It's rare for newspapers to editorialize in favor of marijuana legalization. But it's just happened:
MARIJUANA should be legalized, regulated and taxed. The push to repeal federal prohibition should come from the states, and it should begin with the state of Washington.
The "grappling" continues:
Spokesman Jay Carney said Obama has always opposed the Defense of Marriage Act as "unnecessary and unfair." But Carney said there's no change to how Obama views gay marriage itself.
Larison thinks that the presence of American citizens in Libya explains the administration's muted response:
[I]t would be a remarkable display of arrogance and folly to start denouncing Gaddafi’s crimes when U.S. citizens could immediately be exposed to violent reprisals or arrest. It doesn’t seem to cross the minds of interventionists in this case that our government could imperil fellow Americans by following their advice. If official condemnations have to wait a few days or weeks until U.S. citizens in Libya are safely out of the country, that is what a responsible government should do.
Ambinder's analysis:
The announcement today does nothing to the law directly. That would take an act of Congress or a final finding by the judicial branch, probably the Supreme Court. But it changes the vector of the legal cases considerably. Privately, the administration believes that five justices of the Court, including Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote, would find parts of most of DOMA invalid if the federal government withdrew its arguments that the law was unconstitutional.
Port Moody, British Columbia, 9.43 am
Max Eden praises Daniels' moderation:
Mitch Daniels once again showed that he is not interested in running for president. And by doing so, he has shown why he should.
Governor Daniels has taken criticism for refusing to order Indiana state troopers to hunt down Democratic state legislators who have, like their Wisconsin counterparts, fled the state. If Daniels were truly interested in running for president he should forget the context of his job and try to one-up Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for the spotlight. Yet Daniels refuses to forget his context and his job, and it may serve his critics well if they took 30 seconds to consider it.
Allahpundit attacks:
In a major shift, the DOJ will no longer defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act in the courts.
According to a blogger Malia Litman's account of a phone interview with a spokesman for the Anchorage Police Department, the APD has admirably corrected its initial statement to the National Enquirer regarding this unconfirmed story. Money quote from Litman:
"Officer Parker confirmed that the Officer Billiet was the officer who had spoken with William Fortier when the initial call was made regarding possible prostitution activities. Dave Parker did not know about Officer Billiet’s involvement or his tip from William Fortier. Thus Dave Parker confirmed that he did not have all the information when he prepared the press release for the National Enquirer.
Officer Parker confirmed that no attempt was made by him, and to his knowledge, by anyone with the Anchorage Police Department, to check the computer records or cell phone records of either Kashawn Thomas or Shailey Tripp. Thus he confirmed that the names of many people could be on the computer or cell phones seized, but he would not know about that.
Thus if Todd Palin’s name appeared on the cell phone or lap top of Shailey Tripp, Officer Parker was not in a position to confirm or deny that. He did say that 'rabid' anti-Palin people might try to 'conjure' something up. He did confirm that the cell phones and computer would be returned when both cases are closed, and that there would be no reason for any phone numbers or names to have been deleted.
In conclusion, the Press Release issued by the Anchorage Police Dept was inaccurate and misleading.
"Use live ammunition," - Jeffrey Cox, a deputy attorney general for Indiana, responding to a report that riot police might be used to clear demonstrators from the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin. Confronted about his comment, Cox doubled down.
Just when you're not expecting, she ruins your day:
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"I campaigned on [the proposals in the budget repair bill for Wisconsin] all throughout the election. Anybody who says they are shocked on this has been asleep for the past two years," - Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.
"We introduced a measure last week, a measure I ran on during the campaign, a measure I talked about in November during the transition, a measure I talked about in December when we fought off the employee contracts, an idea I talked about in the inauguration, an idea I talked about in the state of the state. If anyone doesn't know what's coming, they've been asleep for the past two years," - Scott Walker.
These two statements are untrue with respect to collective bargaining rights for some public sector unions, the crux of the current controversy. Politifact confirms the Dish's conclusion yesterday.
