Author: Greg Saunders

In 1972, Pauline Kael’s infamous quote “I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon.” became a rallying cry for those who wish to paint liberals as out-of-touch northeastern elites^[1]. Thirty three years later, the tables have turned and it’s conservatives who don’t understand the world outside their insular bubbles of influence :

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, responding to criticism from the vice president, said he doesn’t “care if Dick Cheney likes my mother or not.”

The vice president said in a recent interview that Dean was not the type of person to lead a political party and mentioned the chairman’s mother.

“I’ve never been able to understand his appeal. Maybe his mother loved him, but I’ve never met anybody who does. He’s never won anything, as best I can tell,” Cheney said in an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes.”

Of course you don’t understand his appeal, Mr. Vice President. People who love Howard Dean aren’t the money-grubbing pieces of shit^[2] who would spend $10,000 a plate for a “seat at the table”. That’s your constituency.

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^{1 : Which is understandable. It’s a really stupid thing to say.}

2 : Pardon my “freedom”.

It’s a tough choice, but if I had to pick a favorite fire-breathing, immigrant-baiting blowhard, I’d have to go with Lou Dobbs^[1]. Why? Because if you can look past the way he sneers the words “illegal aliens”^[2] you can find the occasional story that really deserves more attention :

DOBBS: The influx of illegal aliens into this country has reached nothing short of a crisis as we report here almost nightly. Since the federal government has failed absolutely to deal with the issue of illegal immigration and border security, my next guest proposes his own plan to handle what he calls the imminent invasion from Mexico. Robert Vasquez is commissioner of Canyon County, Idaho. He wants to sue the people who hire illegal aliens. That plan would make Canyon County, Idaho, the only local government in this country to use federal racketeering statutes against people who employ illegal aliens.
[. . .]
VASQUEZ: Well, I was listening to your previous segment. I believe that certainly those World Trade Organizations have had some influence in the passage of NAFTA, and certainly in the preparation of CAFTA. It’s merely the establishment of the 21st Century slave trade, as I see it. It affects not only my county, but the United States. And I’m pleased to see that representative Bernie Sanders and others are taking action on that.

DOBBS: Commissioner, the idea that you bring to bear, that is using racketeering statutes, to actually go after the — those firms that hire illegal aliens, how soon can you do what you propose? And precisely what will happen, in your judgment, to those employers?

VASQUEZ: Well, Mr. Dobbs, we’re on a fast track, as I see it. We initiated this action in March. We brought in Howard Foster, who’s an attorney from Johnson Bell. He rendered an opinion letter indicating that we had standing. And from there we’re proceeding with the investigation. When that investigation is concluded, we’ll proceed to the next step, which will involve the filing of a brief — and then possibly the lawsuit to follow.

[. . .]
DOBBS: Well, many farmers, construction companies, in your region tell us that they don’t feel they can survive without that illegal labor. How do you react?

VASQUEZ: Well, if your business depends on breaking the law and the exploitation of labor, then perhaps you don’t need to be in business.

Damn right. Of course, big business loves the invisible hand as long as they’re talking about cutting the costs of environmental and labor regulations, but there always seems to be a “pro-business” politician ready to save the day for a company that can’t survive when they’re forced to obey the law. Economic Darwinism gets about as much respect as the other kind these days….

More to the point, it’s troubling that discussion of immigration issues is dominated by protectionists and xenophobes because there’s a serious problem here that needs to be addressed. Of course, the President proposed his own solution last year :

Allowing undocumented workers, who make up an unknown percentage of the approximately 8 million illegal immigrants now in the United States, to work legally here would benefit all Americans, Bush argued. He said it would make the nation’s borders more secure by allowing officials to focus more on the real threats to the country and would meet U.S. employers’ dire need for workers willing to take the low-wage, low-skill jobs unwanted by many Americans.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no immigration hawk. The way I see it, somebody who comes to a country where they don’t know the language, lives in an overcrowded apartment with their extended family, and works for next to nothing in a horrible work environment^[3] has worked harder to achieve the American dream than I ever have. But at the same time, there does need to be a system in place to keep immigration at a reasonable level and ensure that people who “play by the rules” don’t get screwed.

But that’s not what the President proposed. His plan is just a sneaky attempt to legalize a whole segment of the labor market that should be illegal^[4]. Lou Dobb’s guest, on the other hand, understands that when it comes to illegal workers, it’s the employers who are the bad guys here. They’re the ones who have been working around the system of worker protections that have been put in place over last hundred years. The workers themselves are generally making below minimum wage, aren’t getting benefits or overtime pay, work in hazardous environments, aren’t allowed to form a union, etc. These are the crappy jobs the President wants to legalize.

