Month: February 2010

Brian Riedel assumes that the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan really will end soon and shows that Bush's tax cuts, Medicare splurge and wars are "only" responsible for one third of the deficit over the next decade (although the Medicare Prescription entitlement will never end and continue to add to debt thereafter and was never budgeted in any serious way). But this is the important point:

A better way to diagnose the cause of long-term deficits is to measure taxes and spending against their historical averages. This more comprehensive methodology shows that long-term deficits are overwhelmingly driven by runaway entitlement spending.

By 2020, the CBO-based budget baseline projects that federal spending will reach 26.0 percent of the economy (5.3 percent of the economy above the 40-year spending average).

Revenues will settle at 17.7 percent of the economy (just 0.6 percent of the economy below the revenue average) – and even that assumes all tax cuts are extended. So as deficits expand by 5.9 percent of the economy, nearly 90 percent of the growth will come from higher-than-average spending, and just over 10 percent from lower-than-average revenues. Virtually all of this new spending will come from surging Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid costs (driven primarily by 77 million retiring baby boomers), as well as net interest on the national debt. These four expenditures will cost $26 trillion over the next decade – surging from $1.6 trillion this year to $3.6 trillion in 2020. That is causing the massive budget deficits over the next decade – and must be the focus of any serious effort to reduce the budget deficit.

Jonathan Bernstein counters Bainbridge:

Six months ago, people thought that Joe the Plumber was a Serious Republican Leader.  Guess what?  He wasn’t. Scott Brown isn’t Joe the Plumber; he’s a perfectly legitimate pol who just won a Senate seat in a huge upset.  Of course Republicans, a party that hasn’t won very much lately, are all excited about him.  This is neither new, nor remarkable, nor a sign that either party is about to turn to Paris Hilton for leadership.  Plenty of things to worry about in American politics, but this ain’t one of them.

Too many faces of the day to choose from.

A reader writes:

Balko’s piece moved me to write, but my point has more to do with your drumbeat about the terrible consequences of torture.  As a young lawyer, I helped represent a man who had pleaded guilty to first degree murder several years earlier, and who was clearly innocent.  It was a terrible crime in a small town, and the awkward, developmentally disabled kid made for a good suspect.  After several hours of ridiculously comic interrogation, the young man “confessed” after the police convinced him that he would get the death penalty if he didn’t take responsibility for the crime. 

That’s a common theme in cases of false confession:  If someone is afraid for his life, he’ll tell you anything you want to hear, even if it means a lifetime in prison. 

Luckily, after a decade behind bars, my client was granted his release upon a showing of actual innocence.  But the lesson wasn’t lost on me when the Bush/Cheney torture techniques came to light.  If the threat of being put to death some time in the future can elicit a false confession, imagine what the sensation of imminent drowning can do.

A reader writes:

Shoddy work on the headline.  Wasn’t it clear from the article that the directive from Holder and Obama was ignored.  Blow off my order, at one branch of a branch of the Justice Department, and oh yeah baby, I’m caving.  If anything, this story demonstrates that both medical marijuana sellers and DEA supervisors in Colorado don’t see the upside of keeping a tighter hold on broadcasting their own accomplishments.  

Another writes:

I'm 100% in favor of legalization, but I'm happy with the medical marijuana compromise.  I think you might be a little harsh on Obama, because they probably got this guy for a good reason.

I'm not familiar with Colorado's exact laws, but the way medical pot growing works is that the grower gets patients to list him or her as caretaker, and is allowed X number of plants per permit. I live in Hawaii, and each permit is good for 7 plants, and one grower can have a max of 5 permits good for 35 plants.  In California, one grower could be caretaker for hundreds of people, which allows largescale warehouse operations to run perfectly legally.

Like I said, I don't know about Colorado's laws, but it is very likely based on the Denver Post article that this guy has too many plants given the number of patients he is caretaker for.  If he bragged that he is making hundreds of thousands of dollars, then he must have a very large operation, and that would give the feds probably cause to raid him based on the fact that he is violating state law.

I've been arguing for years that pot should be taxed and regulated, so I'm not going to bend over backwards defending people who break those regulations.  It is also exceedingly foolish for growers to brag about their operation, and especially their profits.  They become a target of not only law enforcement, but violent criminals.

