If you happen to be stuck at the office this morning with nothing to do, you can watch President Obama sign the health care bill on this webpage (at 8:15am). And if you’re really bored at work today, you can stay on that page and at 11am it will be showing (not advertised, of course) Vice President Joe Biden, Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske, and others laying out for the first time the Obama Administration’s National Drug Control Strategy.

It may not be obvious from seeing my blogging, but there are a number of topics for which I could potentially find agreement with their strategy today (on greater funding for drug treatment, effective education programs for dangerous drugs, even smarter advertising campaigns aimed at warning children about the dangers of drugs like meth and heroin). Unfortunately, the religious adherence to complete prohibition as the only way to deal with certain drugs discredits them right out of the gate, and makes it far more difficult for them to get any of their more sensible initiatives taken seriously.

Wow:

On Monday McKenna, the state’s Republican attorney general, said he’d join GOP colleagues and sue to stop the Democrats’ comprehensive health care reform law from taking effect. President Barack Barack Obama is expected to soon sign the measure passed by his party in dramatic fashion Sunday night.

“I believe this new federal health care measure unconstitutionally imposes new requirements on our state and on its citizens. This unprecedented federal mandate, requiring all Washingtonians to purchase health insurance, violates the Commerce Clause and the 10th amendment of the US Constitution,” McKenna said in a statement.

So let me get this straight. When the federal government implements a requirement that all people buy into a health care system that we all use and benefit from, this is an unconstitutional violation of the Commerce Clause and an egregious imposition on our state and its citizens. But when the Supreme Court says that a voter-approved Washington law allowing for sick people to grow marijuana plants for their own medicinal use can be nullified under the Commerce Clause, Rob McKenna not only enthusiastically endorses that argument, but also uses attorney-client privilege to cover up the fact that he was using it to undermine the state law and prevent sick people from having access to medicine.

If you believe that the federal government telling a terminally ill patient being advised by a doctor that he or she can’t grow a pot plant on their property, not sell it to anyone, and then use 100% of it by themselves – in a state that has legalized this by popular vote – is something that can be regulated by the Commerce Clause (as was decided in Raich v. Gonzales), then you have absolutely no leg to stand on when you turn around and claim that individual mandates within a national health care system are unconstitutional. That’s so blatantly hypocritical, it should completely discredit Rob McKenna from ever seeking elected office in this state again.

This man is a complete fraud. He’s a political opportunist who can hold two completely contradictory legal opinions at the same time, without a care in the world for the lives he needs to destroy in order to keep up the facade. Hopefully, Washington voters – and the media – will finally regard this man as the extremist and shameless hypocrite that he’s always been.

Ezra Klein makes this point magnificently:

When Medicare was being considered, the American Medical Association hired Ronald Reagan to record a record housewives could play for their friends. It was called Operation: Coffee Cup, and you can listen to it in the clip atop this post, or read the text here.

Reagan was a more graceful speaker than Blackburn, but his point was much the same. Kill the bill. “If you don’t do this and if I don’t do it,” he said, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Well, the bill passed. And moments ago, Rep. Paul Ryan was on the floor of the House, bellowing against Democrats who would dare propose “across-the-board cuts to Medicare.” This is breathless opportunism from Ryan — he has proposed far deeper across-the-board cuts to Medicare, and is making arguments against the Democrats’ bill that would be far more potent and accurate if aimed at his own — but leave that aside for a moment. The GOP’s embrace of the program that Ronald Reagan fought, and that Newt Gingrich sought to let “whither on the vine,” is based on the lived experience seniors have had with the bill: It has made them more, rather than less, free.

Blackburn’s introduction aside, people do not “celebrate” the freedom to not be able to afford lifesaving medical care. They don’t want the freedom to weigh whether to pay rent or take their feverish child to the emergency room. They don’t like the freedom to lose their job and then be told by insurers that they’re ineligible for coverage because they were born with a heart arrhythmia.

When faced with the passage of programs that would deliver people from these awful circumstances, the Republicans adopt a very narrow and cruel definition of the word “freedom.” But when faced with the existence of programs like Medicare, and the recognition that their constituents depend on those programs to live lives free of unnecessary fear and illness, they abandon their earlier beliefs, forget their dire warnings and, when convenient, defend these government protections aggressively. There’s nothing much to be done about that. It is, after all, a free country. But Americans should feel free to ignore these discredited hysterics.

The House now has the votes to pass this thing.

Last week’s contest was won by Liberal Scientist. It was Mt. Vernon, NY.

For those who are new to the contest, click the picture and within the Bing mapping webpage, select Aerial and then select Bird’s Eye if you think you’ve at the location pictured below. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Not that that’s news to most of us here, but it appears that even conservatives are starting to figure it out too.

You might think that the execution-style murder of a young American couple by drug lords in Mexico would be a significant tragedy and another piece of evidence of our massive failure in how we deal with drug use in this country. But as Paul Armentano explains, if you’re the deranged individual who President Obama just nominated to run the DEA, the killings are a clear sign of success.

