A few random items:

– How a drunken bus ride from Paris to Berlin may result in a major change to our Afghanistan train wreck.

– Adam Serwer writes about how we turned Faizal Shahzad from a warrior into a pathetic loser by giving him access to our justice system.

– Haven’t been able to sign the I-1068 petition yet? Just pick up a copy of The Stranger this week.

– Gene Johnson writes about how medical marijuana patients can get the shaft in custody disputes.

– KUOW aired a discussion on marijuana policy yesterday. I didn’t get a chance to listen to it yet, but you can listen to it online here.

– Mark Cooke also discusses the futility of the recent DEA sweep.

UPDATE: And one more link…

– What happens if both liquor privatization initiatives pass?

I always thought the word “news” was found in the word “newspaper” for a reason.

– Jacob Sullum at Reason does some thorough fact checking on Fox News buffoons Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly. But while parts of the Fox empire are still living in a fantasy world when it comes to the drug war, not all of it is.

– The L.A. Times printed a lengthy profile of Marc Emery earlier in the week, but some important details about the political nature of Emery’s prosecution were left out of the finished piece.

– Another child will be born into this world without a father because of the drug war. And Pete Guither links to a follow-up from the case in Georgia where another father-to-be was gunned down by drug cops last year. Now one of those drug cops has been arrested for making false statements.

– Washington’s Good Samaritan Law (only the second in the nation after New Mexico’s) took effect on June 10.

– David Borden discusses why the DEA’s recent “Project Deliverance” was a waste of your taxpayer dollars.

– The drug Sativex, which is made directly from marijuana plants by British pharmaceutical firm GW, has won regulatory approval in Britain for the treatment of multiple sclerosis. Meanwhile in the United States, the federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug with no medical use.

Last week’s contest was won by Troll – who first guessed what the view was – and wes.in.wa who provided the link just before Don Joe. The correct answer was the home in Perugia, Italy where British student Meredith Kercher was murdered in 2007. Last week, a jailed mobster claimed to have proof that University of Washington student Amanda Knox did not commit the crime.

Since Troll was able to win last week’s contest, it appears I’ll have to make these a bit harder. Each picture will still be related to something in the news from the past week. Here’s this week’s, good luck! And happy Father’s Day!

This post from Bruce Ramsey on I-1068 and the ACLU is a week old now, but I wanted to call it out and add some extra thoughts. Except for a few minor quibbles, I think Ramsey is mostly correct about both that post and his earlier post on differentiating liberals and progressives. The inability for Democratic interest groups in this state to rally around this initiative does demonstrate that Democrats in this state are more progressive than liberal – the difference between the two being that progressives are more concerned with things that government should be doing, while liberals are more concerned with what it shouldn’t be doing. Ideologically, most progressives are liberal and most liberals are progressives, but within circles of entrenched power, the people who want government to do more always win out over the people who want it to do less.

My first minor quibble has to do with this statement:

ACLU-WA’s statement says, “The ACLU isn’t willing to support an incomplete initiative in hopes that the Legislature will fix it.”

I can understand why a group of attorneys might take that position. But the ACLU statement also says, “A negative vote on the initiative would be a significant setback for our ongoing reform movement.” And that is also true.

I don’t agree with this at all. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that losing a statewide vote on marijuana legalization does anything to set the movement back. In fact, Colorado voters largely rejected a marijuana legalization initiative in 2006 that was doomed from the start, yet the organizers of that initiative saw their effort as a way to kick off public discussions that weren’t already happening. They were able to do that, and since then, Colorado has seen several big advancements in drug law reform, from medical marijuana dispensaries to successful city-wide legalization initiatives, things that we haven’t seen yet in Washington state. Their effort was derided at the time as foolish, but it most certainly did not set back the cause of drug law reform there. In fact, it pushed it forward.

My second minor quibble (ok, maybe this one is more than minor) concerns the nature of the ACLU of Washington’s failure to endorse the initiative. It had little to do with a progressive vs liberal ideological divide. When the ACLU of Washington declared that they were declining to endorse I-1068, they listed multiple reasons, but the belief that the initiative had no chance of passing was the primary motivator. In fact, their concerns over the lack of regulation in the bill weren’t exactly genuine, as ACLU of Washington Drug Policy Director Alison Holcomb wrote to me in email that it would be “great” if it passed. They were just more concerned about what an endorsement of what they saw as an ill-fated initiative effort would have on their credibility. When I asked Holcomb to provide an example of when an organization’s endorsement of an initiative they had no direct involvement with ever hurt that organization’s credibility, she complained about having too many unread emails in her inbox.

