Via Balloon Juice. Amazing.

As David Horowitz and his legions of victim-card-playing chickenhawks at various American universities bitch and moan about how no one cares how often they have nightmares about terrorists, here’s a roundup of recent news reports from around the globe:

Gaza

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the U.S. is planning to send senior officials to examine Israel’s complaints that the smuggling of arms, equipment and persons from Egypt into the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip, continues.

Rice said that the smuggling activities are a grave concern and reiterated what she told her Egyptian counterpart Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit two weeks ago about the need to do more, and “urgently.”

The Bush administration is concerned about the continued flow of arms into Gaza and is under constant pressure from Israel and its friends in Congress, calling on the administration to do more to convince Egypt to prevent the smuggling.

At least in public, Egypt is refusing to accept responsibility for the smuggling. American officials who will visit the area will try to determine the goings-on on both sides of the border.

Lebanon

Lebanese troops opened fire Thursday on Israeli warplanes flying low over southern Lebanon, but no hits were reported, Lebanese officials said.

Soldiers opened up with machine guns and light anti-aircraft weapons mounted on armored vehicles at two planes that flew by just east of Marjayoun town near the border at midmorning, a Lebanese security official said.

An army statement issued later in the day said “the Lebanese army’s ground antiaircraft guns confronted the hostile Israeli aircraft during its violation of Lebanese airspace over the regions of Marjayoun and Bint Jbeil, forcing it to leave over the town of Alma Chaab in the direction of the occupied lands.”

Lebanon, like most Arab countries, does not recognize the State of Israel.

Syria

Syria has razed a suspected nuclear reactor building that was bombed by Israeli aircraft, according to nuclear experts.

Using commercial satellite images, the Institute for Science and International Security said there were signs of a hasty clean-up of the site that was attacked last month.

“Dismantling and removing the building at such a rapid pace dramatically complicates any inspection of the facilities and suggests that Syria may be trying to hide what was there,” ISIS said on its website.

Turkey

Turkey today demanded the extradition of all Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq as its air force carried out further strikes on militant hideouts in the area.

The call by the Turkish deputy prime minister, Cemil Cicek, came after a meeting with the Iraqi defence minister in an attempt to defuse the rising conflict over the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) fighters, who are operating from bases in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

Iraq

The Iraqi government remains determined to expel the Blackwater USA security company and is searching for legal remedies to overturn an American-imposed decree that exempts all foreign bodyguards from prosecution under local laws, officials said Wednesday.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government accepted the findings of an Iraqi investigative committee that determined Blackwater guards, without provocation, killed 17 Iraqis last month in Nisoor Square in western Baghdad.

Iraqi investigators declared that Blackwater should be expelled and $8 million should be paid as compensation for each victim. The officials said the Cabinet decided Tuesday to establish a committee to find ways to repeal a 2004 directive issued by L. Paul Bremer, chief of the former U.S. occupation government in Iraq. The order placed private security companies outside Iraqi law.

Saudi Arabia

Oil roared past $90, setting a record Thursday, as tight inventories and fresh signs that OPEC would shrug off calls for additional oil from big consumer nations sent prices up nearly 4%.

U.S. crude settled up $3.36 at $90.46 a barrel after striking an intraday record of $90.60. The rise added to Wednesday’s gain of nearly $2.

Energy officials from OPEC nations Venezuela and Algeria said the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries would not boost output when it meets informally in Saudi Arabia next month.

Iran

THE big chill between the US and Iran has deepened, with the White House imposing its toughest sanctions in almost three decades on the rogue nation amid concerns the countries are headed for war.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have slapped sweeping new financial penalties on Iran in a bid to force it to stop enriching uranium and curb its terrorist activities.

However some US allies are concerned the White House is starting to build a case for war against Iran.

Critics see parallels in the rhetoric the Bush Administration is using against Iran with comments it made about Iraq in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Baghdad.

Russia

Tensions between Russia and the West over sanctions against Iran will be laid bare today as President Vladimir Putin attends a summit with EU leaders in Portugal.

The Russian leader described supporters of tough policies as “mad people wielding razor blades” after the US imposed economic sanctions on the Islamic republic yesterday in an attempt to curb its nuclear programme.

