The State of Marijuana

With the internet buzzing around the idea of recreational marijuana usage in the states of Washington and Colorado, many seem misguided in what the November 6th vote really entails.

The residents of Washington and Colorado have come to accept the idea of legalized marijuana, yet the rest of the nation lags behind. Only 17 have provisions for medicinal usage. With more than half the states’ laws opposing marijuana in any form, many see states such as Colorado and Washington as a safe haven. They’re largely incorrect.

Regardless of what a state declares legal, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency still maintains jurisdiction over the entirety of the 50 states. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper commented on the recent poll results, saying, “The voters have spoken and we have to respect their will. This will be a complicated process, but we intend to follow through. That said, federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug, so don’t break out the Cheetos or gold fish too quickly.”  Federal enforcement agents appear even in states where only medicinal marijuana is accepted. For people in states such as California, the ultimate illegality of their newly “legalized” medicinal marijuana came as a surprise, when even state-funded medical marijuana dispensaries regularly face federal raids and shutdowns.

Federal interference faces much controversy from those who believe their states’ laws should ultimately govern their citizens. Further, marijuana’s federal status as a Schedule I drug proves difficult to support when considering empirical evidence from states which have previously accepted medicinal forms of marijuana. Unsurprisingly, they have experienced no endemic of dangerous marijuana usage. Schedule I drugs, such as marijuana, are those with no “accepted” medical usage and are considered likely to be abused, whereas Schedules II - V contain drugs which are medically accepted and increasingly less likely to be abused (for example, methamphetamine and cocaine). While popular opinion about the drug more realistically places marijuana as a less dangerous substance, the federal government will continue to proactively fight against it, looking to their Schedule system to prioritize their efforts.

For the people of Colorado and Washington, their decision to legalize the drug’s recreational use will not be prosecuted by their own state-level police. While the Federal government will likely step-up enforcement in those states, they cannot possibly extend adequate enforcement across the state. This sparse coverage has been applied in states where medicinal marijuana still breaks federal regulation, and proves ineffective at curbing overall consumption of the drug. Large loopholes will exist for more casual marijuana users as the federal government attempts to curb production and distribution of the drug.

Marijuana enthusiasts age 21 and older still face a relatively more permissive environment. Police searches around a house where marijuana is being used, being pulled over while driving (sober) and possessing marijuana, and growing small amounts of marijuana will no longer result in fines, jail time, and a criminal record. However, underage consumption, driving under the influence, and run-ins with federal drug enforcement agents will.  While the majority of voting Colorado citizens are pleased with the results of the recent legalization, others are left in dismay. Their best option, perhaps, is to take a page from their fellow citizens’ book and relax.

Once More, With Feeling

Just a few months ago in September, I wrote a piece for The Concordian Politics called “Charting a Course”. The gist of the piece was basically the idea that the United States needs to disabuse itself of the notion that it can unilaterally shape the affairs of the world to its liking. In the United Nations the other day, there was a vote scheduled which ties in to this very idea. The vote taken by the General Assembly was largely symbolic, but its primary effect was to upgrade Palestine from “non-member observer entity” to “non-member observer state” at the United Nations. The vote sailed to victory with a huge margin, passing 138-9. Interestingly, though perhaps unsurprisingly, the United States was not among the nations who voted for the resolution.

Both the United States and Israeli governments dismissed the vote as counterproductive. The Israeli ambassador to the U.N. argued “it pushes [the peace process] backwards”. Such language from Israel and the United States is more than a little bit disappointing. The peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians has been stalled without any kind of significant movement for years even though pretty much everybody involved with the negotiations agrees the problem requires a two-state solution, yet for all this consensus we are really very little closer to ending this decades old conflict. In fact just today word leaked out of the Israeli government of plans to build 3,000 settlement units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, part of the territory which would supposedly go to the Palestinians in a two-state solution.