Here are a few thoughts/reactions to the recent violence in the medical marijuana community:

– The major tragedy of the week wasn’t just the murder of Mike Howard, but the lingering questions about why this terrifying act of violence took nearly a week to be reported in the media. It’s hard to believe that an individual who was beaten to within an inch of his life with a crowbar while trying to defend his property wasn’t the top story that evening on Seattle news stations. The answer may lie in the actions of Pierce County Sheriff’s deputies, who – if this account is accurate – didn’t seem very motivated to help the gravely wounded Howard, but instead were more concerned with finding his plants.

– Steve Sarich, the homeowner in Monday morning’s incident, is a bit off. When I first starting following the story of the legislature’s attempts to revamp the medical marijuana law, I had a long, rambling phone conversation with him that lasted about an hour. He was angry, but I couldn’t pin down any specifics on what he was angry about. When it was all said and done, very little of what he said was backed up by anything I could find in the bills online. There were leaps of logic being made that didn’t quite match up with what I was able to find out on my own. Since that time, I’ve kept him at arm’s length, and take the things he says with a grain of salt.

Sarich is definitely the most controversial and polarizing figure in the medical marijuana community. People generally see him as either a hero or a villain. He’s often accused of working with the police to spur raids on other medical marijuana patients who cross him, but he’s also one of the most outspoken critics of law enforcement as well. As curious as I’ve been to know what the reality of that dude is, he’s still mostly an enigma to me.

– I wasn’t too surprised that police found as many plants as they did in Sarich’s house, but I would definitely be surprised if they were all full-grown plants. My understanding of what his CannaCare operation does is that it creates starter plants for other patients to take home and finish growing themselves. That may or may not still be true, but that’s what I’ve been told by several folks who are familiar with it. Is it illegal according to the state law? Probably. Should it be? Absolutely not. This was a profound failure by our legislature not to allow for operations like this to exist openly. By refusing to allow dispensaries, the legislature created this problem. To the extent that Sarich’s neighbors were upset about having this kind of an operation happening on a residential street, they can blame both Frank Chopp and Governor Gregoire, neither of whom took this issue seriously back in 2007 and 2008 when the law was being revised.

– Despite the accusations being thrown at the Pierce County deputies for how they treated a seriously wounded Mike Howard, and at the King County deputies who apparently ransacked Sarich’s residence after the shooting, the statements of both King County Sheriff Sgt. John Urquhart and King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg show that some folks in law enforcement do get it that Sarich and Howard are treated as criminals only because the laws are inadequate.

“By forcing this production to remain underground,” Mr. Satterberg said, “you increase the risk of violence for everybody and you disburse that violence to residential neighborhoods and put everybody at risk.”

This is a lesson that we need the legislature to learn – and learn quickly.

Once again, the Change.org website held an open forum for voting on which issues Americans want the Obama Administration to address. The results were announced and – once again – ending marijuana prohibition was one of the top issues voted on. In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper discovered the same thing when he agreed to respond to questions from the online community. He was expected to respond to these questions today.

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I’m getting word over email that the homeowner involved in this morning’s shooting in Kirkland is Steve Sarich. Sarich is a very prominent – but also very controversial – figure in the medical marijuana community. Last week, after a 38-year-old medical marijuana patient named Mike Howard was beaten to death during an alleged robbery attempt, Sarich sent the following email to both state legislators and the media:

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The King County Conservation District election is coming up this Tuesday. Kirk Prindle is a friend of HA and we hope that you can make it out to one of the seven voting locations and make your voice heard.

Last week’s winner was Doc Daneeka. It was HersheyPark in Hershey, PA.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

The Google Maps Street Views below look like typical small-town scenery, with a lot of open space and far from the hustle and bustle of urban America. But they’re not quite as rural as you’d think. Each of the intersections above are only a short bike ride from downtown Detroit. In fact, much of the old neighborhoods around downtown Detroit have simply disappeared, with no development to replace the bulldozed homes. New Detroit Mayor Dave Bing (yes, that Dave Bing), has a plan for fixing it:

Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural.

Near downtown, fruit trees and vegetable farms would replace neighborhoods that are an eerie landscape of empty buildings and vacant lots. Suburban commuters heading into the city center might pass through what looks like the countryside to get there. Surviving neighborhoods in the birthplace of the auto industry would become pockets in expanses of green.

This would be like Queen Anne or Capitol Hill becoming completely abandoned and turned into farmland again. Hard to fathom, but this is what happened to what was once one of the wealthiest cities in the United States in the early half of the 20th century.
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Wal-Mart fired a cancer patient in Michigan (who had been named Associate of the Year in 2008) after they discovered that he was authorized by his doctor to use marijuana. That occurred back in November. Wal-Mart is now even going so far as to try to challenge his eligibility for unemployment compensation.

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The bill to expand Washington’s medical marijuana law has passed the House after some late amendments were made to require tamper-proof authorizations (as a way to reduce fraud). After Senate re-approval, the bill will land on Governor Gregoire’s desk. The bill doesn’t address some of the major flaws in the medical marijuana law (such as full arrest protection), but it does make it easier for people in rural areas to get authorizations.

One thing that’s interesting about this legislation is that the Cannabis Defense Coalition (a group I work with – and that I can truly attest works on a small budget) actually hired a lobbyist to make the case for this bill. I think it caught a lot of us by surprise how much can really get accomplished when you have someone effective in the halls of Olympia fighting on your behalf.

UDPATE: More news on the legislation here.