One of the news stories I expect to be following closely in 2008 is the case of Marc Emery, the Canadian marijuana seed seller who faces an upcoming extradition hearing to decide whether he should be sent to the United States to face trial. The effort to extradite him has been led out of the US Attorney’s office right here in Seattle (originally by John McKay, and then by his replacement Jeff Sullivan) and will re-commence in a courtroom in Vancouver, BC on January 21.

As we’ve seen with the Ed Rosenthal case in the Bay Area, prosecuting outspoken drug law reform advocates has been a very high priority for the Bush Administration’s Justice Department. In that particular case, even after the presiding judge urged US Attorney Scott Schools to drop the case, they continued with their futile prosecution attempt, even as it was clear that Rosenthal would never be punished and the number of white-collar crimes being investigated around the country plummeted.

The fact that Emery is Canadian (and that the DEA has openly admitted that he’s being targeted for his political views as well as his business) makes this case extremely important up north. What he does is technically not legal in Canada, but the Canadian government has long felt that it has more important things to do than to try to break up a multi-million dollar industry that isn’t hurting anyone.

Writing in the National Post, Ontario attorney Karen Selick expresses her opposition to the extradition attempt in an open letter to Canadian Justice Minister Rob Nicholson:

Dear Mr. Nicholson: On Jan. 21, 2008 an extradition hearing will begin in Vancouver for Marc Emery, Canada’s pre-eminent activist for the legalization of marijuana. Marc has been charged in the U.S. with conspiring to manufacture and distribute marijuana, and conspiring to launder money. If convicted under U.S. law, he faces possible life imprisonment without parole.

Should Marc be extradited to the U.S.? The Canadian court will almost certainly say yes. It has little choice under the Extradition Act. Marc openly admits selling marijuana seeds over the internet to customers around the world, including the United States, for years. His conduct would have been grounds for criminal charges here, although Canadian authorities never chose to charge him. But that’s enough under the Act to make it mandatory for the judge to commit him for surrender to U.S. authorities.

That’s where you come in, Mr. Justice Minister. Once the court has ruled, the Extradition Act gives you discretion to refuse to surrender Marc if it “would be unjust or oppressive having regard to all the relevant circumstances.”

I’m obviously no expert on Canadian law, but if Selick is correct, there seems like a valid rationale for the Justice Minister to intervene. This could be one of the reasons why there was some discontent in the Western Washington US Attorney’s office over former DEA head Karen Tandy’s politicization of the case. Either way, Emery seems eager for a confrontation and feels destined to become a martyr.

I won’t copy and paste the remainder of Selick’s letter, but she makes one very important point. Emery has dutifully paid over half a million dollars in taxes from his business. He assisted the Canadian government when they needed to implement a medical marijuana program. But now they appear ready to turn their back on him solely because the United States can’t come to terms with the failure of our own marijuana prohibition (which we continue to try to impose on the rest of the world). How can the Canadian government profit and benefit from a man and his business for years, then allow for the United States to put him in jail for life without even a fight?

Pete Guither ridicules Markos Moulitsas for trying to make the case that Ron Paul is a racist.

Does this man sound like a racist to you?

I posted up at Reload about the recent story about the informant in Cowlitz County who tried to frame an innocent 21-year-old Kelso man for drug dealing.

I haven’t read Jonah Goldberg’s new book “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning,” and I probably never will. But I’m amazed that anyone even tried to make the argument he’s trying to make.

One of the main reasons why I started blogging a few years back was because I read Mein Kampf. As hard as it was to read a book that’s not just extremely racist but led to the deaths of people I’m related to, I felt like I had to wrap my head around how something like the Holocaust can happen. To try to compare the sentiments expressed in Mein Kampf to anything you hear on the American left today is a stretch of the imagination that I can’t comprehend. If Goldberg claims to have read Mein Kampf as part of researching his “thesis,” he’s either lying or crazy.

