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The Bush administration may be in the process of revolutionising America’s foreign policy but, on the domestic front, it seems like business as usual:
The Bush administration, pressing its campaign against state medical marijuana laws, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let federal authorities punish California doctors who recommend pot to their patients.
The administration would revoke the federal prescription licenses of doctors who tell their patients marijuana would help them, a prerequisite for obtaining the drug under the state’s voter-approved medical marijuana law.
And, of course, his predecessor was no better:
Contending that the drug has no medical value, the Clinton administration announced in January 1997 that doctors who recommended marijuana would lose their licenses to prescribe federally regulated narcotics. Doctors in many fields need federal licenses to remain in practice.
Proof that, regardless of who is sitting in the hot-seat, the absurd and insane ‘war on drugs’ just has to go on and on and on.
[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame who posted this article to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
George W Bush has agreed to send up to 1,000 troops to Liberia. CNN reports that he took the decision after a meeting of his National Security Council. An announcement was expected, possibly today, that the US troops will head an international peacekeeping force.
Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, had urged the UN Security Council to dispatch a force “to prevent a major humanitarian tragedy” in an upsurge in fighting between factions engaged in a 14-year conflict that has killed a tenth of Liberia’s population.
Apart from embassy protection detachments, the marines will be the first American soldiers deployed in Africa since the withdrawal from Somalia nearly a decade ago. Britain, France and some African countries had called on America to lead it because of its historical links with Liberia, founded in 1822 as a settlement for freed American slaves.
Comments by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer that Bush was considering sending troops provoked a nearly instantaneous reaction in Monrovia, where thousands of people gathered outside the U.S. Embassy to cheer a possible American presence. One man said:
We feel America can bring peace because they are the original founders of this nation, and secondly, they are the superpower of the world.
Strange, Liberians do not seem to have a problem with that…
I post this on Thursday afternoon, just ahead of the day when our American friends take a break from the office, farm and factory to commemorate the birthday of their country.
And may these words stand, forever, as the guiding principles of the greatest nation on this planet.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
PS. Could we have the tea back from Boston, please?
PPS. Could we borrow this when it comes time for Britain to leave the EU, please?
Last week I posted a scan of a rather tattered magazine picture of Strom Thurmond surrounded by marshmallows on the stage of the CMU Skibo Ballroom, circa 1970.
It seems the original student photographer is one of our readers. This blast from the past duly reminded him of this classic image and he has sold it to Reuters. You can see a much better copy of Jerry Siskind’s photo there.
This is likely to lead to a lengthy exchange of do-you-remembers betwixt us!
The Dissident Frogman has returned from his trip to Normandy, where he visited, among other things, the Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie (Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy) in Bayeux… He is, as always full of interesting observations and has a new game for his readers. It is called “Guess what’s missing at a museum dedicated to the Battle of Normandy, 1944?”
The game consists of three incredible pictures. My first reaction was – ‘surely, they could not go that far’. But alas, it is true. What’s more, he couldn’t get any lucid and convincing explanation for this “fortuitous” accrual.
Please go here to ‘play’ and perhaps engage in shooting off a few emails to the Mayor of Bayeux…
With the exception of the judgement by the Supreme Court to overturn the Texas anti-sodomy law, the last few days have seen some bad judgements in both the United States and Britain.
Indeed even the sodomy case was dodgy – in that a good result was achieved by, I suspect, bad methods.
True I have not been able to bring myself to read the judgements (reading the words of modern judges tends to make very depressed), but unless they used the elastic Ninth Amendment (which, perhaps, could be used to stop the Federal, State of local governments doing just about anything – which might be no bad thing) it is hard to see how the six judges found anything in the Constitution to prevent the State of Texas banning sodomy. I suspect that the judges tended to waffle on about freedom – i.e. expressed their political opinions (which I happen to agree with this time) rather than actually based the judgement on the text of the Constitution (as they should have done).
As for the other cases that have caught my eye.
Well the University of Michigan has been told that it is okay to practice racial discrimination – as long as it is not open and honest about doing so (diversity waffle rather than an overt quota). This would seem to be the worst of both worlds. Of course there is an easy way to solve the problem of who goes to State Universities – close them down and have no one go to them. However, whilst they exist, it would seem reasonable that such places do not make skin colour a factor in admissions (but five of the Supremes think differently). Oh well, who reads the 14th Amendment anyway – ‘equal protection of the laws’? No, let us have ‘diversity’ instead (although the Constitution does not mention the word diversity anywhere).
Then there was the Nike case. The Supreme Court decided that if a company decided to argue back against attacks made on it, the company may be taken to Court under California’s wonderfully biased statutes. In short the First Amendment applies to ‘activists’ (individuals or groups) attacking a company, but not to the business itself.
Back in Britain we have just had the long predicted outcome to the mobile phone (cell phone) farce. Some time ago the government manipulated some mobile phone companies into paying vast sums (billions of pounds) for mobile phone licences – this put these companies into financial difficulty. Fast forwards a few years later and the government declared that companies must cut their call rates.
In short the companies had paid through the nose and then got hit on the nose. They sued – and have just lost.
The old saying is proved right yet again – never trust the government.
And remember, the courts are part of the state.