The GAO has a new report (PDF) on the enormous dangers.
John Yoo, who believes that presidents are sometimes empowered to order the massacre of a village or the crushing of a child's testicles, has a post up at Ricochet arguing that president Obama "misunderstands his constitutional role" and "continues to display his misunderstanding of the constitutional order." How?
...by repeatedly inserting himself into matters reserved to the states and localities, such as the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, the location of a mosque near ground zero in New York City, and much of Arizona's immigration bill.
And by "inserting himself," Yoo means that he comments on them. It's certainly reasonable to argue that Obama shouldn't comment on these matters. It's just a little much coming from a man whose legal reasoning about a president's constitutional role allowed a president to seize any citizen or non-citizen at will anywhere on earth and torture them. Here's Yoo's credentials, according to his own former overseers:
The ethics lawyers, in the Office of Professional Responsibility, concluded that two department lawyers involved in analyzing and justifying waterboarding and other interrogation tactics — Jay S. Bybee, now a federal judge, and John C. Yoo, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley — had demonstrated “professional misconduct.” It said the lawyers had ignored legal precedents and provided slipshod legal advice to the White House in possible violation of international and federal laws on torture.
Even the man who rescued Yoo from being disbarred conceded that "Yoo’s loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to author opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, view of executive power."
So naturally he now makes his living as a law professor and is taken seriously as a pundit writing on the subject of the executive's role in government. And can actually say that merely speaking out on a topic of public debate, a president is constitutional over-reach! And naturally, Paul Wolfowitz has the gall to call for invading another Middle East country. And Don Rumsfeld refuses to cop to his own war crimes. If you are a part of the partisan right, nothing matters except your team.
Clive Crook has an excellent summary of the actual issues involved. When a fiscally conservative governor has lost Clive Crook, he's really gone overboard.
Don't miss the Dish's round-up coverage of developments in Libya over the last twelve hours. It's here.
"How can a leader subject his own people to a shower of machine-guns, tanks and bombs? How can a leader bomb his own people, and afterwards say 'I will kill anyone who says anything?'" - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Qaddafi.
Lynn Vavreck presents a study on TV habits and political affiliation:
When we examine the viewership of each show ... interesting partisan composition emerges. Republicans make up more of the share of the audience for NCIS (48%) and Criminal Minds (41%), while shows like Desperate Housewives (55% Democrats), The Mentalist (54%), and CSI:Miami (50%) are much more likely to be composed of Democrats than Republicans. Extreme Makeover is a pretty even mix of partisans from both parties. Where there are differences, they are significant, at least in a statistical sense.
What’s interesting about these trends in television viewing is the similarity between the programming of shows like NCIS and CSI:Miami – both shows are about forensic science and criminal investigations – yet, partisans somehow manage to sort themselves into the shows in a systematic way.
Robert Krulwich got fooled by the above video (actually just an art project). But, he argues, the prospect of employing bees to find illegal plants isn't so unrealistic:
At first I was irritated by being duped by a news-like video. Then, thinking it over, I got the uncomfortable feeling that Waithe's fantasy doesn't seem all that far-fetched. I'm (vaguely) OK with DNA testing, scent-chasing bloodhounds, police-aiding psychics, but somehow, turning social insects into police intelligence units seems just crazy enough, just do-able enough, just attractive enough to the police, that one day we may have to actually cringe when a bee comes wandering through the kitchen window.
John Barry describes how dictators maintain power:
[T]he real key to regime survival has been what RAND Corporation analyst James Quinlivan calls “coup-proofing.” In an influential 1999 study, Quinlivan itemized the basic safeguards for dictatorships. First: Consolidate an inner core bound to the regime by “family, ethnic, and religious loyalties”—in essence, a mafia, with goodfellas in various guises protecting the big guy’s back (and their own; if he goes down, so do they).
