Well, I don’t know how we missed posting on this yesterday, but Obama has done something very, very right by calling off the Feds in states where medicinal marijuana use is permitted.  In terms of states’ rights, patient rights, and just sane, rational domestic policy, Obama made the right move. And according to Gallup, he’s joining the rest of the United States in an upward trend toward support for legalization.  In fact, Americans now favor legalization at 44% – a new U.S. high.  (No pun intended.)

Public opinion is virtually the same on a question that relates to a public policy debate brewing in California — whether marijuana should be legalized and taxed as a way of raising revenue for state governments. Just over 4 in 10 Americans (42%) say they would favor this in their own state; 56% are opposed. Support is markedly higher among residents of the West — where an outright majority favor the proposal — than in the South and Midwest. The views of Eastern residents fall about in the middle.

The new findings come as the U.S. Justice Department has reportedly decided to loosen its enforcement of federal anti-marijuana laws by not pursuing individuals who buy or sell small amounts of the drug in conformity with their own states’ medical marijuana laws. This seems likely to meet with U.S. public approval, as previous Gallup polling has found Americans generally sympathetic to legalizing marijuana for medical purposes. In 2003, 75% of Americans favored allowing doctors to legally prescribe marijuana to patients in order to reduce pain and suffering.

This is also an economic issue.  In California, not only are normal suburbanites turning to pot-farming for extra cash – selling legally to dispensaries – but local governments are shoring up lost revenue during the recession with new cannabis taxes. [Read more →]

Andrew Sullivan’s dissection of one Boston cop’s overtly racist response to the Gates arrest is worth reading in full, but this part caught my eye:

And the more you read, the more you realize how deep the Bush-Cheney legacy runs and how the torture and ‘enemy combatant’ state, celebrated nightly on Fox, easily seeps into domestic law enforcement. Notice how Cheney actually wanted to use the military against “suspects” in America.

. . . This man is also in the National Guard.

My first reaction to this was an exaggerated eye-roll, followed shortly by something to the effect of “sure, torture is really, really bad, but does police misconduct have anything to do with military interrogation practices?” Then I remembered this frightening article from the Boston Globe:

If the spread of torture techniques suggests a blurry line between “us” and “them,” it also teaches that there’s no real boundary between “there” and “here.” It would be ignoring history to assume that what happens in an American-run prison in Iraq will stay in Iraq. Soldiers who learn torture techniques abroad get jobs as police when they return, and the new developments in torture you read about today could yet be employed in a neighborhood near you.

In Chicago, in the decade after Vietnam, the use of magnetos and other clean tortures left a disaster: At least 11 men were sentenced to death and many others given long-term prison sentences based on confessions extracted by torture, and in 2003, Governor George Ryan of Illinois commuted the death sentences of all 167 death row inmates. Earlier this month the City of Chicago agreed to pay nearly $20 million to settle lawsuits filed by four former death row inmates who claimed they were tortured and wrongly convicted.

I think this is one of the most compelling points in favor of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, even if it doesn’t result in retroactive prosecution. Reestablishing widely-held social norms against torture really is the only way to ensure that mistreatment doesn’t become routinized, particularly if ‘enhanced interrogation tactics’ are likely to bleed into daily law enforcement.

[updated below]

National Review’s obnoxious (and predictable) response to the mistaken arrest of a black Harvard professor has been to publish this truly remarkable post from Roger Clegg:

Even if race played some role in how Professor Gates was treated — who knows? — the Left is, predictably, exaggerating the sociopolitical significance of it all. And I’ll go further than that: I suspect that, as soon as the police arrived, Professor Gates realized he had been handed a great opportunity to play the victim and advance his agenda, and he decided to milk the incident for all it’s worth. And he’s still doing it. That’s too bad, since the last thing African Americans need in 2009 is to buy into more victimology.

Clegg’s powers of telepathy notwithstanding, I sincerely doubt that the good professor’s first thought upon encountering a heavily armed police officer was “Lucky me – what a great opportunity for grievance-mongering!” Given his racially-tinged response, I suspect Clegg is guilty of a bit of psychological projection here.

Unlike Clegg, I do not claim to read minds, so I hesitate to pass judgment on the responding officer’s motives. One odd undercurrent to all this, however, is the widely-held assumption that no matter how badly things turn out, the officers on the scene deserve the benefit of the doubt. The logic seems to be that police are both heavily armed and work a difficult job, and are therefore entitled to a lot more deference than other civil servants.

Policing is a trying (and occasionally dangerous) occupation, so I understand why we venerate police officers. But I don’t believe that civic veneration should extend to a special category of deference for law enforcement. Because cops wield a disproportionate amount of power in any confrontation with civilians, I actually tend to think that their actions should be subject to more scrutiny, particularly when it’s not at all clear that the officer(s) in question responded appropriately.

As I said, I don’t mind celebrating cops as civic heroes. I don’t mind funding salaries, equipment, and generous pension plans. But I do find it frightening (and fundamentally at odds with our political traditions) when someone suggests that absolute deference to the police is the only appropriate response to a confrontation with law enforcement. Nodding your head and signing on the dotted line may be the safest and quickest way out, but sometimes the boat is worth rocking.

Update: Having read Obama’s response, I’d like to pose a question to the hordes of bloggers who are outraged by the president’s comments. Is there any real defense of the responding officer’s decision to arrest Gates after he provided identification? I think I’m with Josh Marshall on this one:

Here are some salient facts. The house was Gates’ house. From what I understand, no one disputes that prior to his arrest and while in the house, Gates provided proof that the house was his. When you have those facts and the guy whose house it is ends up getting arrested, I think that’s prima facie evidence of bad police work.

There also seems to be some willful denial at work here – not one of these critics is ready to acknowledge (or even consider) the fact that the interaction of Black Americans with law enforcement is is colored by a very real history of discrimination and abuse. John McWhorter is worth reading on this subject.

Finally, take a moment to re-read the president’s comments. He a) does not accuse the Cambridge police of racism b) acknowledges that their initial response was correct and c) notes that we’ve made incredible progress in dealing with these issues. The only point of contention is whether the responding officer acted foolishly. Is anyone prepared to defend the officer’s actions as an appropriate response to this type of situation? I’m not saying the guy is a racist or deserves to be fired, but I really don’t think this is an example of sterling police work.

Update II: Apparently, there are also reasons to doubt the accuracy of the police report:

For starters, police used an investigatory exemption in the public records law to bar the public’s right to view Gates’ police report. Even after the charges against Gates were dropped, police were unwilling to release the report and, mysteriously, a leaked copy that appeared on Boston.com’s Web site was replaced the next day with a less complete version. Globe editors declined to explain to the Chronicle why the documents were swapped, while the department said it was conducting an internal investigation to find out who leaked the arrest report.

Update III: For those interested, here’s the legal definition of “disorderly conduct” in Massachussetts. I’m not a lawyer (paging esteemed co-blogger Mark Thompson), but I really don’t think that Gates’ actions (however intemperate) qualify as “threatening, violent or tumultuous behavior” that “serve[d] no legitimate purpose.”