Every 38 seconds in this country, someone is arrested for a marijuana offense. In 2006, 738,915 Americans were charged with marijuana possession only.

In past years, roughly 30 percent of those arrested were age 19 or younger.

“Present policies have done little if anything to decrease marijuana’s availability or dissuade youth from trying it,” St. Pierre said, noting young people in the U.S. now frequently report that they have easier access to pot than alcohol or tobacco.

If past trends are any indication, those arrested are likely to be disproportionately non-white, despite the fact that drug use rates are roughly equal when compared across racial lines. Considering that 8 million people have been arrested for marijuana offenses over the past decade, and nearly 100 million Americans have admitted to having used it, can anyone explain the point to all of this? Or is the only explanation that still makes sense that it gives police and prosecutors more to do?

Sorry for adding to the OJ noise surplus, but this video was too funny not to post:

Small-world side note: I once played a round of golf with Yale Galanter’s father’s golf clubs (although I’ve never met either one). And much like OJ, I was unsuccessful in locating the real killers.

Eric Earling responds to my post from earlier today. Let’s see if we can make some sense out of this thing:

I would like to personally thank Lee over at Horse’s Ass for so ably proving my original point on this topic.

You’re very welcome, sir. For those who haven’t been following, here are what appear to be the points he made in that post:

– MoveOn.org and the netroots community – including our own local friends in that following – have lost touch with political reality

– Their attack against Giuliani in Iowa after his response to their Petraeus ad is a blessing of the first order for Team Rudy

Eric is exactly right that I “proved” the second of these points. Why? Because I somewhat agree with it. And I even said so in the original post:

Giuliani may very well be able to use this as a way to make him look tough to the 29% of Americans who are still inhabiting the fairy tale world where Bush is a great president and victory in Iraq is just around the corner.

The first point was the one I took issue with. MoveOn has not “lost touch” with political reality in any way. Rudy Giuliani took out a one-page ad in the New York Times attacking them, so they responded. That’s politically smart. When someone challenges you, you fight back. Americans actually want more of that from Democrats and left-leaning groups, not less.

Eric’s just warming up though:

His frothy indignation over the fact MoveOn.org attacks against Rudy Giuliani are actually helping his candidacy is a delightful exhibition of all that is lovable and cute about the netroots.

Actually, as I mentioned above, my “frothy indignation” was over the accusation that MoveOn and the netroots have lost touch with political reality, not that any of this helps Giuliani. While I’ve been very outspoken on why I think Giuliani might be the worst of the Republican candidates, I have little interest or ability to influence who the Republicans pick as their nominee. MoveOn arguably has some more interest and ability, but anyone who thinks that that’s the main consideration for why they responded to his attack is silly. Giuliani went after them. If this helps Giuliani, it was because he was the one who picked the fight (any of the candidates could have responded to the original MoveOn ad). What was MoveOn supposed to do? Respond to Mitt Romney or John McCain instead? The fact that it might be helping Giuliani is not an indication of MoveOn not understanding political reality, it’s an indication that the Republican Party is an embarrassment and that they seem eager to nominate someone who can’t possibly win next fall.

He continues:

His core point seems to be: “Earling is wrong because the American public isn’t happy with the situation in Iraq.” Thanks for the newsflash. Too bad I don’t dispute that point about the American public’s feelings and it has nothing to do with the post in question.

That’s pretty far from obvious if one reads that post again. The mistake I made is that I didn’t realize that when Eric was talking about “political reality,” he was talking solely about the fantasyland that Republicans are living in now – where they’re looking for a candidate who appears tough enough to keep themselves from wetting their beds – and not the political reality that the rest of us are dealing with, where we’re appreciative of anti-war efforts with some spine.

The reality of national public opinion doesn’t for a minute change the fact that attacking Rudy Giuliani in a Republican primary by saying he didn’t stand up to George W. Bush on Iraq isn’t going to have the desired effect.

Except that it is going to have the desired effect. MoveOn isn’t responding to Rudy solely because they’re trying to take him out in the Republican primary. They’re responding to Rudy because they’re sick and tired of watching Democrats in the same situation fail to respond to attacks.