Keith Schneider maps it:
[Geographer Huo Youguang] explained that the two most important natural resources that are needed to support China’s development in this decade—water and energy—are defined by what he called a “geographic mismatch.” The new energy reserves are in the dry north. The available water to develop them is in the rainy south.
The story has some amazing stats, like this:
Though China’s economy has grown almost ten-fold since the mid-1990s, water consumption has increased 15 percent, or 1 percent annually.
Scott Lucas starts us off:
State media is reporting that the Minister of the Interior, Major General Abdul Fatah Younis, has been kidnapped hours after he dramatically broke ranks with Qaddafi --- his friend and ally since the regime took power in 1969 --- by resigning and calling on the armed forces to join the "February 17 Revolution".
This could be disinformation: in his speech yesterday, made just before Younis announced his departure, Qaddafi said the Minister of Interior had survived an assassination attempt. Or it could be a pre-emptive strike by the Libyan leader: Younis said late last night that the assassination attempt was by Qaddafi's own men, and today's rumour may be a signal that Younis has indeed been removed from the scene by abduction or worse.
More on Younis here. The latest from AJE:
12:51am: A pro-Gaddaffi Libyan police colonel says two "Islamic emirates" have been set up in the east of the country, and that drivers carrying food aid are too scared to drive to Benghazi, the site of the beginning of the uprising, because the people there are on hallucinogenic drugs. ... Al Jazeera's Rawya Rageh says that all speakers in Libya's state TV press conference keep repeating that "assailants" and arrested men "are on hallucination pills".
4:51am The first major evacuation vessel sponsored by the US Government is set to evacuate American citizens from Libya.
Radley Balko's latest column has huge implications for the Fourth Amendment - and a nice anecdote about his dog:
For the first few years I had her, I was impressed by my late dog Harper's uncanny ability to assess people's character. She hated every crappy landlord and bad roommate. Barked at them. Snarled at them. Wouldn't go near them. But if I brought home a date I liked, Harper, a Shar Pei/Labrador mix, would curl up right next to the woman and turn on the charm. It took me several years to figure out that my dog wasn't a good judge of character; she was just good at reading me. She liked the people I liked and disliked the people who rubbed me the wrong way. For dogs descended from lines bred for protection and companionship, this talent makes sense. A dog adept at distinguishing friend from foe was likely to be kept around and bred, and one very good way to tell friend from foe is to read your master's body language.
My confusion about what was going on in Harper's head reflects a common misconception that is also apparent in the ways dogs are used in criminal investigations.
After musing about how many people he could torture with a modest sum of money, Jason Kuznicki makes this point:
If you have a burning ambition to increase human liberty, the marginal returns to the enterprise are very unevenly distributed in terms of government finance. ... [D]on’t imagine that lowering spending is always the best way to preserve or increase liberty. We could become a vastly freer country while paying only a little less in taxes, if the cuts came in the right places. And we could become a very, very unfree country with only a pittance in extra spending.
CNN has more on the situation in Cameroon, which is planning "Egypt-like" protests today to oust its 30-year ruler.
A reader writes:
In this post (and some of the previous Bahrain coverage) one gets the sense that Bahrain is an absolute monarchy. This is not true. See Bahrain's constitution. Article I, Section B clearly states that Bahrain is a constitutional monarchy.
"Gaddafi appears to have separated himself from any semblance of reality, which would be funny if it didn't mean slaughter, pain and horror," - Stephen Fry.
Today on the Dish, mercenaries attacked protesters and defected military, we gawked at cuckoo Qaddafi (the short version), and our jaws dropped as he rambled on. We weighed options for what the international community could do, Andrew balked at Wolfowitz's calls for a no-fly zone over Libya, and Larison argued against it. Andrew Solomon itemized Qaddafi's mistakes, and Evgeny Morozov fingered why social networks can be dangerous when governments don't fall. The first Western journalist entered Libya, John Barry enlightened us about "coup-proofing," and Andrew Barwig cautioned us to examine future electoral reform. The 1848 analogy gained steam, we previewed Iraq's day of rage, and full coverage from the long and violent weekend is here.
