Mark Kleiman

Tom Edsall continues to demonstrate the technique of “objective” reporting: The most volatile combination of events on Nov. 6 would be a very close election in which Mitt Romney wins the electoral vote with knife-edge victories in states like Florida, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. If new voter ID laws survive legal challenges in those Republican-controlled battleground […]

Mitt Romney wants to make it the basis of foreign policy. I guess the rest of us racial inferiors – Krauts and Kikes and Spics and Dagoes and Chinks and such-like, not to mention that n—-r in the White House – had better re-learn our place. Note the deliberate racialization of the claim: “Anglo-Saxon” rather […]

Greg Campbell’s comparison of marijuana smokers to buyers of blood diamonds (h/t Andrew Sullivan) is hardly original: the Partnership for a Drug-Free America ran a series of ads on this theme a decade or more ago, one of them showing a young pot-smoker saying “I killed a judge today.” But it comes wrapped in two […]

Did you know that half a ham sandwich is better than the love of God? I can prove it. If B > C and A > B, then A > C. Right? The transitive principle. Well, let C = the love of God, B = nothing, and A = half a ham sandwich What is […]

Commenting on Matt Yglesias’s essay about how cheap pot would be post-legalization, my old friend Kevin Drum notes that marijuana prohibition is built into the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and its successor international drug control treaties. Within the constraints of those treaties, what Kevin calls “decriminalization and wink-wink nudge-nudge lack of enforcement” are indeed […]

Remember the heartless, conscience-less bully and coward who cut the hair of a pleading, screaming classmate while four accomplices held the victim down? Apparently he’s still around. Look, in politics you wind up hurting people. But there’s no need to be mean about it. This sort of thing is special problem among the self-righteous; it’s […]

Matt Yglesias explains one of the main points of our marijuana legalization book: legal pot would be dirt-cheap. (Much cheaper per stoned hour than beer.) That’s been acknowledged by some advocates, including Dale Gieringer of California NORML, but it’s still denied by others. Two nice things about Matt’s piece: he completely gets the argument, and […]

Anthony Gardner, himself a private-equity operator, has crunched some numbers: 10 of roughly 67 major deals by Bain Capital during Romney’s watch produced about 70 percent of the firm’s profits. Four of those 10 deals, as well as others, later wound up in bankruptcy. Gardner then explains, using some of those big deals (including Ampad […]

Damien Cave reports that the upsurge in diverted pharmaceutical use is causing a re-thinking of drug policy generally. I’m all for a re-thinking, and especially for a new policy not based on the fantasy that drug law enforcement can substantially reduce international drug flows if we just keep doing it, or do more of it, […]

Mitt Romney has made two things clear: 1. He’s going to keep insisting that he had nothing to do with the management of a company of which he was the sole shareholder, president, CEO, and chairman. Good luck with that. 2. He’s not going to show any more tax returns. He showed 10 years to […]