This is not a new phenomenon. The Israeli government was forced to halt construction plans in these same zones under pressure from George W. Bush’s administration. Israel’s response to the developments in the U.N. seems therefore to be pretty much the same thing they’ve been doing for decades. The U.S. government’s response to these plans was to in turn call them “counterproductive”. What this reveals is a lack of any coherent policy on the status of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite the calls from Washington and Tel Aviv for Palestine to return to the negotiating table, the two nations have thus far given very little indication that peaceful means of achieving a lasting peace might be effective. It’s unclear what the White House feels would be a better negotiating table than the floor of the Untied Nations General Assembly. Now, to be fair, there is more than enough egg for the faces of all parties U.S., Palestinian, and Israeli alike. But the last several years have also given little indication that Israel feels that it stands to gain from continuing the peace process.

The piece I wrote for The Concordian Politics in September read in part



“…the role of the United States in the formation of a democratic Middle East cannot be understated. The United States is in a unique position to help these emerging democracies confront the same challenges America faced when it was first created and still confronts to this day more than 200 years after our founding — the role of a free press, the scope and scale of military and executive power, how best to form a judiciary to interpret the law, to name just a few.”



It is still the case that the United States cannot force peace, cannot shape the world according to its interests, without the cooperation of the global community but what the United States missed on Thursday was something even bigger than that. It was an opportunity to lead by example. It was an opportunity to pronounce the basic humanity of a long suffering people and to reaffirm the tenets of our founding, that we hold to be self evident certain truths and the rights of justice and freedom and which, we know in our hearts, can only be denied if we say nothing to defend them.

Idiocracy

Fox News and MSNBC have something very important in common: people aren’t listening to a word they say. Voter trust in the media is reaching new lows, with only 26% of Republicans saying that they trust the media a “great deal” or a “fair amount.” 60% of Americans say they trust the mass media “not very much” or “not at all.”




This distrust of the news has serious consequences: it results in more people strictly voting the party line. When people don’t trust the news that’s given to them, they’re more likely to rely on the political beliefs that they’ve always had. This generally means that a person is going to fall back on what their parents believed in terms of politics. While it may seem like it’s not a problem to have America’s voters going back to their traditional values, it poses a considerable problem for maintaining an educated electorate. When voters stop listening to the news because they don’t think it’s credible, they’re lulling themselves into complacency about their ignorance of current events.

It’s generally agreed upon that being an informed citizen is important. The problem is that each and every voter cannot personally investigate every issue that’s on the major platforms. People do not have the time nor the resources to drop everything and research what politicians are talking about. News media provides an important service to the viewer—education. The news is invaluable; it gives voters access to current affairs, and both provides background information and projections on what the implications of what’s going on are. The news provides citizens with crucial information on the state of the world—but that news is being brushed off.

It’s clear that Fox News isn’t really “Fair and Balanced” and MSNBC wants you to Lean Left more than it wants you to “Lean Forward.” However, simply because two major networks are blatantly biased does not mean that viewing those networks are detrimental to a person’s understandings of the world. Learning a liberal or a conservative stance on the issues won’t hurt the voter—it provides an understanding of different arguments. The secret to voting correctly isn’t in eliminating knowledge of current events—it’s in soaking up as much information as possible before stepping into the booth. Even if these news sources are biased, they’re still helpful in learning what’s going on in the world.










There’s a clear correlation between media distrust and partisan voting, as pointed out by Dr. Ladd of Georgetown University. While in 1973 Americans trusted news media at about the same level as they trusted all three branches of government, in 2006 they trusted news media less than both major corporations and unionized labor—two areas that struck a chord with both sides of the political spectrum. This distrust is leading to more and more people voting staunchly conservative or staunchly liberal. This could possibly be one of the reasons why America’s government is becoming more and more polarized—hanging more and more moderates out to dry.

America needs that moderation. As it pulls itself farther and farther away from the middle, the American government is becoming more of a battleground than a place for discussion and cooperation. To have moderation in government, though, the masses of America need to be informed. The masses need to see both sides of the issues before determining where their vote should be cast.

Ignorance isn’t bliss—ignorance is a dysfunctional government. Americans need to watch the news and inform themselves before deciding the fate of their country, or else it’s headed towards a bleak future.

