ERIC HOLDER, MEDICAL MARIJUANA AND CALIFORNIA LAW…THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE AMBIGUOUS
The good news: Last week US Attorney General Eric Holder said that his people aren’t going to be getting all raidy on California’s marijuana collectives any more, since California’s state law says we can have ’em. Or that’s sort of what he said.
The ambiguous and possibly bad news, depending upon your POV: Various California law enforcement types have said, piffle, they’re still going to raid, but they’ll only raid the bad weed clinics, not the good ones. (Bad and good being malleable terms, unfortunately.)
Clearly the legal scenario is still…you know….developing.
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CALIFORNIA’S DEATH PENALTY LITMUS TEST FOR OBAMA’S DOJ?
This San Francisco criminal justice story has fascinating implications:
In a federal murder case being tried in San Francisco, the Bush Justice Department has asked for the death penalty, but the two local federal prosecutors trying the case said no, and have instead made a deal with the defendant. “District Attorney Kamala Harris and her predecessor, Terence Hallinan, have refused to seek the death penalty,” said the SF Chron.
Now that Eric Holder’s DOJ people are taking over prosecuting the case, they will have an interesting choice: To be or not to be? To go for death? Or not?
What the newbies at Justice decide in this case could say much about their future attitude toward the death penalty in general, thus this will be an unfolding situation worth watching. (The Chronicle has the rest of the story.)
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RENAME THAT LAW!!
Newly minted US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has said that he wouldn’t mind renaming the controversial No Child Left Behind act. (And, by the way, today’s LA Times has a slightly meandering editorial on No Child and related topics.)
With that in mind, the folks over at EduWonk are having a contest to urge readers to come up with the snazziest post NCLB moniker.
My personal favorite this far is:
Achieving America’s Reading, wRiting and aRithmatic Goals
AARRRG!
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DUELING OVER PROP 8
Sunday’s Sacramento Bee has an article looking at the very different personalities of Kenneth Starr and Shannon Minter, the lead attorneys in the California Supreme Court case that will decide the fate of Proposition 8 and, by extension, the marital futures of many Californians.
Starr is a conservative creep crusader who relentlessly hounded Bill Clinton about sex, and is now dean of the Pepperdine School of Law. (Does that sound over harsh?)
Minter was a lead counsel in last May’s state Sups case that allowed same-sex couples to marry. Minter is also the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights in San Francisco, and a transsexual who spent his first 35 years as a female.
California AG, Jerry Brown is also sending one of his attorneys to court who will argue Brown’s contention that Prop 8 is unconstitutional due to the fact that legal protections given to minorities and others can be taken away only if the state can show there is a “compelling interest,” and that Proposition 8 lacks that compelling interest.
Oral arguments begin on Thursday of this week.
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IF YOU RAN THE NEA WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
On Sunday, the LA Times ran a nice, splashy section in which they asked a list of people what they’d do if they ran the National Endowment for the Arts. You can read the answers here, plus a bunch of comments from readers telling what they’d do.
For the record, my favorites were…. Tom Hayden, Rachel Maddow, Sandra Tsing Loh, John Patrick Shanley and Kareen Abdul-Jabbar.
I found Bill Maher to be the most annoying with Joel Stein running a close second.
Ann Coulter was beneath comment.
(Anybody who doesn’t get that arts and literature are essential to the health of a nation needs to exit their bubble of willful stupidity immediately.)
So, okay, what would you do?
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PS: MAKE SURE TO LISTEN TO THE NEW “BAD BANK” EPISODE OF THIS AMERICAN LIFE.
It’s available for download this week only, but you can listen online anytime. Seriously. It’s really good. (Their Giant Pool of Money episode remains the best and most entertaining explanation of the subprime mortgage meltdown, to date.)
(These guys, at The Baseline Scenario, are pretty great too.)
Jesus Christ – Ann Coulter is, along with her other obvious negatives, just plain dumb. Apparently she’s not aware that Norman Rockwell, almost universally acknowledged as one of America’s greatest illustrators, was also a quintessential political liberal which is clearly evoked in some of his best and most famous work (aside from his popular New Deal and civil rights-era paintings, during the Vietnam era he even contributed a portrait of the pacifist Bertand Russell as a Ramparts magazine cover.) Putting the prolific Rockwell in the category of a hack like Kincaide – or even suggesting that his work “annoys” liberals – proves what a bizarre, disconnected, fourth-rate mentality she represents. Rockwell wasn never in competition with Jackson Pollack (New York City-bred, Rockwell actually went to Paris and tried his hand at cubism before settling into commercial illustration, of which he was a master.) Ann Coulter’s bile and cynicism has nothing in common with Norman Rockwell’s Americana – were he alive today he would undoubtedly have been commissioned for a magazine cover celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama. Ironically – or not so – the Obama family along with the citizenry gathered in DC on Jan.20 are a perfect subject for the Rockwell treatment.
