JayB

The difference is the rule of law or lack thereof. For some of us, that's a pretty big difference. Yes - I'm sure that a McCain administration's decision to continue the use of renditions under the very same set of guidelines would have elicited the very same response heralding the resurrection of the rule of law and all the rest of it. Please.

What was once fodder for uncritical, categorical denunciation now requires elaborate exercises in ethical spectrophotometry, such are the many hues of grey associated with "rendition" these days. "Oh...well...there's rendition and then there's rendition..."

A healthy exposure to the humanities* is necessary for a complete education, but far from sufficient. Whenever I hear lit majors or their equivalents lavishing praise on themselves for their elevated sensibilities, I can't help but wish that they'd read CP Snow's "The Two Cultures." *Personal definition excludes Communications, Media Studies, and a raft of other programs dedicated to vogueish parsings of inconsequential ephemera.

Smart political moves by Obama. It's important to understand the value of appearances.

I'd settle for the elimination of the "credulity" gene. I'll buy a year's subscription to "The Nation," if conclusive proof emerges that Mengele's work work is responsible for any statistically anomalies in the rate of twin-births in this town.

From the "comments" section: "My grandchild (when he starts talking!) will call me Gaia. Gaia is a primordial and chthonic deity in the Ancient Greek pantheon and considered a Mother Goddess or Great Goddess --Wikipedia. It is to me "Mother Earth." I like it, my daughter-in-law likes it and we're all happy! Joal Peugeot Northfield, Illinois" Ack. Yes - even when it comes to grandkids, it's all about you. Jesus. The unspoken tragedy here is that these people will go to their graves never knowing what it's like to love something more than themselves.

Just. Never. Ends. "A Grandma or Grandpa by Any Other Name Is Just as Old Boomers Want to Pick What Grandkids Will Call Them: Meet Glamma and Papa Doc By ANN ZIMMERMAN Aging baby boomers are in the midst of a grandbaby boom, and they're struggling with a bunch of issues. How to be attentive grandparents while having a busy career and, increasingly, caring for their own elderly parents? How to stay close to the tykes while living far away? But one of the most vexing issues they face is deciding what they want to be called by their grandchildren, lest it make them sound -- and feel -- old. It's another example of how baby boomers, whose anthem was Bob Dylan's "Forever Young," are not going gently into old age. While many people are happy with the old appellations, Granny, Gramps, Bubbe and Zayde just won't do for this group, with their toned bodies, plastic surgery and youthful outlooks. How about Grand-dude? [susan Kandell Wilkofsky] Susan Kandell Wilkofsky Susan Kandell Wilkofsky, a 56-year-old Dallas documentary filmmaker and photographer, became a grandmother on Christmas Day. For months, her friends and family had pestered her about what she wanted her new granddaughter to call her. "I didn't see myself as a Bubbe," Ms. Wilkofsky said, citing the Yiddish word for grandmother popular among grandparents of baby boomers, Americans born in the population surge between 1946 and 1964. "That's someone from the old country, who has an accent, looks frumpy and wears a babushka." That's definitely not Ms. Wilkofsky, who exercises religiously and has worn her hair long, straight and parted in the middle at least since 1967's "summer of love." "The only time I wear a kerchief is when I am driving my two-seater convertible," she says. Meet Papa Doc So Ms. Wilkofsky has decided to be called Glamma, as in glamorous grandmother, a name suggested by one of her girlfriends. Her husband, Steven, a 58-year-old doctor, said he didn't want a typical grandfatherly name, either, because "I still feel like I am 25." So he chose to go by "Papa Doc." He was going for a Marcus Welby, M.D. vibe -- after the mellow, graying doctor in a popular television series in the late '60s and early '70s -- but unfortunately the name reminds most people of the late Haitian dictator, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Experts in the field of aging are not surprised that baby boomers are seeking creative ways to avoid wrinkly sounding labels. "That whole generation is reinventing old age," says Tom Nelson, chief operating officer of AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons." " Retch. Redefining cultural necrophilia and elevating misplaced narcissism to new heights. I pity the grandchildren that grow up with "Glamma" and "Papa Doc."

