I love the title of this post. It flies in the face of most of the cultural norms I grew up with. For that matter, it flies in the face of the norms of most weed smokers I’ve known throughout my life. I know a lot of weedheads, burnouts, and dopeboys… but I’m not sure I’ve met someone I would call a “responsible weed smoker.” But that phrase is at the heart of a proposal floated today by Representative Barney Frank who apparently enjoys a quick puff, puff, pass as much as the next guy.
Frank’s proposed legislation would end federal penalties for people carrying less than 100 grams of marijuana. Since no none drug users (or none Canadians) know what 100 grams is, that’s a little less than a quarter-pound. Currently being caught with slightly less than a quarter-pound of weed would net you a felony possession with intent to distribute charge. Under Frank’s plan it would be treated like having an unopened bottle of wine in your car. A nod and maybe a quick recommendation to the officer on the variety that you favor. “Why yes officer, that is Mauwie Wauwie. It’s alright, but you really haven’t lived until you’ve tried Purple Haze.”
Representative Frank says that a little weed smoke is none of the government’s business. And as an openly gay lawmaker, he knows something of the government putting its nose into folks business. His supporters point out that the plan would essentially treat marijuana use like alcohol use. As long as you don’t overdue it, or try to drive, then you’ll remain on the right side of the law.
I don’t particularly have an opinion about his proposal. I don’t object to folks who smoke weed, but I also don’t object to folks who do object to it. The sentencing phase of the nation’s drug laws are absurd and greatly out of wack, but this legislation wouldn’t really impact that a great deal, no matter what Rep. Frank says.
However, I do have some pointed criticism for my favorite part of the program. It would legalize possession of what is a pretty good amount of weed. What it wouldn’t do is change any of the laws against growing, importing, exporting, or selling weed. So my question is… if we can’t grow it, import it, or sell it… then where exactly are all the people who will be carrying around quarter-pounds supposed to get them from?
Frank’s plan would permit the “nonprofit transfer” of up to an ounce, but unless Rep. Frank is much more intimately familiar with the drug trade than I am (and that would be unlikely), I think he is permitting something that has never once happened in the history of marijuana. “Here man, have some of my weed. No, no, keep your money. I’m a nonprofit dealer.” Not to mention, even the weed Frank envisions being nonprofitably transferred would have to have been either grown or imported which still remains illegal.
I think what Frank’s measure would do is decrease the distance between the real ruthless criminals who currently import marijuana by the AK-47 protected plane-load and the sorority girl who enjoys the occasional late-night joint. Right now, the marijuana in that sorority girls joint has to pass through a series of supply levels each less menacing than the last. By the time it gets to the Tri Delta house, the weed that started in the hands of a ruthless cartel boss with his own private army is delivered by Betty Blonde’s lab partner whose roommate knows a guy who sells dime bags out of his mom’s suburban town home.
Having known a few of the guys who traffic marijuana by the pounds, I can tell you one thing. Betty Blonde doesn’t want to meet them. By leaving the potential penalties for suppliers untouched, Rep. Frank’s proposal does nothing to reduce the unsavory and potentially deadly nature of the traffickers. By eliminating the penalties for possessing such a large amount of marijuana, it makes it that much more likely that customers will make their contacts a little higher in the supply chain to save substantial sums of money. After all, a quarter-pound all at once is much cheaper than buying its equivalent in a series of dime bag purchases. The economics of the situation mean more customers meeting the guys they really don’t ever need to meet.
I guess what I’m saying is that Barney Frank’s proposal needs a rethink, but not for any of the reasons you’ll hear in the evening news.
I have a question. Why is the billboard that you see to the left here alright to display along a public highway, but a plan by a Muslim group to display similar messages regarding Islam on the New York subway system is causing outrage? (Granted, it’s a New York Post article, but still) The outrage stems from the fact that one of the people involved in it has been tied to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman otherwise known as “the blind sheik”.
But so what? Isn’t this exactly what we hope Islamic radicals will do? Put down your weapons, stop the death to America chants, and engage in the process? That’s the process of resolving every conflict, religious and otherwise all around the world. It happened successfully in Northern Ireland, where the IRA stopped bombing folks and took a stake in the political process. So now, instead of plotting to blow up the subway, this guy is plotting to advertise the benefits of his faith in the subway. I don’t know about you, but I’m much less scared of the second than of the first. It all sounds a bit like progress to me.
But back to the point, I understand someone at FOX News will trot out the old tired line that the United States is “a Christian nation.” Despite that being demonstrably untrue, for some reason people keep saying it. The United States was not founded as a Christian nation and has never that I am aware of changed that. This doesn’t mean that I am anti-Christianity. I am in fact… a CHRISTIAN!!! Although like a great majority of people of every faith, I am not a particularly observant member of my faith.
Even as a Christian, I don’t particularly love the Jesus billboards along the highways. Something about them seems like a cheapening of something that is supposed to be dear to people. For the same reason, I think the Islamic project with the New York subway system is equally base. Although at least in this case, the goal is more educational than evangelical. Judge for yourself, here’s a link to the project.
