HorsesAss.Org

Jane Hamsher from Firedoglake.com and the national organization Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) have launched a new project called Just Say Now, focused on supporting marijuana law reform around the country, particularly in California where voters will be voting on making it the first state to allow legal sales for non-medical use.

The effort includes an impressive Advisory Board, including former Reagan Administration attorney Bruce Fein, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, former Baltimore anti-narcotics officer Neill Franklin, and University of Vermont College of Medicine professor Dr. Joe McSherry. The organization is quickly becoming a presence within the national media, something that previous campaigns of this nature have never had the connections or resources to accomplish.

I’m often challenged in the comment threads of my posts about why I put so much emphasis on this issue. People often dismiss it as a fringe cause that doesn’t matter. And even worse, they assume that my advocacy for the issue is rooted merely in a desire to buy pot. The latter accusation is the most ridiculous and insulting considering that not only have I had no desire to buy pot since I became a father last year, but even if I did, the current prohibition doesn’t prevent me from buying it. It only forces me to buy it from a person who’s willing to break the law to do so. And there’s no shortage of those people here – or in any other American city. People in this country who want to buy pot can already buy pot.

The reason that former government attorneys and police chiefs are going on TV right now in an effort to end marijuana prohibition is because the issue has become important, even if many of us don’t recognize its importance.

Friday night, I was watching the NBC Nightly News and they reported on the violence in Mexico, where drug cartels are now using car bombs as a way to protect their profits. But in that entire report, it was never explained to the viewer why there’s so much violence. The connection between the billions of dollars in marijuana profits and the cartel’s military and operational superiority was never made. There was no mention of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s call to have a debate about drug legalization. The most dire impact of our marijuana laws – the deaths of tens of thousands of people south of the border – is effectively hidden from the average viewer by the inability of our traditional news outlets to provide context for the stories they report on.

America’s brief experiment with alcohol prohibition came to a crashing halt after only a decade. By the end of the 1920s, with organized crime making astronomical profits and wielding enormous power over major cities, few would have argued that the issue of alcohol prohibition had no impact. But with marijuana prohibition, much of the impact has been outside of the U.S., making it easier to pretend that the dynamics aren’t the same and the impact isn’t as severe.

The violence and chaos in Mexico alone is a sufficient reason to regard marijuana prohibition as an important issue that needs to be discussed and dealt with, but that’s only part of the overall impact that this insane policy has had. The economic impact is also wide-ranging and difficult to quantify. The enforcement of marijuana laws runs into the billions of dollars per year – and does absolutely nothing to impact the willingness or the ability of Americans to buy marijuana.

And beyond the massive cost of enforcement, arrests, and incarceration for marijuana offenses, the effect on the economy of having a legal and regulated market for the drug – similar to alcohol, would be substantial. Not only could you tax it, but taking the control of the industry away from the cartels and handing it over to organizations who can compete and win in a well-regulated environment is a tremendous way to create new jobs all over the country. Think about alcohol, and the amount of people that are employed, from truck drivers to bartenders to brewery workers. Granted, more people use alcohol than marijuana, but it’s still a drug enjoyed by over 20 million Americans.

The reality is that no one knows the exact amount that marijuana prohibition costs us. Beyond the obvious things that I’ve already mentioned, it’s difficult to measure how much it affects us when police officers across the country bust into homes with guns blazing in the name of stopping the “evil weed”. It’s difficult to measure the impact it has when thousands upon thousands of promising young college students are arrested and forced to carry a criminal record that makes it impossible for them to get further along in their studies – or to step into certain jobs. It’s difficult to measure how much safer we’d all be if police officers dedicated to marijuana law enforcement were focused on far more threatening things like identity theft or child pornography. It’s difficult to measure the damage being done to the environment by having marijuana supplies grown clandestinely in national forests. And it’s difficult to measure how much the prohibition-fueled crisis in Mexico impacts the willingness of those living there to buck our immigration laws and cross the border seeking out work.

One of the most ingrained myths of our nearly 75 year war on marijuana (it was made illegal at the federal level in 1937) is that keeping it illegal for adults is the most effective way to keep it away from children. Anyone arguing in favor of removing the criminal penalties for marijuana will inevitably be accused to putting our young people at risk. And for years, that emotional argument often trumped any attempt at reason. Having been a child in the “Just Say No” era, however, it’s hard to put into words how incredibly flawed that belief is. Not only did marijuana prohibition make it easier for young people to get their hands on marijuana, but the overwrought hysteria over the dangers of marijuana actually reduced the credibility of those warning us about far more dangerous drugs.

