Jazz great Dizzy
Gillespie (no relation, alas) woulda been 93 today. He's
got a special Google search
engine doodle going on and he got 4-F status during World War
II by telling his recruitment officer:
At this stage in my life here in the United States whose foot has been in my ass? The white man's foot has been in my ass hole buried up to his knee in my ass hole!...Now you're speaking of the enemy. You're telling me the German is the enemy. At this point, I can never even remember having met a German. So if you put me out there with a gun in my hand and tell me to shoot at the enemy, I'm liable to create a case of "mistaken identity," of who I might shoot.
That's from A Renegade History of the United States, by Thaddeus Russell (Jesse Walker mentioned the book just yesterday), in a chapter titled, "Just How Popular Was World War II?"
Muhammad Ali fans will doubtless recognize a premonition of Ali's famous Vietnam Era explanation of why refused to serve: "No Vietcong ever called me nigger."
Russell, who teaches at Occidental College, notes that, despite the well-documented contributions of many black soldiers and fighting outfits in World War II, African Americans "comprised 35 percent of the naiton's delinquent draft registrants and more than 18 percent of those imprisoned for draft evasion.... There is ample evidence to show that African Americans did not feel that it was their war." Which makes a fair amount of sense, given that the United States was still in the throes of Jim Crow and the forces themselves were segregated.
American entry into World War II became extremely popular after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Yet it also was the first time that the U.S. government recognized conscientious objectors as a legitimate group. Read more about that here.
Here's a Real Audio link to a Gillespie recording of "4-F Blues," featuring Charlie Parker and Clyde Hart's All Stars. More info on the song, which is definitely not the sort of patriotic fare we normally associate with World War II. I am generally not a fan of evaluating the aesthetic value of something through a strictly ideological lense and I hope that readers put off by Gillespie's politics as evinced above can nonetheless enjoy the playing. If all jazz sounded like that, I might even be a fan.
Hat tip: Doug Mataconis' Twitter feed.
The Washington Post
notes a new report indicating that Paul Ryan’s long-term budget
plan “would reduce benefits by gradually raising the retirement age
and gradually trimming benefits for the top 70 percent of earners.”
According to the report, the wealthy and those who are currently
under 25 would see the greatest reductions under Ryan’s plan. Given
that the program is effectively
a subsidy for retirement, reducing the subsidy for the
better-off doesn't seem like the world's worst idea. And as Ryan
spokesperson Conor Sweeney says at the bottom of the article,
Ryan's plan actually
provides beefed-up benefits for low-income individuals. More to
the point, though: What happens to benefits if we don’t
restructure Social Security? As Cato’s Jagadeesh Gokhale pointed out
earlier this year, without change, the program runs a “high risk of
insolvency.” It’s headed for a
permanent deficit within five years, and in 2037, it won’t even
have a mythical
“trust fund” to fall back on. That means that workers in their
mid 30s are looking at a 27 percent benefit cut. So even if you
ignore the larger budget issues, the question isn't whether to
choose between Ryan’s plan or no benefit cuts. It’s what to do with
a program that isn’t sustainable in its current form.
Last month, Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum asked why progressives don't support means testing of Social Security benefits.
Governments are monopolies. They face no
competition and get their money by force. And as John Stossel
explains, they can therefore conspire with public-sector unions to
milk taxpayers. That explains the fix we're in today.
Wishing AIDS on your political enemies and their children. Check out this clip, from way back in 1995, of NPR's Nina Totenberg telling the host of PBS's Inside Washington that if there was "retributive justice" in the world the (admittedly loathsome) Jesse Helms would "get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it." Totenberg is still NPR's legal affairs correspondent.
New York Times columnist David Brooks argues that money is overrated as a means of winning elections. Citing several examples of big-spending candidates who went down in flames, along with the inconclusive findings of research on the subject, Brooks says spending is "almost never the difference between victory and defeat" and functions mostly as a "talisman." Even if you think money is more important than Brooks makes it out to be, the numbers he cites for this year's elections are a striking rebuttal to Democrats who are pre-emptively blaming their expected losses next month on a Republican advantage in independent spending:
The vast majority of campaign spending is done by candidates and political parties. Over the past year, the Democrats, most of whom are incumbents, have been raising and spending far more than the Republicans.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Democrats in the most competitive House races have raised an average of 47 percent more than Republicans. They have spent 66 percent more, and have about 53 percent more in their war chests. According to the Wesleyan Media Project, between Sept. 1 and Oct. 7, Democrats running for the House and the Senate spent $1.50 on advertising for every $1 spent by Republicans....