Who the attack is coming from doesn’t help either. MoveOn.org has about as much credibility with Republican primary voters as Pat Robertson does with their Democratic counterparts.

Exactly, so why would they care about how die-hard Republican voters react? Their message is for those whose minds actually work. If none of those people are voting for Republicans any more, then it doesn’t matter. But a recent survey showed that a majority of Iowa Republicans want a full withdrawal of troops from Iraq in six months. That’s the political reality. If this ad still helps Giuliani in the primary, it arguably hurts the Republicans severely in November 2008.

Put a different way; imagine the Club for Growth running ads in the primary attacking a Democratic candidate for not standing up to organized labor on free trade. Same effect.

If the Democratic candidate attacked the Club for Growth, I would expect them to fight back. But whether or not this helped the particular Democrat would not be based upon the response, but whether Democratic voters agreed with the original attack.

Such attacks from MoveOn.org’s might – stress might – have some potential in the right swing states in the general election, depending on where things are at a year from now. But that’s not exactly what MoveOn.org is trying to accomplish right now is it?

Is he kidding? Is he really saying that when MoveOn responds to an attack on them by a Republican, it could make them look bad? What? [Actually, no he’s not, see below]

It’s certainly theoretically possible that a particular MoveOn.org position can be seen as extreme enough that an unprovoked attack (like the original Petraeus ad) could alienate people. But if a majority of Americans strongly agree with their message, it won’t. And when it comes to some of the basic stuff MoveOn.org is fighting for, the majority of the American public agrees with them.

As I said in the earlier post, am I really sharing a planet with this guy?

UPDATE: After re-reading, I definitely misinterpreted Earling’s last paragraph. He’s saying that an attack like this could help defeat a candidate like Giuliani in the general election. Of course it could. In fact, it most definitely would, and it’s part of the reason why these ads are appearing already. I’m still not sure Eric really grasps how unpopular this war has become.

There are times when I’m not sure I inhabit the same planet as Eric Earling, let alone the same city:

Behold more evidence that MoveOn.org and the netroots community – including our own local friends in that following – have lost touch with political reality. Their attack against Giuliani in Iowa after his response to their Petraeus ad is a blessing of the first order for Team Rudy.

Giuliani is hitting back with an ad that drives home his feisty willingness to confront obnoxious liberalism that endears him to conservatives…even those otherwise skeptical of him.

Exactly who is out of touch with political reality here?

There were two high-profile media events about Iraq last week: The top U.S. commander testified before Congress and President Bush delivered a prime-time speech. What impact did they have?

Very little, according to two polls taken at the end of the week.

Before the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and the President’s speech, 26 percent of Americans polled by CBS News approved of President Bush’s handling of Iraq. After the speech, 25 percent approved.

Before the testimony and the speech, 41 percent of Americans believed the United States did the right thing to take military action in Iraq. After the speech, 39 percent said it was the right thing.

And also consider from a month ago:

In another poll taken August 6-8, 53 percent said they did not trust Petraeus to report “what’s really going on” in Iraq. The survey interviewed 1,029 adult Americans. The results from the Petraeus question had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

So let’s recap. A majority of Americans in early August did not trust General David Petraeus to report the truth from Iraq. General Petraeus comes back last week and does not report the truth from Iraq. Instead, he continues to maintain that the “surge” is working, even though a majority of Americans think that he’s wrong and the evidence doesn’t back him up. Even if you somehow manage to convince yourself that this isn’t some sort of betrayal by a military official who we expected to be truthful, a majority of Americans still think that Petraeus went in front of Congress and fed us a pile of bullshit. And Americans sure as hell care more about that than about an ad in a newspaper that riled up the right-wing PC police.

Giuliani may very well be able to use this as a way to make him look tough to the 29% of Americans who are still inhabiting the fairy tale world where Bush is a great president and victory in Iraq is just around the corner. But for the majority of Americans whose heads are not up their own asses, the political reality is quite different.

Independent pollster Research 2000 conducted a recent poll of Connecticut voters:

For whom did you vote for in the 2006 race for U.S. Senate, Ned Lamont, the Democrat, Alan Schlesinger, the Republican, or Joe Lieberman, an Independent?

