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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.
Impressively dumb. Congratulations.
Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!
This fight is for everything.
American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated
You cannot shame the shameless.
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.
Not all heroes wear capes.
No one could have predicted…
Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.
You can’t love your country only when you win.
Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.
How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?
Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.
An almost top 10,000 blog!
Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.
I really should read my own blog.
Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.
Damn right I heard that as a threat.
Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.
I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.
But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.
The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.
You are here: Home / Politics / War On Drugs / The War on Your Neighbor, aka the War on Drugs / Fair-Weather Federalists
cleek
wait… the party of reactionary, know-nothing authoritarianism is happy to tell people what they can and can’t do with their own bodies in the privacy of their own home ?
that can’t be.
Zifnab
John, John, John. The guy had cancer. You want to make things worse by getting him high? This is the sort of thing they teach you in all those liberal Ivory Tower medical indoctrination schools.
You know what cures cancer, John? Not Mary Jane, but Mary’s Son Jesus, who died on the cross for you. If more people would accept Jesus into their lives – like John McCain has done – then perhaps they too would recover from cancer. And who knows? Maybe they’d be on their way to the White House.
Incertus
But drugs are a plague on society unless they’re manufactured by big pharmaceutical corporations, the kinds which avoid paying taxes whenever possible.
This is the result when you constantly conflate capitalism with democracy. You have the government making the country safe for certain industries and telling the rest that they’ll go to jail if they offer a different product, and fuck the Constitution along the way.
Tax Analyst
Yeah. The “Killer Weed”. It SHOULD be a national scandal that the Federal Government is still doing this shit. Pot has been demonstrated time and again to be helpful in reducing the awful symptoms many cancer patients suffer while undergoing chemotherapy. Some people cannot even hold down food during periods when they are undergoing treatment, and marijuana has proven effective in alleviating that symptom, not to mention it’s effectiveness as a pain-reducer.
But I’m not surprised, the thinking behind the DEA enforcement policy comes from the same type of minds that brought us the Terri Schiavo fiasco.
CBeck
It only takes the barest mention of Ashcroft/Gonzales v. Raich to put me in a pissy mood for hours.
Incertus
This particular policy, true, but not drug policy in general. That mess, I’m afraid, is a true bipartisan fuckup.
Josh
this guy needs drugs…
/shitty joke
//wincing in pain
Delia
What can be said about this insane load of crap that is the War On Drugs?
When I lived in SoCal I knew a middle-aged, middle-class woman, very intelligent. She was a Mormon, married with about four kids and was a cancer survivor. She told me that if her cancer ever came back (which she assumed would mean she was going to die from it), she really, really, really wanted to have access to medical marijuana. It’s dope fiends like this that the DEA is protecting us from.
Ugh
Of course they’re hypocrites. To paraphrase something John Yoo once said in class in a response to someone arguing that republicans are federalists so they wouldn’t do X if they won the election (this was in 2000), “Don’t think that if they get their hands on ultimate power they won’t use it.”
kid bitzer
look, there has never, ever, been a principled federalist.
there have mostly been people who flew the federalist flag because they wanted to preserve slavery or jim crow.
and there have been a few others who pretended to be federalists because they wanted to exercise some other, local form of tyranny.
but the southern racists were delighted to drop their federalism as soon as the dred scott decision looked like it might invalidate norther state laws protecting fugitive slaves–that was how deep their commitment to federalism ran.
and the same has been true for every successive crop of right-wing, reactionary thugs who claim to be ‘federalists’.
e.g., the entire scalia court in re bush v. gore.
the quicker people learn “federalist” means “opportunistic right-wing thug”, the better our national discourse will go.
Incertus
He would know, that son of a bitch.
Buck
Yeah. And it makes watching cartoons a hell of a lot more fun too!
Calouste
So can anyone explain why morphine can be used as a prescription drug but marijuana can’t? No? Thought so.
Jake
OT, but Obama’s Hawaii vacation is killing him in the national polls.
Maybe Cokie Roberts was right after all. He shoulda gone to Myrtle Beach, along with all the good Negroes.
Johnny Pez
When conservatives talk about states’ rights, they only ever mean the state’s right to deny certain basic civil liberties to a certain minority group. That’s why the people who have always made a fuss about states’ rights are the same people who venerate the Confederate Battle Flag.
Brachiator
Keep in mind that conservatives love to tell ya that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution. It makes authoritarianism so much easier.
The federal government believes in the perfect circle jerk. They insist that marijuana has no beneficial medical uses and then prohibit or strongly discourage medical research.