It is true that Republicans have an edge when it comes to outside expenditures. This year, for example, the United States Chamber of Commerce is spending $22 million for Republicans, while the Service Employees International Union is spending about $14 million for Democrats.
But independent spending is about only a tenth of spending by candidates and parties. Democrats have a healthy fear of Karl Rove, born out of experience, but there is no way the $13 million he influences through the group American Crossroads is going to reshape an election in which the two parties are spending something like $1.4 billion collectively.
An unsurprising graph from Gallup:
Paul Waldman of the liberal American Prospect responds by zeroing in on the Republican line:
The next time you get an urge to say that the country is gripped by a belief that government is dangerously out of control and that it's threatening our freedom, remind yourself that the country is not in fact gripped by those beliefs. Republicans are gripped by those beliefs, and the fact that they're yelling them very loudly doesn't mean they're shared by everyone else.
Will Wilkinson reacts:
This is fair enough, I suppose. But it would be equally fair to note that Democrats are "gripped" by similarly impugnable beliefs. The advent of the Obama era has evidently put Democratic minds at ease. But why? Is government now, as a matter of fact, less of a threat to American citizens? President Obama seems no better than George Bush on those issues that presumably led a majority of Democrats to view Washington as a threat. Indeed, the continuity between the Obama and Bush administrations on these issues is so complete, it would be misleading to characterise Mr Obama as "Bush light". Mr Obama's stance on civil liberties and executive power amount to a vigorous affirmation of the very policies he openly deplored during the campaign. He has, for example, asserted the authority to order the assassination of American citizens, which seems pretty threatening to me. The fact that the Obama administration is deporting record numbers of undocumented immigrants may not seem a threat to citizens, but it is. And as we noted the other day, the Obama Department of Justice has directly threatened to arrest and imprison Californians who buy and sell marijuana, whether or not California voters choose to make it legal in their state.
Mr Waldman is right to suggest that today's Republican alarm and Democratic light-heartedness are partisan phenomena. But one is no sillier than the other. The majority of Democrats who saw government as a threat in 2007 were right to do so, and nothing truly significant has changed since then.
I disagree with Wilkinson on one point: I think one is sillier than the other. Even if it's mostly for partisan reasons, the Republicans at least are moving in the right direction. For now.
Washington Monthly has a really interesting
piece about the pot-growing history, lore, and culture
of Humboldt County and Cali's fabled "Emerald Triangle."
Here's a snippet that should make anybody who's on the fence vote
in favor of the Golden State's watershed Proposition 19, which
would give towns and cities the right to regulate and tax sales of
marijuana:
As much as today’s younger growers may admire the environmentalism of the first homesteaders, their primary concerns more often center on economic survival. When I was in Humboldt County, in the remote town of Alderpoint, I met a former small-time indoor grower named Obadiah Switzer, who belongs to an expanding sociological category in the Triangle: second-generation growers. The adult son of “truck gypsy hippies,” he looked like a clean-cut fireman and talked like John Wayne. Whatever bohemian adventurism had inspired his parents seemed lost on him. “My whole life I’ve been here, and weed’s always been gettin’ grown,” he said, letting out a short laugh. “There’s no romance here for me.” He might as well have been a longshoreman’s son in Baltimore.
While many in his parents’ generation were up in arms about the heresies of indoor pot, [second-generation grower Obadiah] Switzer was focused on mobilizing the county to protect itself against the disruptions of legalization. He had recently become the Humboldt County representative of a group that was informally calling itself a union of marijuana growers. And the union was against Proposition 19.
To Switzer, the initiative to tax and regulate marijuana was just paving the way for far-off industrialists to corner the market. “It’s about stealing the economy from the people it’s been built by,” he said. “What’s gonna happen is there’s gonna be a shitload of minimum-wage jobs out there. And all these people that have subsistence incomes or a little bit better in the cannabis economy, their work is gonna go away. And they’re gonna be able to get a minimum-wage job.”