Andrew called Walker on his campaign promises to end collective bargaining for public sector unions, and found serious flaws in his budget. Ezra Klein asked if the GOP's hardball would pay off, Andrew called it over-reach, and Will Wilkinson questioned the left's back-up plan. The National Review offered a platform to the ever-incendiary Breitbart, and Rush Limbaugh went there. Maryland moved closer to marriage equality, Bruce Barlett examined tax trends, and Sanchez rebutted Andy McCarthy on Patriot Act wiretaps. Noah Millman chose foodie curiosity, and Felix Salmon raised renting over ownership as the next American Dream. Palin liked herself on Facebook, the Internet betrayed its partisanship, and Andrew unpacked her lies about reading all the newspapers.
Memo of the day here, quotes for the day here, here, and here, the future of eco-trash here, MHB here, FOTD here, VFYW here, and VFYW contest winner #38 here.
--Z.P.
Mackey finds it:
Ali Abdulemam, a prominent Bahraini blogger who was detained last year, was released on Tuesday night, according to Nasser Weddady, a Mauritanian activist and blogger. Maryam Alkhawaja of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights posted this image of Mr. Abdulemam in a set of photographs of political prisoners released in the past hour.
Evgeny Morozov remains pessimistic about the Internet's democratic potential. But even Morozov doesn't do the full-Gladwell:
The lesson here is that social media and technology can definitely make protests more effective. You look at what happened in Tunisia just a few weeks ago. Twitter and Facebook were used to get people into the streets. This is something that deserves recognition. The problem is that if the government doesn't end up falling in the end, the government also gets much more data and much better technology to engage in a crackdown.
Al Jazeera says of the above video:
You must watch this. The family of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian from Sidi Bouzid whose act of self-immolation triggered the Tunisian Uprising, has a message for the families in Libya who have lost their loved ones to the violent repression of the protests.
Below is the second half of today's news round-up. From the Guardian:
Gaddafi is not standing down or leaving the country. He said he would die in Libya "as a martyr". It was his first major speech since the beginning of the unrest that threatens to topple the regime. One of his sons, Saif, is expected to again address the country tonight. The Libyan leader has also telephoned Silvio Berlusconi, with whom he has forged a friendship, to tell him that "everything is fine" in Libya. But refugees streaming across Libya's eastern border into Egypt said Gaddafi was using tanks, warplanes and foreign mercenaries to fight the growing rebellion.
More on the Qaddafi/Berlusconi relationship here. The latest from AJE:
Libyan government spokesman gives press conference outlining the vision of Gaddafi's eldest son, Saif al-Islam. Plans for reform include boosting payments to the unemployed. Also announces the formation of a committee to investigate events over the past couple of weeks. He says people "will be shocked by the extent of the distortion committed by Arab and foreign press and media. The spokesman goes on to attack "the brothers in Qatar" [aka Al Jazeera]. ...
The UN Security Council has agreed in the last hour [12:09 GMT] to condemn the violence used against protesters in Libya by the government there. ...
Deputy Libyan ambassador emerges from UN discussions. This is significant, as the deputy has a radically different position to the pro-Gaddafi ambassador. ... Libya's deputy UN ambassador says that Gaddafi's speech was code for his forces to start genocide against the Libyan people.
Andrew Barwig recalls "instances when Arab regimes under duress used the guise of electoral reform to maintain control":
[W]e should pay careful attention to the rules that govern upcoming elections in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. If history is any guide, protestors and reformists may be left out in the cold if transitional electoral systems simply diffuse power and reinforce clientelism rather than alter the rules of the game in a fundamental way.