Are you really calling yourself a cretin? Because I certainly didn't call you that. And you do have a habit of disappearing when taken to task, for reason you only know, as well as a habit of not addressing what you are told. Wow! Didn't I say that not taxing resource extraction, decreasing progressive taxes, decreasing corporate taxes, and decreasing social spendings, when the real economy shrinks and good paying jobs are outsourced, all the while increasing regressive taxes on sales and services, and increasing spendings on law and order, results in budget shortfalls that are bound to get worse as revenues from the casino economy crash? Whichever hat they wear, they are responsible for the policies described above that are typical of market fundamentalists. Progressives do not have the undemocratic super-majority necessary in the state legislature to change policy. Changes would have been vetoed by either Davis or the gropinator anyway. I read 13th which is on par with other rich, highly urbanized regions. Thankfully, living in California isn't like living in Texas in terms of service availability, you ought to know by now that nothing is free. But most importantly, taxes as a fraction of average income is below the national average. right, let me check what the dominant "business tax climate" has brought on the overwhelming majority of americans ... Trend in corporate California state taxes up to 2003: Abstract Since 1988, California Corporation Tax revenues grew much more slowly than both the California economy and other major sources of California revenue. In fact, inflation adjusted Corporation Tax revenues actually declined during this period. This paper finds that much of the apparent weakness in the California Corporation Tax can be attributed to policy decisions. Estimates are presented of the revenue losses from: the creation and expansion of new forms of business organization, growth in the use of corporate tax credits (most prominently the Research and Development Credit and the Manufacturer’s Investment Credit), increases in the use of Net Operating Losses, corporate tax rate reductions, and the water’s-edge election http://www.ftb.ca.gov/aboutFTB/Tax_Statistics/Corporate_Tax_Trends.pdf I never said 95% of the people were taxed too lightly. I said that progressive income tax has been partly replaced by regressive taxes, which has displaced the burden of state revenue onto the middle and lower classes. I didn't argue it but it is clearly true that national policies are also to blame. Note that your condition ("in a manner independent ...") is bunk because it wouldn't be surprising for state policies to reinforce the dominant dogma. But, here is one example of how it can happen: "In late September, while the major presidential candidates debated solutions for reforming the federal corporate income tax, a little-noticed ruling by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) opened the door for widespread corporate tax avoidance by a few of the biggest, most profitable financial institutions in the country. The IRS ruling, which took Congressional tax writers by surprise, will almost certainly push the federal government—and many states—further into the red at a time when they can least afford it.Generally, corporations that report tax losses in a given year are allowed to apply these losses against profits in future years. But this ability to “carry over” losses from one year to reduce taxes in future years has limits. For example, when one company buys another company that has tax losses, the law prevents the acquiring company from using the purchased company’s tax losses. There’s a very sensible reason for this rule: to ensure that companies don’t purchase other companies simply as a tax dodge. But a little-noticed September IRS administrative ruling creates a specific, temporary exemption from this rule for banks acquiring other banks whose tax losses are attributable to bad loans. The rule is apparently retroactive." http://www.ctj.org/pdf/irsruling20081106.pdf "advantages" for corporations but not people. Lower prices for walmart plastic junk never make up for loss of good paying jobs. This is a strawman argument because I am not a protectionist. Fair trade includes clauses about worker welfare and environmental protection. There is a cost to doing business that includes living wages and paying for externalites. Communities also have built these industries in many different ways, why should robber barrons steal them away? Wanting so-called free trade without fair trade measures will have the average person in the US meet the chinese 95% of the way toward their condition, including not uncommon slavery of children, if it's what we have to compete with. Appropriate state services demand progressive income tax policies. Anything else and the majority of us will live in slums. It's just a matter of time. -I am not opposed to progressive taxes, and prefer an income tax to various consumption taxes for the same reasons. -I'm also for the optimal sustainable tax-yield, so that the state actually can afford to pay for roads, education, etc. I think we differ on what would constitute a sustainable revenue optimizing tax-model. -When it comes to corporations (and all other businesses), they can only do two things with their money. Pay their employees with it, or re-invest it in the business. This is true even of money they put in savings or investments - eventually they have to use it for one or the other. The less money they spend on taxes, the more they'll spend paying their employees or building new factories, etc. Where we differ substantially is that I think that an optimal corporate tax rate would be zero, and that the gains in income taxes would more than offset losses in corporate taxes. Around the world, most countries - even in Europe - are reducing their corporate tax rates for this very reason. Conduct a brief thought experiment and imagine the amount of capital that would flow into the US if the corporate/business tax rate were permanently and permanently reduced to zero. Would this result in increased factories, wages, etc - or less? Would there be more, or fewer opportunities for the people with less to offer in terms of education or skills than we have at present, or less? The bottom line is that when the costs of doing business in a particular area exceed a certain threshold, businesses either move somewhere else or shut-down. Driving through the countryside in the Northeast and and taking a look at all of the abandoned factories there is as good a testament to that fact as any. High margin businesses that employ highly educated people can absorb these costs, low margin businesses that employ people with limited skillsets and educations can't - and they're often the first to go. -When it comes to "fair" trade, I'm all for encouraging businesses to treat their employees as well as possible wherever they are, but I'm also convinced that the people who live and work in those countries are the ones best equipped to make the value judgments about what does and does not constitute an acceptable trade-off. If they decide that the wages that they make by working in a hot factory for 12 hours a day represent a superior alternative to a lifetime of backbreaking labor under a hot sun as a subsistence farmer, I think that we have to respect that choice. Ditto for the "Factory worker vs sucky-sucky in a malarial culvert for 10 cent," "Factory worker vs landfill urchin," and other choices open to them. Where I differ from you, I think, is that I don't think that supporting policies that effectively eliminate the "working in a hot factory" option in order to preserve the jobs of people in a dramatically wealthier society, who have infinitely more options and opportunities, and assistance available to them constitutes the more moral path to go down. In the space of ten years, trade has lifted more people out of poverty in China than all foreign-aid payments from all countries at all times. Worth bearing in mind when discussing trade policy. Cretin #1, signing out to head for the South Island....