Sensible Colorado, a marijuana advocacy group, posts on their website:

The Colorado Health Department previously had an informal policy prohibiting a caregiver from being responsible for more than 5 patients at a time. However, in 2007 Sensible Colorado filed a lawsuit on behalf of a licensed patient who had been denied his choice of caregiver and this informal policy was nullified by the court. Thanks to Sensible Colorado’s efforts in this landmark case, caregivers may now manage the well being of as many patients as they are capable of serving.

Full Q&A here. Another reader writes:

Your post on this caught my eye, since I've gotten my recent weed here in New Mexico from a medical grower in Colorado (via a black market friend). It is without doubt the most high-quality ganja I've ever had, a true marvel of the botanical arts. My first thought was I hope the grower busted was not my dude

However, I'm not too surprised there's been some kind of crackdown. I spent some time in Denver this summer, and wow, the medical pot business is booming. I was a little taken aback at how open it is. So a pushback or muscle flex by the feds is not unexpected, and a single incident does not yet mean Obama is caving.

I'm fascinated by the cultural tide on this issue, though. In my dreams the legalization of marijuana in the U.S. will come like the fall of the Berlin wall. There are signs, like the California vote to legalize this fall, that give hope. But I suspect attitudes are different in, say, Alabama. I'm guessing Nate Silver's estimate of 10 years is about right.

He starts by claiming he is a centrist conservative and I, of course, am a left-liberal. That apparently is in some way relevant to my concern about his publication of a baldy racist and McCarthyite Internet smear. My concern was the blanket descriptions such as "Arab facts" and "Arab truth," as if an entire ethnic group is beyond something as fundamental as truth or honesty, something that real anti-Semites once said of all Jews. These words cannot mean anything given the enormous complexity of the Arab world except racist demonization. Radosh then uses the occasion for more attacks on Richard Goldstone. Eventually, he gets to the point:

As to the charge of racism – which is the reason Sullivan wants my blog removed from PJM – he … asserts that to say there is something called “Arab facts, Arab information and Arab truth” that cannot be trusted is simply racist. It is clear that Sullivan does not remember the many false and accepted Arab claims about the Al Dura incident a few years ago, in which many in the media believed the false and staged reports about how the IDF had intentionally killed a Palestinian father attempted to shield his son from being hit during a battle.

One might also recall the false claims by Hamas and its American supporters in the International Solidarity Movement that Rachel Corrie was intentionally murdered by the IDF to scare off peaceful protesters opposed to the Israeli “occupation” of Gaza. I could go on and on with many such examples of the kind of Arab facts that Chweidan warned Goldstone against accepting.

This is simply repeating the same racism – "Arab claims" "Arab facts" – this time in Radosh's own words. This makes the whole thing much worse. 

I have no doubt that there are instances in which Hamas has lied; in which Palestinians have lied; in which Saddam Hussein has lied; in which Assad has lied; in which the Saudi leaders have lied; and on and on and on. But lying is not restricted to any racial or ethnic group. It is a human failing; and it affects all of us. To describe an entire people as liars is disgusting. To say that an entire ethnic group is somehow uniquely outside the realm of truth and honesty is despicable. And I repeat that if anyone had ever written, in derogatory fashion, about "Jewish facts, Jewish information and Jewish truth" or "Jewish claims" and "Jewish facts", in any reputable publication in the United States, their career would be over.

The double standard on this is so grotesque it beggars belief.

Fallows calls out Bayh:

Do you think hyperpartisanship is destroying the Senate? Why not call out people — by name, by specific hypocritical move — when you see them doing what they should be ashamed of? I guarantee that the press would eat this up. Why not a ten-month public seminar, through the rest of this year, on who is doing what, and how it could be different? Do you object to personal "holds" on nominations? Make it an issue! You have an idea of some issue where Republicans and Democrats might agree? Be specific about it and see what you can do. Again, if I know anything about the press and the melodrama of public life, I know you could turn it to your advantage — and the public's, Mr. Smith style.

Above is the vivid poster illustrating the first post of our thread on health insurance and mortality. It was forwarded to me and I should have tried much harder to find the source. It's by Jake Lewis, who writes this blog, has this Flickr stream, and sells his remarkable work here. I'm really sorry for this lapse of credit. Another brilliant Lewis piece after the jump: