MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow doesn’t think much of medical marijuana

Rachel Maddow (one of my faves) has a complaint, wondering how could 9 out of 10 marijuana initiatives succeed at the ballot box, while 4 out of 4 anti-gay initiatives succeeded. (Updated with hyperlinks and bumped. — “R”R)

To be fair, I understand Rachel’s point about the anti-gay ballot amendments in California, Arizona, Florida, and Arkansas all passing – it’s despicable that we would treat gays and lesbians any differently under the law than we treat straights. However, that doesn’t mean there is some equivalence between reforming marijuana laws and discrimination against gays.

For one thing, I’d note that the only state that had statewide gay and marijuana initiatives was California, the only state where a marijuana initiative (Prop 5) failed. (Arkansas had anti-gay adoption, but Fayetteville, not the whole state, approved cannabis as lowest priority for law enforcement.) It wouldn’t be fair to say the anti-gay amendment also brought out anti-pot voters in California, would it?

I’ll admit, Rachel, that the results seem ironic and sad, though no more sad that Californians approving humane treatment of chickens at the slaughter while also taking away marriage rights from humans that already have those rights. But your casual dismissal of some very important gains by the cannabis community is not in keeping with your usual inclusive and tolerant beliefs.

In dismissing marijuana initiatives with “whatever, dude” and “Funyuns” comments, you are dismissing the thousands of seriously ill and disabled Michiganders who will no longer fear arrest and incarceration for simply using a plant to alleviate severe pain, nausea, spasticity, seizures, or the wasting that comes with chemotherapy treatments and HIV/AIDS. Rachel, didn’t you begin your career as an activist helping those with HIV/AIDS in prisons? You should know this better than most.

You’re also dismissing residents of Massachusetts who’ve chosen to put their law enforcement resources into crimes more serious than busting a college kid for a baggie of weed. Or are you supportive of criminal penalties for marijuana that endanger students’ financial aid, poor people’s housing, and working people’s jobs and professionals’ careers?

Perhaps we just did a better job of mobilizing our base and convincing the voters of our message. Yes, you had the financial might of the Mormon Church fighting to pass Prop 8 in California, but we’ve had the financial and prosecutorial might of law enforcement fighting us from their bully pulpit using our own tax dollars. And while it is a terrible injustice to deny the rights of gay people to marry or adopt, nobody is arresting 872,000 gay people a year for being gay, nobody is testing gay people’s urine for metabolites of homosexuality and declaring them DUIs, and nobody is incarcerating gay people for their “lifestyle”.

Yes, gay people face revolting acts of violence and discrimination most stoners never face, but we can still be arrested for our “lifestyle”. The government has an entire cabinet bureau dedicated to propagandizing against us, lying about us, defeating our ballot propositions, and arresting and convicting us.

We should be natural allies, Rachel. Our struggles are very different, but also quite similar. We need to come out of the closet, too. We need to educate ignorant people about us. While you may think the big difference is that gay is innate and stoner is a choice, don’t be so sure. We all have an innate desire to alter our consciousness, and for medical users, they really don’t have much of a choice.

Now pass the Funyuns!

John “Keating Five” McCain and the Damned Liberal New York Times!

More than a few listeners have emailed me to say, “Thank you for reporting on John McCain’s history with the Keating Five scandal.”  On the air I put it in my “Under the Radar” segment to note how this completely relevent story is being ignored my the MSM – the last major financial regulatory scandal in our nation’s history, which just happened to involve the GOP presidential nominee!

Seems like the Obama campaign has noticed, too, as per this press release:

Daily Kos: State of the Nation
Number of probing stories the NY Times has written over the course of the campaign about Barack Obama, his life, his religion, his childhood, his politics, his time in the state senate, his time in the U.S. Senate, his family, his religion, his friends, his fundraising and all other manner of associations: more than 40

Number of stories the NY Times has written over the course of the campaign about the last major financial regulatory crisis, resulting in a huge bailout, and which John McCain was centrally involved in with his political godfather Charles Keating: 0

Yeah, poor McSame doesn’t get treated fairly by the media, all right.  His veep nominee, Mrs. Palin, hasn’t given a press conference in the 24 days she’s been a heartbeat away from a American Taliban wet-dream, and ol’ McPOW’s involvement in a deja-vu-times-ten scandal from the 1980’s is ignored.