Reason.tv's latest gives both sides of the case for and against Prop. 19. Take a look and make an informed decision:
Via TPM, here's a new SEIU ad that proclaims just about everything negative you could say about Republican Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle short of how she misspells her own damn name! Well, that and her bold stances against involvement with the United Nations and fluoridated water.
Among the charges: If Angle gets her insidious, evil way, there will be no abortions, no college loans, and no jobs! The ad shows a woman aging from young kid to blinky-eyed senior as a voiceover intones:
Sharron Angle's dangerous ideas will make her life worse - at every stage... If she was raped - and got pregnant - Angle would force her to have the baby. Her college loans - ended. If she's looking for work - it's tough luck with Sharron Angle. At retirement her Social Security - phased out. Sharron Angle: too dangerous to have real power over real people.
That's pretty good work for a lady whose greatest political success so far is battling a zombie politician and Senate Majority Leader to what appears to be a dead heat this election cycle. That's a testament to the actual craptacular legislative resume of Harry Reid, not the Book of Revelation-style apocalypse Angle promises to bring if elected to the World's Lamest Deliberative Body.
I wouldn't vote for Angle (or Reid) if I lived in Nevada, but I find ads like this, which skip from one thing to another and pretend to be aimed at the womens annoying. I believe in abortion rights and I don't think anyone should be concerned that Angle's extreme (and, let's face it, totally logically consistent from a pro-life POV) position has any chance in hell of prevailing.
The implication in the ad is that Angle would gut public-sector college loans, which is also unlikely. Though unlike abortion, it's a question worth raising. If people agree that untold gobs of free and subsidized money helped to fuel the housing bubble and bust, certainly exactly the same thing is true in higher education, where the bubble is barely starting to be recognized (the first step to it bursting). Certainly, Angle would have no role in killing private-sector college loans, anymore than she would create a world in which "jobs" themselves would be against the law. If the SEIU, that incredible job-creating collective, is claiming that Angle would drive the economy into an iceberg and thus kill employment opportunities, well, she got to that party too late. Which is the only reason she's neck and neck (if he has one) with Harry Reid.
Which leaves us with Social Security, especially as it relates to women, the target of this particular spot. Women are more likely to depend on Social Security in retirement, especially if they are unmarried. Which is also one of the reasons they should be vociferously arguing for the end of the program:
Women depend on Social Security more than men. Based on Social Security data, almost 29 percent of women over age 65 rely on Social Security for 90 percent of their retirement income. That number increases to 46 percent for unmarried elderly women....
The expectation of a Social Security payment can make women worse off as it reduces their incentives to save and prepare for their own retirements.
Imagine if a woman could have saved and invested the 12.4 percent of her income she paid for years in payroll taxes (including the employer’s share) for Social Security. She could have it available in case of emergency during her lifetime or pass it along to her children or grandchildren if she didn’t need it anymore.
Depending on Social Security payments also makes women vulnerable to changes in government policies. At any time, Congress can reduce benefits even for people who paid their entire lives into the system. In a sense, it did that earlier this month by saying Social Security recipients won’t get a cost-of-living increase this year.
That's from
a column at Bloomberg by Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy,
who runs through what a pro-woman political agenda would look like
(sadly, neither party is offering much). What she says about women
above obviously applies to men as well. And anybody who doesn't
think that cuts to Social Security benefits are coming is way, way
out to lunch (perhaps from too much fluoride in the water?).
As I noted above, I don't have a case to make for Sharron Angle, whom I wouldn't vote for. But what the SEIU ad, and so many other attacks on her and other Tea Party candidates, miss is that characters like Angle don't need a case to make. They're running against the abject failure of the idjits already in office, most of whom have been in office a very long time (Reid's been in the Senate since 1986!) and have little to nothing to show for it. It's a testament to incumbents' incompetence that we're facing a great tsunami of throw-the-bums-out fever (sorry for the mixed metaphor!) and that all you need to play is the ability to present, as Angle has done, a semi-credible alternative to the status quo. That's not dangerous, it's democracy.
