Year: 2013

Last week, Jacob Sullum worried that cannabis taxes will be too high to quash the black market. Kleiman, on the other hand, fears that pot will be too cheap:

Now that the federal government has made it clear that state-licensed production in Washington and Colorado will mostly get a pass from federal law enforcement, and now that Washington has decided to allow outdoor growing, avoiding the production bottleneck that might have resulted from the lags in local land-use approval for growing facilities, I’d expect to see much lower-than-current prices in Washington State’s commercial stores no later than next fall.

Why this could be a problem:

If cannabis prices are allowed to fall to something like their free-market levels, a very large increase in heavy use would be the likely result. Preventing that will require heavy specific-excise taxation (perhaps on a per-milligram-of-THC basis) and enough enforcement to prevent the evasion of that tax.

In other cannabis commentary, Kelley Vlahdos looks at the experiences of different towns in Colorado, which have the choice to allow or ban marijuana sales within their jurisdictions:

[W]hile many places—including other major Colorado cities, like Thorton, Westminster, and Centennial—have revolted against so-called “cannabisiness,” plenty of towns and counties are not just resigned to the new reality, but are actually embracing the “weed friendly” label. In fact, officials like Sal Pace, commissioner of Pueblo County, which plans to move forward with commercial sales, say they are happy to get the spillover business from smokeless neighbors like Colorado Springs. “Every time one of our neighbors bans it, we cheer,” Pace told the Denver Post. His people tell TAC that Pueblo is courting marijuana testing facilities and other marijuana-related commerce, and is serious about pot serving as a long-term economic driver

Eliza Gray notes that California will be keeping tabs on CO and WA:

This week, the American Civil Liberties Union announced a new panel, headed by California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, to draft a possible 2016 ballot measure to legalize pot in the Golden State, where an earlier attempt failed in 2010. The panel will study the implementation of Washington and Colorado’s laws to see how they might serve as a model for California, according to member and ACLU attorney, Alison Holcomb.

 

[Update: See correction below]

The Fix considers whether the GOP will heed Mitch McConnell’s advice:

McConnell’s advocacy for a sort of Republican realpolitik is, quite clearly, the right approach for his party in Congress.  The shutdown was, by any measure, a political disaster for Republicans and one that they simply cannot afford to repeat again. (We mean that literally. If Republicans forced another government shutdown over President Obama’s health-care law, it would almost certainly negate their chances of winning the Senate back in 2014 and might also jeopardize their chances of holding the House next November.) At some point, principle must give way to practicality, and now is that time for Republicans.

Of course I agree, but I still find it passing strange that McConnell is now viewed as some kind of moderate realist. I’m a little tired of bestowing the laurels of moderation on all those who only actually worked toward sanity in the very last hours before default. Many appeased insanity until that very point, which, given the economic catastrophe over the horizon, is not moderation at all.

The GOP is full of cowards – congressmen scared of primaries, leaders scared of Ted Cruz, everyone scared of Rush Limbaugh. It’s a party riven by fear, exploiting fear, and creating fear.

And McConnell is absolutely a part of that. Which is perhaps why Pareene supports the Tea Party’s efforts to oust McConnell – to heighten the contradictions and bring on the nadir we need:

The campaign to take down Mitch McConnell is insane, from a conservative perspective. McConnell is the single most effective legislator Republicans have, and he’s used his power to advance the interests of the conservative movement. … All McConnell has done is undermine and block Obama’s agenda with ruthless efficiency for five years. And he’s done so without becoming the sort of angry laughingstock Republican that normal Americans hate (and movement conservatives love). What has Ted Cruz done? What have Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan done? Rand Paul is trying to actually be the effective version of Ted Cruz, and what has he done?

So, yes, fund a primary campaign against Mitch McConnell. Definitely do this, conservatives. It will work out great. Even if Bevin beats McConnell and wins the seat, Republicans will have traded their best parliamentary weapon for another Mike Lee. Good strategy, everyone.