The Fiscal Cliff: A Republican Voter’s View

It should be obvious to anyone who follows the news even cursorily that the biggest issue in Washington right now is the matter of the upcoming “fiscal cliff.” If this seems like an overly dramatic expression, it’s because the issue itself is extraordinarily dramatic and, if allowed to transpire, threatens to unleash a host of devastating repercussions not only on this country’s economy, but also on that of the entire world. What happens in the coming weeks – before January 1, when most of the fiscal cliff’s provisions are scheduled to take place – will be crucial. The fate of the economy’s health in the year 2013 rests in the hands of the Obama administration, Senate Democratic leaders, and John Boehner, the House Speaker. None of these players wants the fiscal cliff to occur, and yet key disagreements may make it inevitable.

So what exactly is the fiscal cliff? It refers to rises in taxes and drastic cuts in spending that were written into law and scheduled to occur on January 1, 2013. The tax increases and spending cuts that will take place on that day are staggering in severity: all the Bush tax cuts will expire; there will be across-the-board cuts totaling trillions of dollars over several years as specified by the Budget Control Act of 2011; the reversion of the Alternative Minimum Tax thresholds to their 2000 tax year levels; the expiration of measures delaying the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate from going into effect; the expiration of the 2% Social Security payroll tax cut; the expiration of all federal unemployment benefits; and the imposition of taxes through Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

The projected effects are as staggering as the preceding list is complicated. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that all these changes to taxes and spending would, while dramatically improving the 10-year outlook on American debt (by eliminating as much as $7.1 trillion of the national debt), immediately push the United States into recession, wiping 0.7% of GDP in the entire year 2013. Unemployment would rise sharply to 9.1%, and the White House estimates the average family of four with an income between $50,000 to $85,000 would pay an additional $2,200 in federal taxes. Defense sequestration would reduce defense spending between 2012 and 2021 by $445 billion, prompting many in the armed forces to sound alarm bells about America’s ability to adequately guarantee its security during this time. Since the economy is still in a fragile state and ongoing shocks from Europe’s prolonged financial crisis threaten to tip the entire world economy into recession, the impact of the fiscal cliff in the United States would be felt and measured virtually everywhere.

So what are the administration and House leaders doing about this? There is broad agreement that taxes on the middle class should not rise. Any agreement that would emerge from the two sides would prevent this from happening. The major disagreement that prevents them from achieving this common ground in practice is the issue of the Bush era tax cuts for individuals making $200,000 or more a year, and married couples making $250,000 or more a year. Republicans, who still control the House after this month’s national elections, want to preserve the Bush-era cuts for everybody, including these higher earners. Democrats generally want to allow taxes for them to rise. And this is where the terrifying Russian roulette game begins.

The president has made clear that he will not sign any measure emerging from Congress that does not raise taxes on the highest income earners. The House GOP leaders insist that allowing the rates to rise will be detrimental to job creators and the general engines of prosperity, although they did indicate they will be open to more revenue through eliminating various loopholes and deductions in the convoluted tax code. In response to this concession, the president said he would not accept it, declaring that raising revenue through such means would not yield enough.

Lowering taxes is great economic policy. Leaving more capital in the private economy is good for investment, for consumption, for confidence, and for making sure that limited resources are invested in ventures that are needed in the private economy. Higher taxes leave fewer resources for investment, distort economic production by leaving decisions about investing resources in the hands of centralized authorities, and reduce consumption by leaving fewer wages in earners’ hands. No country has ever taxed itself to prosperity, and countless instances of economic literature attest to the desirability of a simplified tax code characterized by generally low rates. However, on this issue, the Republicans are incapable of winning. The Democrats credibly claim a mandate for their position on this issue after the elections, and any refusal by the Republicans in the House to contort their position would result in them being blamed politically for the United States going off the fiscal cliff. No one disputes the importance of preventing taxes abruptly rising for the vast majority of this country’s wage earners, including the middle class. Although raising taxes on the top earners is not desirable economic policy, Republicans should accept that that is a lesser evil than allowing taxes to rise for all. On this issue, they should throw in the towel and agree to the president’s demands. Refusing to do so would not only be disastrous economically, it would virtually guarantee their loss in the 2014 House elections and contribute to an even more gridlocked atmosphere in Washington.