Mr Putin, who is at the summit to discuss disputed trade issues with the EU, is expected to make further comments on Iran this afternoon after a senior American diplomat suggested that Russia was “aiding and abetting” the Iranian military.

Nicholas Burns, US Assistant Secretary of State, said that Russia should stop selling weapons to Iran, and China should stop investing in the Middle Eastern state. “They’re now the number one trade partner with Iran,” he told the BBC. “It’s very difficult for countries to say we’re striking out on our own when they’ve got their own policies on the military side, aiding and abetting the Iraninan government in strengthening its own military.”

Pakistan

A suicide bomber has attacked a truck carrying troops in Pakistan, killing at least 20 people and wounding 34.

The blast happened in Mingora, the main town in the north-western district of Swat where 2,500 paramilitary troops were deployed this week to fight supporters of a militant cleric.

The blast set off an explosion of ammunition carried inside a military truck, triggering bullet fire.

Most of the casualties were soldiers, but some bystanders were also hit. Some nearby shops, restaurants and cars were damaged.

Afghanistan

Gordon Brown yesterday amplified Nato calls for more combat troops in Afghanistan to spread a burden currently being borne by UK, US and Canadian forces, but the chief of defence staff warned that the country’s problems could only be resolved by political, not military, means.

Echoing concerns expressed by General Dan McNeill, commander of the Nato-led international force in the country, the prime minister called for greater “burden-sharing” in Afghanistan. Speaking after talks in London with President Hamid Karzai, he added: “We are all determined that Afghanistan should never become a failed state again, and to support the democracy that’s been created in that country.”

United States

With Democrats and Republicans on the hill sparring over the costs and lengths of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Adm. Michael Mullen said that the current levels on defense spending—about 4 percent of the GNP—will not likely be enough to meet the U.S. military’s future needs.

He noted that the current level of defense spending–in percentage of the GNP– is less than even during the Gulf War. The Bush administration has requested $481.7 billion for the defense budget in fiscal 2008 and over $190 billion more to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There’s definitely a lot to be scared about in this world. No one is arguing that. Conflicts across the Middle East are getting worse right now and many of them truly ring the alarm bells. But while fear is a perfectly natural and healthy human emotion, it’s a pretty shitty mechanism for making sound decisions. When fear becomes an obstacle to using a rational approach to these problems, we end up only advocating solutions that do nothing more than compound the problems that make us scared in the first place. This is why we’ve ended up where we’re at in the Middle East. Out of fear, we convinced ourselves that Saddam Hussein was a much greater threat to us and his neighbors than he really was. We convinced ourselves that the Islamic radicalism that led to 9/11 is a much larger movement than it really was. Today, we still convince ourselves that if we leave Iraq, the “terrorists” will rejoice and follow us back home. And we continue to fear that merely talking to Iran and Syria makes us weak, even as it remains one of the key prerequisites for allowing us to fix the mess we’ve created on their doorstep. All of these fears are irrational, and all of them hinder our efforts to bring freedom and stability to the region.

During the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon used what he referred to as the “Madman theory”:

At the core of Nixon’s notions was a diplomacy-supporting stratagem he called the Madman Theory, or, as he and Bob Haldeman described it, “the principle of the threat of excessive force.” Nixon was convinced that his power would be enhanced if his opponents thought he might use excessive force, even nuclear force. That, coupled with his reputation for ruthlessness, he believed, would suggest that he was dangerously unpredictable. The Madman Theory undergirded not only his policy toward North Vietnam but also toward other adversaries, including the Soviet Union.

Nixon’s theory never actually worked to achieve its intended goals – to bring a quick end to the Vietnam War and to preserve the South Vietnamese government. The strategy was based upon the belief that using fear would change the Soviet outlook and get them to act in ways they otherwise would not. But it failed. The problem with the Madman Theory is that it requires your adversary to be someone who allows fear to alter their worldview and keep them from acting rationally. And the Soviet government at that time did not allow that to happen.

Today, we have a growing conflict with Iran where both sides are trying out Nixon’s Madman Theory. The Bush Administration continues to threaten military action against a country of 65 million people, and the Iranian President tries his best to play the part of the unpredictable nutjob who would nuke Israel to bring about the apocalypse (even though he doesn’t even have the power to do that). Both sides think they can get what they want by being seen as a threat. The question is which side will allow the fear from the other side to force them into a stupid decision.

