Barney Frank use pot legalization analogy...

and then refuses to accept a single metaphor from Stephen Colbert.

(No, he didn't use this one.)

But before that, Colbert was pressing Frank on why the recently-created Consumer Protection Agency was needed, saying it's just another "nanny-state" measure by the Dem's. Frank then asserted that if Colbert was concerned about the nanny state he should consider ending marijuana prohibition. At which point Colbert started using obtuse metaphors about trying to make banks (tigers) change their thieving ways (stripes).

Also, watch the interview with (almost indistinguishable from that other tall, thin scary-looking blond, right-wing-moron chick, except her voice is less raspy--but not completely unraspy, as that's no doubt part of the appeal, being on the radio and their, achem, older male dmographic) Laura Ingraham. He fillets her and her stupid new NY Times best-seller quite nicely; it went well with my mac & cheese entree.

(No, this is MIA. She's like the opposite of Ingraham, but I wanted to post her spitting on a camera guy. Classy.)

A reminder to my anti-South inclination of Southern worth.

The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Flannery O'Connor, born 85 years ago today in Savannah, Georgia (1925), who wrote two novels and 32 short stories and who said: 'I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.' When she was six, she and a chicken that she taught to walk backward appeared on the news. She later said: 'I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.'

After college, she went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and then spent time at the Yaddo Writers' Colony. At the age of 26, she was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had killed her father when she was a teenager. At the time, doctors told her she would live for another five years, but she survived for nearly 14 years. She moved back to Georgia so that her mom could take care of her, to a 500-acre family farm in Milledgeville where she raised chickens, ducks, hens, geese, and peacocks, her favorite. She arose every morning when the chickens first cackled, went to 7:00 a.m. Mass in town at Sacred Heart, returned home and wrote for a couple of hours each day, until she felt too weak or tired.

As she herself put it, she wrote about 'freaks and folks.' She said, 'Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.'

In her sickly 14 years on the farm with her mother, O'Connor wrote two dozen short stories and two novels filled with her freakish, obsessive characters, crazy preachers, murderers, outcasts.

Her most famous stories include 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,' about a silly, annoying old woman whose entire family gets murdered by a man called The Misfit, and 'Good Country People,' about a pretentious young woman whose wooden leg is stolen by a Bible salesman.

Many of Flannery O'Connor's letters are collected in a volume called The Habit of Being (1979), edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald. And despite O'Connor's premonition that 'there won't be any biographies of me, because lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy,' a new book about her life came out just last year, written by Brad Gooch and entitled Flannery (2009).

Flannery O'Connor said, 'The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.'

(Faulkner quote)

Breaking Silence - For My Son by Patricia Fargnoli

The night you were conceived
your father drove up Avon Mountain
and into the roadside rest
that looked over the little city,
its handful of scattered sparks.
I was eighteen and thin then
but the front seat of the 1956 Dodge
seemed cramped and dark,
the new diamond, I hadn't known
how to refuse, trapping flecks of light.
Even then the blackness was thick
as a muck you could swim through.
Your father pushed me down
on the scratchy seat, not roughly
but as if staking a claim,
and his face rose like
a thing-shadowed moon above me.
My legs ached in those peculiar angles,
my head bumped against the door.
I know you want me to say I loved him
but I wanted only to belong--to anyone.
So I let it happen,
the way I let all of it happen--
the marriage, his drinking, the rage.
This is not to say I loved you any less--
only I was young and didn't know yet
we can choose our lives.
It was dark in the car.
Such weight and pressure,
the wet earthy smell of night,
a slickness like glue.
And in a distant inviolate place,
as though it had nothing at all
to do with him, you were a spark
in silence catching.

from Necessary Light. (c) Utah State University Press, 1999.



Lest we forget all the Baptists. Even the NE doesn't look too good. At least there's more diversity of kookiness. Still, the West is looking better and better: down w/ God, up with Pot.

More proof that pot will save the world.

In this case, a correlative activity, watching TV, as opposed to those associated with alcohol or uppers, can be beneficial to society.

