"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers."THIS, however small it may seem, means very very much to me. Non-believers are visible members of our society, it says to me.
In February, 2009, the Obama DOJ told an appellate court it was embracing the Bush DOJ¡¯s theory that Bagram detainees have no legal rights whatsoever, an announcement that shocked the judges on the panel hearing the case. In May, 2009, President Obama delivered a speech at the National Archives ¡ª in front of the U.S. Constitution ¡ª and, as his plan for closing Guantanamo, proposed a system of preventative ¡°prolonged detention¡± without trial inside the U.S.; The New York Times ¨C in an article headlined ¡°President¡¯s Detention Plan Tests American Legal Tradition¡± ¨C said Obama¡¯s plan ¡°would be a departure from the way this country sees itself, as a place where people in the grip of the government either face criminal charges or walk free.¡± In January, 2010, the Obama administration announced it would continue to imprison several dozen Guantanamo detainees without any charges or trials of any kind, including even a military commission, on the ground that they were ¡°too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release.¡± That was all Obama¡¯s doing, completely independent of anything Congress did.posted by lupus_yonderboy at 4:10 PM on August 8, 2012 [4 favorites]
$('.text_container').html('ROBOT ASSASSINATIONS!')jQuery; thanks McSweeney's!If you are in a battleground state, well, the choice is between voting strategically and voting your conscience. If I honestly believed that the Democratic Party would gain a clue if people stayed home, I'd urge them to stay at home, but convincing the Democrats to stop their charge towards the right is I believe impossible. On the other hand, as long as we keep rewarding them for doing the wrong thing, they'll keep doing it.posted by zombieflanders at 5:29 PM on August 8, 2012 [1 favorite]
the increasing military budget and the endless foreign wars
The way I want to approach the issue of medical marijuana is to base it on science, and if there is sound science that supports the use of medical marijuana and if it is controlled and prescribed in a way that other medicine is prescribed, then it's something that I think we should consider.I agree weed should be legal. But medical marijuana was never gonna be the way this was going to get done--at least for recreational use.
just a little behind the schedule proposed by Bush for the same thing
In January 2009, when Mr. Obama took over, there were less than 35,000 troops in Afghanistan.
it's been four years, and there are a lot more troops in Afghanistan than there were when Mr. Obama took office
Let me ask you about the War on Drugs. You vowed in 2008, when you were running for election, that you would not "use Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state laws about medical marijuana." Yet we just ran a story that shows your administration is launching more raids on medical pot than the Bush administration did. What's up with that?http://m.rollingstone.com/entry/view/id/25455/pn/all/p/0/?KSID=804c418b7f9814c5bb73b76582fc578b&ints_viewed=1
Here's what's up: What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana. I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana ¨C and the reason is, because it's against federal law. I can't nullify congressional law. I can't ask the Justice Department to say, "Ignore completely a federal law that's on the books." What I can say is, "Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage." As a consequence, there haven't been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes.
The only tension that's come up ¨C and this gets hyped up a lot ¨C is a murky area where you have large-scale, commercial operations that may supply medical marijuana users, but in some cases may also be supplying recreational users. In that situation, we put the Justice Department in a very difficult place if we're telling them, "This is supposed to be against the law, but we want you to turn the other way." That's not something we're going to do. I do think it's important and useful to have a broader debate about our drug laws.
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posted by mazola at 1:08 PM on August 8, 2012 [10 favorites]