One of the rapidly developing second-term problems for Barack Obama is his administration’s retrograde commitment to elements of the failed War on Drugs, and particularly the legal collision soon to occur between federal anti-drug warriors and states whose voters have chosen peace. Here’s Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson with the basics:

Legalization has set Colorado and Washington on a collision course with the Obama administration, which has shown no sign of backing down on its full-scale assault on pot growers and distributors. Although the president pledged to go easy on medical marijuana - now legal in 18 states - he has actually launched more raids on state-sanctioned pot dispensaries than George W. Bush, and has threatened to prosecute state officials who oversee medical marijuana as if they were drug lords. And while the administration has yet to issue a definitive response to the two new laws, the Justice Department was quick to signal that it has no plans to heed the will of voters. “Enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act,” the department announced in November, “remains unchanged.”

Dickinson quotes administration insiders as suggesting that mid-level bureaucrats marinated in the War on Drugs are responsible for the unwillingness to reconsider policies now that states are moving rapidly away from “Just Say No.”

And there’s no question the administration’s policies are being affected by ancient fears of liberal vulnerability on the subject. Even if today’s dope-smokers are as likely to be libertarian MBAs and/or African-Americans as the white slacker hippies of legend and lore, stereotypes die hard.

In urging Obama to get with the program, Andrew Sullivan makes it angry and personal:

[I]f [Obama’s appointees] decide to treat the law-abiding citizens of Colorado and Washington as dangerous felons; if they decide to allocate their precious law enforcement powers to persecuting and arresting people for following a state law that they have themselves just passed by clear majorities; if they decide that opposing a near majority of Americans in continuing to prosecute the drug war on marijuana, even when the core of their own supporters want an end to Prohibition, and even when that Prohibition makes no sense … then we will give them hell.

And it will get personal. The president wasn’t just once a pot-smoker, he was a very serious pothead. His own life and career prove that this substance is no more potentially damaging to a human being than alcohol, which is not only legal but marketed to us with abandon. The future coalition he has built - especially its Millennial base - will splinter. Maybe even some libertarian Republicans will seize the issue and champion federalism consistently for a change.

This last suggestion ain’t happening any time soon, but Sullivan is speaking for a lot of angry people here. If the administration can agree not to make enforcement of other bad laws—like the Defense of Marriage Act—a prosecutorial priority, it can do exactly the same thing with pot.

Took a while, but it’s happening, per this report from The Hill’s Sam Baker (who beat SCOTUSBlog to the punch):

The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will hear a challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) — the federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The court also agreed to hear a lawsuit challenging California’s statewide ban on same-sex marriage.

These two cases are not as similar as the media reports will sometimes suggest:

Supporters of same-sex marriage are optimistic about the chances the court will strike down DOMA, making all marriages equal in the eyes of federal law. It would be an historic ruling, and one of the most significant civil-rights decisions in the court’s history.

The challenge to California’s Proposition 8 goes a step further, providing the court with an opening to declare that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The justices will consider whether the 14th Amendment bars California from enforcing a law that prevents same-sex couples from marrying.

And the results could differ as well:

Justice Anthony Kennedy is seen as likely to side with the court’s liberal bloc on DOMA, but his views on Proposition 8 are harder to predict.

Looks like oral arguments will be heard in the spring, with a decision likely in the summer.

Yesterday afternoon, Jonathan Chait wrote a post suggesting that since Obama concessions on the entitlement front will ultimately be made if there is to be any kind of fiscal agreement, maybe accepting a Medicare eligibility age increase wasn’t such a bad idea, because (a) conservatives value this concession well beyond its actual cost, and (b) by shifting a two-year cohort of citizens from reliance on Medicare to reliance on Obamacare, it might boost support for the latter among older folks. Chait made it clear he thought it was a very bad idea on the merits, and the whole thing read like a contrarian throw-away to me.

For the record, I don’t think argument (b) is very strong at all, and argument (a) is immensely speculative, and also contingent on what other “entitlement reform” ideas wind up on the table.

