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Over
at Mediaite, Andrew
Kirell notes The Nation’s holiday season subscription pitch,
which slags Ayn Rand thusly.

Har har har.

Because lord knows the real problem these days is the outsized
influence of the authoress of Atlas Shrugged.

Because as we all know that Rand wanted federal spending (under
Republicans and Democrats) to double in nominal terms and to end up
staying above $3.5 trillion a year; she hoped that a liberal
progressive president would declare the right to unilaterally kill
anyone he says is a threat to the good ol’ U.S. of A.; she lobbied
for a conservative-majority Supreme Court to rule that the
government can’t just regulate whatever existing commere there is
but can force also force citizens to engage in commerce; and like
The Nation in a recent article, she fretted that the Communist
Chinese are insidiously taking over the American university
system.

Yeah, Ayn Rand and good old Uncle Norm are the problem in
21st-century America!

Do yourself – and Reason – a favor and subscribe to the magazine of
Free Minds and Free Markets. It’s less than $15 a year and it
goes to keep the lights burning bright here at Reason.com.

Over
at Mediaite, Andrew
Kirell notes The Nation’s holiday season subscription pitch,
which slags Ayn Rand thusly.

Har har har.

Because lord knows the real problem these days is the outsized
influence of the authoress of Atlas Shrugged.

Because as we all know that Rand wanted federal spending (under
Republicans and Democrats) to double in nominal terms and to end up
staying above $3.5 trillion a year; she hoped that a liberal
progressive president would declare the right to unilaterally kill
anyone he says is a threat to the good ol’ U.S. of A.; she lobbied
for a conservative-majority Supreme Court to rule that the
government can’t just regulate whatever existing commere there is
but can force also force citizens to engage in commerce; and like
The Nation in a recent article, she fretted that the Communist
Chinese are insidiously taking over the American university
system.

Yeah, Ayn Rand and good old Uncle Norm are the problem in
21st-century America!

Do yourself – and Reason – a favor and subscribe to the magazine of
Free Minds and Free Markets. It’s less than $15 a year and it
goes to keep the lights burning bright here at Reason.com.

Imagine if McDonald’s, rather
than attempting to add
chicken wings to their menu, instead tried to deal with their
fast food competitors by trying to outlaw KFC. Who knows – maybe
they’d try if they thought they could get away with it. They can’t,
but casino magnate Sheldon Adelson believes he can use his fortune
to keep Internet gambling from becoming legal. The Washington
Post notes today the blatant, open corporate cronyism of a man
trying to cast a sinister light on Internet gambling in order to

protect himself from competition:

Billionaire casino magnate Shel­don Adelson, whose
record-breaking campaign spending in 2012 made him an icon of the
new super-donor era, is leveraging that newfound status in an
escalating feud with industry rivals over the future of
gambling.

Adelson, best known for building upscale casino resorts in
Nevada and more recently in Asia, wants to persuade Congress to ban
Internet betting. He says the practice is a danger to society and
could tarnish the industry’s traditional business model.

Nearly all of his competitors, including Caesars Entertainment
and MGM Resorts, disagree. They say regulated Internet gambling can
be done safely and can boost the industry.

Really, imagine people online giving you money and you not
needing to pay overhead for housekeepers and buffets and drink
specials and the whole Las Vegas/Atlantic City “experience.”

But that’s not where Adelson is at. He’s going to launch an
advocacy group, the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, and create
an advertising campaign to paint Internet gambling as evil, using
the same fears of online child predators that your local news
station does, to try to lure in nannyish supporters. For the
children, folks! We mustn’t allow Internet casinos to take money
out of Adelson’s pocket for the sake of the children!

Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey have legalized online gambling
to a certain degree, so Adelson may be trying to fight the tide.
Those rival casinos who support Internet gambling point out that
Adelson’s efforts would backfire, even if he succeeds, by
entrenching an Internet gambling black market:

“Sheldon’s approach would endanger everything he professes he
wanted to protect,” said Jan Jones Blackhurst, executive vice
president for government relations at Caesars Entertainment.
Adelson argues that a strictly enforced federal ban would
effectively shut down black-market gambling.  

Sadly, The Washington Post neglects to press Adelson to
give an example of a “strictly enforced federal ban” that had
successfully shut down any black market, ever, in American
history.

Read the whole story
here.

On August 30, the day after Deputy Attorney
General James Cole
announced a new policy of prosecutorial restraint for marijuana
growers and sellers who comply with state law, Melinda Haag, the
U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California,
said it would not affect her work. She has been true to her
word. The East Bay Express notes
that Haag continues to pursue forfeitures aimed at shutting down
the Berkeley Patients Group and Oakland’s Harborside Health
Center. Haag argues that the Berkeley dispensary is too close to a
preschool, a claim the city’s mayor disputes. She cites the sheer
size of Harborside, the state’s biggest dispensary, as cause for
concern. As the Express points out, neither of those
rationales seems to fit any of the eight “enforcement priorities”
that Cole listed in his
August 29 memo as reasons for federal intervention.  
  

The memo did mention preventing underage consumption, but that
does not really seem relevant, unless Haag thinks 4-year-olds are
scoring marijuana at the Berkeley Patients Group. As for
Harborside’s size, Cole explicitly said, in a departure from prior
Justice Department policy, that  “prosecutors should not
consider the size or commercial nature of a marijuana operation
alone” in deciding whether targeting it is an appropriate use of
their resources. The Express notes that both
dispensaries have the backing of city and state officials:

Neither BPG nor Harborside has broken state law, which is why
Governor Jerry Brown has denounced the federal court actions and
why the cities of Oakland and Berkeley have moved to block the
forfeitures. Oakland sued Haag in October of 2012, and Berkeley
moved to intervene in the BPG case in July of this year.

