Month: September 2010
Prop 19: Legalizing Cannabis in California Could End Mexican Drug War
From a Washington Post op-ed Hector Aguilar Camín, editor the Mexican magazine Nexos, and Jorge G. Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister and now a lecturer at NYU:
On Nov. 2, Californians will vote on Proposition 19, deciding whether to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana. If the initiative passes, it won’t just be momentous for California; it may, at long last, offer Mexico the promise of an exit from our costly war on drugs.
The costs of that war have long since reached intolerable levels: more than 28,000 of our fellow citizens dead since late 2006; expenditures well above $10 billion; terrible damage to Mexico’s image abroad; human rights violations by government security forces; and ever more crime. In a recent poll by the Mexico City daily Reforma, 67 percent of Mexicans said these costs are unacceptable, while 59 percent said the drug cartels are winning the war…
Proposition 19 changes this calculation. For Mexico, California is almost the whole enchilada: Our overall trade with the largest state of the union is huge, an immense number of Californians are of Mexican origin, and an enormous proportion of American visitors to Mexico come from California. Passage of Prop 19 would therefore flip the terms of the debate about drug policy: If California legalizes marijuana, will it be viable for our country to continue hunting down drug lords in Tijuana? Will Wild West-style shootouts to stop Mexican cannabis from crossing the border make any sense when, just over that border, the local 7-Eleven sells pot?
Poll: Only 8% of Ohians Approve of Speaker Wanna-Be Boehner’s Tan
8 percent
– Number of folks in Speaker Wanna-Be John Boehner’s home state of Ohio who approve of his tan (and 4 percent say he is not tanned enough). Otherwise, 42 percent of Ohioans were unfamiliar with him, while 27 percent had a positive view of him and 31 percent had an unfavorable view.
Jerry Brown Has Won More Elections Than Meg Whitman Has Voted in
Jerry Brown has won more elections than Meg Whitman has actually voted in since she’s been in California.
– Political strategist Chris Lehane
Almost 9 million Californians cast ballots in the 2003 special election that swept movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger into the Governor’s Office.
Meg Whitman wasn’t among them.
The billionaire businesswoman now running for governor herself in 2010 didn’t vote in that special election, even after Business Week listed her among a group of top executives with “worse than spotty voting records” in a 2000 magazine story, public records show…
For much of the 1980s, she lived in San Francisco as a management consultant at an investment firm, Bain & Co.
The San Francisco County elections office no longer retains records prior to 1992, but said that had she been registered and voting, her registration information would have been transferred to the current system. They have no record of her registration.
Similarly, Los Angeles County has no record that she registered or voted between 1989 and 1992, when she worked for Walt Disney Corp. as a senior executive…
Whitman returned to the Bay Area in 1998, when she was hired to be eBay’s first chief executive officer and take the company public.
She told delegates at the convention that she had “been a registered ‘decline-to-state’ voter since 1998.” The Bee was unable to find any public record of that registration.
The first registration record The Bee found, in San Mateo County, was dated Sept. 12, 2002.
At that time, she told San Mateo elections officials that she had been registered in San Francisco County, a county official said, after reviewing electronic records.
Yet San Francisco County officials, whose database records active registrations as far back as 1992, said they had no record of voter registration for Whitman at either of her two San Francisco addresses during the period…
In an interview, Whitman said she was registered as a Republican before coming to California, but declined to say where the public record might be found.
“Go find it,” she said.
After she registered in San Mateo in 2002, Whitman then missed half the local, state and federal elections held until 2007.
She didn’t vote in the recall election that swept Schwarzenegger into office or the special election he called in 2005.
Voters that year defeated measures to roll back teacher tenure and curb state spending and boost the governor’s budget-cutting powers, among others.
Whitman has been a far more active voter in recent years, as she prepared to leave eBay, co-chaired Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and embarked on her own political career.
She re-registered as a Republican in 2007 and cast ballots four times in 2008, including presidential and statewide elections. She voted in the state’s special election in May this year.
Poll: Nearly Three-Quarters Say Bush Recession Is Bush’s Fault
71 percent
– Portion of Americans who say the Bush Recession was caused by George Bush, according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll. Republicans say recession is Obama’s fault four to one. Democrats blamed Bush 20 to one.
CEOs Who Fired Most Americans Earn 42% More Than Average
$12 Million
– Average amount earned by CEOs at the 50 companies responsible for most layoffs, an amount that is 42 percent higher than the average for the Standard & Poor 500.
Gingrich Proposes Govt Seize Ground Zero to Stop ‘Mosque’ – But Govt Already Owns Site, Which Does Not Include Park 51
Meanwhile, buoyed by Democrats’ bad polling, Republicans are not only measuring the drapes at the Capitol, they’re already returning to their old ways — tossing aside their purported principles in favor of political expediency.
Case in point is a proposal last week from former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich — the smartest conservative in America, per the movie “Idiocracy” — that, in order to satisfy his political goal of degrading Islam, the government should seize the site of World Trade Center as a tactic for stopping construction of the Park 51 Islamic center near New York City Hall:
Must See Video! Florida’s New Lt. Gov. Candidate Trashes Running Mate Rick Scott
The cameras rolled this week when Tea Party billionaire and fired CEO Rick Scott chose Florida Rep. Jennifer Carroll (R-Orange Park) as his running mate in his quest for governor. Fortunately, they also rolled a couple of weeks ago, when Carroll addressed her county RPOF chapter and stated all the reasons you should not support Rick Scott. Watch until the end, when Carroll really drives it home.