I guess what I’m saying is that if Christians are allowed to engage in the shameless marketing of God, then how can we rationally form our mouths to object when other religions follow suit and cheapen their beliefs in the same manner? What’s good for one has to be good for the other. In fact, that’s sort of the idea our country was founded around.
I linked you to an article discussing what this would mean the other day, but yesterday the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s office requested an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir. The charges include genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Here’s the press release, summary of the case (a really fascinating and disturbing read), and the prosecutor’s statement on the application for an arrest warrant.
The cover clearly shows the Muslim candidate and his America-hating terrorist wife doing what is now known as a “terrorist fist bump.” And I’m not even talking about the American flag burning in the fireplace. It shows all that. It is also clearly poking fun at each and every element of itself. Every image is carefully culled from one or more of the ridiculous rumors that have swirled around Obama for his entire campaign.
Why this cover should upset the Obama campaign is beyond me. The image comes on the front of a magazine that has one of the most liberal readerships of any in the nation. Is there anyone that thinks The New Yorker’s sympathies lie with the McCain campaign? Really? If The New Yorker magazine had a vote it would be cast for Obama and everyone in the country knows it.
The problem here is a campaign that has shifted from inspirational to calculating, from historic to pedestrian, from in-on-the-joke to out-of-the-loop. That’s why you haven’t spotted a black supporter standing behind Obama since… well, since ever. That’s why, in the midst of a riff about Obama’s trotting out a faux presidential seal, Jon Stewart had to re-assure his audience that it was alright to laugh at Obama also. The candidate who stepped onto the national stage as the most invigorating voice in modern electoral history is quickly losing the ability to laugh at himself.
In his general election incarnation, Obama is working to prove his seriousness, his gravitas, his resolve. Instead he is proving to be wooden, dull, and uninspiring. What do you do with an inspirational leader who has lost the ability to move a crowd? The mistake here is that no one ever expected him to be the heavy-lifting guy. He was supposed to be the ideas guy, the masterful salesman that was going to move us in the direction we should go and convince us that it was the right thing to do.
But that guy has left the building. Instead, general election Obama is seemingly trying to out-boring his formidably boring GOP counterpart. He has bogged down in the details of campaigning, controlling the pictures, staying on message. The Obama that doesn’t get the joke of The New Yorker cover is not the guy we fell in love with. I’m getting a feeling that guy isn’t coming back. And that’s too bad, because that’s the guy I wanted to vote for.
From Lacey Peterson, to the pregnant Marine, to this new lady who got burned up in her apartment… murdered pregnant ladies are being murdered at an astounding rate. According to all appearances in the news media, the easiest way for a woman to become a murder victim is to get knocked up. Police spend thousands of man hours on these cases, when as we’ve all seen over the past few years, everyone always knows exactly who did it. Below, please find an easy to follow guide to who is killing all the murdered pregnant ladies of the world:
1) If a murdered pregnant lady was single then the baby’s daddy did it 99.9999998% of the time
2) except in cases where the baby’s daddy was married himself in which case he or his wife have an equal chance of being the crazed pregnant lady killer.
3) If a murdered pregnant lady was married at the time of her brutal demise, then her husband did it 99.999997% of the time, regardless of whether or not the baby was actually his.
4) But if the murdered pregnant lady was married and her husband didn’t do it AND she was a minority AND she was involved in an interracial relationship, then her father-in-law did it 99.695% of the time
5) and her mother-in-law did it the rest.
6) If a murdered pregnant lady was in a hospital when she disappeared/was found cut open sans baby/etc., then a crazy barren nurse did it 95.436% of the time
7) and the aforementioned crazy barren nurse is caught on camera leaving the hospital with the baby in her purse 100% of the time.
*Source: “What the Hell is with all the Murdered Pregnant Ladies”: a joint FBI/Justice Department study commissioned in June 2008
**unless they see this in which case I made it all up
***and please don’t be mad and/or arrest, deport, or water-board me. It was all Nat’s idea.
Television is all about ratings. You have no idea how true that statement is until you work inside the industry for long enough to reach a certain level. I read ratings because they are the most important measure of how my show is doing. In my perusal of ratings this week I ran into something that made me happy even though it didn’t relate to my program at all.
This news comes in the same week that I sat at a restaurant and silently railed against the closed captions of Lou Dobbs’ program. He was taking Barack Obama to task for suggesting that it might be a good idea for English-speaking children to learn Spanish at the same time our schools are working to teach Spanish-speaking children English. He cited some statistic that said 80+% of Americans support English being named the country’s official language. I say that makes 80% of Americans morons.
So hats off to the folks at Univision who own and operate the stations that got the ratings win. And Lou Dobbs… suck it.
***For all my black and brown folks, this particular post is going to be concerned with making fun of white women. So either skip it or laugh along.***
So I’m reading through my morning papers (yeah, I do that, I’m getting old… but I do it on the computer, so maybe I’m still young) and I see an article in the Washington Post that says skin cancer rates are up 50 percent in young women since 1980. Now I don’t want to kick a lady when she’s down and dying from melanoma, but come on! Dying from skin cancer brought on by tanning is the equivalent of becoming a crackhead.