Conservatives love to write these jobs off as “unwanted by many Americans” as if to paint us all as a bunch of sissies who are afraid to get our hands dirty or break a sweat^[5] when the reality is that average Americans don’t want these jobs because (a) we’ve got a greater awareness of our rights under the law than most illegal immigrants, (b) since we’re here legally we’re harder to blackmail, and (c) it’s nearly impossible to make a decent living off a low-wage job. Beggars can’t be choosers, after all, and the GOP elite hopes to keep it that way.

If you want to control illegal immigration, an important place to start is in disrupting the basic principle that provides for business demand for cheap, disposable labor with a supply of workers who enter this country illegally. If businesses were forced to adhere to the labor laws that are already on the books, this wouldn’t be a problem. Instead, we’ve got a domino-effect where one employer breaks the law (ie. Wal-Mart) and is able to undercut the competition so much that the business community makes the argument that the need to break the law in order to stay competitive^[6].

It’s a bullshit argument, but don’t forget that we’re living in Bizarro world now. The best way to respond to rampant law breaking is to get rid of those pesky laws before they hurt anyone’s feelings. You gotta problem with it? Well, write out your complaint in the memo portion of a check made out to the Republican party and cross your fingers.

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^{1 : Yes, even more than Pat Buchanan.}

2 : Which is, admittedly, a very difficult thing to do.

3 : This is a archetypical example, of course.

4 : If this all sounds familiar it’s because I’m plagiarizing myself from this post.

5 : I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again : Republicans are elitists.

6 : It’s this “dire need” to break that law to which the President is so receptive.

I’ve got mixed feelings on this whole medical marijuana issue. I’ve had friends with cancer who swear by the drug as the only thing (legal or otherwise) that effectively treats the nausea and pain associated with treatment while restoring a lost appetite. For that reason alone, I fully support the use of medical marijuana, but I don’t like the way this issue has been handled by either side of the debate.

On the anti- side, the “war on drugs” crowd has been too reliant on the slippery slope arguments about marijuana being a “gateway drug” and fearmongering about healthy hippies getting fake prescriptions. The ideological rigidity against the idea that there could ever be a positive use for pot seems a bit hypocritical given that these same folks aren’t equally up in arms about the abuse of Oxycontin or Xanax.

That said, I’m not a big fan of the pro- side’s method of trying to make an end run around FDA regulation and federal law. I can understand why advocates would try to find ways around the racist, elitist, hypocritical, and mostly evil “war” on drugs. Even worse, the FDA has been notorious in their unwillingness to even consider approving marijuana for pharmaceutical use^[1]. That said, going the state’s rights route towards legalization was pretty wrongheaded at the outset. Even when these laws originally passed, there was always a feeling of “civil disobedience” in the air. ^[2] The inevitable conflict with federal law was a ticking clock that hung over every “cannabis club” in the country.

So it was no surprise that the Supreme Court weighed in on the side of the feds yesterday in Gonzales vs. Raich. What was shocking to me though, is that it was decided on the grounds of the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause. The dissenting opinion, as Salon points out, leaves us with some strange bedfellows :

The section that gives Congress the authority to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes” now stretches to include, according to Clarence Thomas’ dissent, “virtually anything.” Antonin Scalia, voting with the majority, clarified: “Where necessary to make a regulation of interstate commerce effective, Congress may regulate even those intrastate activities that do not themselves substantially affect interstate commerce.

In Raich, the two women were using California seeds and plants were following California law. No money changed hands. As Thomas writes, “By holding that Congress may regulate activity that is neither interstate nor commerce under the Interstate Commerce Clause, the Court abandons any attempt to enforce the Constitution’s limits on federal power.” So what can’t the federal government regulate?

I’ll leave it to others to speculate about how horrible this precedent may be, but I do want to take issue with what Salon sees as the potential light at the end of the tunnel :

Fortunately, those liberal slaves of principle in the court’s majority — who compassionately lamented the “respondents’ strong arguments that they will suffer irreparable harm” if deprived of medical marijuana — have some sage advice for the millions of victims of the war on drugs. “Perhaps even more important,” croons Stevens at the end of his opinion, “is the democratic process, in which the voices of voters allied with these respondents may one day be heard in the halls of Congress.”