But color me appalled by David Dayan’s piece at FDL early this morning barbecuing Chait as a sell-out peddling “idiocy,” among other choice epithets. Atrios piled on by naming Chait his “Wanker of the Day” (characteristically, Chait tweeted that his acceptance speech would be issued in due time).

Dayan’s lede immediately raised some questions:

Since Jon Chait has never met a concession he didn’t like, he comes out with an endorsement of raising the Medicare eligibility age as part of a long-term deficit deal. So his cover for what is universally regarded as a terrible idea surely led deficit scolds seeking to use the problem to weaken the safety net to give each other high-fives.

Whatever else he is, Jonathan Chait is one of the most joyfully vicious partisans around. His extensive writing on the fiscal talks, far from embracing the principle of promiscuous Obama concessions, has redundantly focused, for nearly two years, on the leverage Obama enjoys from the fact that he doesn’t have to make any concessions at all in order to achieve most of his goals. And he’s also been routinely critical of the “deficit scolds” Dayen suggests Chait is aiding and abetting.

So why the categorical vitriol aimed at Chait? I dunno. Maybe it involves old grudges, which Chait is pretty good at inspiring (those who remember his savage “Diary of a Dean-o-Phobe” blog at TNR back during the 2004 presidential cycle know what I mean). Or maybe it’s precisely Chait’s relatively hard line recently on the fiscal talks that leads folks to fear a sudden lurch into surrender-monkey behavior on his part. Or perhaps it’s something personal. Or it could be just the first skirmish in the inevitable “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party.”

But I do think it’s kind of important that progressives allow each other a bit of liberty in discussions about big fiscal issues: after all, even the Right-Wing Noise Machine is in a bit of disarray on the subject at the moment. I know some people think resisting anything that affects Social Security or Medicare benefits is the ultimate Red Line that cannot be crossed. Personally, my own fear is that in defending that Red Line, congressional Democrats will wind up making concessions on Medicaid and other low-income programs that in my opinion are more morally compelling than keeping Medicare precisely the way it is today.

Maybe my fears are misguided, or maybe I just don’t share the obsession of some liberals in keeping Medicare pristine as a potential model for a universal single-payer health care system somewhere in the distant future, even if that means today’s poor folks have to suffer as a lower priority.

But we ought to be able to talk about these things calmly—particularly at a time when it doesn’t appear conservatives know what they are doing, other than shifting blame and trying to get to the next election.

UPDATE: The esteemed Digby makes it clear her own hostility to Chait is mostly about Iraq.

Earlier this week I offered a less-than-glowing review of the speeches by Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan at the Jack Kemp Foundation dinner, which mocked their advance billing as harbingers of the Great Big Things To Come in the GOP and the conservative movement. Rubio trotted out an assortment of conservative policy chestnuts and reprised his well-rehearsed American Immigrant Dream number. Ryan, for the third time in the last year so far as I can remember, reframed his own policy preferences from a struggle of makers against takers into a War On Poverty where conservatives will bravely liberate the poor from the bondage of dependence on food and medicine.

If you happen to be a movement conservative, it all sounded fine. But “new” it wasn’t. Still, revealingly, it was enough to excite David Brooks, who chowed down on this thin rhetorical gruel as the kind of reformist nourishment he’s been hongryin’ for. I know he’s not responsible for the headline the Times put on his column (though who knows? he may have approval rights in his contract), but “The Republican Glasnost,” fatuous as the allusion is, does accurately reflect his suggestion that this dinner might have represented a turning point.

And what did Brooks regard as the big moment at this dinner? A shout-out to the service staff, and to landscaping crews, and to janitors! They, suggested Rubio, will someday perform Amazing Feats with the opportunities America gives them!

Rubio didn’t offer these proletarian heroes anything tangible. He sure as hell doesn’t want them to raise themselves up with any help from unions or government. What appeared to shock the audience into “hushed silence” and then a “roaring ovation” is that Rubio bothered to notice these people at all. And guess what? They need the same policies rich folks prefer! Indeed, they need them more, as Ryan’s speech insisted! No wonder a well-heeled conservative audience ate it up.

