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The mighty Wall Street Journal (my favorite newspaper) has been hopping with pot talk lately. What's the Voice of Capitalism coming to? It started with an editorial page commentary on March 16 by constitutional expert Randy E. Barnett called "Reefer Madness". It was a learned assessment by Professor Barnett on how the federal courts go through constitutional contortions in maintaining the prohibition on medical uses of marijuana. The commentary was keyed by the Angel Raich story. On March 23 there were four letters in response. If you are a Journal reader, you know that's a lot for any one commentary, meaning there were probably hundreds that didn't get printed. There were letters from organizations "Common Sense for Drug Policy" and "Marijuana Policy Project" decrying criminalization of a useful drug. President Carter's drug czar Lee Dogoloff weighed in - saying "every major" scientist says there is no medical benefit. Ol...

I want a follow-up story! As the Washington Post reported today (March 23 - 07) the Democratic members of the Federal Election Commission say the Bushies cheated us taxpayers on how they accounted for their expenditure of public money. The Republican members of the commission say "did not." An excerpt: "We had a disagreement on this audit, and it was a doozy," said one of the Democrats, Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub. The dispute centered on the use of what the commissioners called "hybrid" ads, which were intended to promote both the president and Republican members of Congress. The Bush campaign argued that it should not bear the full cost of these ads, so it split the tab with the Republican Party. As a result, only half of the cost would count toward spending limits imposed on the campaign when it agreed to take public funds. Weintraub said the spending limit is an essential part of the agreement candidates make to accept public financing....

I notice I've been grousing a lot on the old blog lately. Time - sez I to myself - to write something uplifting, or at least useful. Vacation time is just around the corner. So here: Don’t Deny the Devil There are certain things in the making of recreational choices that color one’s judgment, like a well-tinted pair of sunglasses can make a day look more glamorous than it really is, or a quickly drained dram of tequila can have the same effect on a candidate for social intercourse. The hint of danger is one of those “certain things.” Hints of danger have various thresholds for individuals. Popping one’s ‘chute a thousand feet closer to the ground than usual might hint of danger to a jaded skydiver making the experience beguiling recreation. To the rest of us there are usually less well-defined danger hints. Just considering that hit of tequila, for instance, puts some people off as being ‘way over the limit, fully into danger.’ Depends on your age sometimes...

In today’s Washington Post, Susan Jacoby reviews Stephen Prothero’s book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- And Doesn't (HarperSanFrancisco, 2007). Here are a couple of mind boggling excerpts: Americans are … the most religiously ignorant people in the Western world. Fewer than half of us can identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible, and only one third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Approximately 75 percent of adults, according to polls cited by Prothero, mistakenly believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." More than 10 percent think that Noah's wife was Joan of Arc. Only half can name even one of the four Gospels, and -- a finding that will surprise many -- evangelical Christians are only slightly more knowledgeable than their non-evangelical counterparts. Check it out: http://www.bu.edu/religion/faculty/bios/prothero.html And… http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/ ...

I had a powerful deja vu experience this evening. On PBS Fareed Zacharia was interviewing Professor Shibley Telhami , holder of the the Anwar Sadat Chair at the University of Maryland about the new Zogby Poll on Arab attitudes and opinions. (Telhami designed the questionnaire and analyzed the results.) As you might expect, the good old U.S. of A. doesn't fare too well. G.W. Bush is by far the "most disliked" world leader among Arabs of all stripes. He far surpasses the traditional winner, whoever was the current leader of Israel. In fact, Bush beats the combination of Olmert and Sharon. Professor Telhami noted that the polarization against America has become the driving force uniting Arabs, Shiite, Sunni, et al. The main reason the Arabs admire anyone (including their # 3 favorite world leader Hugo Chavez ) is that they stand up to America. In these powerful findings from a well designed scientific poll there is strong guidance about what's wrong with our c...

Here's another brilliant idea from the W. Bush- leaguers . Make up for the billions blitzed on Iraq and the further billions foregone in the upper crust tax cuts by selling off big pieces of our national forests! Did you hear about that? Probably not unless you are in a Knight Ridder Publishing city. Note: Published on Friday, February 10, 2006 by Knight Ridder Bush Administration Moves to Sell National Forest Land by Seth Borenstein Feb 10... and very little national pick-up of the story. I found it because one of Netscape's newshounds noticed it on CommonDreams .Org and posted it yesterday. The full story is at: www.netscape.com today (Sunday 2-25-07) Here are a few excerpts: WASHINGTON - The Bush administration will unveil a proposal Friday to sell up to 200,000 acres of national forest land in "isolated parcels" ranging from a quarter of an acre to 200 acres, much of it in California. "I am outraged, and I don't think the public is ...