I have to say that if I’d read Eve Ensler’s implicit self-congratulation as a nod to “the brave ones” or Harvey Weinstein’s unintentionally ironic proposal for a New York City Cinema Hall of Fame right before Bill Maher’s NEA death decree, I’d have been inclined to say Bill’s right. Ensler’s notion that the government should, would or could systematically fund cutting edge or “transgressive” art stands among the dumbest notions I’ve ever heard. (There was much work funded by the WPA that had implicit elements of social protest, but the work took populist or documentary forms that might have raised some political hackles, but didn’t leave the average person – i.e. taxpayer – scratching their head and wondering WTF?)
There seemed to be consensus among most of the sensible folks – even Weinsteing gave it second place among his priorities – that funding hands-on art projects in schools and other settings oriented toward youth was the best use of the paltry NEA pot. This strikes me as common sense, given that arts are the first to go when education budgets tighten. The reality is that arts funding as a civic good is going to have to be done first and foremost on the local level – with a big assist from private donors – in the foreseeable future. Cultural “warriors” who look to the Fed for funding strike me as unlikely to stir the pot of democracy in any meaningful way as “critical theory” academics who fancy their efforts as “transgressive” or “political.”
Celeste: Starr is a conservative creep crusader who relentlessly hounded Bill Clinton about sex….
Are you really that stupid? Do you think that perjuring oneself in a federal court is a sex act? Bill Clinton did more than suggest “stonewalling” justice, which was the end of Nixon…Clinton actually did it.
On Porp 8, the Left can’t stand that California voters have spoken their minds. If this was unconstitutional, there should have been a case before the vote rather than waiting to see how it turned out.
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Celeste: Anybody who doesn’t get that arts and literature are essential to the health of a nation needs to exit their bubble of willful stupidity immediately.
The issue isn’t about arts and literature…it’s about who pays for it.
Good art sells. Bad art takes taxpayer money. You like seeing a crucifix immersed in urine and having the taxpayers fund it? You like a picture of a man with a bull whip in his anus? Yeah? So, get the money from taxpayers, as was done for those “pieces of art.” I, however, oppose such taxpayer waste.
“The slogan of the National Endowment for the Arts is ‘a great nation deserves great art.’†I think we’ve seen enough of their great art. Let someone else pay for it.
(BTW, for some reason, the security on my computer would not pull up the views of those pictured in the blocks.)
Reg, I thought about the particular idiocy of the Rockwell remark. Thanks for commenting on it and reminding us of Rockwell’s extraordinary value.
Woody, to continue to pound the NEAâ€â€which has been making a huge difference on comparative pennies for more than 40 years over their funding of Mapplethorp is a little….silly. (As Hayden said, one day in Iraq = one year of the NEA’s budgetâ€â€except that the day in Iraq costs a lot more. $200 million vs. $341.4 millon.)
Please rethink the logic of the Clinton/Starr argument and get back to me. Starr had nothing, zero, zip, nadda on Bill Clinton except that when he hounded the president about his ill considered affair with a Whitehouse intern, Clinton lied about it under oath.
Heck of a job Mr. Special Prosecutor. Glad you saved the country from our ignorance about stains on blue dresses. Whatta guy!
Oh, Nixon only wanted to “stonewall” a minor break-in at Watergate? Nice job, media and Democrats to save us from our ignorance about taping locks open. Celeste, the law is the law, no matter who does it or what it’s about. The President lying under oath cannot be excused. Also, consider what Clinton got a pass on. Strange thing about those lost Rose Law Firm files turning up in the living quarters of the White House. Oh yeah, Vince Foster.
Celeste, I’m checking, but I don’t think that the NEA has freed a nation from a tyrannical dictator, fought terrorists, and established a democracy anywhere. Comparing a nation-freeing military operation to welfare artists is…well, stupid.
Why, why, why do you left-wing people believe that taxpayers are supposed to support your hobbies and products that the free market rejects?
This is similar to typical, wasteful government grants in the U.S. and gives you “something to contemplate”. LINK Surely, there is some welfare artist with an NEA grant who has featured that medium.
Woody, how can you be so closed minded as to criticize the left for defending public funding of historic art shows such as “Rainbow Swastikasâ€Â, “Nooses of Educationâ€Â, “Crosses of Fireâ€Â, and “Al Qaeda necktiesâ€Â?
Woody, how can you defend someone like Starr, who went out of his way to prosecute an admitted perjurer who used state police as his personal escort service?
Woody, how can you possibly defend the voice of the people of California who voted overwhelming to keep the definition of marriage what it has been for 10,000 years?
Woody, how can you support NCLB, which has reached millions of once written off children, improving their reading and math scores across the country, but did nothing for their art scores?
