture may not be so clear.

The reason is because both Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown, the two Democrats running for statewide offices this year, both came out against the initiative. And they didn’t just check some checkbox somewhere saying that they were against it. They went full-on drug warrior with their public statements.

Boxer’s campaign put out a statement saying that it would lead to an increase in crime, and that law enforcement costs would go up. Just to underscore how ludicrous that statement is, the official ballot argument for Proposition 19 was signed by a former police chief, a former deputy chief, and a former judge.

Jerry Brown put out an even more ridiculous statement in opposition to Proposition 19 saying that it would open the floodgates for Mexican drug cartels. Jon Walker does an excellent job here drawing the parallels to alcohol prohibition and explaining why Brown’s statement makes absolutely no sense.

The recent polling for both Boxer and Brown hasn’t been good. Brown is trailing Meg Whitman in the Governor’s race. And in recent months, Boxer’s favorability numbers have taken a hit and she’s in a dead heat with Carly Fiorina. Her decline probably has a series of factors, but her opposition to the marijuana initiative is likely playing some non-trivial role in it.

I feel confident in saying that for two reasons. One, it’s an issue that puts her in direct opposition to her base (69% of self-described liberals support it according to the latest Survey USA poll). And two, I tend to think that while very few voters consider marijuana to be a major issue, a lot more of them have a strong enough opinion about the issue (and understand it well enough) for it to play into their overall perceptions of how the candidates would deal with issues more pressing, like the economy or health care. Boxer is being painted as an out-of-touch DC insider who caters to government interests. Her position on marijuana just plays right into that stereotype.

So how is this going to end up? Will the benefits to California’s big ticket Democrats from additional young voter participation due to Proposition 19 be counteracted by both Boxer’s and Brown’s laughable public stances on it? Someone with more time and resources than me could potentially put together some good poll questions to explore that, or to do some statistical analysis from existing polls. But what’s clear is that even if Democratic consultants see the benefit of having marijuana initiatives on the ballot, they apparently still don’t see the benefit of actually endorsing them.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting report in the San Francisco Chronicle about Boxer and her polling woes:

Boxer’s slight numerical lead masks potentially serious problems for the senator, starting with how 52 percent of the respondents hold an unfavorable view of her.

At the same time, her job approval rating is among the lowest that Field has measured for her since she was first elected to the Senate in 1992: 43 percent of registered voters disapprove of her performance while 42 percent approve. Among likely voters, 48 percent disapprove and 42 percent approve.

…

“It’s a reflection of the effectiveness of a Republican strategy to characterize Sen. Boxer as everything that’s wrong with the government,” said Larry Berman, a professor of political science at UC Davis. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., another longtime Democrat facing a tough re-election challenge, faces a similar predicament, Berman said.

As I mentioned above, the job of characterizing Senator Boxer as “everything that’s wrong with the government” becomes a lot easier when Boxer herself takes a position on the marijuana initiative that large numbers of both her base and independents understand as being “something that’s wrong with the government”.

Fox News personality Judge Andrew Napolitano on Bush and Cheney:

They should have been indicted. They absolutely should have been indicted for torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants. I’d like to say they should be indicted for lying but believe it or not, unless you’re under oath, lying is not a crime. At least not an indictable crime. It’s a moral crime.

It’s not a coincidence that Fox News didn’t put people like Napolitano on TV give Napolitano his own show until after we had a Democrat inhabiting the White House.

UPDATE: A commenter pointed out that Napolitano was occasionally on Fox News in the past, but he didn’t have his own show until 2009. I’ve updated the original post accordingly.

UPDATE 2: In fact, Freedom Watch was created in February 2009 and began airing on Fox Business Channel in 2010. The timing was not a coincidence.

Pete Guither responds to Roger Roffman’s concern-trolling of the drug law reform movement in the Seattle Times Mommy Advice Journal.