Some uh-oh news from the latest Prop 19 polling from the Public Policy Institute of California:
Today, 44 percent of likely voters plan to vote for Proposition 19—the measure that would legalize marijuana—while 49 percent plan to vote against it, with 7 percent undecided. This is an 8-point drop in support since September (52% yes, 41% no, 7% undecided). Support has declined among Democrats (56% today, 63% September), dropped sharply among independents (40% today, 65% September), and remains low among Republicans (30% today, 32% September). Support has declined across nearly all demographic groups, most strikingly among Latinos (42% today, 63% September). Most likely voters say the outcome of the vote on Proposition 19 is important (52% very important, 28% somewhat important). Those planning to vote no are more likely to consider the outcome very important (67%) than those planning to vote yes (40%).
And that's a big goddamnit. I agree with the words of a long-time pot law reform activist said to me yesterday, that at this point we are no longer talking about if, we are just talking about how and when, when it comes to adult legalization of the weed; but I sure wish the conversation would come to a conclusion quicker than it now looks like it might. Link via Alan Bock at the Orange Punch blog.
Penthouse founder Bob Guccione
has died of cancer at age 79. Reason interviewed Guccione
in 1975, a wide-ranging conversation that covered not just sex and
censorship but tax resistance, drug laws, the draft, civil rights,
public education, and more.
Here's a Washington Post headline for you: "NPR fires Juan Williams over anti-Muslim remarks." What were the "anti-Muslim remarks" in question? These:
"I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country," he said. "But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they're identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."
Williams then brought up a statement made in a New York courtroom this month by Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani American who pleaded guilty to trying to detonate a bomb in Times Square and was sentenced to life in prison.
"He said the war with Muslims, America's war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don't think there's any way to get away from these facts," Williams said.
That latter half cannot be the objectionable bit, so we're left with this 21st century ask-the-ethicist puzzler: Is it now "anti-Muslim" to admit your anxiety when seeing an Orthodox-looking Muslim on Islamic terrorists' most infamous weapon of mass murder? I think if you stated that most Muslims are a threat (a much more declarative formulation than "I get worried" about "people who are in Muslim garb"), or that all Muslims should be singled out for special scrutiny, or that our basic policy problem is with Muslims, then you might be getting warmer. But later in the O'Reilly interview, Williams specifically repudiated all three of those sentiments:
WILLIAMS: Wait a second though, wait, hold on, because if you said Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals, very obnoxious, you don't say first and foremost, we got a problem with Christians. That's crazy.
Later, in a crosstalk-heavy exchange about Germany's Muslim integration issues, there was this:
O'REILLY: Juan, who is posing a problem in Germany? Is it the Muslims who have come there or the Germans? [...] Who's causing the problem?
WILLIAMS: I think -- I think -- no, no, wait. See, you did it again. It's extremists. It's people who refuse to --
O'REILLY: It's not extremists.
WILLIAMS: It's a German society. They are the ones causing that problem.
And then there was this:
WILLIAMS: But, Bill, here's a caution point. The other day in New York, some guy cuts a Muslim cabby's neck and says he's attacking him or you think about the protest at the mosque near Ground Zero --
[...]
WILLIAMS: I don't know what is in that guy's head. But I'm saying, we don't want in America, people to have their rights violated to be attacked on the street because they heard a rhetoric from Bill O'Reilly and they act crazy. We've got to say to people as Bill was saying tonight, that guy is a nut.
O'REILLY: He is a nut. And I said that about the guy in Florida -- who wanted to burn the Koran. I came down on him like crazy.
WILLIAMS: Correct. There you go.
Williams' firing is a clarifying moment in media mores. You can be Islamophobic, in the form of refusing to run the most innocuous imaginable political cartoons out of a broad-brush fear of Muslims, but you can't admit it, even when the fear is expressed as a personal feeling and not a group description, winnowed down to the very specific and nightmare-exhuming act of riding on an airplane, and uttered in a context of otherwise repudiating collective guilt and overbroad fearmongering.