If David Horowitz gets what he wants out of his silly self-promotion spectacle this week, and the Bush Administration listens to people like Bill Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, the losers in this pointless stare-down will be us.

I’m sure more will be written later about Dino Rossi’s announcement, but at Effin Unsound, I thought this was a good opportunity to put together a compilation of his idea man’s greatest hits.

COMPLETELY UNRELATED UPDATE: The Birds Eye View Contests are back…

Canadian Marc Emery is facing extradition to the United States for running a mail-order marijuana seed business. If extradited, he could spend the rest of his life in prison here, even though what he’s charged with is only a fine in Canada. The effort to extradite him has been led out of Seattle’s US Attorneys office previously run by John McKay. What’s making this case very interesting is that Emery isn’t a dummy, a slacker, or even a remotely threatening human being, and this fact is getting a lot of attention. He started his first business at his parents’ home at the age of 14 in London, Ontario and has long been a champion of entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency. He has used this case to highlight the incredible absurdity of the laws that are being used by the Bush Administration and the DEA to go after him, and sees himself as a martyr representing a country where 55% of the citizens support the legalization of marijuana, even as their current government slavishly obeys the Bush Administration on drug issues.

Last night on CBC, a documentary on Emery called “The Prince of Pot” was aired and it’s already available in its entirety on YouTube. You can see each of the 5 parts here (and you may want to be somewhat careful watching if you’re at work).

This was delayed for about a week due to my house situation, but it’s finally up. I give you the first edition of the Crackpiper Chronicles. I’m not sure if anyone will ever give us as much to laugh at as our old friend Marvin, but the Crackpiper has been balls out recently. If you have any comments or exchanges that belong in part 2, feel free to drop me a mail.

Well, thanks to the unbelieveably crappy housing market, my wife and I are no longer moving to Kent, unless we win the lottery in the next 10 days and can afford two mortgages and a new car. I will spare everyone the long and ugly details of what actually happened, but this article has some clues.

On the bright side, I will finally have some more time to blog again.

Just a quick note to Lou Guzzo. Lou, if you want us to take you seriously when you claim that Al Gore’s collective works on global warming “constitute the worst collection of misjudgments and outright lies the world has witnessed in a long time”, you might not want to also claim that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini won the Nobel Peace Prize in the next paragraph.

Via Slog, Newsweek reports on a very bizarre incident in Iraq:

The colonel was furious. “Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers.” He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV. His account was confirmed by the head of another private security company.

Via Atrios, the New York Post reports:

October 10, 2007 — ODDEST couple of the decade: lifelong Democrat Andrew Stein and arch-conservative cutie Ann Coulter. The former city council president (when there was such a title) first took Coulter – author of “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans” – to the black-tie Lincoln Center Film Society gala two weeks ago, where they turned heads. More recently, they were at Soho House “in passionate liplock,” according to a witness. Stein told Page Six: “She’s attacked a lot of my friends, but what can I say, opposites attract!”

For some reason, it reminded me of this:

It’s amazing how the narrative that Rudy Giuliani is a 9/11 hero stays alive even as New York’s former mayor gets loudly booed at Yankees Stadium. Dave from Queens has more.

This is an open thread.

From San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proclaimed the nation’s war on drugs a total failure and insisted the crime rate would go down if the government spent money on treatment as opposed to jailing people with drug problems.

“If you want to get serious, if you want to reduce crime by 70% in this country overnight, end this war on drugs,” he told reporters at City Hall on Thursday. “You want to get serious, seriously serious about crime and violence end this war on drugs.”

…

In a ten-minute tirade about the drug war’s failure, Newsom told reporters that most politicians – including those in his own party – just don’t have the guts to admit the obvious.

“It’s laughable that anyone could look at themselves with a straight face and say ‘oh,we’re really succeeding.’ I mean it’s comedy. And as I say, shame on my party, the democratic party, because they don’t have the courage of their private thoughts, because we don’t want to appear weak on this topic,” Newsom said.

Alcohol prohibition ended when mayors like New York’s Fiorello LaGuardia spoke out about how it was nothing more than a war on minority communities. Drug prohibition will end the same way, as mayors from San Francisco to Newark are all starting to say the same thing.

David Guard has a recap of the incarceration hearing from Thursday.