After swallowing this dubious entree, Brooks goes on to link the exciting new message he heard at the dinner with two other signs of glasnost: Jim DeMint’s decampment to Heritage (which most everyone else is viewing as a sign of the South Carolinian’s even greater power) and John Boehner’s willingness to offer Mitt Romney’s tax ideas as a “concession” to Obama.

I don’t know if Brooks’ column is an act of deception, or merely of self-deception. But it shows how little it takes for movement conservatives to turn the unhappiness of would-be “moderate reformers” into the happy yelps of a well-fed puppy.

After rainy, foggy week, it’s a beautiful day on the Central Coast; the storms have at least temporarily dispersed the ugly brown line of kelp that sometimes spoils the long blue view (but nourishes the fishes, I’m told, and it was their ocean first!). Here are some mid-day news morsels of note:

* L.A. Times posts its front page from December 7, 1941. And yes, it features the word “Japs.”

* PPP survey shows Georgia Republicans split right down the middle on desire to secede from United States.

* “Bloodbath” of layoffs will reportedly be announced today at Newsweek.

* At TNR, Noreen Malone pens profile of Kelly Ayotte, Joe Lieberman’s apparent successor in the “Three Amigos.”

* At TAP, Brooke Jarvis reports on formal advent of same-sex marriage in Washington State.

And in non-political news:

* State of Florida has announced Python Hunt in Everglades for January, with prizes! No thanks. And Chelsea Handler will have fun with this one.

Back after some chores.

It’s hardly a big surprise, but it’s still with a sense of foreboding that I read this signal-of-future-intentions from the Washington Post:

The Washington Post will probably start charging online readers for access to newspaper articles in the middle of next year, a person familiar with the plans said.

This lede sounds pretty weird coming from Washington Post reporter Steven Mufson; “a person familiar with the plans” is probably one of his bosses. But whatever:

Long reluctant to charge for online content, the newspaper is close to a decision to introduce digital subscriptions and charge online readers once they surpass a certain number of articles or multimedia features a month, the person said. Access to the home page and section fronts would not be limited.

The model — known as a metered paywall — would be similar to that used by the New York Times, which started charging for online content in March 2011 and now has nearly 600,000 digital subscribers. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have similar models.

Ah, yes, the big Times experiment. I didn’t know if had officially been declared a great success, but then I generally avoid stories about the evolution—or more often devolution—of the news industry like they were Signs of the Apocalypse.

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates offers an acute observation on this development:

I read the Post online enough to say that I would pay for this. Plus I’ve basically come around to the idea that content-providers will have to charge something. But putting yourself on the market cuts both ways, in that it rather quickly reveals what, precisely, consumers will pay for and what they won’t. The Times found that opinions were as numerous as middle fingers, and thus couldn’t really monetize it’s columnists. It’s reporting turned out to be another story.

The problem with the Post is that the paper has been so decimated that you wonder whether they still have a product they can sell. I wonder if the Post basically got it backwards—they tried to save by cutting, but in cutting damaged the product (and the brand), and now the Post is trying to get people pay a much less substantial product. It seems it would have been smarter to charge when you had something you knew you could charge for.

But there is the rub—no one knew. This wasn’t a Washington Post problem. It was an industry problem. We’re only slowly adopting to the idea of paying for information. They’ll likely be some casualties due to the tardiness.

That’s true. And I suspect the sound of approaching hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen are being heard here and there at WaPo.

It won’t be formal until next Tuesday (thanks to a five-day delay requirement for bills passed by both Houses), but the Michigan legislature has indeed approved “right-to-work” legislation in a lame-duck session blitzkrieg of enormous audacity. There were no hearings, no public debate, and virtually no warning before the famously pro-labor state joined the Greater South in declaring itself union-unfriendly territory, as Gov. Rick Snyder abruptly reversed his prior opposition to consideration of such legislation. That very day the hammer came down in a series of votes.

