News Stuff

The Medical Marijuana thing...from a purely political viewpoint, this is an amazingly interesting case. Rehnquist and Thomas -- two of the core conservative justices -- dissented. The Reagan-appointed O'Connor dissented as well, though she rides the fence a lot. Scalia, a very conservative justice, went with the majority...but wrote his own opinion basically saying that there was legal precedent involved in this sort of thing. One may argue of medical compassion or the use of drugs, but the ideological issue here that trumps everything else is federal power vs state/local rights. Which is why this isn't going to kill medical marijuana -- it's just going to be federally regulated and, most likely, taxed. I'd say things would probably stay unchanged for a while, as conservatives tend to be lax on the federal involvement, but we have neocons in the White House and Justice. Neocons are almost liberal in that they never met a situation that couldn't be improved with massive federal oversight.

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Dean is a nut. He's not going to last a year. If he does, he's not going to last the next landslide election in 2006.

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I almost don't care about the Michael Jackson verdict. I think he's guilty, so I'm hoping for a conviction. But even if he gets off (so to speak...), he's going to flee to Europe. So either way, he's out of our hair anyway and the average weirdness quotient of California will lower just a tiny, tiny fraction.