Atlanta, Georgia, 10 am
Felix Salmon hopes homeownership gets knocked off its pedestal:
The Libyan dictator spoke to the Italian prime minister over the phone today, "telling him that Libya is fine and the truth about events in the country are being shown on state media." Robert Mackey takes a look at their friendship:
On Monday, Mr. Berlusconi had broken his silence over the reported atrocities in Libya, calling the use of force against civilians "unacceptable." The Italian leader, who has cultivated close ties with his Libyan counterpart, was criticized over the weekend for
saying that he did not want to "disturb" Colonel Qaddafi during the bloody crackdown on protesters. On Tuesday, Bloomberg News explained that the Italian and Libyan economies are closely linked. "Italy's trading ties with Libya make it the most exposed European Union country to any collapse in Muammar el-Qaddafi's regime," Bloomberg reported. ...
The close ties between the Italian and Libyan leaders became the subject of closer scrutiny and mockery last year, after an Italian newspaper reported that a young woman told Milan police that Mr. Berlusconi called sex parties at his home "bunga bunga," in reference to a rite of Colonel Qaddafi's harem. That led an Italian opposition party to put up posters in Rome showing Mr. Berlusconi's "evolution" into a version of the Libyan leader.
Maybe there is some systemic difference between Hispanic women with bachelor's degrees and 20 years of work experience who put in 52-hour weeks in the public sector and Hispanic women with bachelor's degrees and 20 years of work experience who put in 52-hour weeks in the private sector. If anyone has some evidence for that, I'm open to hearing it. But the EPI study is aimed at a very specific and very influential claim: that Wisconsin's state and local employees are clearly overpaid. It blows that claim up. Even in Manzi's critique, there's nothing left of it. So at this point, the burden of proof is on those who say Wisconsin's public employees make too much money.
General Abdul Fatah Younis, Libya's minister of interior and Qaddafi's No. 2, resigned today and gave a fascinating interview to Al Arabiya. Sultan Al Qassemi translates via Twitter (tweets are strung together):
I am not a two-faced man. I worked with Gaddafi for 42 years, I was shocked at his speech today. I wish Gaddafi had instead said a prayer for the fallen youth in his last days in office. Our plan now it to support the youth in Tripoli so that it is liberated like Benghazi was. I offer my condolences to the fallen martyrs (reads a statement of support for the youth revolution). I begged Gaddafi not to send planes, I called him. Now of course we don't speak, I have joined the revolution.
More insight into Younis' defection:
There was a crowd of people outside my office, I was with my cousin. A bullet then went next to my right cheek, it hit my cousin who is in a very bad case now. Gaddafi, that dirty man, wanted to say that I was killed by protesters so that my tribe, the Obeidat, will stand by him.
Al Jazeera asks in regards to the interview excerpt below, "Is Younis positioning himself to take over?"
Larison's case against one:
Not only would the U.S. very directly be taking sides in an internal Libyan conflict to which we are not party, but should enforcing such a no-fly zone could turn into a prolonged commitment that will be one more mission added to the burden of an already overstretched military. No-fly zones are the sort of easy-sounding response to an immediate problem that can turn into an endless policy. If the reason for the no-fly zone is to halt Gaddafi’s assault on civilians, it probably won’t be long before the no-fly zone evolves into an air war against Gaddafi’s ground forces to achieve the same end, and that might escalate into a new war for regime change. Libya’s internal conflict is just the sort of situation that Americans should have learned to avoid by now.
Courtesy of Alexis:
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has done an admirable job building out a digital document archive from his time in the government on his website, Rumsfeld.com. While I was watching the events in Libya unfold, I decided to search his papers to see what he'd written on the country. In so doing, I ran across a document that left me flabbergasted. It's a message (probably an email) that Rumsfeld sent to then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith on April 7, 2003. ...
The memo's tone is so casual about such complex and important topics that it prompted Technology Review editor Jason Pontin to ask me on Twitter, "Is this a parody?"
But no, the memo is real.
Wylie profiles seven Iranians arrested after the 2009 protests who are still in jail.