One of the right-to-work bills (the one affecting public-sector workers) passed the Michigan House by a 58-52 margin, just one vote below the number of Republicans who will serve in the next session. This reinforces the impression that GOpers feared they wouldn’t have to votes to enact right-to-work had they utilized the normal legislative process and waited until representatives elected on November 6 were in place.

The panic-stricken nature of the GOP coup wasn’t much reflected in the bland and empty public rationales offered for it by Snyder:

In an interview with The Associated Press, Snyder said he had kept the issue at arm’s length while pursuing other programs to bolster the state economy. But he said circumstances had pushed the matter to the forefront.

“It is a divisive issue,” he acknowledged. “But it was already being divisive over the past few weeks, so let’s get this resolved. Let’s reach a conclusion that’s in the best interests of all.”

Also influencing his decision, he said, were reports that some 90 companies had decided to locate in Indiana since that state adopted right-to-work legislation. “That’s thousands of jobs, and we want to have that kind of success in Michigan,” he said.

OMG, Indiana’s screwing its workers, so Michigan has to do the same right now! This is very literally a “race to the bottom” if ever there has been one.

Because Republican legislators shrewdly attached an appropriation to the bill, it will not be subject to reversal by initiative. Looks like November 2014 will be the first opportunity for some accountability, when the entire legislature is up for re-election, along with Snyder.

The Michigan Senate’s Democratic Leader, Gretchen Whitmer, had a tart description of the entire manuever:

“These guys have lied to us all along the way,” she said. “They are pushing through the most divisive legislation they could come up with in the dark of night, at the end of a lame-duck session and then they’re going to hightail it out of town. It’s cowardly.”

And a fine “happy holidays” to Michigan workers, too.

The drama surrounding Jim DeMint’s sudden resignation from the Senate continues to unfold down in South Cackalacky, where Gov. Nikki Haley must soon appoint an interim Senator to serve until a special election in 2014 (DeMint’s term runs out in 2016).

The only thing we know for sure is that Haley has ruled out any maneuver to get herself appointed to the Senate gig (smart of her, since her perpetually flagging popularity in the state would not be enhanced by a self-aggrandizing step that has very rarely worked out for others who have tried it over the years).

So now more than before, the odds are high that Haley will choose Rep. Tim Scott (whom DeMint himself is reported to prefer), giving the national GOP the symbolic bragging point of an Asian-American woman tapping an African-American man in the state that sent John C. Calhoun and Strom Thurmond to the Senate.

You’d figure that would make local wingnuts in the Palmetto State happy, given Scott’s hard-right political profile (a 92% rating from the Club For Growth, and 96% from the American Conservative Union).

But this is South Carolina. Prominent (and perpetually troublesome) conservative blogger Will Folks—the former Mark Sanford and Nikki Haley staffer made famous in 2010 by his so-far-unsubstantiated claims of having an affair with Haley—is trying to stir up DeMint supporters into a revolt against the putative choice of Scott:

Scott was elected on the strength of support from fiscal conservatives, but has repeatedly bent to the will of the GOP establishment in Washington, D.C. In fact his self-serving vote in support of a “Boeing bailout” proves he’s part of the problem in our nation’s capital … just as his recent endorsement of fiscally liberal S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell shows he’s part of the problem here at home.

DeMint’s legacy of liberty promotion and taxpayer protection in Washington, D.C. has been unrivaled in recent years. Haley needs to honor that legacy by appointing someone who will continue to advance it - not someone who will ask “how high” whenever establishment Republicans in Washington tell him its time to “jump.”