This little ditty is from SeedMagazine.

"With all the negative impacts of TV, it might make you wonder whether TV offers any benefits at all. The pseudonymous neuroscience blogger “Neurocritic” found one studyshowing a benefit of television: People say they’re less lonely when they watch. As with the Dunton study, this is just a self-reported correlation, but if TV really makes people less lonely, that’s inarguably a plus.

But there may be more tangible benefits to TV, especially in developing nations. Daniel Hawes, a PhD candidate in applied at the University of Minnesota, discusses a study of a thousand villages in Tamil Nadu, India. The researchers found that shortly after the introduction of TV into a village, the standing of women improved dramatically. Villagers were more likely to say it was wrong for a husband to beat his wife, and women had greater autonomy and lower rates of pregnancy.

This makes some sense—in the US, the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s followed shortly after the nation-wide explosion of television ownership in the 1950s. It’s quite conceivable that TV’s power to induce social change—by giving people more access to information—is universal.

Paradoxically, while TV may be harmful to an individual’s mental and physical well-being, on the aggregate it could be beneficial to society. Perhaps, as with so many other things, the best advice might be to watch TV—but only in moderation. For more on the impact of TV and other technologies, visit ResearchBlogging.org."

The org mentioned, while not visually stimulating, has some interesting posts.

Plenty of room at the Hotel...

Bed-Stuy, early last week.

I woke up depressed. Or rather I got depressed quickly. First, I hear/read that the past few days I’ve been without TV or internet I’d missed the abdication of the public option by the Obama Administration from health care reform. I’ll be honest, I can’t say the public option is the salve needed to start the process of good health care reform, but I haven’t heard compelling arguments against it either (meaning I’ve heard more for it).

Then, another Obama-related tidbit: 57% of Americans don’t think the stimulus has made any positive difference. The help shoring up state budget deficits across the country alone has softened the blow. With most of us living in these biggest, most populated states, like NY and CA, as you’ll see below, it would seem the statistic is backward. But no, just fucked up priorities.

Can’t help the government because the government shouldn’t help us, because government is bad, because it’s un-American. Un-American? Really? You might want to wipe that subsidized corn syrup off your mouth before you speak. Or at least pull up your pants after you’re done fucking the economy from Wall Street, while, between de-regulation and tax cuts of the past thirty years, the wealth you’ve accumulated at the expense of everyone else is still intact.

But actually these two groups can’t compromise the entire 57%. Besides a few other specific groups, the rest are working-class poor (mostly white, non-urban and Christian) who don’t know anything more than the mantras of God and Country they were taught in elementary school, now echoed in the right-wing talk radio and tabloid cable-TV “news” and, lest we forget, Hollywood-ified American history.

To meet a critique of the last mentioned medium more than halfway, I’ll use a rare example of good historic filmmaking I’ve seen recently. Though it might be unfair to call HBO Hollywood, they’re close cousins, the John Adams bio-drama was a fair representation of some of the intellectual and philosophical strains surrounding the Revolution, the founding documents and early administrations. Still, even just an introductory knowledge of the documents and the histories of the time are needed for the dialogue to be anything more than mere platitudes.

I don’t claim expertise, but I’ve at least read most the writings and histories of the events of the era. So, do me a favor, don’t tell me what an American is, and I won’t tell you either. Tell me something about health care reform, instead of shouting at me and then telling me it’s your American right to do so. Nowhere in the Constitution or the Federalist Papers does it mention being an asshole. But then again, its better to be shouted by a mob than to be tarred and feathered by one, as was shown in the Adams series. Wow, so I guess we really are making progress! Adams, Jefferson, and the boys would be proud. Now I feel better too.


Actually, the real reason I’m in a better mood is that a piece in The New Yorker (with the bonus of it coming a few days earlier than normal, which is later than it should be, normally, which is today) about the Golden State that just happened to align with a piece I’d started earlier this summer about California, it’s budget, drug law reformation, the right-wing, etc.—you’ll see below.