I think we have this argument before and I think that your philosophical arguments are convincing, particularly with reference to constitutional promises and personal freedom. But it's entirely another issue I think to suggest that a government should rescue its finances by promoting (from a relative perspective) revenue-generating markets that more or less promise to harm its constituency, at least in the short term. I don't think that's the way it should happen, and I don't think that's the way it happened in the case of abortion. Assuming that we are in agreement re: personal freedom, there is the broader question of how to implement the ideal of personal freedom as it pertains to drugs in a humane fashion. It is easier to accept abortion purely as a societal phenomenon given that it appears to be stable and predictable, and the effects on society are far from catastrophic, if even negative. We don't know how a drug liberalized society would behave, and while it is a very romantic concept that many of us agree with in theory, I think that high a level of caution is warranted in regard to trying to make it happen. In any case, the slow legalization that appears to be occurring, as agonizingly slow as it may be, might be the most prudent way to go about it. In the meantime maybe California will figure out how to manage its finances... without performance enhancing drugs. bada bum ching Yeah - the drug taxes to balance the budget comment was partly in jest, even though I'd honestly prefer that to the effects of the currently drug policy in Mexico, Columbia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. As long as we're talking hypotheticals here, I'd attach a mandate that stipulates that all revenues derived from taxes on the sale of drugs have to be spent on treatment, prevention, etc. Returning to the way things are at present, though, it seems like we're already at a point where the state simultaneously taxes vices and attempts to discourage and/or limit their harm. Smoking, drinking, and gambling - doesn't seem like such a stretch to add other vices to the roster.