Today, I find myself with a child of my own, and with as strong a desire as any parent to keep my child from being exposed to potentially addictive substances (whether its alcohol or pot) before he’s old enough to understand the responsibility of being an adult. But unlike my parents’ generation, I have no illusions about what’s the most effective method for doing so. The “Just Say No” era believed that government-mandated abstinence by adults was the most effective way. Instead, that merely handed over the distribution to people who had minimal interest in the welfare of young people. It had the opposite of its intended effect, moving sales of marijuana away from a regulated environment where a young person could be prevented from buying it to locations where they couldn’t – and where young people themselves often became part of the distribution chain. If there’s one purely selfish reason I have for my advocacy on this issue, it’s precisely that. I don’t want the schoolyard to still be the local drug store when my son goes to school.

Finally, we often toss around the words “freedom” and “liberty” as we discuss politics and demand things be done accordingly. People clearly have their own notions of what those two words mean, but I find it very difficult to define them in any way that doesn’t boil down to a belief that government should not exist to protect us – as adults – from our own moral choices. Marijuana prohibition has long been premised on the idea that it’s necessary for our own well-being, the well-being of our children, and the well-being of our nation as a whole, to do exactly that. And after all of these years, it should be painfully obvious that this premise is tragically flawed. No one’s well-being is served by this policy. It has left in its wake an enormous path of misery, failure, and destruction, and the only sane response at this point is to speak up and demand that it ends.

Just Say Now.

UPDATE: Philip Smith writes about the monumental waste of resources that has become a yearly ritual in California.

It has been suggested to me that it was wrong to accuse the Building Industry Association of Washington’s Tom McCabe of smoking crack, especially without giving him the opportunity to put the pipe down long enough to defend himself. So in the spirit of full and fair civic discourse I hereby challenge McCabe to a public debate in which we can discuss any or all of the following subjects:

A.) His bizarre assertion that environmentalists are the direct and sole cause of the the Great Recession;

B.) The BIAW’s even bizarrer assertion that environmentalism has its ideological roots in Naziism, and that the DOE’s storm water regulations are the moral equivalent of the Holocaust;

C.) The BIAW’s even more bizarrer Initiative 1082, that in the name of reform would actually increase workers compensation costs for the bulk of its own members; or

D.) Tom McCabe’s obvious and debilitating addiction to crack.

You and your lovely if potty-mouthed spokeswoman Erin Shannon know how to reach me Tom, so drop me an email and we’ll set up a time and place.

My slightly more tanned toes wriggling in the hot sand of Longport NJ. Hope you’re all enjoying your sixty-something degree Seafair.

Last week’s contest had two winners and one big loser. That one big loser was me, because after Liberal Scientist correctly guessed that the view was related to the German Love Parade tragedy and identified the matching link, commenter Don pointed out that the tunnel where the tragedy happened was a different tunnel less than a kilometer away.

Here’s this week’s, which I’m far more certain is the correct location for its corresponding news story. Good luck!

Romans 1:26-27
Women no longer wanted to have sex in a natural way, and they did things with each other that were not natural. Men behaved in the same way. They stopped wanting to have sex with women and had strong desires for sex with other men.

Discuss.

Arthur Silber has a great post up dealing with Wikileaks and how it confounds those who seek a level of control that can never be obtained:

Wikileaks has taken the only weapon it has — its ability to make information freely available to anyone and everyone — and aimed it directly at the heart of those who seek control and demand obedience. It has scored an immensely powerful hit. No wonder States and those who advance their policies are so panic-stricken. They’re powerless, and they know it.

I’ve often defined a neocon as someone who overestimates the power he has to use fear and intimidation to influence the behaviors and actions of others. And the hallmark of our neocon-inspired foreign policy is that we convince ourselves that we can succeed if only we control the flow of information and the messages that people hear. But unless you’re someplace like North Korea – where free technology is completely absent – that level of control is unattainable.