I think Williams' worried/nervous comments were much too broad–I see zero reason to ever feel anxiety if a 100-year-old woman in traditional Islamic headdress is sitting next to me on a plane–and it's been a long time since I recall the heart rate quickening at the sight of a bearded and nervous young man in Islamic garb standing in front of me in an airport security line. But I have felt that heightened sense of anxiety in the past, and if it wasn't a common enough sensation you probably wouldn't see satire like this:
According to the depiction on NPR's own website, this episode seems to have a political back story that I suspect plays a strong role:
NPR issued a statement praising Williams as a valuable contributor but saying it had given him notice that it is severing his contract. "His remarks on The O'Reilly Factor this past Monday were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR," the statement read.
Williams' presence on the largely conservative and often contentious prime-time talk shows of Fox News has long been a sore point with NPR News executives.
His status was earlier shifted from staff correspondent to analyst after he took clear-cut positions about public policy on television and in newspaper opinion pieces.
I hope NPR gets more specific about which "editorial standards and practices" in particular were violated here, so we can best tailor our archive searches.
Politico reports on the results of a new study from Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor and former Air Force lecturer:
Pape and his team of researchers draw on data produced by a six-year study of suicide terrorist attacks around the world that was partially funded by the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency. They have compiled the terrorism statistics in a publicly available database comprising some 10,000 records on some 2,200 suicide terrorism attacks, dating back to the first suicide terrorism attack of modern times — the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 241 U.S. Marines.
"We have lots of evidence now that when you put the foreign military presence in, it triggers suicide terrorism campaigns, ... and that when the foreign forces leave, it takes away almost 100 percent of the terrorist campaign," Pape said in an interview last week on his findings.
Pape said there has been a dramatic spike in suicide bombings in Afghanistan since U.S. forces began to expand their presence to the south and east of the country in 2006. While there were a total of 12 suicide attacks from 2001 to 2005 in Afghanistan when the U.S. had a relatively limited troop presence of a few thousand troops mostly in Kabul, since 2006 there have been more than 450 suicide attacks in Afghanistan — and they are growing more lethal, Pape said.
Deaths due to suicide attacks in Afghanistan have gone up by a third in the year since President Barack Obama added 30,000 more U.S. troops. "It is not making it any better," Pape said.
Andrew Sullivan gives a blog post that also links to this same Politico story an appropriate headline: "Ron Paul Was Right."
Pape and James K. Feldman have a book out soon on this topic, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.
Having leased out his Northwest Side home after
becoming White House chief of staff, Emanuel faces a potential
lawsuit claiming he is ineligible to pursue his next ambition,
becoming mayor of Chicago. The city code says you have to be a
resident of the city for at least a year to run, and for the last
couple of years, Emanuel has been bunking elsewhere. But as Steve
Chapman explains, whether the argument will stand up in court is in
doubt, since Emanuel has kept his Chicago voting registration and
his Illinois driver's license, and since he clearly intended to
return. But the dispute does make one thing clear, Chapman writes,
the silliness of residency requirements for public office.
It now looks like the security team working for Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller that handcuffed one journalist and threatened others over the weekend were active duty military.
If it’s not completely intolerable to have active-duty soldiers handcuffing American journalists on U.S. soil while acting as private “guards” for Senate candidates, what would be? This is the sort of thing that the U.S. State Department would readily condemn if it happened in Egypt or Iran or Venezuela or Cuba: active-duty soldiers detaining journalists while they’re paid by politician candidates?
Greenwald's updates suggest that active duty military personnel working for a partisan political campaign violates DOD regulations. If it isn't off limits, it should be. It isn't difficult to see the problems that would come with active soldiers working private detail for politicians.
Miller should have apologized, fired his security, and acknowledged that the handcuffing and threats were out of line. Instead he's defending the actions of his security and making excuses that aren't true.
Hmm. Inflated sense of privilege. Inability to admit a mistake. Doubling down as it becomes increasingly clear he screwed up. Miller's looking more and more like a U.S. Senator by the hour.
Disturbing. But also probably to be expected of a guy who thinks the U.S. should adopt an East German model of border control.