At an October 29 conference, BPG’s attorney reports, the “judge
questioned why this case was proceeding in light of the Cole memo,”
and “the U.S. attorney had a very difficult time articulating an
answer.” By contrast, André Birotte, the U.S. attorney
for the Central District of California,
dropped several forfeiture cases against dispensary
landlords in Irvine, Santa Ana, and Los Angeles in the wake of the
Cole memo.

The Cole memo leaves
lots of leeway for prosecutorial discretion, depending on how
the enforcement priorities are interpreted and whether new ones are
invented on the fly (a possibility the memo itself contemplates).
But if Haag’s continued crackdown is consistent with the new
policy, it clearly does not mean much in practice. Likewise if U.S.
attorneys feel free to flout it.

[Thanks to Richard Cowan for the link.]

• The Supreme Court
  turned away a case from the Electronic Privacy Information
  Center to stop the National Security Agency’s mass collection of
  telephone call metadata. There are still other challenges heading
  through the federal courts.
• A judge has ruled that prosecutors can use evidence from
  
  James Holmes’ apartment in his trial for the Aurora, Colo.,
  theater shootings, even though police didn’t have a warrant at the
  time of the search.
• Washington State has started accepting license applications for
  those who want to
  legally sell marijuana in the state.
• The Department of Justice and the Security Exchange Commission
  seem to be accepting that Bitcoins are
  “legitimate financial instruments” of currency in a hearing
  before a Senate subcommittee today.
• 
  George Zimmerman has been arrested again, this time on a
  domestic disturbance call in Central Florida.
• The
  high tax rates in France are leading to social unrest that
  could blow up even worse than it already is, according to a secret
  report from country’s ministry of the interior.

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Back when President Obama was a senator, there
were high hopes for a return, of sorts, to the era that ended 50
years ago this week with the assassination of President Kennedy.
Obama, recall, came into office with members of the Kennedy family
and JFK’s White House counselor, Ted Sorenson, expressing hope that
he would follow in JFK’s footsteps. Ira Stoll says that if Obama
wants to be more like Kennedy, his best hope at this point is
probably a final push on free trade.

View this article.

Back when President Obama was a senator, there
were high hopes for a return, of sorts, to the era that ended 50
years ago this week with the assassination of President Kennedy.
Obama, recall, came into office with members of the Kennedy family
and JFK’s White House counselor, Ted Sorenson, expressing hope that
he would follow in JFK’s footsteps. Ira Stoll says that if Obama
wants to be more like Kennedy, his best hope at this point is
probably a final push on free trade.

View this article.

The Guardian has an interesting
article out today on the growth of so-called “cannabis clubs” that
have sprung up in the U.K.

From
The Guardian:

Over the past few years, local cannabis clubs have blossomed
over Britain. There are now 49 around the UK, which are united by
the UK Cannabis Social Club, an organisation founded in 2011 to
represent cannabis users. Operating primarily through Facebook,
(the LCC’s page has had 39,301 likesthe clubs bring cannabis users
together from all over Britain to discuss topics ranging from
fertiliser to self-medication and campaigning for the
decriminalisation of the drug. They also organise meetings, from a
recent 10,000 person smoke-out in Hyde Park to more intimate
evenings such as tonight’s soiree, allowing pensioners, students,
bricklayers and bankers to talk about one of their favourite
hobbies.

Clubs like the London Cannabis Club (LCC) continue despite the
possession of marijuana being illegal in the U.K. As the head of
the LCC points out, talking about pot is not against the law:

The fact that growing and possessing cannabis is illegal in
Britain does not deter many cannabis clubs across the UK from using
social media to publicise meetings – “It’s not illegal to talk
about cannabis,” says Boon – and the openness is part of the
campaign for normalisation. Members themselves usually keep their
involvement private: “Many of the people I’ve met have families,
high-profile jobs, mortgages and all sorts, and are terrified of
losing everything,” he adds.

LCC’s Facebook page (visit it here), includes not only a
collection of pot-related news from around the world, it also
features pictures of marijuana sent in by members (example
below):

The existence of clubs like the ones mentioned in The
Guardian could be used by British drug warriors like Peter
Hitchens to back up their claim that the war on drugs
is a myth:

How is it that, in a country where drugs are supposedly illegal
— where ‘evil dealers’ are endlessly denounced — that drugs are so
common and that little or nothing happens to those who are caught
in possession of them? How did the ‘cannabis warning’, a gesture
without force or penalty, unsanctioned by Parliament, become the
preferred response of the police to the crime of possession? How
can Pete Doherty drop illegal drugs on the floor of a courthouse,
be caught by a security guard and yet walk free from the building,
if we are — as we are so often told — running a regime of stern
prohibition?

The answer is that the official version of events is simply
false. Since a momentous Cabinet meeting in February 1970, there
has been no ‘war on drugs’ in this country, only the official
pretence of one.

Of course, the U.K. doesn’t wage anywhere near as aggressive a
war on drugs as the U.S. does. However, the fact remains that
possession of drugs in the U.K. can
result in a prison term. Supplying drugs can also result in a
prison term, and the British government considers sharing drugs as
supplying. In June, the British government
reported that over 10,000 people in England and Wales were in
prison for drug offenses, representing 14 percent of the sentenced
prison population. 

There may be cannabis clubs in the U.K., but the growing and
possession of the product they are dedicated to is, unfortunately,
still illegal. 

Thankfully, it looks like Hitchens holds
a minority view when it comes to British drug policy, and at
least one British law enforcement official, the
chief constable of Durham Constabulary, believes that making
drugs legal would be a good policy change.