I had never seen the political cartoon showing George W. holding a homeless "will work for food" type sign saying "Will Kill For Oil" until today. It illustrates a powerful argument against the standard Cheney- esque position about Iraq. It's all in a great blog I just discovered http://www.theoildrum.com/ Please check it out (even though my blogging skills make you have to paste the URL in your browser). Briefly put: "The idea is that, although Bush was wrong to get us into this war, we are there and we cannot simply pull our troops out. If we do so, then Iraq will collapse into civil war and Iran could very well take over the whole country, including its oilfields." Those are Allen Pfiefer's (the blogmeister ) words. His concise rebuttal goes like this: "This seems plausible. But when you look closely at this argument, you will see that there is nothing to support it other than the delusion that the US is fighting the good fight. ...

How much can they screw up? Let me count the ways. Even a news hog like me can miss an important apple now and then. The one I missed this time was how our new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is apparently trying to re-light the cold war flames. Brilliant! I've missed all the tension about imminent nuclear conflagration. It sort of keeps the worry about imminent terrorist attacks in perspective. Just putting some of our flawed "missile defense shield" in ex-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe was enough to crank up the Russian defense spending. Check this paragraph from the Feb 9 edition of the British Guardian Limited http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,2009339,00.html In his speech to Russia's parliament, Mr Ivanov (Russia's hawkish defence minister, Sergei Ivanov) announced that the military would get 17 ballistic missiles this year, compared with an average of four in recent years. The plan envisages the deployment of 34 new silo-based Topol-M missil...

I hope you have read – or heard about in detail – the marvelous reporting by Dana Priest and Anne Hull of the Washington Post on the miserable way nearly a thousand U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are being treated in and around Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It’s a horror story in many ways, but it is especially slimy considering the responsible party has made “support our troops” its mantra. Something about hypocrisy makes me madder than just about any human weirdness. I don’t mean The Republican Party either. This is the George W. Bush Administration failing our vets. Republicans in general are one helluva lot better that this administration. Of course we can’t let the Republicans off the hook, because they let this gang of two-faced incompetents and their cynical ideologues take control of the G.O.P. The inhumanities at Walter Reed are just part of the story, of course. The under funded, understaffed, overworked and totally inadequate-to-the-task Ve...

GOODBYE, MOLLY Witty to the point of hilarious. Bright to the point of genius. Tough to the point of nails. She'll be missed. And missed. Not a great picture. It is the one she chose for the dust cover on Bushwacked . If you haven't Read it, and understand why George W. is like he is . RIP

It all started as I was grinding my teeth yesterday, listening to RWR (right wing radio). Senator James Inhofe was a guest on the Sean Hannity program. Inhofe is the "flat earth" senator from Oklahoma. He was saying environmentally-oriented people worried about global warming "want us to give up our cars, stop building new homes and buildings, sacrifice our way of life for this hoax they call global warming." Etc. So I was thinking, what's an uninformed person to think? Probably "Is this true? Damn those lefty tree huggers." I mean he IS a U.S. Senator. Would he lie? Well you betcha, but unless you know his history, how would you know? Can you believe, for instance, when a critic of the Iraq war says there has been huge fraud and theft by war profiteers? Maybe they are all liars, righties and lefties, saying whatever it takes to make their points. I still believe that solid Journalism is the antidote to this kind of debilitating cynicism. The Wall Stre...

[From Reuters.com] 440,000 Deaths per Year By Jason Szep BOSTON, Jan 18 (Reuters) - The amount of nicotine that smokers typically inhale per cigarette rose by 11 percent from 1998 to 2005, perpetuating a "tobacco pandemic" that makes it harder for smokers to quit, a Harvard study said on Thursday.……….. "Cigarettes are finely tuned drug delivery devices designed to perpetuate a tobacco pandemic," said Howard Koh, the school's associate dean for public health practice and former Massachusetts commissioner of public health. …………. "The end result is a product that is potentially more addictive," the study said. …………. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers cigarette smoking the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. About 440,000 people die each year from lung cancer and other diseases related to tobacco use. Whole story at: http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=...