In Defense of a General

The swirling controversy surrounding the resignation of the director of the CIA, former four-star general David Petraeus, because of an extramarital affair is extremely perturbing. Surprisingly, the affair is perhaps the least bothersome piece of information about the whole situation. This is in no way to diminish the significance of General Petraeus’s actions; he made a mistake and seems to recognize the implications, both private and political, of his actions. The ensuing media circus harkens back to another scandal in the 90’s when a stain on the blue dress of a young White House intern provided Americans with a front row view of a marital meltdown. But is it appropriate that the political implications of such a tragedy even be taken into account? America’s continued fascination with the private lives of its public servants seems, at best, invasive and voyeuristic at worst. The problems with the scandal itself and its subsequent handling in the media bespeak larger problems with our criminal justice infrastructure and, more broadly, with our attitudes towards lapses in moral judgment.

By way of providing some backstory, let me just fill in some of the details surrounding the actual investigation which ended up bringing the General down. Jill Kelley, a Tampa socialite and family friend of General Petraeus and his wife, began receiving emails, which she described as “threatening.” Recently, there has been some reporting to suggest that the emails may not have been as threatening as they were made out to be; but, as of yet, the precise contents of these emails remains unclear. Jill Kelley then brought this complaint to a friend of hers who works at the FBI, this agent then brought this information to the Bureau which, in turn, began an investigation. This investigation traced the emails back to a woman named Paula Broadwell, who happened to be General Petraeus’s biographer. An apparent search of Ms. Broadwell’s electronic communications led the investigation to the information that the General had been having an affair with Ms. Broadwell. At this point, none of the details of the investigation or its findings had been made public or shared with the White House or any relevant Congressional body, though it is worth mentioning that there was no evidence at that time, or since, that any crime had been committed. Further complicating the situation, the FBI friend of Jill Kelley was revealed to have sent shirtless photos of himself to Ms. Kelley. Frustrated with the pace of the investigation (which he wasn’t actually a part of) he also contacted a member of the House Republican Caucus who passed the information along to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor who then put Jill Kelley in touch with the Director of the FBI.

The story is compelling and reads almost like a spy novel. Yet, while it makes for great television, a question which has gone wildly underappreciated is precisely how an investigation into “threatening” emails sent to Jill Kelley found its way to General Petraeus. Actually, a more appropriate question may be not “How?” but “Why?”. Initially, the investigation was into a relatively mild case of “threatening” emails sent to Jill Kelley and there was no reason to believe that the situation was any more complex than that. Once the emails were traced back to Paula Broadwell, and once it was determined whether or not her communications with Kelley constituted any kind of crime, the investigation should have stopped there. Under what pretense did the FBI then, essentially, begin a brand new investigation into the private life of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency? Furthermore, why where the details of the investigation into a nonexistent crime brought to the attention of the Congress and then made public? It seems a stunning indictment of the American criminal justice system for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be picking through the private lives of public officials, and an official in no less a sensitive position than the director of the CIA, with no evidence of any crime having been committed. One would certainly hope that the FBI has better ways to spend its taxpayer-funded resources than investigating the peccadilloes of powerful Washingtonians.

The added dimension of this tragedy is not just in the heartbreak and sorrow it must certainly have caused in the Petraeus family, but also in the media circus these tragedies seem, inevitably, to create. The usual tin hats are out in force, speculating (wildly) as to whether the General’s resignation was some sort of cover up for the Obama administration’s handling of the killings of four Americans in Benghazi since General Petraeus was set to testify before Congress on that exact subject. To treat this speculation as a viable viewpoint would be the epitome of false equivalency, partly because it’s a ridiculous assertion to begin with, but also because his resignation doesn’t prevent him from testifying since Congressional committees have subpoena power and could simply compel him to testify anyway.

The treatment of General Petraeus’s affair, by the public and the media, on a more personal, human level has also been disappointing. It’s easy to pile on in criticizing someone who’s made a mistake but the American citizenry should be reminded that David Petraues served his country honorably, in uniform and out, for nearly 40 years, led the United States military in Iraq and Afghanistan and remains, to this day, a war hero. Again, this is not to diminish the poor judgment Petraeus showed or to downplay the anguish he has almost certainly caused his family and others, but simply to put the events in perspective.