Will Wilkinson is wondering:
Supposing that Mr Walker and not the SEIU is the vanguard of history—supposing that America is headed toward the stable non-union equilibrium—what is the next-best scenario from a progressive perspective? What is the answer if resurgent unionism is not? Is there one? I hear plenty of progressive rhetoric to the effect that only a rehabilitated union movement can save America from plutocracy and middle-class stagnation, but my sense is that this is a lot like conservative rhetoric to the effect that only a return to constitutional principles will save America from sclerotic socialist decline. Do progressives, like their conservative counterparts, really believe their own hype?
Steinglass thinks it a good question but doesn't have an answer.
Angry Birds: The Next Generation:
I earlier referred to data showing an amazingly cushy period for the teachers' unions in Wisconsin. It behooves me to add that this changed in 1993:
As rising health insurance costs have eaten up most of the 3.8% total compensation target, teacher salaries in Wisconsin have stagnated and even declined. As a result, Wisconsin teacher salaries fell 6.8% from 1997-98 to 2007-08, when adjusted for inflation. For 2007-08, Wisconsin's teacher salaries ranked 21th in the nation at $49,051, down from 20th the year before, and below the national average of $52,308.
That's from the teachers' union's website. But they apparently offered the following concessions on flexibility last week:
Perhaps the most disgusting commentary yet uttered about the protests in Madison is a monologue comparing Wisconsin teachers to foreign Islamists:
Ezra Klein thinks that the showdown in Wisconsin and the possible shutdown of the federal government are important tests:
Dan Amira lists the reasons Mike Huckabee might sit 2012 out.
The leaked manuscript for a new book on Sarah Palin, "Blind Allegiance," has made for fascinating reading. There's a useful summary of its contents at the Anchorage Daily News. But there are some revelations that make sense of what previously just seemed bizarre. Take that awful moment in the Couric interview when Palin was asked what periodicals or newspapers or news sources she read and said "All of them." Here's Bailey's account:
Why did Sarah not name anything, when we knew she spent a fair amount of time reading? The answer boils down to image management. Sarah‘s media diet came exclusively from local sources including the Alaska Journal of Commerce, the Alaska Business Monthly, and the Anchorage Daily News. In addition, various administrative assistants put together a compilation of stories from major Alaskan news sites each morning. This document, referred to as Daily Clips, ran in excess of thirty pages and Sarah digested those capsulated reports by 8:00 a.m. each morning. To suggest she didn‘t read is wrong.
However, in her mind, admitting to this regional-only emphasis would‘ve made her appear less interested in national and international events—which was absolutely the case. Instead of honesty, she panicked and, once again, made matters infinitely worse.
As I sat and watched this salt-in-the-wound interview, I raised my eyes and asked the ceiling, ―Why can‘t she just tell the truth?
The sheer number of unnecessary Palin lies Bailey recounts boggles the mind.
Oh, yes, and then there's the Trig question. You think I wouldn't be curious? Bailey believes it's preposterous that anyone doubts Palin is Trig's biological mom - and because he's so damning about her in so many ways, that's salient. I'll soon be providing his evidence - of the rumors as far back as March 2008, and the Palins' obsessive emails about the contretemps. Bailey, however, remains as befuddled as the Dish has been by Palin's refusal to kill the rumors - as far back as during her pregnancy - by the "simple solution" of releasing medical records. It's some good crack.
Jack Healy and Michael Schmidt preview it:
It is a date being discussed in Iraq’s tea shops, on television and in the streets with varying shades of hope, fear and cynicism. On Friday, thousands of Iraqis are planning to take to the streets for their own “day of rage,” hoping to harness the popular anger that has swept through much of the Middle East but has failed to gain much traction here.
The Arab uprisings are really a vindication for Obama.
A new manuscript reveals her media mouthpieces.
On the fiscal crisis, he represents no hope or change.
That's the Washington Village's devout wish.
Civil equality does not erase cultural or religious difference.
— George Orwell
Editor Andrew Sullivan
Executive Editors Patrick Appel, Chris Bodenner
Senior Editor Conor Friedersdorf
Associate Editor Zoe Pollock
