Mark Kleiman

On hot-button social issues, Barack Obama prefers to lead from behind. So when Barbara Walters asks him “Do you think marijuana should be legalized?” and he replies, “I wouldn’t go that far, but …” there’s a pretty strong signal there. The stance toward Colorado and Washington State Obama enunciates in the interview seems to be […]

Naturally, the anti-American, socialist-sympathizing Democrats are all in an uproar because the Republican minority in the Senate blocked ratification of a treaty that basically writes the Americans with Disabilities Act into international law. What part of “American exceptionalism” don’t they understand? If we let all those other countries, full of funny-looking people with weird names, […]

Gavin Aronsen at Mother Jones makes an important and obviously correct point: demand for the synthetic cannabinoids marketed as “Spice” and “K2″ is entirely an artifact of cannabis prohibition generally, and in particular the practice of urine-testing for cannabis metabolites by employers, schools, and criminal-justice agencies. The synthetics are, by all reports, less pleasurable and […]

The Congress appropriates money. The Congress levies taxes. (Subject, of course, to the President’s veto power.) The President must spend appropriated money and collect the revenue due under the tax laws. That’s part of taking care that the laws be faithfully executed. He can’t collect a nickle more than is due or spend a nickle […]

… such as Boehner and McConnell, operate by their own set of rules. The Democratic Strategist offers some useful reflections, along with an actual law-enforcement guide to dealing with the more ordinary variety of extortionist, referred to as a “hostage-taker” (HT). Key points: * The first priority is to isolate and contain the HT. *Set […]

Keegan Hamilton has a usefully skeptical piece on the Atlantic website challenging claims that cannabis legalization in Washington State and Colorado will dismantle the Mexican drug trafficking organizations. Overall, the piece is very well done. But the rules of the Bloggers’ Guild require me to pick out the two points where I think Hamilton got […]

Under the header “Reality Check II,” Andrew Sullivan reports: There’s a new poll out on ending Prohibition on marijuana. This one’s a CBS News’ poll taken after the election, and it shows a 47 – 47 percent tie on whether marijuana should be legalized. When Obama was first elected, the same poll with the same […]

I haven’t been paying close attention to the Fiscal Cliff negotiations. I’ve been more or less assuming that since the shape of a final deal seems fairly obvious, the two sides would decide to reach that deal before rather than after damaging the economy and the country’s international standing with another demonstration of our inability […]

I’m glad to see the Washington Post endorsing the idea that the feds should let Washington State and Colorado go ahead and experiment with legal marijuana. “For now, the federal government does not need to stage an aggressive intervention, one way or the other. It can wait, watch and enforce the most worrisome violations as […]