Whether California's Proposition 19 passes or not, it has certainly made the absurdity of cannabis prohibition a topic of national conversation in a way that medical marijuana, three stoner presidents in a row, and countless episodes of Dragnet never managed to do. Editorial boards (who are always the last to know) are still bogarting the conversation with their baked jibberish, but it's no longer a career ender to take pot -- and your right to ingest it any old time -- seriously.
Check out the Boston Globe's Big Picture gallery on marijuana, which features images of kind bud, murdered narcotraficantes, burning ganja cinderblocks, the deteriorating Afghan war, and a host of other good and bad elements that would emerge straight and clear-eyed if the normalization of weed were allowed to continue.
And for more on the legalization groundswell, dig Reason TV's take on the Prop 19 debate:
The Obama administration is playing a game of opposite limbo with the federal budget: When it comes to deficit spending, its operative question seems to be “How high can you go?”
New numbers posted today on the Treasury Department website show the National Debt has increased by more than $3 trillion since President Obama took office.
The National Debt stood at $10.626 trillion the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated. The Bureau of Public Debt reported today that the National Debt had hit an all time high of $13.665 trillion.
The Debt increased $4.9 trillion during President Bush's two terms. The Administration has projected the National Debt will soar in Mr. Obama's fourth year in office to nearly $16.5-trillion in 2012. That's more than 100 percent of the value of the nation's economy and $5.9-trillion above what it was his first day on the job.
Mr. Obama frequently lays blame for soaring federal deficits on his predecessor.
"By the time I got into office we already had a $1.3 trillion deficit and we had exploded the national debt," he said last month during one of his backyard chats with Americans.
The president has a (partial) point: Bush ran up mountain-sized deficits too. And when he left office, one of his gifts to the incoming administration was a giant pile of debt. But instead of chipping away at the problem, Obama has allowed the nation’s budget deficit to climb even higher. And his commitment to long-term deficit reduction is weak, at best. Sure, he’s committed to reducing the deficit to 3 percent of GDP. But as Peter Orszag admitted earlier this year, his own budget fails to propose actual policies to achieve that reduction. Instead, it relies on a non-binding commission conveniently set to release its findings shortly after the upcoming election. I think it's pretty safe to say that when a president is a serious about taking action an issue, he usually doesn't choose to address it by relying on a powerless commission that releases its findings in December. Bush’s budgeting failures were real, and significant. But they don’t excuse Obama’s lack of follow-through.
Back in May I noted a lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice against the city of Lake Elmo, Minnesota, which had a law on the books forbidding local farmers from selling produce grown on their own land if that land happened to partially fall outside of the city limits. It looks like the legal pressure paid off. As The Stillwater Gazette reports, the city council approved a new permit this month allowing local farms to sell produce grown outside of town. As IJ attorney Anthony Sanders told the Gazette:
”We filed suit in May because the city's ordinances did not allow to sell products on their farm unless grown in Lake Elmo," Sanders said. "This affected our clients very directly because they grow pumpkins on land they own in Wisconsin and do business with other farms around the country that grow Christmas trees. Farmers have supplemented products for decades. There is more farming freedom in Lake Elmo now because of the pressure put on the city by our client and that's a good thing.”
One thing you can say for Jerry Brown, writes
Senior Editor Tim Cavanaugh, he’s not innocent about politics. It’s
hard to think of any candidate in the country with more experience
of the pleasureless, maddening power of institutions, and knowledge
of the limited capacity of leaders to manage public policy. Yet as
Cavanaugh notes, the problem is that there is more to California
than its government, and Jerry Brown does not see any of that.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Senior Editor Michael C. Moynihan reviews Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case by Walter Schneir, a longtime champion of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Confronting the available archival evidence, Schneir at long last acknowledges Julius Rosenberg's guilt but downplays the significance of his offense.
"People don't want to see
someone jump in from Washington and tell them how to vote," drug
czar Gil Kerlikowske said
today while jumping in from Washington and telling Californians how
to vote on Proposition 19. Kerlikowske, who visited a drug
treatment center in Pasadena, told A.P. the Justice Department
might take the advice
of nine former DEA administrators and sue to overturn the pot
legalization initiative if voters are foolish enough to ignore him.
