Blog Reload

No More Reloading

2008-09-24T21:23:00.000-07:00

This is the last post here at Reload. I started a new job on Monday and will not have the time to devote to keeping this site active and interesting. I'll continue to write at HorsesAss (and hopefully at Effin' Unsound too) although it probably won't be as prolific as it used to be. I'm hoping to bring the Birds Eye View Contests over to HorsesAss next weekend, although it'll likely go back to just being for pride. Milwhcky was declared the winner of the one and only "official" contest.

I'm excited about what Goldy's been doing with HorsesAss. Contributing to what he's doing is something I think is important for drug policy activism - making it an integral part of the overall progressive movement that's overtaking our political climate right now. I believe that progressivism can avoid the kinds of historical follies like alcohol prohibition by better understanding the limits of what government can and can't do (and should and shouldn't do). Unlike most other libertarians, I don't have a fundamental disagreement with the notion of progressivism. I believe that certain types of collectivism are part of the free market and that many individualism vs. collectivism arguments represent two valid perceptions of liberty, rather than believing that extreme individualism is the only path towards liberty. Many libertarians will likely never agree with me on that, or think I'm entering a contradiction, but I always welcome the dialogue and I hope that over time I can still elaborate on how think it should work.

Maintaining this blog has been an enormous joy for me. There are way too many people to thank for reading it, linking to it, and giving me great feedback in the comments. If you're reading this now, you're probably one of those people. Thanks.

Birds Eye View Contest I - View 18 of 25

2008-09-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

Since last week's contest, WesS has gotten not one, but two contests. He got last week's, which was Rotterdam, Holland, and he got the long-unsolved contest 15, which was Glendale, AZ. That brings the overall standings to:

Milwhcky - 11
wstanton - 3
WesS - 2
Mlc1us - 1

With 8 contests to go, only wstanton can catch Milwhcky, so the magic number is 1. Here's this week's contest, which is facing east rather than north.

Birds Eye View Contest I - View 17 of 25

2008-09-11T17:00:00.000-07:00

As you can tell, blogging has stopped here, but I'm going to keep doing the Birds Eye View Contest until Contest I has a clinched winner. The reason for the stop in blogging here is related to my work situation and it's likely the end of Reload, but not the end of my blogging at HorsesAss and EffinUnsound. I just don't expect to have the time to maintain this site going forward, and I don't want it to continually feel rushed and half-assed, as it's felt to me for a while. I'm thinking of bringing future Birds Eye View Contests over to HorsesAss at some point. Feel free to shoot me a mail if you want to be notified by mail of such an occurrence.

Back to this contest, last week's contest was Pennsauken, NJ. The victor was Milwhcky, who's on the verge of clinching the overall title:

Milwhcky - 11
wstanton - 3
Mlc1us - 1
(View 15 is still up for grabs)

Here's this week's contest. Good luck!

Birds Eye View Contest I - View 16 of 25

2008-09-04T17:00:00.000-07:00

Last week's contest is still unsolved as of this morning.

Here are the standings:

Milwhcky - 10
wstanton - 3
Mlc1us - 1

Here's this week's, good luck!

More Suckiness

2008-09-01T19:43:00.000-07:00

I've had some unexpected events come up that will continue to derail my blogging for at least another week. The Birds Eye View Contest will still be posted on Thursday.

Challenge

2008-08-31T18:25:00.001-07:00

This week's Birds Eye View Contest is still not solved.

The Unraveling of Mexico

2008-08-30T19:20:00.000-07:00

It continues:

Eleven decapitated bodies have been found outside the city of Merida on the Yucatan peninsula, heightening fears that Mexico's recent descent into violence has reached even heavily protected tourist areas.

All the bodies showed signs of torture and were tattooed with star signs and the letter “Z”, suggesting that they had fallen victim to the country's growing drug war, which has left more than 2,700 dead so far this year.

Part of me really wants this issue to be discussed in the upcoming debates. The wiser part of me knows that our cable news knuckleheads don't have a prayer in hell of figuring out why this is all happening - and it will just keep promoting the idea that we have to build walls and shake our fists at the bad guys.