	Lieberman	Lamont	Schlesinger
All	49	42	9
Dem	34	62	4
Rep	67	10	23
Ind	53	41	6

If you could vote again for U.S. Senate, would you vote for Ned Lamont, the Democrat, Alan Schlesinger, the Republican, or Joe Lieberman, an Independent?

	Lieberman	Lamont	Schlesinger
All	40	48	10
Dem	25	72	3
Rep	69	7	24
Ind	38	49	9

The main takeaway from this survey is obvious. If the 2006 election were held today, Ned Lamont would be the U.S. Senator from Connecticut and Joe Lieberman would be getting ready for afternoons of chasing the neighborhood kids off his lawn. But beyond that, the survey also reveals the continuing disintegration of the frames that have defined (and misconstrued) the reality of our current political debates.

What’s interesting about this slow changing of opinions is that the biggest shifts come from independent and Democratic voters, but there’s almost no difference at all from Republicans. I think Democrats in Connecticut have clearly been disappointed at how Lieberman hasn’t just abandoned Democrats, but is still actively fighting against them. But for independents, there are likely other reasons for the shift. Independent voters tend to see themselves as moderates. They see themselves as being appalled by both extremes and parties and look for candidates with the courage to stand somewhere in the middle. But while there’s certainly extremism at both ends of our political spectrum, the extremism that drove the Iraq War has become the overriding divide in recent elections, and especially in the 2006 Connecticut Senate race. Being somewhere inbetween the two parties was no longer the most anti-extremist position.

As this divide has taken shape, Joe Lieberman occupied a fairly unique space, and his example is a good way to understand the shifting views of independents and moderates. He’s gone from being the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee to losing a Democratic Senate primary in the span of less than 6 years. But his overall view of the world hasn’t really changed that much. He’s always been a staunch authoritarian. But back before 9/11, his main targets weren’t Iran and Syria, they were video games and the music industry. As a college student during this time, it helped cultivate for me the image of left-wing extremism through political correctness.

The Bush Administration’s war in Iraq then completely shuffled the deck on what we consider to be left and right. The right-wing in this country pre-9/11 was defined more by their free market economic outlook, but following the attacks, it began to redefine itself through the war on terror. Joe Lieberman went from being an authoritarian left-wing nanny who threatened the bottom line of big business to seeing his authoritarian outlook fall perfectly in line with a party eager to drop bombs on the enemies of Israel. But while his political philosophies were always rooted in authoritarian extremism, his diversion from the Democratic Party was painted as “moderation” for being willing to stand up to the supposed “far-left”.

And thus the “moderate” Lieberman was seen by voters as being the centrist candidate – a bi-partisan independent who could relate to both Democrats and Republicans – and defeated Ned Lamont. But being a centrist does not make you a moderate. A moderate is just the opposite of an extremist. And a growing number of independents in Connecticut now realize, as Joe continues to cheer on this deeply unpopular war, and begging for another, that he’s no moderate at all. He’s the same crazy extremist he’s always been, and now his extremism is promoting an agenda much more dangerous than restrictions on video games. And in the new political climate we find ourselves in – defined greatly by how we view what’s happening in Iraq – the “left” is where all the moderates are, while the “right” is where all the extremists have ended up.

Locally, the Burner-Reichert 2006 Congressional race took on a lot of the same frames as the Senate race in Connecticut. Reichert was portrayed by many as a moderate and as having an independent streak. He appealed to independent voters in the district and won re-election. Burner, like Lamont, was a young and inexperienced candidate tied closely to the netroots community through their high-tech backgrounds, and was continually portrayed as an extremist, simply by adhering fairly closely to the Democratic Party platform. Yet Dave Reichert has now just returned from Iraq and is still enthusiastically supporting a war that has become deeply unpopular. He has never voted against the president, nor has he spoken out against any of the extremist tactics (secret prisons, warrantless spying, pre-emptive warfare) he’s employed for fighting terrorism. Darcy Burner has never taken any position even close to as extremist as what Dave Reichert now currently supports. Yet I’m sure we’ll continue to hear from the Republicans about how Burner is the more “extremist” candidate. As independent Connecticut voters have started to figure out that the labels of who was a moderate and who was an extremist in 2006 were reversed, it’s not hard to imagine that the independent voters in the 8th District of Washington are doing the same.

