Miss Clifton Wades In

Today there is much rejoicing. Our Federal Government, the one that dictates how fast we can drive, what light bulbs we use and how much water we need to flush the damn toilet, is ceding to the states the right to legalize weed. And of course, the Bay Aryans are all a-dither in their adulation of the extremely clever and humane administration of our only president. I swiped that last bit from Molly Ivins. She won't care. She's dead from cancer or drinking or an ugly disposition. Something. Anyway, back to the potheads.

I have a series of questions for you, ahem, smokers out there. If you read the comments you get the same old blather about Prohibition and lost tax revenue, yada yada. OK. If marijuana is harmless, why were we subjected to The Grateful Dead for freaking decades? They only made two good albums! Only TWO!!! Why hasn't anybody come up with a more evolved, compelling comparison than Prohibition? Why is this the only time stoners care about something dull like tax revenue? Why is this the singular instance of their noodling out the math? That and mentally doing metric weight conversions. And you know what, Ben and Jerry's isn't exactly good for you.

Oh, not you, of course. You're a productive citizen. Never broke any other laws, always held a job, paid your own way, the whole nine yards. That may be. But you have to know, in your more lucid moments (like the day before payday when you've been smoking resin since Tuesday) how much more productive you could be if you didn't have to spend all that time finding your keys. But today's payday and you have your mind on other things, like working groceries and rent and dope. So I'll tell you why this is a crappy-ass idea from a government that doesn't give a damn about you, that uses you like a punk every two years when it's time to vote for them to continue living off you. Think of it as my public service. I'm a giver.

Legal dope means more people can get it cheaper. Woo Hoo!! I hear you. But think on this: You know how you'd rather not be bothered with certain details when you're high? Or you hear stuff and then forget about it? Or you hear stuff, period? Or you get these big ambitious ideas you never follow through on? Yeah. That's what they're counting on. You like conspiracy theories? Almost as much as you like Sunchips? Mmmm, French Onion... where was I? Oh, yeah. Our government is kind of saying that they'd really dig it if they could keep you... well, suggestible. That it'd be the path of least resistance to just do as you're told, and since you won't remember what you're told that could be a new thing every week. "Giving" your state this "right" is a means by which to buy loyalty through the indenture of your addiction. Because this isn't about sick people. Sick people take Marinol or eat weed; addicts smoke, and you know it as well as I do.

Every worker works because they have a lifestyle to maintain. Nobody has any incentive to earn more than they absolutely need when they know any surplus will be confiscated. Children provide a pretty good incentive. So does a drug habit.

This isn't giving you "the right" to anything. This is cynically preying on people's weaknesses. It's what the British did to the Chinese with opium, to make them malleable and less able to resist The Crown's predation. Read up on the Boxer Rebellion. And you'd celebrate the guy you voted for doing the same to you? You must be on drugs.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Perhaps you've heard of the recent natural gas shortages in Europe caused by Russia's decision to cut the supply. Gazprom is the leading gas utility and through various bailouts and sweetheart deals is a defacto entity of the Russian government. Like General Motors over here. Gazprom's reasoning behind turning off the taps was that the Ukraine owed them money so they weren't going to send their gas through Ukraine's pipelines until they were paid. Gas to most of the rest of Europe also flows through those pipelines, so reducing the pressure in the lines reduces the amount of heat everyone down the line gets. People are freezing. If this ever gets resolved and Gazprom turns the gas back on, my money's on them doing it all at once so it blows out the lines. It would be exquisitely Russian. Of course the real purpose behind all this is to show Europe the extent of Russia's reach. We have the power to freeze you and starve you. Do things our way, 'kay?

Ok, that's worrying, but it's Europe's problem. We have troubles enough over here, right? Not yet, apparently. The model Russia perfected with natural gas is now being applied to the steel industry. As in, our steel industry. Roman Abramovich is one of those Russian 'oligarchs' -- really rich young dudes with no past who seem to have risen from the waves on a clamshell. Amongst other holdings, he is one of two primary shareholders in the Evraz Group. They own steel mills. American steel mills. They've already renegotiated the existing sales contracts through the established business practice of tearing up the old ones and dictating new terms. So now every construction project that requires steel (that would be all of them) faces the prospect of paying the Russian government, since they've provided Abramovich with unsecured bailout funds to keep Evraz afloat. He's in a bit of a pinch right now, since Evraz is also trying to buy Delong Holdings Ltd., a Chinese steel maker.

A couple of other guys, Vladimir Potanin and Oleg Deripaska, plan to merge their mining company with Evraz, as well as with another couple mining companies and a producer of coal and steel. Russia's government would receive a quarter of the new company in exchange for paying off their debts.

They're going to take us without firing a shot. You could almost admire the efficiency of it.

CSPAN Junkie

One huge upside of our peaceful transfer of power is the Democrats have way more televised hearings than the Republicans. Sometimes it's in spite of themselves, like the impeachment. Every time it's a festival of body language, a confluence of personalities so borderline, egos so unbounded they cannnot be contained within a single human body. A good congressional hearing emits tsunomic waves of perfumed self-importance that can be sensed right through the TV screen three timezones away. It is an art form as subtle as Noh, a sport as brutal as Muy Thai. And they are playing for all the marbles.