[Via Pete Guither]

Thursday morning, Virginia Senator Jim Webb, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, and New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney are holding a hearing to discuss our country’s incarceration crisis.

The United States has experienced a sharp increase in its prison population in the past thirty years. From the 1920s to the mid-1970s, the incarceration rate in the United States remained steady at approximately 110 prisoners per 100,000 people. Today, the incarceration rate is 737 inmates per 100,000 residents, comprising 2.1 million persons in federal, state, and local prisons. The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population but now has 25 percent of its prisoners. There are approximately 5 million Americans under the supervision of the correctional system, including parole, probation, and other community supervision sanctions.

With such a significant number of the population behind bars, expenditures associated with the prison system have skyrocketed. According to the Urban Institute, “the social and economic costs to the nation are enormous.” With 2.25 million people incarcerated in approximately five thousand prisons and jails, the combined expenditures of local governments, state governments, and the federal government for law enforcement and corrections personnel totals over $200 billion.

The JEC will examine why the United States has such a disproportionate share of the world’s prison population, as well as ways to address this issue that responsibly balance public safety and the high social and economic costs of imprisonment.

One of the witnesses will be Dr. Glenn Loury, an Economics and Social Sciences Professor from Brown University, who recently wrote about the forces behind this trend.

[Nod to David Borden at the Speakeasy]

Between helping a friend move on Sunday and playing goalie in my co-rec soccer game last night, I’ve been doing a lot of standing in the rain recently. And that can only mean one thing. Summer is over and it’s time for the baseball playoffs. Here’s some history behind the four playoff matchups:

National League

Chicago Cubs vs. Arizona Diamondbacks

The Cubs were formed in 1870 as the Chicago White Stockings. Also in 1870, the newly named town of Phoenix purchased a 320 acre lot of land that eventually became the city’s business downtown. The last time the Cubs won the World Series, in 1908, the population of Phoenix was around 10,000. In 1915, the Cubs’ new home, Wrigley Field could hold 18,000 spectators. Today it seats 41,000, much fewer than the population of Phoenix, which thanks to the invention of air conditioning, has 1.5 million people, and its own team.

Philadelphia Phillies vs. Colorado Rockies

The Phillies were formed in 1883 and were originally called the Quakers. At the same time in Denver, a con-artist named “Soapy” Smith was able to corrupt officials in the quickly growing capital of the new state of Colorado with the money he made from his infamous soap scam. When the Phillies won their only ever World Series in 1980, the Colorado Rockies were still a hockey team. The Phillies won the NL East Division title this year for the first second time since 1983, the year after the old Colorado Rockies moved to New Jersey and became the Devils, and 10 years before the baseball Rockies were born.

American League

Boston Red Sox vs. LA Angels of Anaheim

The Red Sox were founded at the beginning of the American League in 1901 as the Boston Americans. At that time, Anaheim was a small farming community. In 1920, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees, allegedly to finance a Broadway play. This action would curse the team for 84 years until they won the World Series in 2004. In 1924, the Ku Klax Klan secretly won 4 of the 5 seats on the city of Anaheim’s Board of Trustees. This action cursed the city of Anaheim for 78 years until 2002, when the Angels won their first World Series. The following year, a Mexican-American named Arte Moreno bought the Angels, changed the name to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, and began trying to market the team to Hispanic fans. Since that bit of beautiful karma, even Anaheim’s NHL team has been good.

New York Yankees vs. Cleveland Indians

The Yankees and the Indians were both founded at the beginning of the American League in 1901. The Yankees were originally the Baltimore Orioles for two years before the owners were able to move the team to New York. There they were first called the Highlanders because their home field was on a hill. They didn’t become the Yankees until moving to the Polo Grounds in 1913. The Indians also went through a number of name changes. They started as the Cleveland Blues in 1901, but became the Bronchos (1902), the Naps (1903), the Molly McGuires (1909), and finally the Indians in 1911 after the city was allowed to vote on a name. Since then, the success of the Yankees and the Indians baseball teams has pretty much paralleled the fortunes of Yankees and Indians in this country as a whole.

The criminal case out of Louisiana commonly known as the “Jena 6” has now become a major news story highlighting the disparities in our criminal justice system. The heart of the case involves 6 black teenagers who were charged with attempted murder after they allegedly assaulted a white teenager last December, while white students arrested in similar incidents were given much more lenient treatment.