What's Gregoire Smoking?

2008-08-29T09:40:00.001-07:00

The Drug War Chronicle covers the mess involving the state Department of Health's medical marijuana limits.

Here are the previous posts that I've written about it both here and at HorsesAss:

4/22 - Rob McKenna’s War on the Sick and Disabled
5/21 - Cops and Robbers
5/23 - Why is Governor Gregoire Lying About the Medical Marijuana Workshops?
6/3 - Washington State Medical Marijuana Update
6/15 - The Exact Opposite of Compassionate Conservatism
6/30 - Limits
7/1 - 60 Day Limits Released
7/2 - Looking to Oregon
7/6 - Looking to Oregon - Part III
7/12 - “There is no Medical Marijuana law in Pierce County”
8/12 - Chatting with the Governor
8/17 - The Fight for Better Limits
8/22 - Re-Setting the Limits
8/23 - The Hempfest Panel on the Medical Marijuana Limits

On the Road to a Narco-State

2008-08-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

Via Dan Robinson, here's a report on the drug cartels in Mexico and their growing influence.

Birds Eye View Contest I - View 15 of 25

2008-08-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

Last week's contest was won by Milwhcky. It was Sanford, ME.

Here are the standings after 14:

Milwhcky - 10
wstanton - 3
Mlc1us - 1

Rules of the contest are here. Here's this week's. Good luck.

The Biden Dilemma

2008-08-27T20:28:00.000-07:00

Dominic Holden is agonizing over the Biden VP pick, as are other drug law reformers. I don't think drug law reform was even a passing consideration to Obama when it came to selecting a VP, so I don't see his pick of Biden as an endorsement of his truly horrific record. And even though I think that Obama understands the drug war much better than he lets on, I doubt he even considered how bad it looks that he just picked a VP who is possibly more to blame than any other American for the devastation that the drug war has brought upon African American communities.

But Dominic makes the one point at the end that I find to be mildly reassuring:

Obama cannot alter drug laws on his own—he’s lived a youth of indiscretions. (Realistically, no politician can make any sweeping changes; it must be incremental.) But if anyone has the credibility at the federal level to say we were wrong, to push the Senate for sentencing reform, to back Barney Frank’s bill in the House to decriminalize pot—nobody is more more capable than Joe Biden. And if he does, this could be an excellent four years.

I hope he's right. It helps to remember that Franklin Roosevelt ran against prohibition in the 1932 election, after being its proponent for a long time. Politicians will always shift in the wind. It just takes enough of us to start blowing in the opposite direction from how its been blowing for the past four decades. And it would help if he had a good conversation with his colleague from Virginia, who understands the need for drug law reform better than anyone in that body.

Mary Anastasia O'Grady on Mexico

2008-08-26T09:44:00.001-07:00

This is What a Police State Looks Like

2008-08-26T09:25:00.001-07:00

This was how the police in Beijing dealt with people protesting the Chinese government's support of the Sudanese government and the treatment of people in Tibet:

Wait a second, that's a mistake. That's a picture of how police in Denver are dealing with people protesting the Iraq War and corporate influence in our political system.

Convention Coverage

2008-08-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

HorsesAss was selected as the Washington State blog for the DNC, so Goldy, Darryl, and Geov are down there this week.

Fantasy Season

2008-08-25T08:02:00.000-07:00

I'm in the second day of my back-to-back, coast-to-coast fantasy football drafts. I drafted one team in Rockland County, New York yesterday and will be drafting my second team back here in Seattle tonight. Blogging will be lighter for the next two weeks as we get our fantasy website up and running again.

Ninjas

2008-08-23T21:35:00.000-07:00

In New Jersey.

The Hempfest Panel on the Medical Marijuana Limits

2008-08-23T08:03:00.000-07:00

Tides Turning

2008-08-22T07:50:00.000-07:00

The marijuana decriminalization bill in Massachusetts has over 70% support in surveys.