The American public could stand to be a good deal more compassionate and understanding when it comes to the private lives of its public officials. There needs to be a broader recognition that, while it may not be bad to hold our leaders to the highest standards possible, they are, at the end of the day, just as human as the rest of us.

To Vote or Not To Vote?

In 2004, 60.4% of eligible voters cast their vote at the polls, as compared to 54.2% in 2000. In 2008, that number rose yet again, with 62.3% voting. However, in this election of 2012, America followed up its two steps forward with a step backward: only 57.5% voted. While voter turnout wasn’t as bad in 2012 as it was in 2000, it’s still concerning. Are American voters simply signaling their displeasure with the candidates by not showing up to vote, or is there a greater sense of voter apathy disengaging the public from government?

57.5% of eligible voters actually getting out and voting doesn’t sound too terrible. But think of it this way: 93 million citizens who could have voted did not. To put that in perspective, President Obama won the popular vote by about 2.5 million. It’s difficult to say if the election would have turned out differently if those people had shown up, though. The states with the lowest voter turnout were Hawaii, West Virginia, New York, Oklahoma, and Texas—all of which were decidedly Obama or Romney states before Election Day. It’s likely that people living in states where one candidate is clearly going to win are less likely to think their vote matters, and are thus less likely to actually show up to vote.

It could be that Americans don’t think their vote matters, or it could be that they didn’t want their vote to go to either Obama or Romney. The country is divided on whether or not Obama is doing well—he currently has a 51% approval rating.

This number is surprising to some, since the people who disapprove of Obama are often doggedly opposed to his policies and him as a person. A lot of anti-Obama voters have been very outspoken in their opinions, making it seem as if more of the country was opposed to the President than actually are. This election has definitely been a negative one, with two candidates that weren’t exceptionally strong: the economy is still very weak under Obama, and Romney’s track record of changing positions on important issues and being out of touch on economic woes of most Americans left both candidates slinging insults and attack ads at each other. It’s certainly possible that voters were tired of both candidates, and showed that by not casting a ballot.

It’s tempting for American voters to feel as if their vote doesn’t matter. It’s true that one vote doesn’t do much at all—it’s the mass of votes that decide the future of the country. The rationale of voting isn’t that one vote will make a difference, it’s that the crowd will make changes. A crowd, though, is composed of many individuals. A good way to look at voting is through Kant’s categorical imperative.

The categorical imperative states that people should act in ways where it would be good for humanity if every person acted in the same way. For example, lying done by one person is immoral, since if every person lied, it would be detrimental to society. Kant states that it is necessary for people to evaluate what actions they are about to do as if all of society were to do them. If an action is bad for society when everyone does it, it is also immoral on the individual level. We can relate this to voting: if all eligible voters actually went and voted for the candidate they felt would do what was best for the country, we would have a much more democratic country with leaders that were more representational than us. If all eligible voters stayed at home instead of voting, it would be highly detrimental to society. Government wouldn’t know what the people wanted, the government wouldn’t know who to put in power, and so on. If Kant were a political pundit today, he would say that those 93 million voters did America a disservice. It is every eligible voter’s obligation to get to the polls and cast their vote for who they think will be most representational of what they need.

Current voter turnout begs the question: what would the Founding Fathers think? Low voter turnout is undermining the democracy they worked so hard to establish.Votes matter. If America continues to slip in voter turnout, it’s looking at a future of a government that doesn’t represent the needs of the people.

Ragnarok for Republicans

The 2012 campaign was supposed to be a nail-biter. Republicans were convinced they had an incumbent in the White House who was vulnerable, both because of the weak economy and because of deep-seated divisions among the electorate. The strategy was an old one for Republicans: find some kind of wedge to break the electorate in two and hope you come away with the biggest piece. In 2012, that wedge was Barack Obama, but the GOP ultimately failed to come away with the larger chunk. What caused this? What made Republicans and Democrats each so confident that they would ultimately come away with the largest constituency? It becomes important, then, to examine the fault lines in the electorate and explain how each campaign sought to use them to its own advantage.