+1

By all means, take your meth-legalization plan to the next Yakima, Darrington, Twin Falls, Bend, Chilliwack, or Butte town council meetings. I'm sure some of the family members of meth users could astonish you with stories of "amazing transformations". Again - take gambling, drinking, pornography, promiscuity, overeating, etc and you could easily produce a crowd that would pour forth with a litany of heart-breaking tragedies brought about by a loved one's behaviors. The fact that there are currently, always have been, and always will be people who have difficulty coping with the freedoms that society allows individuals does not justify granting the state the power to take the said freedoms away from everyone else. Moreover, we've had prohibition, criminalization, and incarceration for ~ 90 years now, and the misfortunes you've alluded to are still with us, and this tragedy has been compounded by an expansion of state power over individual behavior, a dimunition of personal freedoms, a massive missalocation of resources into an enforcement/incarceration bureaucracy, a massive subsidization of organized crime, etc, etc, etc. I'd have zero problem presenting the legalize and treat model as a superior alternative to the prohibition/criminalization/incarceration system that we currently have in place to any such meeting.

Think that's more of a city/county issue, but maybe someone from California could chime in if that's not correct.

The same is true of smoking, drinking, promiscuity, pornography, obesity, gambling, etc. It's possible to mitigate the social costs of all of the above, and discourage destructive excesses associated with them, without outlawing or criminalizing them. In fact, in just about every case, criminalizing them exacerbates the costs to both the individual and society, rather than reducing it. The fact that there are people who abuse personal freedoms doesn't constitute a sufficient argument for granting the state power to eliminate them. Sorry. Don't be sorry, I agree that in some cases there are better uses of resources to combat the problems associated with drug use than criminalization. Chiba, yes. Something that might induce you to throw a severed head out of a car doing 90 or turn one into a jibbering vegetable robbing the neighbors at steak-knife point, no. Not sure why this is a problem... This is why we have laws against doing 90, severing heads, and robbing neighbors at knife point. The assumption that prohibition effectively combats any of the above is a tenuous one, at best. The crime, violence, etc that it spawns are abundantly clear.

It seems like the major unstated premise of your post is that decriminalization = free for all. That's clearly a false dichotomy. There are any number of ways to protect an individual's right to do whatever they will to their bodies, without promoting drug use, and while mitigating the damage that drug users to do themselves and society. Tossing off in your bedroom isn't illegal, but having a tug while standing on top of a float in the town parade is. Smoking and drinking aren't illegal, but there are rules governing where and how you can do so. Etc, etc, etc. I'd combine incremental legalization for possession and private use of mariujana, along with the elimination of incarceration for non-violent drug offenses right off the bat. I'd combine that with expanded public funding for rehab, make it easier to get clean needles, etc and build from there. Once people realized that the world wasn't coming to an end, I'd work on policies that make the production and sale of drugs restricted, but legal, and thereby eliminate the profits that fuel much of the crime and violence associated with the drugs trade - in this country and elsewhere. Yes - I'd gladly bet an entire city, country, world on the success of this approach. There are no cost free options, and legalizing drugs might well mean more addicts - but when you consider the costs of street-crime, organized crime, incarceration, *and* addiction that we currently have, more addicts seems like a bargain. Especially if people who do become addicts have more resources available to them to help them end their addiction.

The same is true of smoking, drinking, promiscuity, pornography, obesity, gambling, etc. It's possible to mitigate the social costs of all of the above, and discourage destructive excesses associated with them, without outlawing or criminalizing them. In fact, in just about every case, criminalizing them exacerbates the costs to both the individual and society, rather than reducing it. The fact that there are people who abuse personal freedoms doesn't constitute a sufficient argument for granting the state power to eliminate them. Sorry.

What's interesting to me is that there are folks who simultaneously insist that terminating a pregnancy is an exquisitely personal matter with no ethical or moral dimension beyond personal choice and that any state encroachment on this turf represents a dire intrusion of the state across the boundary of protected personal freedoms, etc - but insist that the consumption of addictive drugs by non-pregnant adults should be outlawed. There's at least a logical consistency in the anti-abortion/anti-drug outlook, and in the pro-abortion/pro-legalization outlook - but it's puzzling when there's such a glaring conflict between the stance on one issue and the other. Prole, Justin, etc - care to explain?