April 19, 2001, Washington DC – Wanted terrorist Timothy McVeigh released another video today from his hideout in the wilderness of northern Canada. The video promised more attacks from Christian Identity terror cells throughout the United States. In the six years since 4/19, there have been no attacks like the original bombing in Oklahoma City, but Clinton Administration officials warned Americans once again to be vigilant. But people have grown increasingly skeptical of the once popular president, ever since the threats that postponed the 2000 Election are believed by many to have been just a political stunt to maintain power.

Clinton’s approval ratings reached another record low recently as he continues to defend his record. He’s touted success in fighting the militias in Montana and Michigan, and claims that his landmark Secular Conformity Act, enacted in 1996 to give him more powers to spy on Americans without oversight, is working. “These tools were necessary in order to prevent another 4/19. Next time it could be a mushroom cloud in downtown Chicago,” the President said in recent remarks to a convention of atheists.

The stress on the President has been enormous as he feels the nation simply doesn’t understand the kind of unique threat the United States faces from domestic terrorism. In the wake of 4/19, President Clinton declared the threat from Christian Identity followers to be a “unique threat, one that America has never had to deal with before.” During the 1996 election, he derided those who disagreed with his “war on terror” as irresponsible apologists for the militias. Since his re-election, the National Guard has rounded up thousands of “enemy combatants” in 12 different states, most of whom are held indefinitely without access to an attorney, one of the powers given to the President at the beginning of his second term. Hundreds of church groups have had their assets frozen for having links to Christian Identity members.

In eastern Montana, however, Christian Identity militias have taken over many towns and the violence in Billings has reached record levels as the National Guard struggles to keep the peace. President Clinton sees all of this as success in the overall war. His main Homeland Security official will be testifying in Congress this week about how former anti-government militia members in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan are now starting to turn against the more radical fundamentalists.

The opposition in Congress has been too weak and ineffective for most Republican voters. The main voices speaking out, Congressmen Bob Barr (R-GA) and Ron Paul (R-TX), feel that America has been fooled by the President into believing the threat from McVeigh and his Christian Identity followers is worse than it really was, and that his decision to send in the National Guard to forcibly disarm them is just expanding their ranks. The President’s strongest supporters, such as California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, dismiss that as the rantings of unhinged and unpatriotic lunatics. Anchors on Hound News have been referring to Barr as “Billings Bob,” and plan to have another interview with the head General in charge of defeating the Christian extremists right after his Congressional testimony. The General has come under intense fire from conservative groups for his methodology in concluding that the violence is down from last year.

The main question being asked today is how it’s been 6 years since the bombing and yet McVeigh still remains free to make videos to send to his followers. Blaming his accidental release after a traffic stop in 1996 on “bad communication with the FBI”, Clinton later seemed disinterested about whether McVeigh would ever be caught. He claims to be working with Canadian authorities to locate McVeigh, but no one seems to know where he’s at. The new ‘4/19 Truth’ movement, led by transsexual author Ann Coulter, now has millions of followers nationwide who believe that Clinton himself planned and carried out the attacks.

Democrats seemed eager to use the latest tape as proof that the nation was still facing an existential threat from terrorism and once again accused groups like the ACLU and the NRA of helping the terrorists. The President’s supporters on talk radio also sought to defend the President. Host James Carville noted how similar McVeigh’s message was to those of Clinton’s main critics, especially his strong defense of the right to bear arms and his opposition to abortion.

Meanwhile, a number of retired CIA and State Department officials warned that this focus on homegrown militias was distracting us from even more dangerous threats from overseas. Former Clinton Administration official Richard Clarke, who was pushed out after strong disagreements with the White House in early 1996, said, “How are we ever going to defeat international terrorist groups like Al Qaeda if we can’t even defeat these kinds of groups here? We’ve continually expressed to Clinton’s folks that defeating terrorism is a matter of law enforcement and not a war. They just don’t listen. God help us if we try to do this in the Middle East.”