Hawaii's Big Island will vote on making marijuana enforcement the lowest priority.

A legalization movement is under way in Poland.

Birds Eye View Contest I - View 14 of 25

2008-08-21T17:00:00.000-07:00

Mlc1us returned to victory lane last weekend to make this contest a three-way race. The answer was Spokane, WA.

The standings after 13 are:

Milwhcky - 9
wstanton - 3
Mlc1us - 1

Here's this week's. Good luck

McCain's America

2008-08-20T07:20:00.000-07:00

In the Washington Post, Michael Dobbs writes about the recent outbreak of hostilities in Georgia. Dobbs has a good amount of experience in the region, and he explains how Georgia played a big role in provoking this crisis, possibly at the encouragement of the Bush Administration. Russia's response was overly aggressive, but despite our promises to Georgian president Saakashvili, there's little to nothing we can do militarily to stop what's happening.

John McCain's electoral hopes are pinned on his abililty to breathe life into the dying myth that Republicans are "tougher" on foreign policy, and he certainly sees this crisis as a way to do so. He decided to send the Larry and Curly to his Moe out to Tbilisi to do whatever it is that they do when they travel closer to the countries they're terrified of. But beneath the surface, this conflict brings out some of the glaring weaknesses in the Bush-McCain foreign policy playbook. It may sound like toughness, but in the end, our allies get kneecapped and fewer people around the world trust us.

Publius from Obsidian Wings reiterates the central failure of McCain's foreign policy approach:

David Kirkpatrick’s piece on McCain’s response to 9/11 and the “McCain Doctrine” should have been titled “McCain Repeatedly, Horribly Wrong on Virtually Everything About Iraq.” Kirkpatrick lays out several damning facts, but — frustratingly — makes the reader draw the most important conclusions.

Anyway, what’s frightening about McCain’s response to 9/11 is that it was basely entirely on false assumptions and the knee-jerk use of military force. But it’s more than simply that McCain was wrong about Iraq — lots of people were wrong about Iraq. What’s particularly troubling about McCain’s reaction is that his wrongness stemmed directly from the assumptions of his manichean worldview — assumptions he would bring with him to the White House.

In short, his is a world of good versus evil, where threatening and using force is always necessary, and where wildly diverse countries are lumped together as evil “autocracies.” No matter the country (Serbia, Iraq, Georgia), no matter the circumstances — the problem is always the same (evil), the solution always the same (threaten or use force).

The past decade has shown us how the dangers of this thinking - our belief that we must boil every issue and every conflict that arises in the world into a bi-polar good-vs-evil struggle and use force to combat that "evil" - has stretched our military to the breaking point and left us unable to address real threats. When you become locked in this mindset, and you and your allies are always the "good" in that equation, your view of the world becomes incredibly distorted. In the end, you begin to sound like a confused madman, chastising others for doing the exact same things that you've been doing yourself. But in your mind, it's always justified because you are the "good" in the struggle against "evil."

Over the past decade, the world has come to see this growing emptiness in our supposed moral authority, even if many Americans never question it. But one can't cover their eyes with their hands and expect the entire world to become invisible. The Bush Administration has made America weak, and what we've been seeing in Georgia this month was Russia's ability to exploit that weakness with ease.

But while endorsing another 4 years of this failed foreign policy mindset is bad enough, I'm not sure we're thinking about how dangerous this is when the people in charge feel that the "evil" they're fighting is lurking domestically as well. Speaking in front of the Urban League recently, John McCain said the following:

Answering a question about his approach to combatting crime, John McCain suggested that military strategies currently employed by US troops in Iraq could be applied to high crime neighborhoods here in the US. McCain called them tactics 'somewhat like we use in the military...You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control. And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement.' The way he described it, his approach sounded an awful lot like the surge.

Every large myth is supported by a series of smaller myths, and the myth of Republican foreign policy superiority is certainly no exception. The myth that the Surge was some magical tactic that single-handedly ended violence in Iraq is still around. For those who haven't been keeping score, the drop in violence in Iraq started happening before the Surge, some of the most prominent reductions in violence happened in places where coalition troops left, and Baghdad is now a city of walls rather than a newly pacified urban area.