Dave Neiwert does a good job picking apart some basic errors, like pointing out that despite Goldberg’s claims that the Nazi’s were “socialists,” the first people sent by the Nazis to Dachau were actually Socialists and Communists. People who called themselves socialists back then were as close to real socialists as the people who today call themselves conservatives – but believe in starting war after war in the Middle East – are to real conservatives. But the whole book seems to be based upon this very basic error in understanding the history of Nazi Germany.

The Sadly No! crew actually have a copy of the book and have been posting some of the most ridiculous passages. His larger argument is that the desire by liberals and progressives to improve society through government is the direct path to fascism and relates back to the Nazi movement. Now while it’s certainly possible for left-leaning movements to become authoritarian, it’s not what’s happening in America right now, it’s not how fascism evolved in 1930s Germany, and one can really only reach the alternate conclusion if they believe that things like universal health care are more anti-liberty than torture. I think Brad may have located a major part of Goldberg’s mental block:

Giving out free food isn’t fascism. Look, Jonah, I’ve done some research into the matter and have determined that giving out free food is one of the least fascist things a government can do. Call this hyperbole if you will, but if the very worst thing the Nazis had ever done was to give people free food, they’d have probably gone down as the greatest government in history.

When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, his vision had nothing to do with economics. His vision was pure paranoia, where he blamed the “Jewish press” for weakening support for the war effort during World War I. He viewed the influence of immigrants as a direct threat to the nation. He also railed against pacifists, Communists, capitalists, the ruling class, ethnic minorities, and fellow soldiers who faked injuries to get out of the war. As Germany was subjugated by the victors of WWI in the post-war period, his paranoid outlook found an audience, but his message was never one of socialism, it was of nationalism. In Chapter V of Mein Kampf, he shared his thoughts on what happened during World War I:

After the very first news of victories, a certain section of the press, slowly, and in a way which at first was perhaps unrecognizable to many, began to pour a few drops of wormwood into the general enthusiasm. This was done beneath the mask of a certain benevolence and well-meaning, even of a certain solicitude. They had misgivings about an excess of exuberance in the celebration of the victories. They feared that in this form it was unworthy of so great a nation and hence inappropriate.

The notion that the press (which was of course run by Jews and treasonous Germans) was insufficiently patriotic during the war and had a bias towards pacifism and international institutions like the League of Nations was central to his outlook. It’s the polar opposite of what the American left stands for today, and it’s why comparisons to Ann Coulter and other extreme voices on the authoritarian right aren’t all that far-fetched. At the same time I started blogging back in 2004 and wrote that post, Jonah Goldberg wrote the following:

In the process of debating the merits of publishing, and now continually hyping, the Abu Ghraib photos, I keep hearing that it is contrary to the American journalistic tradition to let patriotism or concern about the negative effects of bad news interfere with coverage. I have no idea where this idea comes from.

You know where the idea comes from, Jonah? It comes from people who’ve actually taken the time to study and to try to understand the roots of fascism, rather than just attempting to draw nonsensical parallels between Hitler and the people who make fun of you on the internet.

From the General: Ron Paul supporters blame “Jewish Cabal” for anti-Semitism charges.

This is an Open Thread.

I’m hoping that Governor Gregoire doesn’t really believe that she will actually be stopping people from committing suicide by doing this:

Gov. Chris Gregoire is hoping to take the Aurora Bridge off the list of most popular spans for committing suicide, by putting $1.4 million in her supplemental budget proposal to begin building an 8-foot suicide-prevention fence on the historic landmark.

…

“Installation of an 8-foot suicide-prevention fence with illumination on the Aurora Avenue Bridge will help make the bridge safer and can help prevent suicides,” the governor said in budget documents released Tuesday.

Considering that the Aurora Bridge jumpers can land on buildings, I see some justification for this expenditure, but you have be even crazier than Lou Guzzo to believe that this is something that will save people from killing themselves.

Sometimes, we really don’t have our heads screwed on straight:

Jackie Brooks has smoked for a half-century and figures she consumes a pack a day inside her Auburn apartment.

The 74-year-old doesn’t want to quit and says she has a right to smoke in her own home.