In the end, exacerbating existing fissures within the drug law reform community has done far more damage to the cause of ending marijuana prohibition (which I don’t doubt the ACLU of Washington wants) than a failed initiative attempt would have. With the I-1068 campaign, we ended up with a well-connected – but politically clueless – ACLU of Washington effectively derailing an amateurish but eager attempt to force a vote on the issue of marijuana legalization this year. The I-1068 campaign showed their lack of experience by continually venting through press releases (which rather foolishly just got more people to notice the difficulties they were having), but in the end, they built up a network of thousands of activists and continued to raise awareness of this important issue. As for the ACLU of Washington’s credibility, all I can say is that an organization that I’ve admired and defended throughout my life profoundly disappointed me with their actions this year.

Having the North Koreans in the soccer World Cup is quite a spectacle:

North Korean manager Kim Jong-Hun reportedly gets coaching advice directly from the country’s diminutive dictator via an invisible cell phone.

According to ESPN.com the coach has claimed he gets “regular tactical advice during matches” from Jong Il “using mobile phones that are not visible to the naked eye.”

“Jong Il is said to have developed the technology himself,” coach told ESPN.com.

And it gets even weirder:

Cameras caught a contingent of North Korean supporters in the stands cheering eagerly, each dressed exactly the same in a red shirt and cap and waving North Korean flags.

It’s not certain, however, that any of those flag waving fans were North Korean.

In May, 1,000 Chinese nationals were essentially rented by the government of North Korea to sit in the stands and cheer, according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.

Given that few citizens of the impoverished nation could afford to attend the games, or would be allowed to leave the country, the North Korean Sports Committee gave tickets to Chinese nationals, many of them actors and singers, to attend the event, Xinhua reported.

A Seattle Police officer punches a 17-year-old girl after stopping a group of teenagers for jaywalking.

The video at the bottom of the post makes it pretty clear that the teenagers were resisting arrest – and while punching a teenage girl was probably ill-advised – the officer certainly had a right to take action (in fact, he deserves credit for not using a taser or pepper spray). But the bigger question here is why we’re still trying to ticket people for jaywalking:

Criminalizing something as common and useful as jaywalking—criminalizing an environmental positive like jaywalking—invites selective enforcement and civil-rights abuses. I’m not saying that yesterday’s unpleasantness is a clear-cut case of police brutality, although that punch-to-the-face was pretty brutal. All I’m saying—besides “jaywalking: good”—is that yesterday’s unpleasantness could have been avoided if the cops hadn’t have stopped those girls in the first place.

Last week’s contest was won by milwaukeehockey (aka milwhcky). It was a Valero gas station in downtown Kansas City where there was a mysterious explosion in a nearby donation bin. There are still no updates on a suspect or motive, but one wonders if it was one of the folks who caused the Valero to have to post this sign inside the gas station mini-mart.

Here’s this week’s photo, good luck!

And for those of you who enjoy this challenge, Andrew Sullivan has started doing a similar contest with his reader-submitted “View From Your Window” photos.

I’ve been following the saga of Wikileaks over the past few days. The secretive website’s founder, Julian Assange, has been on the run from the Pentagon:

American officials are searching for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks in an attempt to pressure him not to publish thousands of confidential and potentially hugely embarrassing diplomatic cables that offer unfiltered assessments of Middle East governments and leaders.

Assange is like the kid in school who found the popular girl’s secret diary where she talks shit about the people she pretends to be friends with.

The person who’s believed to have turned over these cables was a 22-year-old Army Intelligence Analyst named Bradley Manning. Manning was arrested last week after admitting to the leak in a series of online chats. Manning also took credit for leaking the video that Wikileaks unveiled in April.

There will be a lot of debate about whether Manning should be considered a whistleblower or a traitor. In leaking the video, he was clearly trying to expose a coverup (Reuters had been unsuccessful in getting the footage showing U.S. troops killing one of their photographers). But with the cables, it’s not clear if Manning was trying to expose any particular wrongdoing or if he was just bent on undermining American foreign policy. Yet even if that distinction matters to some of us, it certainly won’t matter to the Obama Administration and the Pentagon.

While the true nature of what he revealed remains a big unknown, what isn’t a mystery is how this young Army analyst became disillusioned to the point of doing this. In his lengthy online chats with the man who eventually turned him in – a former hacker named Adrian Lamo – he pointed to one specific incident:

(02:31:02 PM) Manning: i think the thing that got me the most… that made me rethink the world more than anything
(02:35:46 PM) Manning: was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police… for printing “anti-Iraqi literature”… the iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the “bad guys” were, and how significant this was for the FPs… it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki… i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…
(02:35:46 PM) Lamo : I’m not here right now
(02:36:27 PM) Manning: everything started slipping after that… i saw things differently
(02:37:37 PM) Manning: i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…

Even as someone who thought the war in Iraq was ill-advised from the very beginning, and who fully expected an outcome where our occupation would eventually begin imitating the tyranny we’d set out to replace, I still find it fascinating to see this young man running into that glaring contradiction between our ideals and our actions. I have no idea yet how history will eventually judge Manning, but I understand how he ended up doing what he did.