So, apparently, now that the state has now been deemed “ungovernable” (what the once said of NYC; that is, before Giuliani; though, that is a myth) a revolution is a brewing. As opposed to the comparably conservative notion I talk about below—pot legalization as a revenue generator—these guys are ready to trash the whole government. I love it! These MF’s are crazy.

I’ll say it now, if this happens I’m moving to California; if not to be a full on citizen, than just to watch it all go down. I was already thinking of moving there anyway if they did, or were about to, legalize pot. And though, yes, I like pot, this has more to do with the revolutionary nature of legalization and its implications for drug policy nationwide, worldwide.

But, damn, they’re talking about an actual revolution—not just a green one. The beauty is that, so far, it has wide ranging support across the political spectrum in the state. I always liked the phrase, if everyone agrees but none are happy, then it’s probably fair. I’ll add the corollary, even though it’s the inverse of the usual formulation, that, in this case, if everyone agrees it’s probably a good idea. Even The Economist is overturning this old platitude, but instead for the "cash-for-clunkers."

After all, any scheme that so many politicians agree on is almost bound to be a clunker itself. Yet given the difficult economic circumstances facing the world, the policy looks like a nice little runner.


California, one of the wealthiest places on the earth, with a multi-millionaire governor and billions in debt, had to send IOU’s to residents for their tax returns this year after the state’s inability to pass a new budget.

No question the system is broken," said liberal Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who recently decided not to run for governor next year and whose city is grappling with a $530 million deficit. "It's a state on the brink, families falling through the cracks with IOUs as a safety net. It's mind-boggling to me how little controversy there is over the IOUs."

Then Schwarzenegger held a large knife in a television address about the budget and it finally passed. Unsurprisingly, the balancing came by cutting services not increasing taxes. What got cut? The usual: schools, the elderly, state workers.

There are no new taxes. But hammer blows hit the poor, the elderly, the infirm and students and will keep them staggering for years.

Because California is one of only three states that require a two-thirds majority to approve a budget or even a tax increase, the small GOP minority had just enough votes to block passage. And entrenched gerrymandering makes their seats invulnerable, allowing them to take the most extreme positions. "For me it has been heartbreaking," said Democratic Assemblyman Kevin de Léon, one of ten conferees on the budget. "Back in February we came up with a good budget but with those two minor taxes--on oil and tobacco. That money would have gone right into education. But because of the two-thirds rule, and even though a majority wants it, we get handcuffed by a small group."

Over the past three decades, California has tripled the number of prisons it operates, has more than quintupled its prison population and has gone from spending $5 on higher education for every dollar it spent on corrections to a virtual dead-heat in spending.

Perhaps, in the next logical step away from the War on Drugs, after legalizing “medical” marijuana (was in LA recently and saw pot stores advertising along with prescription writing doctors in local papers), the state will realize the cash crop they’re sitting on, and legalize pot completely.

Here are some excerpts from two great articles from The Nation. Most quotes above are from a more recent piece about the "ungovernable" state. The pieces below give a more than decent overview of the past and present failures of the War on Drugs, both nationally and in California.

For Betty Yee, chair of California's Board of Equalization--the office responsible for collecting sales tax in the Golden State--the changes, especially around drug-law enforcement, can't come soon enough. …Specifically, she has become an outspoken advocate for legalizing pot for residents older than 21… Yee wants to levy fees on business owners applying for marijuana licenses, impose an excise tax on sellers and charge buyers a sales tax. Do it properly, and the state could reap about $1.3 billion a year, she has estimated. "Marijuana is so easily available. Why not regulate it like alcohol and tobacco?" she says, and gain additional tax revenue into the bargain?

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger… announced that the state should at least consider the merits of pot legalization. He wasn't advocating it, he was careful to stress, but he did think the time was ripe to debate the issue.

Huh, what?!? Did say debate? Well, I’m sorry but that just sounds waaayyyyy too reasonable to me—I smell a rat!