"The letter from the former DEA administrators, a number of whom
are not only practicing attorneys but former state attorney
generals, made it very clear that they felt that pre-emption was
certainly applicable in this case," Kerlikowske said.
Not surprisingly, Kerlikowske did not cite any constitutional provision or case law that says California must ban what Congress bans or that states are obligated to punish whatever the federal government punishes. A.P. itself misleadingly frames the issue, saying Prop. 19 "would conflict with federal laws classifying marijuana as an illegal drug." There is not a conflict simply because a state chooses not to replicate the federal criminal code.
Speaking of conflicts, Kerlikowske noted Attorney General Eric Holder's promise to "vigorously enforce" marijuana prohibition in California whether or not Prop. 19 passes:
The attorney general made it clear the federal government will continue to enforce the marijuana laws under the Controlled Substances Act. It's a duty and responsibility of government, it's not something where they can say which laws they want to enforce and which they don't.
Yet Kerlikowske insisted that "vigorously enforc[ing] the CSA against those individuals and organizations that possess, manufacture or distribute marijuana for recreational use," as Holder said he would do, will not require much in the way of law enforcement resources:
Kerlikowske...criticized claims by Proposition 19's supporters that the law would free up time and money law enforcement agencies now spend pursuing marijuana offenses.
"Law enforcement agencies are not spending an inordinate amount of time chasing adults around for small amounts of marijuana," he said. "Here in California, the jail resources, law enforcement resources, court resources are not being overburdened with adults going through the system" for personal pot possession.
For those who believe the government has no business dictating what grownups may put into their bodies, any amount of time spent enforcing marijuana prohibition is "inordinate." But Kerlikowske can't have it both ways. Either pot prohibition is not worth vigorous enforcement, in which case voters have to wonder whether it is justified at all, or it is important enough to merit the resources required to arrest a substantial percentage of those who violate it.
The other day I noted that the feds account for less than 1 percent of marijuana arrests, which suggests they would have a hard time picking up the slack if a state like California opted out of enforcing marijuana prohibition. Here is another relevant fact: All the marijuana arrests (about 858,000 in 2009) amount to maybe 3 percent of people who violate marijuana prohibition every year. (That's according to the federal government's survey data, which probably understate the number of marijuana users.) In other words, the government fails to catch marijuana offenders at least 97 percent of the time, and the feds are getting less than 0.03 percent of them. Is that what Holder calls "vigorous" enforcement?
So it’s now confirmed: That women interviewed at a Georgia Tea Party protest was indeed former Velvet Underground drummer and ur-riot girl Moe Tucker. Tracked down by the St. Louis alt-weekly Riverfront Times, Tucker unloads on the Obama administration and government waste, while complaining that there has been no cost of living increase for Social Security recipients. But Tucker argues that she isn’t "against food stamps, welfare or Medicaid, if only they would oversee these programs properly!"
Some excerpts:
No country can provide all things for all citizens. There comes a point where it just isn't possible, and it's proven to be a failure everywhere it's been tried. I am not oblivious to the plight of the poor, but I don't see any reason/sense to the idea that everyone has to have everything, especially when the economy is so bad. I see that philosophy as merely a ploy to control…
My family was damn poor when I was growing up on Long Island. There were no food stamps, no Medicaid, no welfare. If you were poor, you were poor. You didn't have a TV, you didn't have five pairs of shoes, you didn't have Levi's, you didn't have a phone; you ate Spam, hot dogs and spaghetti. We all survived! I am not against food stamps, welfare or Medicaid, if only they would oversee these programs properly!”...
I am also against the government taking over the student loan program, car companies, bailouts and the White House taking control of the census (what the hell is that all about?); [about] any First Lady telling (I know, I know, "suggesting to") us what to eat, the mayor of New York City declaring "no salt" (screw you, pal!), the mayor/city commissioners of Anytown, U.S.A. declaring you can't fly a flag, can't say the Pledge of Allegiance and can't sing the National Anthem....
As a lead-in to the next part of your question: Today it was announced that there would be no cost of living increase for Social Security recipients because "there's no inflation." I'd love to know what makes them think that! Where the hell do they shop? Prices have been rising for over a year. Inflation is a natural happening, I know. But why is it that suddenly food prices don't go up two or three or five cents, but instead they're going up 40, 50, 60 cents at a clip? No inflation my ass!