Not anymore. The King County Housing Authority is banning smoking in all units at Plaza 17, the 70-unit apartment complex where Brooks has lived for 14 years.

Back when I was on the losing end of the I-901 fight, I at least had some acknowledgement that there were some legitimate points to be made for restricting smoking in public. Not so much because it’s cancerous, but because of its more immediate health effects. People who have asthma or some other respiratory problem shouldn’t have to be surrounded by cigarette smoke against their wishes when the health effects are clear and undeniable. Banning this activity in enclosed public places is just common sense. It obviously gets murkier when you’re talking about restaurants and bars as these are places that people can essentially choose not to go to, and I didn’t think it was the place for the state to tell business owners what environment they should provide. The one counter-argument that I found somewhat compelling was that certain classes of workers (servers, musicians) should be protected by the state, but did that require a ban which didn’t even allow for local municipalities to license certain places as exceptions? I still don’t think so.

But those are separate arguments from this one. Banning smoking in private residences just goes way too far.

The reality behind a lot of these bans is that they really are attempts to enforce a rigid public health morality. I’ve heard enough interesting propaganda on the effects of currently illegal drugs to be very skeptical of the current Surgeon General when he says that there’s no risk-free level of second-hand smoke (which is cited by the Times article as the KCHA’s reasoning for the ban). That’s silly. Obviously, there’s varying risk relative to exposure and below a certain level of exposure, you’re not at risk.

We see the same thing with the reports of marijuana smoke having more toxins and carcinogens than tobacco, but studies meant to demonstrate an actual link between marijuana smoking and lung cancer find no correlation. This is because, as Jacob Sullum writes, the dose makes the poison. Just being able to smell cigarette smoke through an open window is obviously not at a dangerous level. Is it annoying? Perhaps. But you’re not gonna get cancer from it and it’s not going to trigger any other health problems. The end of the article makes it fairly obvious what’s driving this:

Alice Bruce, 71, Brooks’ neighbor across the hall for a dozen years, has heart problems and is glad the authority is banning smoking in her building. She believes years of exposure to secondhand smoke from family members contributed to her cardiac arrest more than a decade ago, and she’s still concerned about secondhand smoke.

“I’ll be sorry to see her go,” Bruce said of her neighbor. “I think the world of Jackie. I still do. I just don’t agree with her smoking because of the experiences I had with my own family and smoking.”

I’m in no position to know whether Bruce is correct in her belief that second-hand smoke has led to her health problems, but even by her own words, that’s not the reason she supports the ban. She “just [doesn’t] agree with her smoking”. It has nothing to do with her own health. Someone smoking in the apartment across the hall is obviously not directly affecting her. This is a case where people are successfully goading a government agency to impose a particular public health morality. And even though forcing these old smokers out of their homes may be popular, it’s still the wrong thing to do.

I just gave this guy some cash:

Greenwald has more on what happened:

From the beginning, there was pure hostility from numerous Beltway crevices towards Dodd’s stance. The Beltway media largely ignored it except to mock it and question its authenticity with their standard lip-curling, jaded pettiness. The very day that Dodd announced his hold, Harry Reid made clear that he was hostile to it, and strongly insinuated that he would not honor it. That led to an outburst of anger directed towards Reid’s office which caused them — falsely as it turns out — to spend weeks issuing public and private assurances that Reid would treat Dodd’s hold the same way he treats other holds.

More significantly still, the leading presidential candidates — particularly Clinton and Obama — originally said nothing about any of these matters. That led to a separate joint effort from blogs and their readers, along with MoveOn, to demand that the Clinton and Obama campaigns issue a statement vowing to support Dodd’s stance. When the issued statements were ambiguous and seemingly noncommittal, a further controversy erupted, and in response, the Obama campaign (though never the Clinton campaign) clarified that they intended to express categorical and unconditional support for Dodd’s filibuster.