That doesn’t mean that we’re not trying in Afghanistan. This editorial from an American intelligence analyst who’d served in Afghanistan demonstrates how truly lost we are:

The Taliban’s media machine runs circles around our public information operations in Afghanistan. Using newspapers, radio broadcasts, the Internet and word of mouth, it puts out messages far faster than we can, exaggerating the effectiveness of its attacks, creating the illusion of a unified insurgency and criticizing the (real and imagined) failings of the Kabul government. To undermine support for United States troops, the Taliban insistently remind the people that America has committed to a withdrawal beginning next summer, they jump on any announcement of our Western allies pulling out troops and they publicize polls that show declining domestic American support for the war.

To counter the spin, we need to add the Taliban’s top propagandists to the high-value-target list and direct military operations at the insurgents’ media nerve centers. A major reason that people in rural areas are so reluctant to help us is that Taliban propaganda and intimidation have created an atmosphere of fear.

With a straight face, the individuals directing our mission in Afghanistan say that in order to combat a climate where dishonest propagandists create an atmosphere of fear among the public, that we must militarily attack those people. And somehow this will lead to the people of Afghanistan being less afraid of us. What?

Our entire mission there is premised on the ability to control the uncontrollable and silence the unsilenceable. And even in one of the least technologically advanced countries on Earth, we can’t do it. That should give you a pretty good idea of how much luck the Pentagon will have in stopping Wikileaks. Even if they’re successful at going after the individuals who maintain the site, it only emphasizes to more of the world why they too need to be wary of what those with power are capable of doing.

The Building Industry Association of Washington’s Tom McCabe is an idiot, an asshole and a liar:

So this is what it looks like when the extreme environmentalists get their way.

For two decades, enviros in our state have been striving to shut down homebuilding.

No-growthers have argued, litigated, legislated, and lobbied for every law, regulation, tax and impact fee designed to stop homebuilders from building homes.

Enviro groups with righteous-sounding names like Futurewise and Earth First! fight against virtually every single development and every single homebuilder.

State and local government agencies such as the Department of Ecology and the Puget Sound Partnership join the fray as well.

All these self-anointed priests of nature want to stop growth. Well, they succeeded.

Growth has stopped. Housing starts in our state have been reduced 67 percent (from 52,000 to 17,000) since 2005.

The enviros won.

McCabe then goes on to list the litany of economic woes allegedly caused by environmentalism run amuck, including skyrocketing unemployment, a ballooning, multi-billion dollar state budget deficit, a decline in charitable giving, and even the collapse of the newspaper industry. Which begs the question: how confident is McCabe in the rationale behind the BIAW’s political and policy agenda that he and his organization seem so keen on aggressively courting the stupid vote?

Really, how absolutely imbecilic or even anencephalic do you have to be to believe that the Great Recession was caused by excessive environmental regulation rather than, say, the catastrophic, nationwide collapse of the housing bubble and the fantasy-collateralized mortgage industry that inflated it? I mean, doesn’t the minimum mental capacity necessary to read McCabe’s column already make one too smart to fall for his laughable line of unreason? Hell, I feel kinda dumb just bothering to refute him.

For years, the BIAW and its members profited handsomely off an unsustainable housing market fueled by cheap-money induced visions of endless double-digit appreciation, and now that they’ve come down from their trippy, mortgage-fraud-huffing high, they blame the enviros? (You know, just like they blamed the enviros for the Holocaust.) No wonder the BIAW is attempting to pad its coffers with a self-serving, workers compensation privatization initiative; all that crack they’ve been smoking must cost a lot of money.

(And for those of you who have trouble discerning the difference between metaphor and allegory… yes, I am accusing McCabe of smoking a lot of crack. He’s a base crazy, crackerjacked, political bag bride. How else to explain his column?)

I’m just sayin’.

(And there are about 50 more links to the past week in political media at Hominid Views.)

… but I told you so:

DIFFICULT times call for more than a capable caretaker of a political seat. The 8th Congressional District needs a representative with vision, a sharp grasp of the issues and the ability to lead. The task is considerable.

With that in mind, The Seattle Times editorial board takes the unusual step of endorsing two challengers to U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert, who is seeking a fourth term in the district spanning eastern King and Pierce counties.

We do not do so lightly. Former Microsoft executive and Democrat Suzan DelBene and Tim Dillon, a Republican and member of the Yarrow Point Town Council, demonstrate a depth of knowledge and have compelling ideas.

On issues ranging from the wars to the economy, three-term Republican incumbent Reichert is unstudied and comes up short. After six years in office, this is unacceptable.

