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" Of all the unfathomable quirks \u2014 and I am being very kind, it being the holiday season and all \u2014 of the Obama Administration, its unfathomable rigidity on the topic of marijuana makes less sense than any of the others. The squishiness elsewhere on civil liberties is understandable in the context that America simply will not elect a president who campaigns on a platform of appearing to weaken the office. The crushing of whistle-blowers \u2014 and the revolting confinement of Bradley Manning \u2014 at least can be understood in that same context. (We have committed ourselves, one way or another, to voting for a president based somewhat on his more authoritarian impulses since the country elected Andy Jackson. The last president to get elected based on promises to maintain the office within its prescribed constitutional limits was James Madison, who helped define those limits in the first place.) The occasionally mushiness on corporate malfeasance is a demonstration that the president&amp;#039;s populism has very clearly defined \u2014 and, to be entirely fair, very clearly explained \u2014 limits. All of these can be understood generally \u2014 which is not the same thing as being excused \u2014 by the fact that we elect human beings to be our president and that we have certain expectations of those humans and that office which are darker than others, and which we don&amp;#039;t talk about among ourselves very often. But the relentless busting of chops on ganja doesn&amp;#039;t fit into any of those categories. If nothing else, the results in Colorado and in Washington state \u2014 and, to a lesser extent, in Massachusetts \u2014 indicate that the political salience of the &amp;quot;war on drugs,&amp;quot; as applied to marijuana, at least, almost has completely evaporated. It can be argued that there is no more political risk to the president of changing his policy on marijuana now than there was in his &amp;quot;evolving&amp;quot; on gay marriage last year. In both cases, the people out in the states are out ahead of the national politics of the issue. But, as we learn in today&amp;#039;s New York Times, in a story by national-treasure Charlie Savage, rather than avail itself of the freedom to maneuver it was granted by the results of statewide referenda last month, the administration instead is reacting to those results by getting even tougher. Even as marijuana legalization supporters are celebrating their victories in the two states, the Obama administration has been holding high-level meetings since the election to debate the response of federal law enforcement agencies to the decriminalization efforts. Marijuana use in both states continues to be illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act. One option is to sue the states on the grounds that any effort to regulate marijuana is pre-empted by federal law. Should the Justice Department prevail, it would raise the possibility of striking down the entire initiatives on the theory that voters would not have approved legalizing the drug without tight regulations and licensing similar to controls on hard alcohol. Some law enforcement officials, alarmed at the prospect that marijuana users in both states could get used to flouting federal law openly, are said to be pushing for a stern response. But such a response would raise political complications for President Obama because marijuana legalization is popular among liberal Democrats who just turned out to re-elect him. A little further down in the story, we get a glimpse of at least a piece of what is really going on, a real-life response to the warning of Governor William J. LePetomaine from Blazing Saddles: &amp;quot;Gentlemen, we could lose our phony-baloney jobs over this.&amp;quot; In reviewing how to respond to the new gap, the interagency task force \u2014 which includes Justice Department headquarters, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department and the offices of the White House Counsel and the director of National Drug Control Policy \u2014 is considering several strategies, officials said. One option is for federal prosecutors to bring some cases against low-level marijuana users of the sort they until now have rarely bothered with, waiting for a defendant to make a motion to dismiss the case because the drug is now legal in that state. The department could then obtain a court ruling that federal law trumps the state one. A more aggressive option is for the Justice Department to file lawsuits against the states to prevent them from setting up systems to regulate and tax marijuana, as the initiatives contemplated. If a court agrees that such regulations are pre-empted by federal ones, it will open the door to a broader ruling about whether the regulatory provisions can be &amp;quot;severed&amp;quot; from those eliminating state prohibitions \u2014 or whether the entire initiatives must be struck down.  Yeah, there&amp;#039;s the entire private and public infrastructure that has grown up to service the &amp;quot;war on drugs.&amp;quot; People have gotten quite rich and quite fat over the periodic pointless frenzies into which the country hurls itself. Reputations and fortunes have been made, and that&amp;#039;s not even to get into the criminal empires that have sprung up, and the underground economy that services them, because we didn&amp;#039;t learn fk-all from the last failed Prohibition experiment that we talked ourselves into. There are a lot of people, cops and criminals and everyone in between, who have a lot to lose now. Even given the first part of the blog&amp;#039;s First Law Of Economics (Fk The Deficit) does it strike anyone else that embarking on either one of these strategies \u2014 but especially, the second one \u2014 is a profound waste of money at a time in which we&amp;#039;re quibbling over how much cat food we are going to allow our seniors in exchange for (maybe) pushing the top rate up to half of what it was after the JFK tax-cuts finally got passed? And, after three decades of wasteful spending, truncated personal liberties, and feckless cultural hysteria, we are now preparing to throw that much good money after that much bad? This is not just bad public policy, because its such an obvious waste of time and resources. And this is not just bad politics, because the president is blowing an opportunity to correct the obvious waste of time and resources, and to do so in a direction in which the country is already moving. This is completely freaking nuts. I mean, seriously, are these people high? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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