The Dish

Here he is on medical marijuana:

"You can accomplish everything you want to accomplish with things other than marijuana, probably better. There are pain medications much superior to marijuana. We’d be much better off telling people the truth. Marijuana adds nothing to the array of legal medications and prescription medications that are available for pain relief."

There is no medical evidence for this assertion. For several categories of pain and for nausea, smoking marijuana has been found to have unique properties for relief. But even if you were to buy Rudy’s argument, why should a patient be denied any treatment he seeks as long as it is as harmless and as non-toxic as pot? This I don’t understand. The sick, to my mind, have a right to seek treatment of any kind that does not harm them and may help them. Marijuana should be no more banned than vitamins.

I don’t think so. He’s human. But Vitter himself has written otherwise:

Some current polls may suggest that people are turned off by the whole Clinton mess and don’t care — because the stock market is good, the Clinton spin machine is even better or other reasons. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether President Clinton should be impeached and removed from office because he is morally unfit to govern.

The writings of the Founding Fathers are very instructive on this issue. They are not cast in terms of political effectiveness at all but in terms of right and wrong — moral fitness. Hamilton writes in the Federalists Papers:

(No. 65) that impeachable offenses are those that "proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust."

Further reflections. Chris Crain writes:

According to the Human Rights Campaign’s press release,

For the first time the leading candidates for the presidency will hold a televised debate devoted solely to LGBT issues.

It’s not so historic, actually, considering HRC hosted a forum of Democratic presidential candidates on July 15, 2003.

Let’s compare them, shall we?

2003 event:

    * 7 of 9 Democratic candidates
    * live gay audience of 500
    * gavel-to-gavel nationwide coverage on CSPAN
    * moderated by ABC News senior correspondent Sam Donaldson, who pressed the candidates on gay marriages vs. civil unions and gays in the military, noting that their positions largely matched otherwise
    * HRC executive director Elizabeth Birch called the event an historic first

2007 event:

    * only 3 of 8 Democratic candidates confirmed
    * live "studio audience"
    * live coverage on Logo and LogoOnline.com
    * moderated by recording artist Melissa Etheridge and HRC director Joe Solmonese
    * HRC calls the event an historic first

So in 2003, HRC hosted almost all the candidates to a forum in front of a large and boisterous audience and subjected them to one of journalism’s most well-known aggressive questioners and broadcast the whole thing on a universally available basic cable channel to an audience of both gay and straight Americans.

This time around, only 3 of 8 candidates will answer questions from non-journalists before a Logo TV audience largely limited, in the cable systems that carry the network, to gay people. Anyone who’s heard the Solmonese radio show on XM knows he makes even Larry King look like, well, Sam Donaldson by comparison. But contempt for real media (gay and straight, old and new) is par for the course for HRC under Solmonese, and so is allowing HRC to be co-opted by "gay-friendly" Democrats to avoid upsetting them.

Not only is there now no journalistic presence, the two "questioners" are both indistinguishable left-liberals, one a long-time abortion lobbyist and the other a rich rock star. That’s now the range of opinion in the gay world? One civil rights achievement of these past few years has been integrating gay issues seamlessly into the national conversation and raising the presence of openly gay journalists in the national conversation – not as gay but as journalists. But HRC, for their own marketing purposes, host a ghettoized forum with no journalists, their own chief hack and a celebrity. And they’re peddling bullshit again about their own "historic achievement". Their only historic achievement is to dumb down and seal off the important national conversation about gay equality.

Denver, Colorado, 6 am.

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The narcissism of small differences, I guess. But like Glenn Reynolds, I have no problem legalizing prostitution. My problem with Vitter is not that his private life is imperfect (whose isn’t?) but that he’s been busy trying to stigmatize and control mine. He’s also been defunding contraception (PDF) and pushing abstinence programs. C’mon.

"Sen. John Edwards began what he’s calling his poverty tour today. He’s visiting people who have no money and no hope. His first stop: John McCain’s campaign headquarters," – Jay Leno last night. A McCain staffer transcribed it for Ambers.

Arrests of students; a stoning; new charges against Haleh Esfandiari. The mullahs are not in a good mood, which is the only encouraging development from the latest intensification of theo-fascism.

"Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here!" Dr Strangelove, with a ten second deja vu of the current war debate.

"Let’s give Vitter credit for having relations with people who aren’t minors and who are of the more respectable gender for such matters," – Dean Barnett, on Hugh Hewitt’s blog. It’s a joke, of course. But a revealing one.

It’s an obvious imperative – raising the collective pain of carbon use. But no American politician has the balls or integrity to propose it. Brendan Nyhan thinks he’s found a political solution. I’m skeptical, but worth discussing.