Reichert opposed financial reform, but was unable to explain what he did or did not like about the legislation. The 8th District deserves someone who is faster on their feet.

It is with some satisfaction, and perhaps an even greater degree of bitterness, that I read the Seattle Times’ endorsement in the 8th Congressional District primary, in which they dis Republican incumbent Rep. Dave Reichert as cynical, simplistic, unstudied, unknowledgeable and unacceptable. Well… duh-uh. Yet this is a paper, both news and editorial, that has propped up Reichert against his opponents for years.

As our state’s largest daily, the Times played a crucial role in creating the myth of Sheriff Dave as the man who caught the Green River Killer (he most emphatically did not), and who refused to reexamine this oft-exploited, career-defining claim even after he’d creepily taken to framing nearly every utterance with heroic tales of his encounters with Gary Ridgway. It was the Times who virtually refused to cover Darcy Burner’s inspiring, come-from-nowhere, 2006 campaign until spectacular fundraising and tight polls forced their hand, only to cynically and viciously brand her as a “spinmeister” who would make “Karl Rove proud,” while laughably lauding Reichert for his “conscience-driven independence streak,” even in the face of his own public admission that he voted how the Republican leadership told him to vote.

And it was the Times who, when polls showed Burner with both momentum and the lead heading into the final weeks of the 2008 election, intentionally torpedoed her campaign with a bullshit, front page, above-the-fold expose accusing her of lying about earning a degree in economics from Harvard (she earned a degree in computer science with a concentration in economics, a course load that is equivalent to a double major at some colleges, Harvard’s nonstandard terminology notwithstanding), while willfully ignoring the many years Reichert’s own resume claimed a bachelors degree, when he in fact only earned a two-year associates degree from a Lutheran high-school-cum-barely-junior-college.

And now they bemoan that Reichert is “unstudied” …? Um, no shit, Sherlock!

Indeed it’s the Times, who after years of defending and praising the obviously unqualified Reichert, who now appears unstudied.

Dillon says a turning point for him was Reichert’s “willingness to trade core principles on the environment.” He was referring to Reichert’s appearance before a gathering of Republican precinct committee officers when he explained that while he toes the party line most of the time, a few select environmental votes were “certain moves, chess pieces, strategies” he used to keep environmental groups from trying to defeat him. The moment was revealing. This page’s response then and now is “how cynical.”

Damning audio that was leaked to me, by the way, and first posted here in an HA exclusive, because my source assumed from their record of toadery, that the Times simply wouldn’t be interested in exposing Reichert as the conscienceless dependent he really is. So would it be ungrateful or ungenerous of me, now that the Times cites my reporting (without attribution, of course) as the turning point in their own reassessment of Reichert, to respond with a big, fat “FUCK YOU” …?

I mean, it’s not like Reichert hasn’t been caught on tape before, saying nearly the exact same thing! Only back in 2006, rather than calling Reichert on his cynicism, the Times chose to attack Burner for allowing the DCCC to excerpt TVW’s video without permission.

So yeah, I suppose I should congratulate the Times’ editors for finally coming to their senses, or thank them for putting aside their own pathologies for a moment in the interest of the greater good. But their paper’s reporting and commentary on past 8th CD races has been so galling — so utterly and inexcusably insulting — that it’s just hard to let go. For how do we reconcile the Times’ revisionist take on Reichert with this:

The Auburn Republican deserves re-election. The former King County sheriff has an impressive record of public service and has shown a conscience-driven independent streak that reflects his moderate district.

Or this:

[Reichert] has matured in the job and his voting on complicated issues reflects that. His experience as a first-responder has been a strength. … Opponent Darcy Burner criticizes him for changing some positions, but Reichert shows a capacity for appreciating nuance and an appetite for seeking answers himself and making up his own mind.

Or this:

He surprised many recently by saying he’s not convinced about how much global warming is caused by human action. We are convinced it’s a substantial contributing factor.

But Reichert says he’s skeptical, so he’s investigating. That’s a better approach than adopting a ready-made ideology.

I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ… talk about attempting to turn a turd into a tiara. And they accused Darcy of being a Rovian spinmeister? Look in the goddamn mirror, Frank!