After everyone with the means to do so fled Baghdad for places like Syria and Jordan, the Iraqi capital city was turned into a series of ethnic prison enclaves in order to dampen the violence. I sure as hell hope this isn't John McCain's vision for solving inner city crime. But as Publius explained, for John McCain every problem is an "evil", and every solution is to threaten or use force. Short of genocide, there's no greater indication of an intent to use force than trying to turn the place where the "evil" resides into a giant prison, caging it inside.

America's crime problem is certainly growing again. Mexico's crime problem is a national crisis. And the amount of illegal immigration that occurs from Mexico is certainly fueled by the latter. While illegal immigrants, on the whole, commit less crime than legal immigrants or American citizens, the sensationalizing about their massive presence overshadows this and quickly drowns out the facts. And the presence of so many people in this country working and living outside the system will undoubtedly start to have serious societal repercussions if nothing is done.

There are two ways to attack these problems. One way involves understanding the roots of why these phenomena are happening, addressing those issues, and beginning to undermine the criminal gangs by going after how they make the money they need to survive. The other way involves seeing drug trafficking and illegal immigration as an amorphous evil that we must combat through brute force. For years we've tried the latter, and for years, we've watched these problems get worse and worse. In the end, many people have just thrown up their hands and said, "just build a wall," but while that might work for a while in a city like Baghdad, it won't work at all across a 2000 mile border. At some point, we need to get smarter, and that's obviously not going to happen if we put John McCain in the White House.

When it comes to our attempts to keep the peace in Iraq, we've seen the use of private security contractors grow. But it's not just in Iraq that companies like Blackwater win government contracts. Blackwater personnel were on the ground during Katrina, and they're also conducting anti-terrorism training at a new facility along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In Southern California recently, one of the DEA agents carrying out a raid on a medical marijuana dispensary was seen wearing a Blackwater T-shirt. The picture was then removed from the L.A. Times website. No one knows why this agent was wearing it. Hell, he may have ordered the thing online. But the image reminded us that having a private security agency with little or no oversight like Blackwater enforcing the drug war, or enforcing our immigration laws, is a line no thicker than many of the other lines that the Republican Administration currently in power has crossed.

The growth of paramilitary police tactics throughout America is one of the scariest developments of this era. When someone like John McCain stands in front of us and says that he wants to "clamp down" on the violence in our cities and towns, too many of us still just assume that we won't get caught in its grips. But tell that to someone like Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor Cheye Calvo, who had a SWAT team raid his home, terrorize his wife and mother-in-law, and shoot his two dogs for no reason, all because someone randomly addressed a package of marijuana to his house as part of a drug trafficking scheme. Tell that to people like Cory Maye and Ryan Frederick, two young men with no criminal records who awoke to the sound of people breaking into their house at night, reacted by shooting at the intruders, only to realize they'd killed police officers and might have to spend the rest of their lives in jail.

Whether it's halfway across the world, or in our own backyard, the idea that our power and authority does not come with any form of accountability or responsibility - simply because we are "good" fighting against "evil" - is rapidly eroding the trust in that power and authority. The Bush Administration's hypocrisy between the Kosovo and the South Ossetia situations shares a common denominator with the hypocrisies over how America fights crime domestically. It starts with a belief that a desire for autonomy can be a dangerous thing if it's viewed as running counter to that larger struggle.

But the battle for autonomy is the larger struggle. There's no greater representation of democracy than having the ability to express your desires freely. George Bush and John McCain often say they understand this, and that they're "spreading democracy," but by their actions, it's very clear that they don't, and they aren't. And the most dangerous thing we can do right now is to take another 4 years to learn how the failed approach of our foreign policy also fails when applied right here on our own streets.