A former most-wanted fugitive, Kenneth Freeman, is returning to Washington State to face charges:

An American man accused of raping his daughter and posting the videos on the Internet has agreed to be extradited from Hong Kong to the United States, his lawyer said Monday.

Kenneth John Freeman, a former reserve sheriff’s deputy on the U.S. Marshals Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s most-wanted list, has been challenging the extradition request since he was arrested while traveling in Hong Kong in May.

“After due consideration, Freeman decided he will consent to surrender and be sent to the United States,” Freeman’s lawyer, Giles Surman, told a Hong Kong court on Monday.

The extradition is expected to take 3-6 weeks. For those who don’t read Effin Unsound religiously (you know who you are!), Freeman was my boss at the time he skipped bail and fled the country. And yes, I was creeped out by all of this more than you could possibly imagine.

Two items this week have really demonstrated the limitlessness of how inept and clueless those in the traditional media can be.

Lou Dobbs, in his weekly tirade against all things Mexican, says the following [emphasis mine]:

Calderon can’t have it both ways. He cannot fail his citizens at home and then act as the Great Imperialist Protector of his citizens who are driven by poverty and corruption to enter the United States illegally. The United States provides Mexico with an annual surplus of $65 billion in trade, an estimated $25 billion in remittances from Mexican citizens living and working here illegally, and at least another $25 billion generated by the illegal drug trade across our southern border.

Considering that Lou has previously praised Calderon for how he’s gone after Mexico’s drug lords, I know that he has some awareness that the $25 billion he’s talking about there doesn’t go to the Mexican government, but instead to criminals who are fighting the Mexican government. But somehow, he still uses that figure as if its money that the Calderon government is simply wasting. It’s as ridiculous as criticizing Hamid Karzai’s inability to strengthen the Afghan government by pointing out how much money the Taliban makes from poppies. How this man has a TV show is a complete mystery to me.

The second item has been all over the internet already, but it’s a beauty. The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, in what appears to have been an attempt at humor, writes the following:

A survey of political bloggers showed that 94 percent of them had never been out of the country or read anything other than a Harry Potter book.

Something tells me that if every Washington Post columnist was blindfolded, put in a van, and driven 2 hours west of Washington DC and dropped off, 94 percent of them would think they were in a foreign country.

Last night was one of my favorite annual events – our fantasy football draft. Our league started out in 1998 with a bunch of recent college grads who relocated here to work for Boeing. Now, we’re starting up our 10th season. More than half of us are now married, and a few have kids, but we still have one night a year where we revert to shameless bachelorhood, talking trash, drinking cheap beer, and picking the players whose successes or failures our hopes will ride on for the next four months.

In the past, I’ve made pretty elaborate NFL predictions at the beginning of the season, only to debate with myself in November whether I can go back and delete the post. Like fellow Philly-native Goldy, I’m a huge Eagles fan, but I’ve also grown to like the local team here, and really enjoy how much the Seahakws’ recent success has brought some excitement to the games at Qwest Field.

As the Saints and Colts get it all started this evening, what do you expect to see this year? Can the Seahawks make it back to the big game? Were the Saints a fluke last year? Can the Colts win it again? Will Donovan McNabb still be healthy when the Seahawks head into Philly in December? Will Joey Harrington make everyone in Atlanta forget about Michael Vick? Can anything possibly happen this season that’s more embarrassing than what happened to my alma mater last Saturday?

Enjoy the games everyone!

The second Marvin Stamn Highlight Reel is posted.

With much of our foreign policy focus on the Middle East these days, we haven’t been looking that much at what’s been happening closer to home:

Alarmed by rising threats to Mexican law and order from ever-more-brazen drug lords, the Bush administration is quietly negotiating a counternarcotics aid package with the Mexican government that would increase US involvement in a drug war south of the border.

The fact that Mexico – which has historically been averse to any assistance from the US that could be construed as a breach of its sovereignty – is seeking the increased aid shows how serious a threat President Felipe Calderón sees drug gangs posing to his country.