I read of Strom Thurmond’s demise at the ripe old age of a century and it sent me digging madly through an old trunk for this most memorable magazine photo of his 1970 visit to my alma mater:
This was at the hieght of the Viet-nam anti-war movement at CMU and Pitt and students of those universities formed a coalition of the willing to pepper the good Senator with Marshmallows.
My guerilla theatre troop later used the deadly Cluster Marshmallow against the Pittsburgh Federal Building with equally devastating results. One of the troop told me a checkout clerk at the grocery store asked him, “What Senator is in town this week?”, when he purchased the case of them for our “event”.
Oh the Horror! The Horror… and the memories. God it was fun!
The BBC has a great, big monkey on it’s back and that monkey is America. The nabobs who run that state broadcast organisation just don’t understand how a country that (in their eyes) does everything wrong can end up so supremely dominant in terms of power, wealth and influence, while a country that does everything right (such as France) seethes and whines impotently about the unfairness of it all.
You can see the tension in their news reportage, torn as it is between a horrified revlusion of America and, at the same time, an unquenchable fascination. That was very much on display tonight in a 90-minute TV special run on BBC2 and called ‘What the World Thinks of America’.
Despite all the negative polling data that was apparently gathered from all around the world and a studio in London that consisted of people like firebrand British leftie Claire Short and former French Culture Minister Jack Lang, it was not the belligerent anti-American hate-fest that I thought it was going to be. What amused me most was general agreement that the USA was rich because of its economic model and, at the same time, a complete rejection of the idea of copying it.
In fact, it was rather dull, equivocal and not quite sure of itself. The underlying theme was largely one of self-pity and petty jealousy culminating in a morose admission that America was the unchallengable world superpower and there isn’t much the likes of France can do about it except whine and bitch. They may as well have called it ‘Inferiority Complex – The Movie’.
Over on the BBC website (and doubtless in anticipation of forthcoming EU regulations) they have provided a forum for Americans to answer back, hosted jointly by the respective Chairmen of Democrats and Republicans Abroad.
Perhaps some Americans might waggishly suggest an US TV special called ‘What Americans Think of the EU’. Now that I would pay to see.
I did a posting here a few days ago about how political debates are, at any rate in Europe, and most especially here in Britain and in England, becoming more about who we are, and not just about who is right. It was the one about the Renault TV car advert.
There were many commenters, one of whom said that in the USA, things were different. Who we are, he said, is not an issue in the USA, because we know who we are. And in the sense that in the USA, unlike here, or for that matter here, there is no debate about what country they should be, what continent they should be a part of, and so on, that’s true.
But now take a read of this bit, from a Sunday Times article by Andrew Sullivan, on the subject of Hillary Clinton. Hillary C, says Sullivan, is the most divisive US politician since Nixon, and she doesn’t just divide at the level of opinion, she divides at the level of “identity”. (Equals: who we are.) → Continue reading: Andrew Sullivan on Hillary Clinton – and me on the globalisation of the “who we are” question
Just a titbit. I’m listening to the England/Zimbabwe cricket commentary on BBC radio 4, and for some reason one of them, Jonathan Agnew, who used to bowl quick for some county or other (and for England occasionally if I remember it right), referred in passing to the fact that his newspaper reading this morning had included the New York Times. There’d been some reference to Agnew in the newspapers, it seems, but in the papers he’d been reading he hadn’t come across it – something like that. They were just making conversation between overs. Anyway, Agnew’s fellow commentator Mike Selvey, who used to bowl quick for Middlesex (and England occasionally if I remember right), then said:
The New York Times? I wouldn’t believe a word of it. Their editor’s just been fired.
I have been listening to cricket commentaries on the radio for the last half century. Never, never have I ever heard the New York Times get any mention on these commentaries before.
That brand is definitely suffering.
Howell Raines, chief editor of the New York Times, that bastion of liberal-left opinion, has resigned, following the recent scandal surrounding young ex-reporter Jayson Blair, who fabricated numerous reports for a period of several months.
It would be arrogant to claim that Raines, who devoted inordinate editorial resources to covering such crucial matters as the admissions policy of the Augusta golf club while forces were fighting in Iraq, could be described as the victim of the blogosphere. But nonetheless bloggers like Andrew Sullivan have been relentless in chronicling how this paper has lost its way under Raines’ leadership.
Perhaps, along the lines of a famous tune, Sullivan and the rest should be humming:
“I can write clearly now that Raines has gone, I can clear all obstacles from my way…”
… and that includes making music, creating pictures, writing verse, shooting films and producing computer games that annoy the crap out of other people.
An attempt by the usual ‘guardians of morality’ to regulate the nature of computer games in a way that would never be tolerated for the written word has been defeated in a US court.
“If the First Amendment is versatile enough to “shield the paintings of Jackson Pollock, music of Arthur Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll”, we see no reason why the pictures, graphic design, concept art, sounds, music, stories, and narrative present in video games are not entitled to a similar protection. The mere fact that they appear in a novel medium is of no legal consequence.”
Score one for the good guys!  Now let me fire up my copy of Grand Theft Auto… I feel like running over a few hapless pedestrians.
The full ruling can be found here [pdf file].
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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