I'm watching Mrs. Clinton's confirmation hearing. Chelsea's there, sitting in the row behind her mom. John Kerry made a point of acknowledging her. Miss Clinton got a polite and loyal round of applause, which Sen. Schumer immediately tried to claim as his own. Now, Mom is wearing a sensible brown suit. Miss Chelsea's got on a purple sleeveless number, in DC in January. Her hair is worn loose and she upstages the hell out of her mother. Delish.

Sen. Kerry said since Chel's dad served as an intern on the FRC, they would be happy to make Chelsea an 'intern for a day' and he personally invited her up on the dias after the hearing so she could sit in the chairs and take in the view. Because our government is their toy.

Thanks Ever So

Remember the picture of Ann Coulter Time mag put on their cover, the one that made her look like she was about eight, sitting in Daddy's chair and playing dress-up in Mommy's shoes? The same photographer, it seems, has worked his magic upon Obama. This is not the magazine I saw this morning in the grocery store, but the photograph is very similar. The one in the store was even more pronounced. Shooting him from below, at a child's perspective, is intended to evoke the Lincoln Memorial, I suppose. I'm getting the Stalin vibe, too. that may be unintentional. And since it's in Time it will become part of the secular iconography of the left. We'll be seeing this shot angle over and over again, which suits me fine. I didn't see 'monumental' or 'heroic' in that photo. The angle is so pronounced it makes his body look disproportionately large. They tried so hard to make him look like Our Hero they ended up with Zippy the President. There's your metaphor.

Yar

Muslim thugs, primarily from Somalia, have captured and are holding 17 ships for ransom, including a shipment of munitions and an oil tanker. Ninety ships have been attacked just this year. The reaction by the world community has been to bravely run away, sending cargo around the Cape of Good Hope so as to avoid the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aden. Me, I would have scuttled every captured ship, taken the write-off and sent the families a ham. That's probably why I'm not in charge of anything important. You'd really only have to do it once or twice, though. Just saying. Oh, and can we stop minimizing the threat by calling them "pirates?" Brings to mind little boys playing pretend. Some of them may well be little boys, but they aren't playing. It's only a matter of time before they figure out a cruise ship warrants a much larger, more expedient payday.

The Russians have taken a different approach. They are sending warships down to the Horn to protect their interests. Interests that will undoubtedly include monitoring ship traffic. It's the only way to find those nasty pirates, doncha know. So when they find a ship with something really bad on it -- or something really good -- they have a responsibility to detain that vessel until they neutralize the threat. Or get paid. After all, who's to stop them? We're swapping one set of thugs for a more organized, better-armed set, one prone to, um, accidents. Even if they get paid. And nobody's going to do anything about it.

A Sudden Rush of Brains to the Head

When the Russians start in on us about the lack of trust between our two nations, that means they have a blackmail file. Allow me to formulate a theory:

OK. Brace yourself.
Medvedev/Putin is 'optimistic' about having favorable (to them) relations with the Obama administration because...drumroll...
They have a certified copy, or the original, of Obama's birth certificate.
And it doesn't say 'Hawaii' on it.
It might not say 'Obama' on it, either. Awkward. But that's a stretch. I figure it's something very disqualifying (But Mrs. Clinton would have ripped his throat out, so to speak, and she didn't) or it's something intensely personally embarrassing, which would be not actually being an African prince but the son of some anonymous Leroy.

Hawaii has sealed the records so no one stateside can go look, but the campaign's been going on since the Battle of Hastings. Two years is plenty of time for a determined intelligence-gathering operation to work up a dossier on anyone, and I don't think even Mr. Obama saw himself as the nominee back then, much less The Office of the President Elect. So the true document is loosed into the wild and it's only a matter of time before it is produced. The only suspense is under which circumstances.

Six Degrees of Barack Obama

Barack Obama is friends with Bill Ayres. Bill says so.

Bill is friendly with Hugo Chavez. He went to Venezuela in 2006 to speak at an education conference, where he expressed his admiration for Chavez.

Hugo Chavez is friendly (like the snake is friendly with the mongoose) with Dimitry Medvedev and by extension Vladimir Putin, the hand up Medvedev's back. He probably likes Putin better, actually. How could a kung-fu fighting pet tiger owner not appeal to the Napoleon Dynamite of world politics?

Medvedev is planning a sit-down with Mr. Obama to discuss Russian-American relations. He says he's optimistic. I bet. Even if The Office of the President Elect saw fit to ask for advice, who'd he consult? Ayres, his bomb-throwing surrogate daddy, would welcome taking it all down, man, so long as he gets a dacha on Lake Michigan. His cabinet will be resuscitated Clinton staffers so we (and people we negotiate with) can mostly predict what they'll say. Biden can only be counted upon to say something stupid and unhelpful. Probably a recipe for glazed ham he swiped out of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. If McCain's age was a liability, why'd we elect Grandpa Simpson as VP?

Russia sees Obama as an insecure lightweight, a grasping, overcompensating punk. They'd have to. Chavez thinks the guy is no big deal. I can't decide whether that's hilarious or insulting. And the people who elected him will be too busy trying to keep ahead of the bills to care if Obama sells out the home world.

I must say it makes me uneasy when life imitates punk.

An interesting footnote: I was looking for the NYT article I saw where Ayres came out after the election and said he was in fact all buddy-buddy with Obama. Can't find it, on two different search engines. It must never have existed...