Smoke This.

From the Boston Globe:

The shifting medical view on marijuana

By Lester Grinspoon, 8/17/2003

IN A RECENT poll conducted by Medscape, a website directed at health care providers, 76 percent of physicians and 89 percent of nurses said they thought marijuana should be available as a medicine.

Not the biggest issue in my life, but it is an example of adult hypocrisy that makes it harder for us to be credible to our kids. My 'lesson' to my kids about drugs is that it doesn't matter how harmful drugs are or aren't, they're illegal and if you get caught the hassle will be far greater than any benefit.

Al Gore is still playing in the Sandbox

http://www.moveon.org/gore-speech.html

At first, I thought maybe the President's advisers were a big part of the problem. Last fall, in a speech on economic policy at the Brookings Institution, I called on the President to get rid of his whole economic team and pick a new group. And a few weeks later, damned if he didn't do just that - and at least one of the new advisers had written eloquently about the very problems in the Bush economic policy that I was calling upon the President to fix.

But now, a year later, we still have the same bad economic policies and the problems have, if anything, gotten worse. So obviously I was wrong: changing all the president's advisers didn't work as a way of changing the policy.

More on Dean

From the Washington Post
Over his five terms as Vermont governor, folks there say, Dean grew more polished as a politician and more fervent as a public speaker. In person, they say, the doctor is charming and charismatic, inquisitive about ordinary people and their problems, attentive to his constituents, family, staff and friends.

From Business Week
Q: What would you do to get the economy moving again?
A: First, we need to do what Clinton did in 1993: We need to make a genuine effort to start to balance the budget to restore investor confidence. The second thing I would do is to support the small-business community. They create more jobs than large businesses do, and they don't move their jobs offshore. And if American taxpayers are going to invest in businesses with tax breaks, we ought to invest in businesses that stay here

Cover Story in Time

There is a model for this kind of intentionally unpolished candidacy, and his name is John McCain.

( These links all came from Google News.)

Billions for Iraq; no money to let a sky marshall sleep overnight.

From MSNBC.com
In an apparent reversal of policy, the Transportation Security Administration will immediately begin scheduling air marshals back on cross-country and international flights, MSNBC.com has learned. The move comes less than 24 hours after MSNBC.com reported that air marshals were being pulled from those flights because of budget problems associated with the costs of overnight lodging for the marshals.

Free* Country

"My co-worker, Craig, says that we should probably be thankful the FBI takes these things seriously; I say it seems like a dark day when an American citizen regards reading as a threat, and downright pitch-black when the federal government agrees. "

Read an article, get visited by the FBI.