[cross-posted at HorsesAss]

The Human Cost of Prohibition

2008-08-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of the Marijuana Policy Project:

Correcting the Past Sins of Federalism

2008-08-18T17:34:00.001-07:00

College Presidents are taking a stand against the 21 year old drinking age. Cue someone from MADD being dumber than a pile of rocks:

But even before the presidents begin the public phase of their efforts, which may include publishing newspaper ads in the coming weeks, they are already facing sharp criticism.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving says lowering the drinking age would lead to more fatal car crashes. It accuses the presidents of misrepresenting science and looking for an easy way out of an inconvenient problem. MADD officials are even urging parents to think carefully about the safety of colleges whose presidents have signed on.

"It's very clear the 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses," said Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of MADD.

Here's a newsflash, dumbshit. The 21-year-old drinking age is not enforced anywhere outside of the places where drinkers are being supervised by business owners. It's not enforced in off-campus houses and fraternities. This is true for schools in rural areas, suburban areas, and inner cities. The only place the 21 year old drinking age is effective and keeps young adults from drinking is within your reality-starved imagination.

Switching Sides

2008-08-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

The former Deputy Director of the Drug Free America Foundation has had a change of heart.

UPDATE: And another converted drug warrior in the UK.

Ron Suskind on The Daily Show

2008-08-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

The Fight for Better Limits

2008-08-17T19:00:00.000-07:00

Bob Young writes in the Seattle Times about Hempfest yesterday, and in particular, the ongoing battle over the medical marijuana limits:

Activists irate about a proposed state limit on medical marijuana urged crowds Saturday at the pro-pot festival to rally at an Aug. 25 Department of Health hearing in Tumwater.

Their target is a new state rule that would limit the 60-day supply for medical marijuana to 24 ounces and six mature pot plants.

"Every single patient I know will not be in compliance with the 60-day rule. It's not going to work. It's driven by law enforcement, not science," said Douglas Hiatt, a lawyer who represents medical-marijuana users.

The panel that Douglas and others sat on Saturday at noon was an interesting one that featured people from all over the spectrum on this issue, from pro-Gregoire to anti-Gregoire. It was rare to see such contention at a Hempfest panel, but it was also somewhat refreshing. We're fighting real battles now, not just expressing wonderment at how public perception is so off from reality (as most of these panels tend to be).

Having spoken to the Governor herself this past Tuesday, my take on what's happening hasn't changed much. The Governor just isn't engaged on this issue enough and isn't aware of how serious it is. She continues to publicly insist that she's pro-medical marijuana, but on Tuesday she also repeated the lie that there's no good science to go on here. That's actually wrong on several counts - not only did medical professionals testify at the workshops around the state, but the science around how many plants would be needed is very well known, and it's probably the most egregious problem with the draft limits. Whether or not one thinks that Gregoire's failings on this issue stems from lack of interest, incompetence, or blind allegiance to law enforcement tends to determine how people are viewing her these days.

According to Hiatt, there have already been two instances in Spokane County where medical marijuana providers were raided for being over the plant count specified within the draft limits. The main question that wasn't addressed in this panel was, why doesn't this happen in Oregon? They have the same limits. The reason is that Oregon has a registry system that protects its patients, and from what I've been told from those down there, many patients and providers are over their plant count limits, but are not bothered by the police. Why this can't be done in Washington isn't clear to me at all.

This is the reason why I asked Gregoire what I did on Tuesday, because with where we stand right now, it's looking very likely that our registered patients are still not going to be protected. It's possible that gains will be made at the hearing on the 25th, but I'm not expecting much, and I'm certainly not expecting the 71 ounces and 99 plants that some of the panelists were pushing for (nor do I even think that limits that high are necessary). Either way, if after this process plays out, patients are still being arrested, the process has failed and the Governor should be held accountable for that failure. She intervened with the process at a time when it was close to reaching a fairly reasonable solution (35 ounces and a 100 sq ft growing area), and we ended up with the much shakier one we have now.

In a state where hundreds of millions of dollars of marijuana has been seized in the Yakima valley just this summer, the idea that we have to err on the side of arresting sick people with a few too many plants in their garage is the height of stupidity. The Governor should know better, and hopefully there's still time to fix this.