My anger stems from the unbelievable (criminal!) waste of money on pork and earmarks. It drives me nuts to see that X millions are being allocated to build a turtle tunnel, a donkey museum, a salamander crossing, etc, etc, etc
An interesting interview, almost ruined by a clueless interviewer. For example:
How did you get involved with the local Tea Party movement?
I'm not "involved" with the local movement. I went to the first Tea Party in June or July of 2009 because it was within striking distance and I wanted to be counted.
Are you still involved in Tea Party activities?
Thanks for listening to the previous answer! And when Tucker clarifies that she’s an angry independent, not a conservative (“Anyone who thinks I'm crazy about Sarah Palin, Bush, etc. has made quite the presumption”), the Riverfront Times follows up by asking if she knows are “other closet conservatives in the music/art world?”
Update: I should note, in fairness to the interviewer, that the interview was conducted via email.
Not say we told you so, but: We told you so.
As noted in this morning's links, thanks to new
regulations designed to protect consumers
free checking is, like, so over. Maintaining low-balance
accounts costs banks money, and the cash that came in from
overdraft fees meant that customers who overdrew their accounts
were subsidizing the folks who kept low balances but were careful
not to overdraw. But when you make it harder to charge those fees,
banks don't just shrug and say "OK, I guess we'll make less money
from now on. Under the new system, banks are looking to replace
overdraft fee income with other kinds of fee income.
At Bank of America, for instance, some of those nefarious semi-secret overdraft fees will be replaced with (semi-secret?) fees for using tellers or receiving paper statements.
To make up for lost fees, [Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan] started thinking of new products. In August, the bank introduced a new "eBanking" account, where customers were offered a free checking account if they banked online. The catch: If they opt for paper statements, or want access to tellers for basic transactions, they would be charged a monthly fee of $8.95.
Bank officials are putting a good face on the end of overdraft fees, saying that they were losing customers because of the practice.
Checking accounts were being closed at an annual rate of 18 percent, said [BoA CEO Moynihan], and complaints were at an all-time high. So Moynihan ended overdraft charges on small debit card transactions. He says the rate of account closings have since dropped 27 percent.
But banks could have discontinued the practice on their own anytime. The new regulations aren't doing banks any favors. The regs benefit a subset of chronic overdrafters who couldn't figure out how to change their behavior and occasional overdrafters who didn't know the rules. But those costs didn't vanish: They have been redistributed to everyone with a low balance account—keep in mind that (for the most part) accounts with high balances, bank credit cards, or other products geared to the middle class and rich won't be affected by these changes—and the fees now adhere to responsible banking behaviors, like staying informed about your balance or visiting a teller.
Interesting followup on Jacob Sullum's post below, on the ExpressJet pilot who refused a full body scan. From an interview with RAND Corporation terrorism expert Brian Jenkins, in the November issue of Los Angeles magazine, alas not online:
In the wake of the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab episode--the guy who had a bomb concealed in his underpants--even though the bomb didn't work, there was a great deal of alarm, and in response we decided to deploy full-body scanners. Hundreds of millions of dollars. One guy, one small device in his underpants, and we've just spent hundreds of millions of dollars.
Then, a page later in the story, so maybe you wouldn't notice the connection:
And, you know, I'm not entirely certain that a body scanner would have detected Abdulmutallab's bombs.
Maybe it's not even likely?
I don't want to get into technical details, but it's not certain...
Security theater: if only it provided entertainment commensurate with its expense.
On November 2, 2010, California voters will decide whether or not to legalize marijuana.
If passed, Proposition 19 would control marijuana like alcohol, allowing adults 21 years of age and over to possess up to an ounce of pot for personal consumption and grow marijuana at a private residence in a space of up to 25 square feet. The initiative would also allow local governments to tax and regulate the commercial cultivation, transport, and sale of marijuana.
In order to get a handle on the debate surrounding. Prop 19, we spoke to both supporters and opponents of the initiative.
So what do you think? Should Californians legalize marijuana?
Approximately 6 minutes. Produced by Paul Feine and Alex Manning.
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