I’m not saying that everyone who gets skin cancer is an idiot. Just the ones who bring it on by laying out in the sun with cooking oil spread all over their bodies. I mean really, didn’t all those old ladies with skin like leather handbags teach you anything? I learned not to smoke crack after Pookie got blown up in “New Jack City” and Larenz Tate shot the crackhead in “Menace to Society”. Simple lessons, simple takeaway. So why aren’t women learning that tanning will kill you?
Let me break this down for you. Increased exposure to the sun leads to an increase in your risk of skin cancer. Skin cancer in even the smallest doses can prove fatal to humans. Therefore, increasing your exposure to the sun can kill you. So, by extension, tanning is a bad thing.
I can hear all my white sisters screaming now, “But we look better when we have a tan”, “I like to have a little color”, or “How am I going to compete as a pale skin girl in a world with an ethnic fetish?” I’ll take these concerns one-by-one:
1) No you don’t look better with a tan. You look exactly the same, only browner. If you are at all attractive, every man in your general neighborhood will still want to sleep with you. If you aren’t, then all the tanning in the world isn’t going to help and you’d be better served working on your sense of humor. Any man who didn’t want you before the tan and does after is a freak and you should steer well clear.
2) If you simply must be a darker shade, try that spray-on stuff. All the color, none of the dead. If you’re extra desperate then head for one of those Mystic Tan places. (Why in the world do I know what that is? I’m so disappointed in myself.)
3) You can’t compete. Guys with Asian fetishes will still chase tiny Asian girls. Guys with black girl fetishes will still go that way. But just like light-skinned R&B singers, these things go in phases. You’ll make a comeback, just wait and see.
So to conclude, tanning equals crack. Both bad, both will make you very dead. In the meantime, you will itch a lot, develop an extremely dry mouth, suck a lot of dick, and rob a convenience store. Maybe not so much the last couple, but who knows. I’d hate to limit your possibilities.
Jesse Jackson is an idiot. I’m not going to argue that. But come on! So what if he said he “wants to cut [Obama's] nuts off”? He is a Civil Rights era black leader who has listened to the first viable black presidential candidate make a series of speeches to black audiences that could very easily be seen as telling off black folks for the benefit of white folks watching at home on their televisions.
After all, the only group of people Obama isn’t winning handily is white males. Is it such a stretch to imagine that an old conspiracy-minded black man like Jackson might see some of what he’s doing now as pandering to white men by selling out black people? Again, I’m not saying that’s what Obama’s doing, but I’m not saying it’s not either.
So yeah, saying what Jesse Jackson said while fully mic’ed up in the Fox News studios is not an intelligent decision. But can you imagine that what he said in the wrong place has been said many times in other settings. Around city barber shops, in the stands at sports events, on black college campuses? Jackson is a long way away from speaking for the collective “black people”, but I think this particular candid remark is a lot more representative than most of the polished commentary he provides for the national media.
Just to wrap this all up. I’m not saying Jesse Jackson is right for what he said. But it’s his opinion. I think he clearly feels like Barack Obama is pandering to white voters at the expense of black people. I think that’s an honest opinion that leads him not to think highly of Obama on a personal level. I can’t say I’ve never said something roughly equivalent to what Jackson said about a person I disliked. Fortunately I wasn’t mic’ed up in a television studio when I said it.
Barack Obama has every right to talk to black audiences about problems he perceives in black America. He’s right about most everything he says when he talks to these audiences. But he has to know that his message that black people should do better is likely to be received at least as well by old white men (the primary demographic of the national news media) as it will be by the black people sitting in the crowds.
So I’ll leave you with a quote from Chris Rock that I think sums up this Jesse Jackson flap perfectly. “I’m not saying what he did was right, but I understand.”
** since posting this originally, I read a really good piece at The Root that may have changed my opinion on this thing slightly. Either way I think it’s worth your time to read.
George Carlin died yesterday. I always loved him because he made me laugh at the same time he was making me uncomfortable. If you haven’t heard him riff on religion and felt just a bit of unease then you’ve missed a real measure of your faith. Everyone knows about his 7 words routine. But here is one of my favorites that’s not quite as famous.
I’ve been having an argument for the past decade or so. I had it again this weekend after Barack Obama was called elitist. I sat down to write about it, but I also had The Daily Show on and Jon Stewart made my point beautifully. So, since he’s funnier than I am, I yield my podium to the honorable comedian from New York. (p.s. Cue it in 7:15 or so to get to the part I’m talking about. The rest is just background)
I love the title of this post. It flies in the face of most of the cultural norms I grew up with. For that matter, it flies in the face of the norms of most weed smokers I’ve known throughout my life. I know a lot of weedheads, burnouts, and dopeboys… but I’m not sure I’ve met someone I would call a “responsible weed smoker.” But that phrase is at the heart of a proposal floated today by Representative Barney Frank who apparently enjoys a quick puff, puff, pass as much as the next guy.