The broader time line behind this case started earlier last fall when a black student at Jena High School, a predominantly white school in central Louisiana, asked the principal during an assembly if he and his friends could sit underneath a particular tree where white students usually sat. The principal said that it was fine, but the following morning, several nooses were found hanging from the tree. The white students behind that act were disciplined and sent off to an alternative school for a month, but over the next several months, racial tensions at the school boiled over, and there were a number of racially motivated fights and other incidents, including an arson at the school.

On December 4, 2006, a white student named Justin Barker was assaulted by a group of black students. Barker was taken to the hospital and released the same day. The police then arrested six black students and District Attorney J. Reed Walters charged five of them with attempted second-degree murder. The youngest of those charged as an adult was Mychal Bell, a 16-year-old who an adult witness says was not directly involved with the beating, but who already had a number of previous juvenile offenses on his record.

Bell’s case went to trial first, and while the charges against him were lowered to aggravated second-degree battery, an all-white jury convicted him, somehow agreeing with the prosecutors that Bell’s tennis shoes should have been considered a “deadly weapon.” Bell’s public defender, a black man by the name of Blane Williams, did little more than show up at the courthouse. He didn’t challenge the composition of the jury pool and he called no witnesses on his client’s behalf. For those who follow trials like this, especially in the southern United States, this isn’t terribly uncommon behavior for a public defender.

On September 14, a Louisiana Appeals Court overturned Bell’s conviction on the basis that he shouldn’t have been tried as an adult. Two other Jena defendents have since had their charges lowered from attempted murder to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy, but since they were 17 will still be charged as adults. Last week, on the day that Bell was originally supposed to be sentenced, tens of thousands of people descended on Jena to protest what was happening (see the Wikipedia link for referenced articles on the background).

As someone who has made these kinds of racial disparities in law enforcement a focus of my blogging, I’m happy to see this topic being discussed more in the media, but I also have to admit that I was puzzled as to why this particular incident is the one that has made such a widespread impact. So many other incidents have occurred in recent years that have demonstrated how corrupt and racist our justice system can be. Many of them have been in the news, but none of them have drawn the kinds of crowds that showed up in Jena last week. Just to name a few:

– In Tulia, Texas in 2000, a single police officer by the name of Tom Coleman, arrested over 10% of the town’s African American population on what turned out to be completely fabricated drug charges. Many of the defendants ended up getting long prison sentences before the mounting evidence of the officer’s past transgressions was finally allowed to be presented and the convictions were thrown out.

– In Hearne, Texas, also in 2000, a drug task force arrested 15% of the town’s young black male population on the word of a confidential informant who later recanted his testimony. To give you an idea of how bad the justice system can be in rural Texas, seven of the completely innocent people actually plead guilty. Thankfully, this and the Tulia incident led to reforms in drug task forces.

– In Prentice, Mississippi in 2001, a 21-year-old black man with no criminal record named Cory Maye was asleep in his duplex with his daughter when he heard people breaking into his home. The intruders were actually drug task force cops who mistakenly raided his unit in the duplex. As he was jarred awake, Maye fired on one of them, killing an officer by the name of Ron Jones. He was tried, convicted, and sent to death row, despite the fact that the evidence overwhelmingly backed up Maye’s assertion that he didn’t know Jones was a cop. His death sentence has since been overturned.

– In Georgia in 2006, a 17-year-old named Genarlow Wilson was given a 10-year prison sentence for engaging in oral sex with a 15-year-old. The prosecution relied on a loophole in Georgia law that could be used against thousands of Georgia teenagers, but prosecutors have still fought tooth and nail to keep Wilson behind bars rather than lobbying to close the loophole.

– In Texas, a man named Tyrone Brown had served 17 years of a life sentence given to him for testing positive for marijuana while on probation for a $2 robbery. The judge who sentenced him gave a much lighter sentence to a white man who actually killed someone while on probation. Brown was recently given a conditional pardon by Texas Governor Rick Perry.

– In Atlanta in 2006, a 92-year-old (some reports have said 88-year-old) woman named Kathryn Johnston, was shot and killed in her own home in a predominantly black neighborhood by narcotics officers who raided her home based upon the word of an unreliable source who said he bought cocaine there. The officers later tried to get another informant to lie for them to cover up the fact that they didn’t follow procedures.