Un-Motivational Poster
“the definition of marriage what it has been for 10,000 years”
Unintentional self-satire ? An assertion like this, of course, is what makes the entire anti-marriage for gay couples hysteria seem like it’s emanating from people with all of the credibility of creationists. Oh, wait a minute…
Reg,
Please review your history or at least GOOGLE it:
– Marriage in Ancient Mesopotamia
– Marriage in Ancient Babylonia
– Marriage in Ancient Sumeria
– Marriage in Ancient China
– Marriage in Ancient Africa
– Marriage in Ancient Egypt
For starters –
Wikipedia – “Marriage Law in Ancient Mesopotamia very much resembled property law. As discerned from Hammurabi’s Code, wives were bought and sold in a manner very much resembling slavery.”
Need I waste more of our time ?
Google this – “Andrea Perez and Sylvester Davis” – to learn more about the legal definition of marriage in California just 60+ years ago.
reg: Need I waste more of our time ?
Since you put it that way, NO! Anyone who can’t acknowledge that marriage has traditionally existed only between men and women is trying to revise history.
Reg,
Since you brought up ancient Mesopotamia, which was primarily governed by the Hammurabi Code (Law), it might be instructive to actually read the Law governing marriage. http://tinyurl.com/cjn7kh
You will find marriage mentioned 31 times in the Law of Hammurabi (4000 year old), mostly to protect the bride.
It is easy for people to belittle an ancient civilization when they know nothing about it and think they are culturally superior.
You guys are clinging to an absird fantasy om protesting that marriage hasn’t been radically re-defined throughout history and in various cultures. Modern marriage is predicated on a set of assumptions about personal choice, sexual equality and personal comittment so vastly different than the wife/wives-as-property proposition of most ancient and anti-modern cultures that the current “leap” in democratic, rights-based societies to include same-sex couples is nothing more than a modest step forward that bows to a sense of fairness, family protection, legal logic and recognition of social realities. Frankly, I find the whole anti-gay argument offensive and beneath dignified debate as a matter of state recognition. Religious groups can believe and ritually sanctify anything they want so far as I’m concerned. But don’t appeal to ancient history – it makes you look stupid.
reg, you’re so gay.
“reg, you’re so gay”
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I laughed so hard I spit-up my coke on my keyboard.
It is typical un-informed liberal cutural egotism to think that people 4000 years loved differently than they do today.
I’m sure people loved 4000 years ago in a variety of ways- hetero and homo and whatever – obsessive, sweet, weird, etc. etc. as literature suggests and historians document. But the institution of marriage was clearly predicated on a vastly different set of assumptions than it is for Buffy and Ken in the OC. Still is in some cultures. Make an argument that has some historical and cultural cred – flip, idiot attempts at insult don’t help make the case.
School’s in:
http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/books/marriage/chapter1.htm
“Marriage has changed more in the past 30 years than in the previous 3,000” – said your source Dr. Stephanie Coontz – (NYTimes).
Love between a man and a woman has been the norm and has been described in song and verse in ancient tablets and manuscripts contineously for 4000 years.
ANCIENT SUMERIAN TABLET (4000 YEARS AGO)
Bridegroom, dear to my heart, Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet, You have captivated me, let me stand trembling before you; Bridegroom, I would be taken to the bedchamber.
ANCIENT EGYPT (LOVE POETRY) – 3000 – 3500 YEARS AGO
— The Flower Song (Excerpt) —
To hear your voice is pomegranate wine to me:
I draw life from hearing it.
Could I see you with every glance,
It would be better for me
Than to eat or to drink.
— The Harper’s Song for Inherkhawy (Excerpt) —
So seize the day! hold holiday!
Be unwearied, unceasing, alive
you and your own true love;
Let not the heart be troubled during your
sojourn on Earth,
but seize the day as it passes
FROM OLD TESTIMENT BIBLE – 3500 YEARS AGO
So Jacob worked seven years to pay for Rachel. But his love for her was so strong that it seemed to him but a few days.
A loving doe, a graceful deerâ€â€may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.
A bowl of vegetables with someone you love is better than steak with someone you hate.
There are three things that amaze meâ€â€
no, four things that I don’t understand:
how an eagle glides through the sky,
how a snake slithers on a rock,
how a ship navigates the ocean,
how a man loves a woman.
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth for your love is more delightful than wine.
My lover is mine, and I am his.
How delightful is your love, my sister, my bride! How much more pleasing is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your perfume than any spice!
Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.
Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away. If one were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would be utterly scorned.
Maybe you should delve into the literature of homoerotic love if this stuff moves you so. Unfortunately it has little or nothing to do with the history of the institution of marriage, which is what this issue is about. Marriage has changed from essentially a patriarchal property relationship to a “choose your lover” institution. Which is why gays should also be allowed to choose their lovers and have the same legal rights within their particular choice of commitment.
And how do you explain the fact that younger folks increasingly could care less about issues like gay marriage – or that, like intermarriage between races which was previously outlawed, sanctioning it is inevitable ? Will the walls come crashing down or can you handle it ? There’s something really sick about this obsession, especially when such intellectually spurious arguments are put forward. “Normal” people need to start acting normal – i.e.with respect, tolerance and minding one’s own business.