When Calderón took office last year, he immediately sent troops into areas where drug trafficking was common and attempted to disrupt the organizations that control the pipeline of drugs that make their way into the United States. The effort was so successful that the country’s powerful drug cartels are now trying to figure out whether or not they will work together or fight each other for the massive profits. The reality in Mexico is the same as it always has been. The drug cartels are too powerful to take down. They will always have the money to buy out law enforcement officials in both Mexico and the United States. The $40 million dollars we’ve been giving them annually in aid is a drop in the bucket compared to the money that the cartels have to spend on weapons and bribes.

As a result, Calderón is trying to get a much heftier aid package from the United States in order to wage his war. To his credit, he’s been placing the blame where it needs to be placed:

Mexico already appears to be laying the groundwork to frame the plan not so much as an aid package but as the United States facing up to problems that are a consequence of American drug consumption. Calderón, often a cautious public speaker, has sternly called for the United States to pay more to combat the cartels.

“The language that they’re using is that the U.S. has a large responsibility for this problem,” said Ana María Salazar, a former high-ranking Clinton administration drug official who was involved in implementing the U.S.-funded program for Bogota, known as Plan Colombia.

There’s no question that American drug consumption is driving this problem. For years, we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that the drug trade is the case of a foreign enemy trying to “poison” us with their dangerous wares. But that’s never been an accurate picture of what’s happening. Millions of Americans choose to use illegal drugs. They’re not being coerced by shifty foreigners trying to get us hooked. Only a small percentage of them are addicts. And as domestic drug law enforcement has driven many of the supply networks south of the border, the cartels have generated the kind of wealth and power than make Al Capone and his gang of bootleggers look like a Girl Scout troop.

The Nixon and Reagan Administrations laid the foundation for this disaster, but the Clinton Administration followed right in their footsteps. They launched Plan Colombia in 2000, the multi-billion dollar initiative in South America’s most prolific coca growing nation that failed to decrease cocaine production, increased corruption in the Colombian government, and actually lowered the price of cocaine in the United States. It’s often jokingly said that the Bush Administration’s policies were determined by looking at Clinton Administration policy and doing the opposite, but I only think that applied to the things that Clinton was doing that were actually smart.

Colombia’s problems have been around for decades, even before we started throwing money and weapons at them to fix them. Leftist guerrillas have waged a bloody civil war for over 40 years, in part because cocaine profits have kept their movement afloat while similar ideological movements in other countries have become an ignored fringe. Today, though, the Uribe government has been winning the military battle against these rebel groups, but finding that more and more of the drug trafficking is just occurring within its own ranks.

Another aspect of the damage being done in Colombia is their current emigration problem:

In the last decade, large-scale emigration has marked Colombian society, with roughly one of every 10 Colombians now living abroad. Internally, the country has been confronted with a major humanitarian crisis, as forced displacement has reached alarming proportions during the same period. Political, social, and economic problems, coupled with widespread insecurity, have fueled both voluntary and forced migration, while the same factors have acted as powerful deterrents for immigration to the country.

Considering that Plan Colombia gave money to American companies who sprayed dangerous chemicals across vast coca growing regions, killing all crops, not just coca; introduced more sophisticated weaponry into the already brutal civil war; and essentially thumbed their noses at any civilian concerns; the fact that millions of people have been fleeing the country shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. What should be a surprise is why anyone thinks that this is a good thing to try in Mexico right now.

Granted, there would be some major differences between Plan Mexico and Plan Colombia. Mexico is more of a transit point for drugs, rather than a source. No aerial eradication is going to happen in Mexico. However, there will certainly be an investment in high-tech weaponry that is sure to escalate the violence that has already been sending millions of people north in search of opportunity and relative peace. Mexico’s (and other Central American) drug cartels haven’t been tied to the country’s leftist guerrilla movements in the same way that exists in Colombia. What seems likely to happen is that the extra weaponry will be used to squash Calderón’s leftist political opponents, while he remains in a permanent stalemate with the drug lords. Corruption will be inevitable, and the drug smugglers will end up having some amount of Plan Mexico’s weapons bounty to maintain control of border towns like Laredo and Juarez where much of the country’s drug shipments enter the United States.

Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? Mainly because we don’t allow ourselves to see the alternatives. American drug consumption is not going to go away, no matter what we do. Three decades of trying to scare Americans out of doing drugs by filling our prisons to record levels hasn’t worked. In the process, we’ve wasted over a trillion dollars in taxpayer money and accomplished nothing. Now, as we look out at the massive drug war failures in Afghanistan, in Colombia, and even here at home in our ravaged and violent inner cities and meth-addled small towns, can we finally get past our fear of what a bunch of plants grown in foreign countries can do to us and start doing something that actually makes sense? Can we finally accept the fact that a certain percentage of America’s population can and does use illegal drugs without the kinds of negative repercussions that require us to lay waste to the rest of the world to prevent it? Can we start distinguishing between drug use and drug abuse and stop thinking that a person who uses marijuana or even does a line of cocaine on the weekends is not a danger to himself and others?

These questions are ones that politicians fear having to answer. Many of them know the right answers, but can’t say them out loud. The paranoia over drugs has been built up over the years to the point where moderate, reasonable ideas are portrayed as the rantings of a radical fringe and still get political figures labeled as crackpots. But we’re nearing the point where we’ll no longer be able to afford the charade. Plan Mexico is expected to cost over $1 billion. That would just be another billion dollars that could have been spent more wisely on other things. A mistake that this country has made more than a thousand times over.

And to kick off the weekend in style, I give you the Inaugural Marvin Stamn Highlight Reel.

Daniel K suggested that I do the EffU thing on the President’s Bellevue speech. Here it is.

Ezra Klein:

One other bit of McMegan’s post that bugged me was her elevation of single-payer as goal in and of itself, as if what interests reformers isn’t the health of the populace or the sustainability of the system but the aesthetics of the financing structure. “Look at that funding mechanism,” we’ll one day whisper in awe. “It’s just so redistributive.”

You get this occasionally from libertarians, and it’s always struck me as an availability bias error: Because the shrinkage of government is an end unto itself for them, they assume the expansion of government is an en unto itself for liberals. Liberals are just libertarians, but backwards, and without the “rtarian.”

That, however, isn’t true. Liberals want greater public involvement in health care because they’ve concluded the profit incentive doesn’t create optimal outcomes in this particular case. You can’t comparison shop during a myocardial infraction. You can’t walk away from the table while on a gurney. You don’t want to be in the position of second-guessing your doctors. You don’t want your neighbors going bankrupt because they failed to adequately save in their HSAs, not suspecting they’d get cancer at 32.

Health care isn’t like flat screen televisions — if I don’t have the former, I can die. If I lack the latter, I’ll be watching Entourage in slightly lower definition. On the other hand, I really wouldn’t want the government taking over the provision of flat screen televisions, as there the market works pretty damn well. The relevant variable isn’t the economic theory, but the good in question.

Now that Idaho Senator Larry Craig has finally been discovered hiding in his closet, it’s becoming more and more obvious that there’s a segment of the Republican Party whose main motivation in politics appears to be making laws that are an attempt to keep themselves from their particular dysfunctional behaviors. We saw it with Mark Foley, who actually introduced legislation to punish the kind of behavior he engaged in. And strongly anti-gay Republicans like Ed Schrock and Jim West have supported and even pushed anti-gay legislation as they sat quietly in their closets.

As David Kurtz points out here, a website for the Idaho Values Alliance contains a remarkably familiar warning about what homosexuals do underneath a picture of family values champion Senator Craig (emphasis mine):

One of the tragic characteristics of the homosexual lifestyle is its emphasis on anonymous sex and multiple sexual partners. It is a little-acknowledged secret that many active homosexuals will have more than 1,000 sex partners over the course of a lifetime (the average among heterosexuals is seven – still six more than we were designed for). This sordid fact of homosexual life surfaced yesterday in an AP article yesterday that reports on the number of arrests police have made for indecent exposure and public sex acts in the restrooms at Atlanta’s airport, the busiest in the world. The increased restroom patrols, begun to apprehend luggage thieves, instead uncovered a rash of sex crimes. Airport restrooms have become so popular that men looking for anonymous sexual trysts with other men have advertised their airport availability on Craigslist. One such ad was from a man saying he was stuck at the airport for three hours and was looking for “discreet, quick action.”

You just can’t make this stuff up.