[Correction: In the original version of this post, I cited a quote from Mitch McConnell about Charlie Sheen from the New Yorker’s Paul Slansky’s quiz. The quote was from Rand Paul, not McConnell. The answers to the quiz were upside down and I read a b) as d). I removed the quote. Apologies for the mix-up.]

(Photo: A Mitch McConnell look-alike in Britain’s Conservative Party Conference last month. By Getty Images.)

Today the president discussed the problems with Obamacare’s exchanges:

I have to say I found his remarks far less contrite than they should have been. Where is the unqualified apology? Where is the commitment to basic accountability for this clusterfuck? Instead, we have all these positive rationalizations and excuses in a confusing technical lecture. Ezra reports that the White House was blindsided by the Healthcare.gov problems:

The problem here isn’t just technological. It’s managerial. The White House’s senior staff — up to and including the president — was blindsided. Staffers deep in the process knew that HealthCare.gov wasn’t ready for primetime. But those frustrations were hidden from top-level managers. Somewhere along the chain the information was spun, softened, or just plain buried.

The result was that the White House didn’t know the truth about its own top initiative — and so they were unprepared for the disastrous launch. They didn’t even know they needed to be lowering expectations. In any normal corporation, heads would roll over a managerial failure of such magnitude and consequence.

And perhaps heads will roll. But for now, the White House is focused on trying to make HealthCare.gov work.

Not. Good. Enough.

Obama needs to get ahead of this, and stop being as defensive as he was this morning. He does not have the credibility to sell us on the ACA when he does not cop more aggressively to his own failure to stay on top of this most important domestic initiative. Sebelius is the person most obviously responsible for the managerial – not technical – problems that have plagued this new program’s rollout.

Until someone that high up is fired, I do not believe that no one is angrier about this failure than the president. I believe that’s true – but also spin. Meanwhile, W. James Antle III wonders whether Obamacare repealers and Obamacare fixers will work together if the exchanges require legislative fixes:

The reasons liberals should want to prevent their long-awaited victory on health care reform from being turned into defeat by the haphazard implementation of a poorly constructed law are obvious. But what’s in it for conservatives? Nothing would better vindicate their case against Obamacare than the “death spiral” that would follow young people fleeing exchanges that are being flooded with the old and sick.

Yet if Obamacare undermines the entire individual health insurance market, it will make it even more difficult—and perhaps impossible—to ever implement any free-market health care reforms. In fact, single payer may loom ever larger as the only viable remaining option to an employer-based system that both conservatives and liberals would like to substantially remodel.

But for Republicans, Obamacare is not and perhaps never has been a program to favor or oppose, to reform or to abandon. It has become a doctrinal issue of paramount importance. They have not acted rationally in shaping it, as they could easily have, or in reforming it, as they could now do. They will continue a policy of sabotage – and the possibility that we could all end up in single-payer as a result is not the kind of empirical thing they can compute. It requires an analysis of costs and benefits, which they are unable to do. All they do is proclaim eternal, political truths and purge any dissenters. That’s all they know. Because actually governing – rather than controlling – the country is of no interest to them.

In a later post, Ezra assesses the efforts to fix the ACA website:

HealthCare.gov is monstrously complex. The Times reports that there’s more than 500 million lines of code — of which more than 5 million lines may need to be rewritten. And that code is interfacing with computer systems (and computer code) at the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, state Medicaid systems, insurers like Aetna, and more. Even the best programmers would have trouble figuring out what’s going on — much less what’s going wrong — quickly.

The truth is that the Obama administration is, to a much greater extent than it would like, dependent on the very people who built HealthCare.gov to fix it. They’re the only people who know what’s going on inside the system.

A reader sent me a recent column by the legendary William Pfaff syndicated in the international edition of the NYT. What he writes there would not, I bet, appear in the domestic NYT. Because what Pfaff does is debate the reality of the Middle East and weapons of mass destruction in ways almost never heard in mainstream American media – but ubiquitous abroad.