Without question, it was those efforts, spontaneously created and driven by blogs and their readers, which led directly to the principled stand Chris Dodd took yesterday in defense of the rule of law. This was not a process whereby some Beltway politician announced a campaign and then citizens fell into line behind it. The opposite occurred. The very idea for the “hold” originated among a few citizens, was almost immediately exploded into a virtual movement by tens of thousands of people, and was then made into a reality by a single political figure, Chris Dodd, responding to that passion by taking the lead on it.

It’s probably too late for Dodd to make a serious run at the nomination right now, but whoever wins it would be very smart to pick this guy as a running mate. The collaboration between our government and the telecoms in an effort to spy on us (which began before 9/11) in violation of federal law is the stuff of third-world dictatorships, not representative democracies. And the lengths that some Democrats have gone to avoid having to deal with this obvious problem demonstrates the power of special interests and the hold they have over both politicians and the media.

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is still unsolved. This is an open thread…

A few links to some issues related to criminal justice…

– At 7PM this evening, our friends at Washblog are having an online discussion about Washington State’s 3-strikes law which will include family members of those affected by the law.

– This past weekend was the 2007 International Drug Policy Reform Conference in New Orleans. One of my favorite bloggers, Pete Guither, blogged throughout the conference, including the session led by 45th District State Representative Roger Goodman, who is one of the most knowledgeable elected officials in the nation on drug policy.

– Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that sentencing guidelines that established a 100:1 imbalance between crack and powder cocaine penalties can be overruled by judges at their discretion. The Sentencing Law and Policy blog has some background here and here.

– Finally, Radley Balko has a tremendous post reflecting on the time he’s spent in Mississippi working on the Cory Maye case. Maye was a young man with no criminal record and a young daughter in rural Mississippi whose house was accidentally raided by cops who weren’t aware that his apartment was a separate unit from the one they were looking for (where an actual drug dealer was living). Believing he was being robbed (the raid was conducted at night), Maye fired on the intruder, killing a very well-respected officer by the name of Ron Jones. He wound up on death row before Balko discovered the case and led an effort to have his death sentence repealed (although Maye is still in jail serving a life sentence). The full compendium of posts on Cory Maye are here.

The Justice Policy Institute released a report [PDF] today on the racial disparities in drug law enforcement, and their findings are some of the most comprehensive I’ve seen on this subject. Here’s the report introduction:

Over the course of the last 35 years, the rate at which the U.S. places its citizens in jails and prisons has risen dramatically. For the first 70 years of the twentieth century, U.S. incarceration rates remained relatively stable at a rate of about 100 per 100,000 citizens. Since 1970, the U.S. has experienced a large and rapid increase in the rate at which people are housed in federal and state correctional facilities. Currently, the U.S. incarceration rate is 491 per 100,000.1

The exceptional growth in the prison population has been driven in large part by the rate at which individuals are incarcerated for drug offenses.2 Between 1995 and 2003, the number of people in state and federal prisons incarcerated for drug offenses increased by 21 percent, from 280,182 to 337,872.3 From 1996 to 2002, the number of those in jail for drug offenses increased by approximately 47 percent, from 111,545 to 164,372.4 This does not include people imprisoned for other offenses where drugs, the drug trade, or other drug activities were a feature of the offense.

The increase in incarceration of drug offenders translates directly to an increase in prison expenditures. The American Correctional Association estimates that, in 2005, the average cost of incarcerating one person for one day was approximately $67.55. The cost of incarcerating drug offenders in state or federal prisons amounts to a staggering eight billion dollars per year.5

There is little evidence to suggest that high rates of incarceration affect drug use rates or deter drug users. Researchers have previously found that decreases in crime in the 1990s were not attributable to an increase in the number of prisons or the increase in the incarceration rate.6 A Justice Policy Institute (JPI) study further substantiated these findings by investigating the relationship of incarceration to the rate of drug use in states. In fact, when observed over a three-year period, states with high incarceration rates tended to have higher rates of drug use.7

