Author: Andrew Sullivan

David Boaz needles the DEA and the Obama administration:

I had a chance to meet with drug czar Gil Kerlikowske and his top aides last year, as part of a series of outreach meetings as the new team planned its strategy. It doesn’t look like my advice was taken. Of course, I probably didn’t help my case by noting that our last three presidents have acknowledged using illegal drugs, and it is just incomprehensible to me how they can morally justify arresting other people for doing the same thing they did. Do they think that they would have been better off if they had been arrested and incarcerated for their youthful drug use? Do they think the country would have been better off if they had been arrested and incarcerated? If not, how do they justify punishing others?

E.D. Kain asks:

Is anybody made better off by being incarcerated for a non-violent crime such as smoking marijuana – their records tarnished, their ability to get a job or even sometimes an apartment permanently hindered?

Isn't that fun?

Leonhardt defends his article:

I certainly agree that the two situations are not equivalent. Greece’s fiscal problems are worse than ours, and both our underlying economy and our political institutions are stronger than theirs. But the last statistic Mr. Krugman cites highlights why I think the comparison is relevant: “we have a long-run fiscal imbalance of 6-plus percent of G.D.P.” So to get our budget in order, we would need to come up with revenue equal to more than 6 percent of gross domestic product, either through tax increases or spending cuts. (That number comes from this paper, by the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale.)

That’s an enormous amount of money. Military spending, for instance, is now less than 5 percent of gross domestic product. Medicare’s budget is now about 3 percent of G.D.P. Coming up with the necessary cuts and tax increases — even over many decades, the relevant time frame — will not be easy.

Balko looks at the reforms Columbia, Missouri Police Chief Ken Burton has agreed to since video of his department's SWAT team in action went viral:

Unfortunately the changes—while small steps in the right direction—still miss the point. Burton says his department will no longer conduct SWAT raids at night. They won’t conduct raids in homes where children are present. Suspects will be under constant surveillance until the raid is carried out. And raids will be conducted within a shorter period of time from when police get the initial tip about a suspected drug dealer. But the Columbia Police Department will still conduct volatile, violent, highly aggressive forced-entry raids on people suspected of consensual, nonviolent drug crimes. That is what’s wrong with the YouTube video. Changing the time of day of the raid doesn’t change the wildly disproportionate use of force.

Over at The Future Of The City, Friedersdorf questions the place the Big Apple holds in the popular imagination:

Even if New York is a peerless American city, an urban triumph that dwarfs every other in scale, density, and possibility; even if our idea of it is the romantic notion that Joan Didion described, "the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself;" even if you've reveled in the fact of the city, strutting down Fifth Avenue in a sharp suit or kissing a date with the skyline as backdrop while the yellow cab waits; even if you've drunk from the well of its creative springs, gazing at the Flatiron Building, or paging through the New York Review of Books on a Sunday morning, or living vicariously through Joseph Mitchel or E.B. White or Tom Wolfe or any of its countless chroniclers; even if you love New York as much as I do, revering it as the highest physical achievement of Western Civilization, surely you can admit that its singularly prominent role on the national scene is a tremendously unhealthy pathology.

I feel exactly the same way. I love it to death, but would never live there. And the narcissism of its inhabitants (yes, I know I'm not exactly one to talk) is deeply irritating. It's much less different than it once was; and nowhere near as interesting as it believes. A reader response here.

In case you missed it: genius – pure genius:

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You're walking down the street, carrying your infant son on your chest, and an out-of-control car hurtles toward you. What would you do? He turned and took the impact himself.

David Sessions surveys the scene.

A reader writes:

Isn't it possible that the gay couple on Modern Family don't kiss because they're in a public space?  How many of us who are gay do the same – we're affectionate at home or at our friends' homes, but when we step outside our doors into the world where straight is the status quo, we hold back.  Sure, there are times and places we let lose, but generally speaking, many of us still feel uncomfortable being as open as our straight brothers and sisters.  This is a sad admission, but it is still true.

Another writes:

In the episode last night, everyone is vacationing in Hawaii. I noticed a great shot of one of the men in the same-sex partnership (Cameron) very reassuringly pat his partner on the bare leg right around his knee as they were both sunning themselves by the pool. Intimate and touching moments between loving adults don't always have to include smooches.

Another:

By contrast, the ABC melodrama “Brothers and Sisters” regularly shows the male couple kissing on the lips, in bed with only boxers on, and talking about their sex life.  Makes me wonder if that’s due to the fact that “Modern Family” is a comedy and they fear that such PDAs would interfere with the comedy, whereas they feel it enhances the drama on “Brothers and Sisters.”

A statement from MF's producers:

Cameron and Mitchell are a loving, grounded, committed, and demonstrably affectionate couple and have been from the beginning of the series. It happens that we have an episode in the works that addresses Mitchell's slight discomfort with public displays of affection. It will air in the fall and until then, as Phil Dunphy would say, everyone please chillax.

Jacob Sullum explains.