Makes Them Feel Powerful

Watching the political birdie of the theoretical trillion dollar platinum coin being batted back forth is educational and intellectually fun, in a way, but still mere mental bubbles in our swirling political river soon to be utterly washed away by events, it’s never happening.

For good or ill the Obama political mentality and approach has always been one of extreme caution, especially anything to be perceived as overtly liberal or provocative. They adamantly refused to install solar panels on the White House despite years of pleading and prodding, far too Jimmy Carter hippie-ish, heavens no. The White House ignored the cannabis petition and referred the matter to Justice, which still leaves nothing but vague quotes, they hate the idea of being out front on this. A huge part of the entire Obama political sell has been the ability to get along and be above squabbles, the White House would never, ever be so divergent to conformity with a trillion dollar platinum coin.

Pentagon Readies for the Knife

In case the GOP thinks they can outflank and scare Obama with the sequester, they should think again.

Tying Themselves Into Knots

Yesterday's news that the country will hit the debt ceiling two weeks earlier now, in mid-February is actually a good thing: it gives Obama two weeks less to screw things up worse than he already has.

I had thought over the last weekend that Obama would strike a grand bargain after all by the end of February, something along the lines of $900 billion in spending reductions (the amount he already offered Boehner which regrettably contained chained CPI) and $600 billion in new revenue from closing loopholes, for a total of $1.5 trillion over ten years. By doing this, he'd be getting $300 billion more in debt reduction than experts agree we need to stabilize our long term debt situation. This would come on top of the $1.5 trillion in debt reduction from 2011 and the nearly $600 billion in new revenue from the fiscal cliff deal, allowing Obama to show that he's worked to get well over $3 trillion in debt reduction towards the typical goal of $4 trillion cited by the bipartisan committees.

I was feeling pretty good that Obama would hit the road before and after the State of the Union (SOTU) to sell the country on a balanced approach that didn't place the wealthy and corporations ahead of seniors, to stack the deck against the GOP's end-game effort to extort entitlement cuts as the price for not sinking the country into default. But at the end of the weekend, that feeling dissipated when the GOP put out the word that they were now willing to let the sequester take effect at the end of February, with its cuts equally split between defense and non-defense spending over the next ten years. Boehner told the Wall Street Journal that the sequester gave them more leverage over the White House, which was reinforced over the last two days with more talk about a government shutdown and the sequester, and less talk about a debt ceiling default, presumably because the GOP's Wall Street backers have started reminding them where their bread is buttered.

Show Me

It’s a little strange, two times in a row covering cannabis the New York Times has regressed into a fussy old maid of tut-tutting authoritarian repression. The first was a classic jackboot quote from a Seattle lawyer insisting cannabis is a Schedule I drug on December 6th, then this morning some MD stating that recently “there has been a pretty dramatic increase in admission to emergency rooms…” from cannabis use.

It’s remarkable how such an alleged bastion of journalism professionalism and supposed objectivity leaves these laughable quotes just hanging there as if they’re facts of the universe. A huge talking point of the cannabis legalization community is precisely its relative non-toxicity, smoke or ingest too much and it’s the munchies and a nap for you, not a fight, drunk driving arrest or bad trip to the emergency room, Lord no. In half a century in perceiving life I’ve only heard of one emergency room visit from cannabis, a friend in the ‘80’s had a young brother who thought smoking cannabis seeds would work. Doh!