The growing rate of incarceration for drug offenses is not borne equally by all members of society. African Americans are disproportionately incarcerated for drug offenses in the U.S., though they use and sell drugs at similar rates to whites.8 As of 2003, twice as many African Americans as whites were incarcerated for drug offenses in state prisons in the U.S.9 African Americans made up 13 percent of the total U.S. population, but accounted for 53 percent of sentenced drug offenders in state prisons in 2003.10

The report uses data from 2002 from across the entire United States and discovers that a staggering 97% of large-population counties in this country have racial disparities in drug law enforcement, despite the fact that the evidence collected shows no disparity between the races when it comes to involvement with drugs. The report specifically discusses the work done by UW Professor Katherine Beckett:

A recent in-depth analysis of drug enforcement patterns in Seattle57 indicates that African Americans are disproportionately arrested for drug delivery offenses, and that these disproportions are not due to any extraordinary characteristics of those African American arrestees, the behaviors they engaged in, or the communities in which they were arrested. In other words, although African Americans in Seattle were not selling drugs at a higher rate than whites, they were targeted more frequently for drug arrests. Given the racial disparities in drug enforcement practice highlighted in this in-depth Seattle study, it is not surprising that the drug imprisonment rate in King County, WA, was 23 times higher for African Americans (465 per 100,000) than it was for whites (20 per 100,000) in 2002.

What’s even more alarming than the fact that an African American in this county is 23 times more likely to go to jail for a drug crime than a white person (despite similar numbers of people violating these laws) is that King County is only the 49th worst large county in the United States. The grim statistics are in this Excel spreadsheet.

About two months ago, I was at the Northgate Park & Ride helping a UW transfer student from Sydney figure out which bus to take back to the University. She’d just arrived in the U.S. that morning and was buying basic supplies at Target. I recognized her accent and knew she was an Aussie right away. She seemed surprised that people she’d talked to earlier in the day thought she was English. I just replied “Americans are stupid.” She says, “You’re the second person to say that so far.” If what’s happening in Olympia isn’t enough proof, here’s more:

UPDATE: My god, people! Get a grip on yourselves. When I said “Americans are stupid” to her, it was said in a joking fashion to someone who was overwhelmed by being in this great country for the first time. The notable thing was that I wasn’t the first person to say that to her.

The bottom line is that Americans ARE pretty stupid (arguably the better world is ignorant) when it comes to knowing about the rest of the world. Survey are survey confirms this. The numbers are terrifying:

Take Iraq, for example. Despite nearly constant news coverage since the war there began in 2003, 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 failed to correctly locate the country on a map of the Middle East. Seventy percent could not find Iran or Israel.

Nine in ten couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map of Asia.

And 54 percent were unaware that Sudan is a country in Africa.

I’m reasonably certain that commenter Puddybud could find Afghanistan on a map of Asia. That means that he’s arguably more knowledgeable about the world than 90% of young adults. If that doesn’t send chills down your spine about what’s going on, nothing will.

TIME correspondent Joe Klein has once again humiliated himself while trying to report on what’s happening with the FISA bills and the attempts by civil libertarians to ensure that the government gets warrants before listening in on domestic phone calls or other forms of communication. As Glenn Greenwald and others have continually pointed out when it comes to Klein, he often allows his particular bias against those who find it valuable to defend civil liberties to seriously cloud his ability to ascertain the facts on these topics.

Greenwald’s latest two posts are here and here, while Klein continues to make lame excuses for his error, saying things like “I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right” (which would be a good excuse if it wasn’t easily verifiable by simply reading the Democrats’ bill to determine that his source was lying to him). Greenwald is also interested in why TIME’s editors seem fairly unconcerned that someone who has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about on this subject – and continues to take the word of Congressional Republicans and their staff at face value even though he’s allegedly the “liberal” columnist – is still getting this half-assed nonsense published in one of America’s most prominent magazines. Count me in that category as well. Watching Joe Klein devolve from being a fairly balanced writer years ago when I was a TIME subscriber to the odd Lieberman-ish hack he’s become today has been pretty sad.

Ryan Singel at Wired has even more.