Miscellanea

Sometimes you have to get these things off your chest...

A.G. Eric Holder is

telling states that they should back off marijuana arrests unless the perp is ‘profiting’ from its sale, excluding for medical use. Can this mean that, at long last, we are going to move away our insane drug policies of the last few decades? When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 one in fourteen convicts was there for a drug bust. Now, it’s one in three.

Speaking of Reagan, is there anything you can legitimately attribute to his reign that wasn’t awful for the American people? A demented drug policy, the ravaging of American unions simultaneous with reckless deregulation, which combined to eliminate the middle class, the defunding and closing of hundreds of facilities including medical hospitals, thereby throwing tens of thousands of patients onto the streets and ballooning homeless numbers, the tacit connivance with corporations, to the extent that they began to (more overtly) run the government, the acceptance of racism once again (e.g., welfare queens), Iran/contra, and that barely scratches the surface. And yet with our propensity for national amnesia he is still considered a positive creature, instead of the second-worst president ever?

Does anyone else think that, even if the Heene’s are tried & convicted for their balloon boy stunt, they’ll still get their reality program? C’mon, TLC and VH1, ‘fess up. You’re already in negotiations, aren’t you?

Why is it that, when a photographer lies on his back, on the ground, to take a picture up a young woman’s skirt as she gets out if a car, public scorn is reserved for the woman?

Michael Moore’s latest film is out, with the predictable backlash already going strong. Sure, there are better documentary filmmakers around, but for putting all of the dirty truths out there, for reminding us (as if we all needed reminding) that there are malign forces placing short-term profits for a few, ahead of the public good, he’s hard to beat. The one legacy we’ll remember from Rage Against the Machine is their tag line: your anger is a gift.

Again, why is it that a couple can be arrested for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts, and yet someone else can carry a loaded, semi-automatic weapon to an Obama event without being bothered? Just wondering...

There, I feel better...