He posits two possible outcomes of recent developments. First off, he cites the so-far remarkably successful effort to find, secure and destroy the Assad regime’s chemical weapons stockpile. Incredibly as it seemed only a few months ago, we look as if we may be on the path to removing those hideous weapons from the world – a big advance in collective security. But imagine if the talks with Iran also conclude successfully – which may well happen, if they aren’t deliberately scuppered by the Christianist-AIPAC alliance in the US Congress. Then you’d have Iran’s nuclear program monitored as a civilian enterprise under the Non-Proliferation Treaty – and Obama would have helped remove WMDs from two Middle East powers, a big advance toward lowering the potential for an apocalypse in that part of the world.

But guess who that leaves as the sole WMD power in the region, with chemical and nuclear weapons not under any international supervision? Pfaff:

The conclusion of such a series of developments could be the regulation and legalization of the conventional weapon stocks possessed by Syria and Iran, leaving Israel as an outlaw not only because of its possession of weapons of mass destruction, but because of its aggressive expansion and apartheid policies with respect to the Palestinian territories and their populations.

If Syria and Iran give up their WMD potential – Israel is going to find itself extremely isolated in global opinion – even more so than today. The Israelis will not be able to argue that their WMDs are designed to deter other WMDs, since those other WMDs will have been neutralized. Israel will argue, understandably, that because of its uniquely despised existence in the region, it still requires a deterrent of huge magnitude. I’d be very sympathetic to that case. But it will be difficult to argue that and to argue that it will never give up the West Bank as well. Neither the US nor the European powers would be able to support both Israel’s retention of nuclear and chemical weapons and the continuing occupation and relentless de facto annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

I can even see a strategy where a successful conclusion to the Iran negotiations and to the Syrian chemical stockpile would increase the pressure on Israel to end its brutal occupation of the West Bank. What is Netanyahu’s strategy for dealing with that? Pfaff sees warfare against Iran as Netanyahu’s response to such advances – against US wishes. But I think that would intensify Israel’s isolation, especially if the Iranians were close to a deal – or even past one – with the West as a whole. Netanyahu is a Ted Cruz figure, but even he would not go there, I guess.

Is it therefore possible that developments in Syria and Iran could help advance a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine? Know hope.

Reviewing the extraordinary progress of the marriage equality movement over the past two decades, Jonathan Rauch coins a term for how changes in public opinion tend to happen in America:

Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman whose observations of America in the 1830s remain shrewdly relevant, famously remarked on Americans’ deference to majority opinion: “As long as the majority is still undecided, discussion is carried on; but as soon as its decision is irrevocably pronounced, everyone is silent, and the friends as well as the opponents of the measure unite in assenting to its propriety.” Although he exaggerates, the broad point remains true: the legitimising effect of public opinion is such that, other things being equal, majority support tends to amplify itself.

Even if I have doubts about gay marriage, the fact that most of my countrymen are on the other side weakens my resolve and impels me to acknowledge the legitimacy of their view. The difference between support at, say, 55 per cent versus 45 per cent — that is, the different between majority and minority standing — is one of kind, not merely of degree. That is not to say that opposition evaporates or crawls under a rock when it loses majority standing. But its power and relevance are greatly reduced.

Another word for this is the tipping point. But more generally, we are indeed much more susceptible to accepting things that a majority seems to have settled on. My biggest experience of this is living for part of the year in Provincetown.

It’s a small New England fishing village in outward aspect but any day-tripper there will encounter much higher levels of gay visibility than they’re used to, drag queens walking to get groceries, transgender people in front of you getting coffee, gay couples with children in strollers, and the occasional glimpse of an unexpected bare ass in leather. The day-trippers come from all-over – for whale watching, taffee-buying, dune touring or nightlife. They are predominantly heterosexual. And yet within a few minutes of awkwardness, they just accept it. Because no one is paying attention to the weirdness, you learn not to as well.

The place itself simply imposes acceptance by majority rule and the visitors immediately seem to sense that and adjust. They may feel differently if a drag queen were holding up the line at Starbucks in, say, Revere. But in the little town of widespread nonchalance toward otherness, the culture shifts almost at once. As usual, Tocqueville was onto something – long before Malcolm Gladwell.

(Polling from Gallup’s latest survey on the question.)