Folks is among those who prefer Rep. Michael Mulvaney (who had already expressed an interest in running for DeMint’s seat if he retired in 2016) or state senator Tom Davis (a former Sanford chief of staff who’s been a leading critic of Lindsay Graham) to Scott. It’s hard to imagine anyone possessing less pull with Haley than Folks, but it is interesting that it’s possible in the funhouse mirror of South Carolina politics for someone to talk about Tim Scott as though he’s some sort of squishy RINO. We’ll hear a lot more of that kind of talk if Haley takes still another path of appointing former SC Attorney General Henry McMaster—who supplied her with a helpful runoff endorsement in 2010 after his own gubernatorial campaign went south—as a “caretaker” Senator, letting conservatives fight it out for the gig in 2014. That is the scenario, BTW, that would most please Lindsay Graham, whom “true” conservatives have been warily circling in hopes of launching a primary challenge to his renomination in 2014.

One reason for the apparent willingness of so many Republicans to focus on who gets blame or credit for a fiscal “fix” rather than the nature of the “fix” itself is the eternal capacity of pols to focus on the next election cycle. Right now that may look like a wonderfully comfortable oasis compared to the realities of, you know, actually governing.

And as Charlie Cook succinctly explains today, 2014 remains, according to history and the likely landscape, a year that may wipe away many an elephant tear:

In the six “six-year itch” elections since World War II, the party in the White House has averaged a 29-seat loss in the House and a six-seat (actually 5.6) loss in the Senate. In 1958 (Eisenhower), 1966 (Kennedy/Johnson), and 1974 (Nixon/Ford), the party in the White House lost 48 seats; in 2006 (George W. Bush), the most recent such election, the party in power lost 30 seats. In 1986 (Reagan), the loss was just five seats, while in 1998, under Clinton, the “in” party actually gained five House seats—no doubt a backlash to Republican efforts to remove the president from office. In that same election, the Senate was a wash, and in the other five, losses ranged from four seats in 1966 and 1974 to six seats in 2006 and 12 seats in 1958.

Obviously, past results are not a guarantee of future performance: Democrats are not going into the 2014 House midterms in an overexposed position, because they took such a beating in 2010, losing 63 seats and regaining only eight seats this year. It’s hard to see how Democrats could lose the 48 seats that the “in” party lost in 1958, 1966, and 1974. Also, with the way the current lines are drawn to form so many one-party districts, it would take a heckuva wave election to move a lot of seats in either direction. The House appears to have reached a kind of a partisan equilibrium; the GOP has a good chance of holding onto control for the rest of the decade, barring self-destruction resulting in a tidal wave.

I’ll interject to observe that “self-destruction” is an option always on the table with today’s Republicans, but Cook’s general point is entirely valid, given the GOP’s ability in 2012 to hold onto a robust majority of House seats despite losing the national popular vote.

But in the Senate, with only one Republican-held seat up (Susan Collins in Maine) in a state not carried by Mitt Romney by at least 8 points, the GOP seems to have little exposure. At the same time, Democrats have four seats in states that Romney carried by 15 or more points (Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Mark Pryor in Arkansas, Jay Rockefeller in West Virginia, and Tim Johnson in South Dakota), with two more in states that Romney won by 14 points (Max Baucus in Montana and Mark Begich in Alaska) and two others in swing states (Kay Hagan in North Carolina and Mark Warner in Virginia).

As I briefly noted in a Lunch Buffet item yesterday, Democrats could be in a position to achieve a Senate super-majority in 2016 if they manage to over-perform in 2014 as they did in 2012. But Cook’s breakdown shows how difficult that will be.

And the factor Cook doesn’t mention is the one that should most trouble Democrats: the growing disparity between the partisan leanings of the presidential and midterm electorates, attributable to the unusually high correlation of party preferences to age and ethnic divisions. Just as odds of Republican gains in 2010 went up the moment after Barack Obama’s election, so too have the odds of GOP gains in 2014, regardless of what happens in Washington between now and then. So it’s no wonder Republicans want to get there fast.

It’s the first Friday of the month. For much of the last two years, that was a political red-letter day, as writers and gabbers everywhere gathered virtually at 8:30 AM Eastern Time to receive and over-analyze the Monthly Jobs Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Today I nearly forgot about it altogether until I saw a brief reference on Twitter. The report itself is superficially the kind of good news for the president that would have created enormous excitement in the chattering classes had it occurred before November 6: jobs are up 146,000, which is about double what most economists had expected, and even more significantly for political types, the unemployment rate (the one BLS statistic most regular people know about) dropped from 7.9% to 7.7%.

Look a little deeper and the report is not so unambiguously positive: the gains BLS reported in September and (especially) October have been revised downward. But like the relative stability of the stock market, it certainly does nothing to undercut the slow but steady increase in the president’s post-election public standing he’s been enjoying.

The anthem of everyone creative who still dreams of producing The Big One, and also a fine sardonic travel song: The Band performing Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece.”

Today alternated between a sort of political news coma (unless you enjoy reading those who are just catching up on earlier developments in the fiscal fight) and reasonably big stuff, punctuated by the chaos and skullduggery in Michigan. Here’s what’s left:

* In response to those claiming that the filibuster’s no big deal, Dylan Mathews of WonkBlog lists 17 major bills that would have been cleared a majority-vote Senate in the last four years.

* At Forbes, Daniel Fisher has long profile of the Kochs focusing on their business practices.

* Hilarious: McConnell forced to filibuster his own 2011 idea giving president power to raise debt limit subject to congressional disapproval.

* At Ten Miles Square, Aaron Carroll takes a good swing at the “bad lifestyles” excuse for the poor performance of the U.S. health care system.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer assesses the new divestment campaigns on college campuses designed to stop endowment investments in fossil-fuel companies.

And in non-political news:

* Apple’s announcement that it will begin assembling Macs in the U.S. less than meets the eye when it comes to the company’s overall operations.

That’s it for a difficult day.

Yabba-Dabba-Do, and:

Selah.

As you may have heard, police used pepper spray on protestors at the Michigan State Capitol today after Gov. Rick Snyder and GOP legislative leaders unveiled a plan to blitz “right-to-work” legislation through a fast-track device during a lame-duck session. To all appearances, GOPers will have the votes to pull off this surprise maneuver, though they might have struggled to do so given their loss of five state House seats on November 6, which reduced (but did not eliminate) their majority.

You have to figure there was some national GOP/conservative input into this decision. The symbolism of Michigan, with its proud labor history, joining the (mostly) southern and western states in the officially anti-union column would be pretty big.

And despite all the rhetoric about “freedom” surrounding this and every other RTW initiative, what such laws actually do is to ban freely negotiated “union shop” contracts between employer and unions requiring that workers represented in collective bargaining contribute to those representing them. Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which gave the states the power to enact such laws, was wildly controversial at the time it was enacted, and needs to become so again today.

It’s possible Michigan GOPers have overreached with this atavistic coup. But progressives around the country who responded so avidly to the earlier battle over collective bargaining in Wisconsin really need to make some noise about Michigan right now.

UPDATE: President Obama comes out against proposed Michigan law, which will certainly help make some noise.

For a guy with a reputation as a genius, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal sure has some dumb “ideas” about how to fix Washington’s dysfunctional fiscal politics. Nestled in the usual “I’m not from Washington” boilerplate about how stupid Washingtonians are, he trotted his proposals out in the dispenser of the Beltway daily bread, Politico—just the place to touch off an anti-Washington firestorm of common sense.

It’s a token of the freshness of Bobby’s Big Think that his prescriptions begin with a tired idea from the 1980s, a constitutional balanced budget amendment, and end with a tired idea from the 1990s, term limits. In between we have two versions of the most discredited idea of all for overcoming fiscal gridlock, legislative super-majority requirements.

I’ve always gotten the impression that Jindal is a man who thinks himself so intelligent that he must embrace egregiously and aggressive stupidity to communicate with the masses (viz. his disastrous let’s-bring-out-the-hand-puppets response to the 2009 State of the Union Address). But he surely understands that if conservatives do not have the political capital to win a straight-up fiscal fight in Congress they are a million miles away from being able to impose any of his Big Fixes.

Perhaps this disposable op-ed was simply his way of giving the actual choices facing the country and the GOP a wide berth. If so, he impressively succeeded in steering clear of reality.