Politics and culture

For Canadians who want to be annoyed by what they read, originally uploaded by D & D. Scene from a Canadian bookstore Update: I just noticed that another of the books on the “Jerks” table is How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a parody of the famous (in the ’40s and ’50s) Dale Carnegie … Read more

Bear (ne Owsley Stanley) has written about drug prohibition and offers “maybe the only published plan for a controlled and intelligent legalisation.” In the effort to “control” drug use, the approach taken on an international scale has been to prohibit even the use and possession of many materials. This model is the “American” one. That … Read more

The War on Some Drugs is irrational, inhuman, morally and logically indefensible, and unamerican. It’s exactly like the opposition to gay marriage: you can’t get anyone to make an argument that doesn’t eventually circle back on itself. How exactly is “the institution of marriage” harmed by allowing two people of the same sex to participate … Read more

“Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s very public moves to rebuild his political fortunes by reaching out to Democrats are making for some tricky equations up in Sacramento,” write Phil Matier and Andrew Ross in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. Take, for example, Arnold’s call for a multibillion-dollar bond to rebuild the state’s infrastructure. Backing such a bond — … Read more

Cribbed from my friend Jim Leftwich: Speaking of which, that fuckhead Bill O’Reilly is back on his hobby horse about the “War on Christmas.” Please please please let him pop a blood vessel and check out once and for all.

My friend Barbara has collected some great photos of our potemkin president on her blog, “fetch me my axe.” And of course, the title of this entry comes from a great anti-Bush blog produced by my friend Jeff Tiedrich.

That’s the headline on today’s Oakland Tribune. The Governator, who I like to call “Schwa,” came into office through a procedural fluke and some excruciatingly mindless voting by my fellow Californians. He proclaimed himself to be a man of the people, but he was in the pockets of the corporate right from Day One. The … Read more

E.J. Dionne’s Washington Post column today points out the crushing hypocrisy of the Republicans vis-a-vis Supreme Counrt nominations and just about everything else. Bush single-handedly undercut the conservatives’ long-standing claim that the Senate and the rest of us owed great deference to a president’s choice for the court. Conservatives displayed absolutely no deference to Bush … Read more

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra J. Saunders, who is usually a really annoying right-wing snotrag, does okay on a few issues. To wit: The failed war on pot users IN 2004, law enforcement officials arrested 771,605 people for marijuana violations, according to federal statistics. Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project was so alarmed he … Read more

From Molly Ivins – Outrage of the Week Sen. John McCain proposed an amendment to the military appropriations bill that would prohibit “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of prisoners in the custody of the U.S. military. This may strike you as a “goes without saying” proposition — the amendment passed the Senate 90 to nine. … Read more