Some of these cases have gotten some attention. The Tulia case is being made into a movie next year with Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry. The Maye case became well known in the blogosphere after it was publicized by blogger Radley Balko. Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy also provided pro bono counsel for Maye. Balko originally discovered the case as he was doing research for his Overkill white paper, which documents numerous other cases like what happened to Maye and Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta. Public pressure has certainly played roles in obtaining justice for both Genarlow Wilson and Tyrone Brown. But so far, nothing has generated the kind of overwhelming response that Jena has.

While I’m certainly happy to see stories like these starting to come out of the dark, I was initially at a loss to explain why this particular case has generated such a tipping-point reaction that the other cases did not. For one, the case is much more nuanced than some of the other cases we’ve seen. The actual crime that occurred is much more indefensible for those who actually committed it and is certain to generate an ugly backlash from the usual suspects. But even if Barker called his attackers the ugliest racial epithets, the response was obviously unjustified. The way Bell was tried and convicted was a disgrace, but this is far from the only time a likely innocent young black man has been convicted and sent to jail with a public defender sleeping at his side (and after convincing him to take whatever kind of deal he could get from prosecutors).

Obviously, I don’t mean to downplay it. What happened in Jena is worthy of our outrage and I hope it’s the spark that compels us to start dealing with the enormous problems we have with our prison system – and our eagerness to send way more of our citizens to jail than any other country. But I was truly clueless as to why what happened there provoked such a huge reaction compared to other incidents. I’ve realized that I just don’t quite grasp the powerful effect that evoking the horrific history of lynching has on African-Americans. The fact that all of this started with nooses hanging from a tree far outweighs the very different ways in which injustices against the black community are carried out today. And it brings many people back to a time when many thought that we would no longer have nooses hanging from trees (and pick-up trucks) in the 21st century.

Hopefully Goldy will forgive me for two pot-related posts in the past 24-hours, but Paul Kiel has the latest silliness from the Duke Cunningham corruption scandal:

In a filing today, prosecutors allege that John Michael, who’s been indicted for laundering Cunningham’s bribes and lying to investigators, hid incriminating documents by keeping them with what prosecutors call “a stash of personal entertainment materials and paraphernalia.” You can read the filing here.

The prosecutors don’t identify exactly what those items are, but note that “Michael has expressed extreme embarrassment” over them and that “their nature objectively supports his perspective” (read: he has good reason to be embarrassed). They say that they’ll identify the materials at a court hearing if need be.

Prosecutors want to introduce evidence of Michael’s embarrassing “stash,” in order to prove that he knew the Cunningham documents were, in their own way, as embarrassing. That he kept documentation of Cunningham’s sketchy mortgage details in a place where he also stored “materials he did not want to anyone else to learn about” proves, they write, that he knew he was up to no good.

It’s important to remember that Duke Cunningham’s son went to jail for this:

Randall Todd Cunningham was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in federal prison yesterday for marijuana smuggling, after his father, the Republican congressman from Escondido, made a tearful plea for leniency.

The term was half the mandated five years and was supported by the prosecutor. In imposing sentence, Judge Reginald C. Lindsay noted that the 29-year-old Cunningham had no prior convictions and had provided information that led to the arrests of higher-ups in the smuggling operation.

It was the first time Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham had come to the court in Massachusetts since his son and several others were charged with smuggling 400 pounds of marijuana from the San Diego area to Lawrence Airport on Jan. 17, 1997.

Of course, Duke Cunningham has always been a staunch drug warrior:

Crucial to winning the war on drugs are education and community campaigns. So on Thursday, my House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Youth and Families will team up with Government Reform Oversight to send a strong message to Americans: Drugs kill. We will hear from health and community experts on what can be done to reverse the drug crisis. And we will also examine ways to marshal community leadership and resources to start local anti-drug coalitions.

Finally, I believe we must revive in word and deed the simple phrase, “Just Say No,” coined by Nancy Reagan in the 1980s. While cynical elites once joked about its effectiveness, I believe it played a significant role in reducing drug use.

That editorial appeared a few months before his son was arrested.

UPDATE: In comments, RonK doubts that the “stash” is drug-related. He could certainly be right, as “paraphernalia” could refer to items of an embarrassing sexual nature as well. I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough as the trial progresses.