-That society existed in the US until roughly the 1920's. -What, in your estimate, are the social costs of the current drug policy in and out of the US, and how do those compare with your estimates of the social costs in a scenario where drug use is legal? -Is the primary determinant of your choice not to smoke crack the illegality of the said activity? How about for everyone else that you know? -What other activities are presently allowed, where the direct adverse consequences are restricted to the individual's own body, that you would like to see outlawed?

Uh? How does de-criminalizing drug use on the basis that individuals, and not the government or their neighbors, have the final say with regards to what they do to their body, so long as the adverse consequences resulting from those choices are concentrated in the same...relate to the "Just Say NO campaign?" Who, exactly, are you responding to here. Whether an external observer deems a particular action that another sane adult takes with regards to their own body is irrelevant, and doesn't constitute a sufficient basis for outlawing it. From an external point of view, free-soloing El Cap could easily be construed as a much less rational action than snorting cocaine, the result of a compulsion that the climber is powerless to modulate, etc - but I'm not about to concede that the practice should be outlawed, much less criminalized, on that basis. Ditto for an old guy with a heart condition having sex with a 24 year old waitress that he met at the local hooters in his Florida condo, the fatass with high blood pressure downing four dozen donuts and chasing it with an eight pack of red-bulls, etc, etc, etc, etc.

I definitely agree with your main point, which I think is that the cost of the poor decisions that individuals make within the sphere of personal freedoms that our laws and customs presently allow for inevitably get transferred onto others. The costs that society bears from obesity alone, for example, are pretty staggering. Where I differ from you, I think, is that I don't think that the existence of such costs is a sufficient rationale for granting the state/society the power to restrict a sane adult's freedom to do whatever they wish to do to themselves, in those cases where the scope of any significant harm arising from their actions is confined to their own bodies. Once the social costs associated with preserving such freedoms becomes a pretext for restricting them, there's no longer a substantial barrier to further intrusions by the state on this basis, and the line between limiting costs, and limiting behaviors that the majority finds simply finds distasteful or incomprehensible becomes very poorly defined. As people who routinely, voluntarily assume risks that are often much more grave than those associated with drug use, and whos choices can have wide ranging consequences and costs - it seems to me that we should all be acutely aware of this fact.

One more argument for legalizing drugs. [Fantasy]Deprive the narco-terrorists of their money and use it to fund the budget shortfall in California. The taxes on the sale of cocaine alone, given Californian's apetite for the stuff, would go a long way towards plugging the gap.[/Fantasy]. Back in reality-land, nothing like this will happen any time soon, and the profits realized from drug-prohibition will continue to drive Mexio towards failed-state status. Given a choice between dead American addicts who hopped into their graves with their eyes open, and dead Mexican policemen who made the mistake of trying to enforce the law - I'll gladly take the former over the latter. Although I think it's dumb as hell, anyone who wants to inject themselves with paint thinner, snort drano, gargle lead, crush their junk in a vise...or shoot heroin, snort coke...should be free to do so. If they do so in public or they harm someone else as a consequence of whatever it is that they put into their bodies - that's where the law should start.

Good read. I think it's set in Wallingford.

Perhaps others may have taken "We will not apologize for our way of life..." to to mean: "We will continue to borrow like the world will end tomorrow and spend money like drunken sailors while we use the worlds resources 3 times as much as anyone else as we damn well please so sod off and just move out of Iraq so we can get our pumps in there and move along to Afghanistan we're not apologizing for any of this at all." ? Hmmmm.... C'mon now Bill. You've done plenty of good while consuming all of those resources. Provided a good home with heat, light, food, etc for your family, provided an income for other folks, enabled other people to do the same, contributed a fortune in taxes to help fund medicare, medicaid, social security, public education, foreign-AID, scientific research, etc - all without borrowing like a drunken sailor. Take off the hair-shirt! It suits Prole much better than you, my friend! Sounds like everyone got the memo except you Jay. And Obama, evidently.

Too late for that. Everyone who failed to buy prior to 2005 will be priced out forever. Just ask the folks in San Diego.

Dude, NZ is totally on sale right now. I just got an email about a 270 each way ticket. Wow. Sure beats ~$3500!

More of a Seattle area homebuyer circa 2003-mid-2007 trademark, I think.