It’s not just this issue.  Think of any major Palin/McCain development and ask yourself, “How would this play if it were Obama/Biden?”…

• Obama’s oldest teen daughter announces a pregnancy out of wedlock with an African-American boy whose Facebook page describes himself as “proud to be a fuckin’ thug” who lives to “play hoops” and “hang out with the boys, shoot some shit and just chillin’ I guess’” who adds, “Ya fuck with me I’ll kick [your] ass”.
• Obama speaks to reporters and mixes up Sunni & Shia, thinks Czechoslovakia still exists, thinks he can fire the chariman of the SEC, and confuses President Zapatero of Spain with someone in Latin America, and can’t enunciate the Bush Doctrine.
• Obama’s wife had been a member of an African nationalist party that advocated secession from the Union.
• Biden had authored a bill to force women to pay for their own forensic examination “rape kits”.
• Obama ordered his wife and his campaign staff to ignore lawful subpoenas into an investigation of Obama’s abuse of the power of his senatorial office.

Don’t worry about the polls

For those of you worried about the 270-268 electoral lead for McCain noted recently on electoral-vote.com, may I remind you of electoral-vote.com from Election Day, 11/2/2004:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041102092512/http://www.electoral-vote.com/

Kerry 298
Bush 231

After McCain’s disastrous grilling by the hard-nosed investigative journalists at The View, watch for the idiot white female vote to drop a few points.  (Note to actual journalists: please watch Jon Stewart, Joy Behar, and Bill Maher, so you can learn how to actually question a politician and call him out on LIES.)  As the Palin scandal faucet moves from drip-drip to a roar and McCain is forced to debate Obama onstage, this thing will be over.

John W. McCain, is Sarah Palin qualified to be President?

After all, she was a mayor for a short period of time and a governor for a short period of time…

Chill out… Obama’s got it… I think

There has been a lot of freaking out over here in Left Blogsylvania about recent polls showing the Anti-Maverick/Psycho-MILF ticket with a lead over Obama/Biden.  Everybody take a chill pill, because these polls are bogus.

1) Pay attention to what they call “Party ID” in the sampling.  When they take a poll, they have to weight it with X number of Dems, Y number of Indies, and Z number of Repugs.  But you can’t just break that down 33% / 34% / 33%, because that doesn’t match the current make-up of the registered voters.  People are leaving the God’s Oil Party in droves.

But this latest poll doesn’t account for the 11 million new registered Democratic voters that have been churned out by the Obama campaign.  (That’s what community organizers do; they register new voters in droves.)  When you oversample Republicans, especially after their convention and the salivating evangenital hypoChristians getting a red meat pick in Gov. Lipstick Pitbull, you’re going to get a lead for McSame.

2) Pollsters are talking to people who answer their landlines when they see a polling firm on the Caller ID and are willing to spend fifteen minutes or more of their time speaking with a stranger.  This oversamples the older Americans and the shut-ins and ignores a whole lot of working class people.  Also, many younger people live mobile-only; they have no land lines.  Thus, a whole broad swath of your Democratic voters are ignored in polling.

The purpose of polling is to play to the traditional media’s horserace narrative.  They need this to be a close race, or you turn off The Greatest Political Team Assembled In The History Of The Universe and watch football or talent shows or crime dramas instead.  This portion of the narrative is the post-convention-bounce section, so time for McCain’s Base to throw him a bone.