If these cables are released, what will come next? Would it cause the unraveling of key alliances to the point that our national security would be threatened? Or does it merely expose embarrassing things that would only affect a narrow set of people and interests? Either way, the diary of the popular girl may be posted online soon.

I have the Netherlands, Chile, Nigeria, and the Kiwis in my pool. The greatest sports tournament on Earth begins Friday at 7am.

Two Egyptian Christians fly to New York to join the whack-job protest of the mosque being built near Ground Zero – and have to be rescued from the other protesters who refused to believe that they weren’t Muslims.

With less than a month to go, it looks like the I-1068 campaign is not going to get the help it needs to get on the ballot. Using only volunteer gatherers (I’ve collected roughly 500 signatures myself), it’s still less than half-way to its signature goal. As Josh reports, the SEIU had initially considered funding paid signature gatherers to ensure it gets on the ballot in November – in part because it would greatly increase turnout among younger voters. If I-1068 gets on the ballot, supporters were looking to use Hempfest as a huge voter registration effort.

Instead, Democrats and the SEIU balked. With an initiative already on the ballot in California to provide some good data points, it’ll be interesting to see whether the backers of I-1068 are correct about how much value there would have been for Democrats to have a marijuana legalization initiative on the ballot – if it doesn’t make it.

Making things even more interesting, we would be able to compare the fates of both Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray; both incumbents, and both being challenged by well-known candidates with big pockets (assuming Fiorina makes it through her primary tomorrow). Although, to add an extra twist, Boxer inexplicably came out against California’s initiative at the beginning of April, and has since seen her favorability plummet since then. It’s not clear whether her opposition was the main reason for that huge drop (or if there just aren’t enough polling points yet to know how big the drop really is), but coming out against an initiative that remains extremely popular with both her base of liberal voters and independents certainly wasn’t smart.

It’s entirely possible that if I-1068 makes the ballot that Murray would follow in Boxer’s clumsy footsteps and publicly oppose it anyway. But if I were Dino Rossi, I’d be breathing a little easier about the likelihood of not having something on the ballot that encourages more younger and liberal voters to show up in November.

Last week’s contest was won by mlc1us in a very impressive 11 minutes. The correct answer was the TownePlace Suites in Urbandale, IA, where Slipknot bassist Paul Gray was found dead from a likely drug overdose.

As always, each contest picture will be related to something in the news from this past week. Here’s this week’s image:

– Glenn Beck has now dropped all subtlety in his American fascist shtick and is now promoting a pro-Nazi book from the 1930s. As Dave explains:

Now, we know that Beck bought whole into Jonah Goldberg’s fraudulent Liberal Fascism thesis, and therefore probably believes that these American Nazis were evil “progressives” at heart. So it’s likely he had a huge blind spot about the fact that American fascists of the 1930s were far-right ideologues whose favorite pastime was Red-baiting.

Media Matters has an interview with Alexander Zaitchik, who has just written a book on Beck’s life and career. Zaitchik is correct when he says this:

As for whether the left sweats him too much, time will tell. He may very well flame out, or melt down. But right now he merits concern. As pleasant as it might be to dismiss him, too many people are willing and eager to enter into this bizarre role-play in which Beck is not only their history professor, but also their quasi-prophetic movement leader. While there is an argument to be made against giving him too much of our energy and attention, completely ignoring him and his ilk is one luxury we can’t afford.

When someone like Glenn Beck is openly promoting books written by prominent white supremacists – and still has a popular show on a major cable news network – that’s certainly not something we should be ignoring as a society.

– In Prescott, Arizona, angry townspeople – led by a city councilman and talk radio personality named Steve Blair – successfully pressured the school principal to order that a recently painted mural have the faces of the children be lightened up. Since then, the councilman was fired from his radio gig. All of the recent insanity in Arizona is reminding me that my old boss repeatedly said he wanted to move there “for the politics”. My old boss was this guy. What the hell is going on down there?

– There were two fantastic media pieces this week on the drug war. Evan Wood writes about how the bloodshed in Jamaica is indicative of a massive worldwide policy failure. And Johann Hari draws the parallels between the failed experiment with alcohol prohibition and its modern global reincarnation.

– In collecting signatures for I-1068 last weekend, a woman who signed my petition commented that she was still worried because “stoned driving is just as dangerous as drunk driving.” This is a topic that rarely yields rational discussion, but it’s still worth pointing out that scientific evidence for that belief does not exist. Driving drunk is far worse than driving stoned. That’s not to say that driving stoned is entirely safe. It’s not. It’s just that driving a motor vehicle while drunk is uniquely dangerous. The major difference between drunk driving and stoned driving is that, while both involve an impairment of reaction times, stoned drivers tend to get overly cautious while drunk drivers tend to become more aggressive with their impairment. And the studies that have been done to compare the two have found big differences between the damage caused by drunk drivers and the damage caused by stoned drivers.