The divisions in the country are clearly evident from exit polling which show that President Obama carried 93 percent of the African-American vote. The President also captured 71 percent of the Hispanic vote to Mitt Romney’s 27 percent in addition to his 11 percentage point advantage among women. In fact, the only demographic group, constituting a major share of the electorate, which Governor Romney managed to carry, was older white men. In previous election cycles this would have been cause enough for concern from the GOP, but has been particularly so as it became more and more apparent that white voters overall have consistently made up smaller and smaller portions of the electorate. In fact, though they still constitute a majority of the votes cast, white voters made up the smallest portion of the electorate since 1976 whereas nonwhite voters made up a record 21 percent of all ballots cast, up from just 10 percent as recently as 1996. Anyone watching MSNBC on election night was treated to Democratic strategists all but salivating over the opportunities increased minority turnout could open up for them, even in the reddest of red states. Speaking in July of this year Obama suggested that even the state of Texas might soon be a battleground state. Obama’s advantage among women also buoyed him in swing states like Colorado on top of the recent growth in minority populations there. Perhaps most surprisingly, in 2012 Obama was able to surpass his record setting turnout of people under 30 from 2008 thanks in no small part to a massive organizing campaign and Get Out The Vote effort on campuses across the country. Even here at Concordia about 73% of students living on campus turned out to vote, a truly astounding figure when one considers that voters under 30 are notoriously unreliable in showing up at the polls.

As mentioned earlier, the strategy of divide and conquer is not a new one in Republican campaigns. The strategy was perfected by Karl Rove in 2000 and 2004, who used state ballot initiatives on same sex marriage and abortion to turn out huge numbers of (predominantly white) religious conservatives to vote for the ballot initiatives and, more importantly for Rove, for George W. “Family Values” Bush. The question then remains, if the strategy worked so well just two election cycles ago, why did it fail this time?

The answer to this question is tricky and has two parts. Firstly, the strategy of divide and conquer did work in one respect, just not to the Republican’s advantage. In the state of Minnesota for instance, the amendment on the ballot banning same sex marriage failed to turn out Christian conservative voters but instead turned out huge numbers of young people, and other Democratic constituencies to vote against the amendment. Here in Moorhead, that probably provided a much-needed boost to local DFL (Democratic Farmer-Labor Party) candidates who had been locked in tough races with heavily financed Republican opponents. Minnesota actually became the first state ever to vote down a ban on same sex marriage. In each of the 32 times the question had been on a state ballot it had been decided against marriage equality. This is indicative of just how rapidly public opinion is shifting on the not only this issue, but on the issue of marijuana, which was just legalized for recreational use in Colorado and Washington and for medicinal use in Massachusetts. Secondly, when pitting one half of the electorate against the other, using Barack Obama as a wedge, Republicans must have known that it would cost them with African-Americans and other minority voters. The growth of minority populations in America, and particularly in swing states like Florida, Virginia, Colorado, and New Mexico has been apparent for years. What Republicans didn’t count on, however, was that they would turn out in such high numbers. This is a testament to the strength of the Obama field campaign in contacting and moving huge numbers of voters to the polls. On just the Sunday before Election Day, the Obama campaign knocked on 376,000 doors in Ohio alone, a full 5 times more than their Republican counterparts who had already been bragging on Twitter about their 75,000 door knocks. The Obama campaign also held a significant advantage in new voter registrations in almost all of the 2012 swing states. The election that was supposed to be a nail biter actually turned into something of a rout. Obama won with a small but comfortable margin of 2% of the popular vote (which comes out to around 2 million votes) and a sizeable margin of nearly 130 electoral votes (assuming he wins Florida which still hasn’t been called but where the President leads by 60,000 votes with more than 99% percent of the votes having already been counted). What is clear, both for Democrats and Republicans is that 2012 will serve as a model for future elections. It may be that the electoral trouncing the Republicans received will be a blessing in disguise. It’s hard to believe that the Republican party will continue to ignore constituencies like Hispanics, African-Americans, women, and young voters if they wish to remain a viable national party.