This is an excellent point. So-called Federalists have no problem with tyranny and authoritarianism. They just like to keep it up close and personal, in the hands of city or state level autocrats, while preventing the federal government from assisting those who are oppressed.
Noah
John McCain’s daughter has written a terrifying book about him!!!
Dennis - SGMM
I can. If Big Pharma admitted the efficacy of marijuana then people would just start growing the stuff for themselves willy nilly. OTOH, if Big Pharma had a stranglehold on supply and distribution then we’d be seeing commercials for “Nature’s Wonder Drug” 24/7 – and the effective cost of it would be $2000/oz.
PK
A bit off topic but I just read on TPM that McCain is sending a delegation to Georgia and that he talks to the Georgian leader daily. Isn’t this a tad presumptuous? Do we have a parallel govt here? Has any presidential candidate done this before?
And they say Obama is entitled!
Zifnab
The same can be said of so many libertarians. When it comes time to talk about crime or drugs or abortion or the flammability of the American Flag, they can’t get in line behind Big Government fast enough. But then tax day rolls around and drowning government in the bath tub is all they can think about.
No one likes federalism or libertarianism unless they think that – should the cops and the lawyers be herded off – they could run the joint. It’s all one big power trip.
Elvis Elvisberg
Not anyone with any influence in any major political party, anyway. It’s a useful cudgel, nothing more.
w vincentz
Methinks the prosecutors are focusing on the wrong criminals.
Seems to me that someone growing pot for their own ailments has NO adverse effect on society. Slaughtering a million Iraqis…yup.
jrg
Yep, that about nails it. We’re talking about the party of Schiavo and the Federal Marriage Amendment here.
Josh
There is Radley Balko, who does a pretty good job of focusing on encroaching nanny statism and Big Brotherism. But he’s the rare exception to the rule. The overwhelming majority conform to Berke Breathed’s definition of libertarians as “a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.”
Punchy
The guy had CANCER. What a moran. He shoulda known the way to deal with attachments that have cancer is to DIVORCE THEM.
Signed,
N. Gingrich
garyb50
Irony much?
kid bitzer
yeah, balko and henley’s gang (thoreau, mona, others) are interesting and principled.
but their libertarianism is also a separate question from federalism.
i.e., it’s not like they’re all “the federal govt. is the sux, but states are so cool, and should have a lot of power!”
and of course, what elvis said about no power.
Krista
Frankly, if someone is suffering from a deadly, painful condition, they should be legally exempt from prosecution and allowed to take whatever drugs they damn well please if it helps them be more comfortable. I’ve just never understood the mindset that it is somehow “better” to be drugged out of your mind with morphine.
Brachiator
Marijuana, morphine, heroin, crack. If a person is sick, he or she should be allowed access to whatever might reasonably lessen the anguish. It’s been noted before that some American (and Western) doctors have problems with helping patients deal with pain, as though suffering is somehow noble or necessary.
And the stupidest thing I ever heard was about a doctor who was reluctant to prescribe morphine to someone who was terminally ill, and had less than a year to live. The doctor was concerned that the person would become addicted to the drug.
jbarntt
I agree with the fair weather federalist claim.
Remember the Raich decision a few years ago by the SCOTUS ?
Raich, a Cancer patient in CA grows marijuana on her own property, consumes it in her house. SCOTUS says feds have authority to prosecute under the interstate commerce clause, even though there was no commerce, (i.e., nothing changed hands), and there was no interstate, it all happened at Raich’s home.
Odd grouping of SCOTUS justices, Thomas, in the minority dissented, saying the obvious, no interstate and no commerce. Scalia joined the majority, with Stevenson, oddly enough.
If the court had ruled with Raich, then much of the edifice New Deal legislation would have been undermined, as much of it is based on ignoring the plain text of the interstate commerce clause.
Liberals like Stevenson did not like upholding the conviction because they favor legal use of currently illegal drugs, but to rule in favor of Raich would undermind the legality of much of the power of the Federal government.
Conservatives like Scalia simply don’t like letting people use federally proscribed drugs, even though the clear text of the interstate commerce clause did not apply.
Thomas of course does not approve of marijuana, but his dissent was honest and consistent with his beliefs in federalism. The other justices sucked in this case and voted their personal beliefs.
I oppose the legalization of mj, but the fact is there was no Federal issue involved, and the CA law legalizing should have prevailed.
Notorious P.A.T.
Wonder who she voted for.