3) This ain’t John Kerry.  This ain’t Al Gore.  This is a guy of Bill Clintonesque political skill who got to the point of auditioning for Bubba’s old job despite being a black guy with a funny name (with a Hussein in it!), an admitted cocaine and marijuana user in his youth, a whackaloon pastor for thirty years, with only four years on the national scene and overcoming the “inevitable” nomination of Bill’s wife.

4) Close your eyes.  Imagine a split-screen at the debates with Obama and McCain.  If Obama’s campaign is smart, they’ll require a coin-flip to determine which stands on stage left or stage right and prevent McCain from only being seen from his “good” side.  Ew, what’s that thing on McCain’s head?  Wow, he sure looks pale.  How much makeup is he wearing?  Man, that dude is old!  Did he just say something?  Folks, I’m thinking Kennedy/Nixon ‘60 here as far as the gulf between how good and how bad each candidate looks on TV.

5) This is a monumental election and nobody has a clue about just how energized minorities and young people are about this candidate.  Pollsters base their deductions on things like “likely voters” and analysis of past election turnouts.  This election will be like none we’ve ever seen before and the youth and minority turnout will shock the pundits.

So chill out, everybody calling for Obama to “hit back” and “get tough”, meaning that he should respond more forcefully to the character assassinations and sarcastic jibes.  The GOP have nothing to run on if it is a referendum on the past eight years of Republican rule.  Their only hope is to return to the culture war playbook of ‘00, ‘02, ‘04, and ‘06, and ‘06 wasn’t so good for them.  Unemployment and inflation are at a high, people are freaking out about the economy, nobody wants this stupid war anymore.  

Obama’s smart to keep this on the issues.  It’s not as satisfying, to use a mixed-martial arts metaphor, as knocking the guy out.  If Obama gets into the petty culture war, name-calling routine, he undermines his message of “not the same old politics as usual”.  McCain keeps jabbing, hoping Obama will throw a haymaker and give McCain the opportunity to counter-punch.  Obama’s game is to keep flicking out that leg kick to McCain’s thigh – “How does this help Americans, how does this address the issues?”.  It’s not flashy, but over time, it takes out the opponent’s legs and then he is helpless.  (OK, not a great metaphor unless you really understand MMA.  McCain’s got no ground game and can’t knock Obama out, that’s what I’m trying to say.)

On the other hand…

Continue Reading…

Andrea Mitchell can’t resist the Rock Hard Gay Agenda

Just watching Meet the Press on my DVR when Andrea Mitchell is asked about the possibility of Sam Nunn of Georgia being Barack Obama’s vice presidential choice. After discussing the pluses of a Nunn veep pick, Andrea just can’t help but make me laugh out loud:

June 22: Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), political roundtable – Meet the Press, online at MSNBC- msnbc.com
Minuses, he is an anathema to the gay and lesbian community because of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He’s tried to moderate his position, but it was he and Colin Powell who shoved that down a young Bill Clinton’s throat in 1993 as a new president.

This is example #5,298 of someone on my TV who can’t help but put “gay” and “shove down throat” in the same sentence. We now return you to you regularly scheduled programming, already in progress…

Fox News Jokes About Obama Being Assassinated

Daily Kos: FoxNews Jokes About Obama Being Assassinated (w/ video) [Updated w/ Full Segment]

Osama, Obama, eh, off ‘em both.  Just to be Fair & Balanced, right?

Ha.  Funny.  Now tell us the one about waterboarding John McCain at Gitmo so he can tell us if it really compares to the torture in Vietnam.  Tell us the one about how John McCain’s vice presidential pick will be the most important ever because the five years of torture inflicted on that now 72-year-old means he’s likely to kick the bucket in his first term.  What?  That would be rude and inconsiderate?  You could never make a joke like that?

This country may not be good enough to deserve Barack Obama.  Maybe ruling during the decline and fall of an empire isn’t in the cards.  Is there any hope left when a Democrat can contemplate another Democrat’s assassination as a legit reason to keep campaigning and when a “news” network can openly joke about equally wishing the death of the most heinous terrorist ever and the Democratic presumptive nominee?