"The budget is so bad now, the populism of the issue is beginning to work here in the Legislature," Ammiano says. [Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a former San Francisco city councilman, is pushing just such a bill in the State Legislature.] "But there's a lot of policy wonks" supporting it. "There's very conservative support from the oddest sources and locations." The GOP chair in the state, as well as Tom Campbell, a Republican gubernatorial hopeful, have indicated their support for his bill, Ammiano declares. "When it starts to cost more money than it's worth even in the eyes of the pooh-bahs, then you can accomplish something."

Oh, right: the fiscal conservatives. Normally used to justify uninhibited financial gain, advance moral (read: crazy-Christian) agendas, or service Congressional rapacity; the more logical, fiscally responsible conservatism is coming to the surface. In large part, this is what is fracturing the Republican Party—to their credit, their benefit and ours.

The Right is finally waking up to the costs, monetary and philosophical, incurred after years of indulging their base: generally, white southern (east and west) and middle states who have co-opted conservatism to fit their xenophobic and Christian-based ideals; e.g., the abortion/execution paradox—love that one. Only, this definition of constituency is incomplete, leaving out generally more affluent whites of the northern part of the country and in urban centers.

These are libertarian folk who believe in states rights over federalism and the right to bear arms as a means of defense from an authoritarian government. Over time, this focus on civil liberties by the founders and the traditional brand of conservatism it spawned, including both fiscal and religious freedom, were split; the former joined the opposite of the latter: the desire to keep the government’s hand out of our pockets, taxation, was melded with the seemingly contradictory want to dictate people’s behavior morally, religiously.

This conservative-Christian alliance is something that’s always stuck in my craw (and, yes, I do have a craw). Conservatism shouldn’t have shit to do religion. If anything, the Right should be the most irreligious—the separation of church and state, anyone? Anyone? Buhller? Buhller? Yet, I can’t remember when the two haven’t been fused. Truly, this is puzzling.

One reason I can think of, according to Occam, would be that neither faction—the fiscally responsible (more in theory than practice, of late, seemingly only when it fits their politics—looked at the Iraq tab lately?) conservatives and the anti-poor (irony alert: most of them are working-class at best; What’s the Matter with Kansas explores this phenomenon), xenophobic bible-thumpers—have ever had even close to enough support individually to combat the wave post-WWII liberalism. But that’s just crazy, right?

Tough-on-crime rhetoric, and the policies and institutions that grow from it, emerged from Nixon's Silent Majority tactics, from his recasting of politics as a series of debates around "values" rather than bread-and-butter issues.

Oh, right. So maybe the usurpation of conservatism by the religious right mentioned above has it backwards, or at least only half right. Perhaps the traditional conservatives enveloped the Southerners, realizing that increasingly after WWII the numbers weren’t on their side. Between the radicalism and civil rights of the 60’s and affirmative action and de-industrialization of the 70’s, this country’s white-patriarchal tradition was existentially threatened—or so they thought.

In fact, recent Zogby polling commissioned by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency suggests that close to eight in ten Americans favor alternatives to incarceration for low-level nonviolent offenders. Another Zogby poll, from last fall, found that just more than three-quarters of Americans felt the "war on drugs" was a failure. The sea change in public opinion holds in California too. In late March the Los Angeles Times ran a column asking readers their opinion on marijuana legalization. So far 4,927 people have replied, and 94 percent of them favor legalization. A Field Poll in April found that 56 percent of Californians favor legalizing and taxing pot.

Checkmate. You guys loose—the drug thing anyway.

But have you ever won an olympic gold medal... on weed!?!

Apparently Michael Phelps has. Which less proves the amazing things that can be done as a pot smoker, and more so the unbelievable physical abilities of certain members of the species despite it. Don't get me wrong, I love the pot. But, I can barely get off the couch these days (which is not a bad thing occasionally) if I do indulge, forget about walking down the street to the Y and swimming a few laps. That said, I think this only makes Phelps an even more astounding athlete--and a cooler guy, that I'd want to hang out with (sorry, but it's true).

(Thanks to Vanity Fair for the image, my first rip-off from them. Does this mean I'm getting classier? Hope not.)