That one day could come as early as next week, when Congress is likely to vote on the Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment, which would prohibit the federal government from spending money to arrest, prosecute or incarcerate patients who use medical marijuana on the advice of their doctors in states where it is legal. Polls have shown upward of 80 percent support for this amendment in past years, so, of course, it loses every year by 100-plus votes. But if the Supreme Court told us nothing else on Monday, it was that if this drug quagmire is ever going to end, it’ll have to be stopped by the ones who started it: members of Congress. Until then, we’ll gradually build our way to a society where half the population is locked in prison and the other half is guarding the prisoners.

Which “drug quagmire” are we talking about now? Like I said before, I think the “war” on drugs is awful, but I thought we were talking about the ways marijuana helps ease the enormous pain and suffering of cancer patients. Yes, the two issues are related, but nobody should be exploiting the sympathy for the terminally ill to piggyback the larger, but tangential, issue of the excessive criminalization of narcotics onto this particular fight.

Furthermore, I can’t think of a worse way to pave the way for medical marijuana than the Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment as described above. I think doctors should be allowed to prescribe pot to chronically ill patients, but the idea of allowing bad laws to remain on the books while passing additional laws that make it illegal to enforce the existing laws seems like a big, big mistake. Sure, it may provide the necessary results, but the means to that end would probably be a legal mess that could end up confusing the issue even further.

A far more reasonable approach would be for Congress to pass an amendment to the Controlled Substances Act that would move marijuana from its Schedule I status to Schedule II. While getting Congress to relax drug laws may seem like a pipe dream, the real world implications would be to simply move pot from the class that includes LSD and heroin to the one that includes cocaine, morphine, and crystal meth. While this probably wouldn’t do much to satisfy the “Legalize It!” crowd, it should give doctors the leeway to prescribe the drug for their patients, open the door to FDA approval, and subject it to more than enough regulations to keep the drug out of the hands of recreational users.^[3]

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^{1 : Are their hands tied by the Controlled Substances Act or are they just too busy rubber stamping deadly drugs from big pharma to test the safety of something that people have been ingesting for thousands of years?}

2 : Just like with S.F. mayor Gavin Newsom’s orders to allow gay marriage, we all knew that the “fun” couldn’t last forever.

3 : That is, assuming you think drug laws work. I don’t, for the most part, but the opponents of medical marijuana obviously do.

Geez. The Bush folks sure are pissed about Amnesty International’s use of the word “gulag”, huh? Perhaps Amnesty should just clarify things a bit by eschewing comparisons to the Soviet Union and making it clear that when they say “gulags”, they simply meant “secret prisons in which innocent people have been tortured to death”.

On a serious note, it’s clear what’s going on here. The Bushies are focusing in on a single word and are going to hit back at Amnesty International until they say something even vaguely conciliatory. At that point, they’ll declare victory. (“Haven’t you heard? Our rape rooms aren’t ‘gulags’.”) Nevermind the details of the report. The use of hyperbole^[1] will render the actual charges obsolete. We’ve seen it happen over and over again.

The fact that this particular AI report was almost dead (in news cycle terms, anyways) until the President decided to abuse the word “absurd” is the biggest irony here. Rumsfeld is giving a press conference right now because the President’s poor attempt to make the question go away only made things worse. The obvious quote here is “thou doth protest too much” because it’s true. These guys wouldn’t be complaining this loudly if it hadn’t gotten under their skin.

Amnesty International obviously hit a nerve and the Bush Administration is going to keep hitting back until there’s a moment of weakness that they can take advantage of. The key here is not to get tripped up in a semantic debate. Innocent people are being abused right now due to our President’s decision that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to our new wars. Don’t let a petty argument over word choice allow the President to deflect attention from the fact that he’s a human rights abuser.

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^{1 :Which in this case isn’t hyperbole at all, but whatever….}

This quote from former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent pretty much says all you need to know about modern newsrooms :

“I also believe that columnists are entitled by their mandate to engage in the unfair use of statistics, the misleading representation of opposing positions, and the conscious withholding of contrary data.”

Regardless of whether you think this applies to Krugman or not, this is a stunning admission that I’d imagine is pretty standard for the gatekeepers in publishing and television news. Why else would hacks like Sean Hannity or Bob Novak remain employed if it weren’t for the fact that the people in charge of protecting the integrity of their news organizations had decided that pundits in lofty positions are entitled to mislead the public.