Yeah sure, I know the Suzan DelBene campaign would prefer I focus on her qualifications over Reichert’s lack thereof, and she’s certainly smart, thoughtful, well-informed, accomplished and progressive enough to serve the 8th CD well. A helluva an upgrade over Reichert. A Democrat I can proudly support, without reservations. And I damn well know that it doesn’t serve my agenda to reward this editorial gesture by sticking the ed board’s own words in its collective face .

But… well… I have every right to be bitter, so fuck ’em.

Here’s Bob Inglis, South Carolina Republican House member who got slaughtered in his primary for standing up to Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, on CNN:

I believe that this is the definition of the term “freak show”.

UDPATE: And there’s more.

Perhaps I’ve underestimated the ideological cravenness of the Seattle Times editorial board, what with their refusal to endorse any Democratic legislative incumbent even remotely tied to organized labor, regardless of their accomplishments or the lack of qualifications of their opponents… but I still think they’re going to endorse Sen. Patty Murray in November.

Why? Well, the more than $500 million she just won for our state in additional federal aid for Medicaid and public schools is just one of many examples of how important she is to our local economy. That’s $500 million  to be spent right here in state. That means thousands of jobs that won’t disappear due to even further draconian cutbacks. That means smaller class sizes, and more kids getting preventative health care.

Had Dino Rossi been senator, he would have stuck to his ideological guns and voted with the Republican leadership to block the amendment. But not only did Murray fight hard to pass the amendment, she’s the one who sponsored it.

Sen. Murray is just too valuable an appropriator, too powerful a defender of Boeing and the thousands of high paying jobs it brings to our region for Frank Blethen to have the balls to instruct his ed board to endorse the light weight Rossi. I mean, he wouldn’t sacrifice the best interests of our local economy just to score an ideological victory, would he?

UPDATE:
In the comment thread, classic HA troll Mr. Cynical poops out some classic GOP bullshit:

Goldy–
All she did was increase the National Debt.
It’s a shell-game the Dems are using.
In the end, the credit card bill will come due…for our grandkids.

Uh-huh. Except, it’s not true. The cost of the Murray amendment is actually paid for through closing several tax loopholes, including one that rewards companies for moving jobs overseas. In fact, the Murray amendment actually reduces the deficit by $1.4 billion.

Which, of course, Rossi opposes, because you know… anything to avoid closing corporate loopholes.

By now I expect you’ve already heard the big news that federal district Judge Vaughn Walker today ruled California’s Prop 8 unconstitutional:

“Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.”

Yippee, and all that, but of course the fight for marriage equality doesn’t end there. The ruling is already being appealed to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is, you know, our circuit… which raises the question: if the Ninth Circuit upholds Judge Walker’s ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional, wouldn’t that make WA’s Defense Of Marriage Act unconstitutional too? And considering the absolutely compelling logic in Judge Walker’s decision, why didn’t WA’s marriage equality proponents file suit in federal court too?

I’m sure there’s a good reason, but I just thought I’d ask.

By now it’s a familiar pattern to those who really pay attention. Rep. Reichert (WA-08) equivocates on an issue. He refuses to take a stand on an issue that anyone can really pin to him. And then he votes against the interests of his district—and hopes nobody notices.

This time it is about big oil. Reichert recently voted against the CLEAR Act, that was in response to the BP gulf catostrophy. The act got rid of the $75 million oil spill liability cap and revamped Federal oversight of the offshore oil industry.

And…

…[i]n addition to a number of Gulf Coast restoration and research programs, the bill also fully funds the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) at $900 million, using money generated from oil and gas drilling royalties, and closes a loophole that exempts oil and gas projects from the storm-water runoff regs under the Clean Water Act. Another major onshore reform is the removal of “categorical exclusions” used to exempt some drilling applications from environmental review on public lands.
[…]

“Americans will be asking, ‘Will Senators stand with the people or the polluters?’” Todd Keller, senior manager of Public Lands Campaigns for National Wildlife Federation, said in a release.

We now know where Reichert Stands…with the polluters.

This is precisely the type of vote that Reichert could have used to make a bold statement in favor of his more-environmentally-aware-than-average constituents. Hell…he could have used this vote to do a little damage control following his embarrassing semi-private statement about pandering to the environmentalists. Instead, he voted with the Party of NO!™ (ideas) and against the interests of his constituents. Apparently, Republican obstructionism is more important to Reichert.

Fortunately, Reichert is pretty much impotent as a legislator—the act passed in the House without any acts of courage on Reichert’s part.