Bad news that looks like good news: Possible changes to New York's marijuana laws

Guest post by Ted Leibowitz  

Ed. note: Ted is good friends with our former associate editor and co-blogger Creature, and Ted often wrote for Creature's now-on-long-hiatus blog State of the Day. He's an occasional guest blogger here at The Reaction. -- MJWS  

Ted Leibowitz is an award-winning internet radio music director / DJ focused on bringing the best new and interesting indie rock to his worldwide listenership via his 10-year old station BAGeL Radio. He has been featured on panels at music/tech conferences and writes about the exciting new business of music as well as the foot-dragging, entrenched, dinosaur-like old music industry. 

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The headline reads, "New York State Is Set to Loosen Marijuana Laws." To marijuana advocates, this sounds good on the surface. However, Governor Andrew Cuomo's gesture is being made more for political reasons than for the betterment of New Yorkers. 

This is not good news for legal marijuana advocates and should be opposed and worked around. As with what Governor Chris Christie did in NJ, or the mistakes made in Connecticut (legal since May 2012; however, the state still has no dispensaries!), a baby step like this will do more to delay medical marijuana for most people and legalization in general than doing nothing. 

Making medical marijuana legal for a very limited number of people doesn't help the hundreds of thousands in jail for possession, nor the hundreds of thousands more who will be incarcerated in the coming years due to way-out-of-line draconian New York State and federal drug laws. 

The continued destruction of lives by criminalization and incarceration for a benign activity partaken of by so many is a social injustice equal to denying sick people medicine that will improve their quality of life. 

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Behind the Ad: Cuomo vs. Cuomo on casino gambling

By Richard K. Barry

(Another installment in our extensive "Behind the Ad" series.)  

Who: The Committee Against Proposition 1.

Where: New York State (downstate).

What's going on: Politics is always about a lot more than who gets elected. Sometimes it's about referenda that could have a significant impact on policy decisions. It's not as exciting as horse race stuff, but it can be very important.

There is a proposition on the ballot in New York State to expand casino gambling. Current Gov. Cuomo supports it, which could add up to seven new casinos in the state.  Twenty years ago, his father, then Gov. Mario Cuomo lobbied against casino gambling.

It's a clever tactic to tie the son to a prior position of the father, though Mario is having none of it. According to The Buffalo News:

Mario Cuomo released a statement tonight distancing himself from the claims in the new ad. "I made those statements in 1994. A great deal has changed in 20 years. The New York that I was dealing with was a different place. We didn't have casinos on every border. Gaming was only in Las Vegas and Atlantic City,'' he said in a written statement.

Mario Cuomo said his statement was made before New York legalized racetrack-based casinos and before casinos came to other states and provinces surrounding New York. "So if you want to vote with Cuomo, vote yes on Proposal One,'' he said.

Memo to the group that produced this ad: No one cares what Mario Cuomo said about anything twenty years ago.

Behind the Ad: Fun with names in New Jersey

By Richard K. Barry

(Another installment in our extensive "Behind the Ad" series.)

Who: The Barbara Buono campaign for governor.

Where: New Jersey.

What's going on: The ad starts out having fun with the fact that some people have a hard time pronouncing Buono's last name. It's not pronounced like Sonny Bono, or Bono the singer, etc., etc.,

And then, somewhat gratuitously, she introduces the name and picture of popular New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Aaron Blake at The Washington Post says this:

Buono's use of Cuomo is particularly interesting given how close Cuomo has been with Christie — especially given their work on Hurricane Sandy-related issues in recent months. Cuomo also has sometimes endorsed against his party's nominee or withheld his endorsement altogether, so it's no cinch that he will back her candidacy.

Buono's ad doesn't say Cuomo has endorsed her, but it sure suggests that she'd like to be associated with his political brand — which will be quite familiar to voters in the Garden State.

Blake calls this sneaky. I'm not sure. As he admits, she doesn't say Cuomo has endorsed her. And what is so wrong with wanting to be associated with the popular brand of someone in your own party in your own region?

Come on. She's going to get thumped. Give her something. 


(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

Gov. Cuomo was never going to challenge Clinton

By Richard K. Barry

I typically avoid sourcing anything to the New York Post, but since this recent story is hardly counterintuitive, I'll take the chance. Call me a snob, but I am suspicious of any media outlet that calls a campaign for the most powerful political office in the word "running for prez."

Anyway, they are reporting that New York Gov. Cuomo is "quietly" telling "friends and associates that he is resigned to the fact that he can't run for president in 2016 if Hillary Rodham Clinton enters the race":

"The governor has told people in recent weeks that there's not a chance for him to run if Hillary gets in the race because she'll easily wrap up the Democratic nomination," said a Cuomo administration insider with direct knowledge of the situation.

"He knows that and he accepts that, and so he won't even be thinking at all in those terms -- unless Hillary decides not to run, which seems unlikely," the source continued.

Cuomo has repeatedly denied an interest in "running for prez," but few believe he would refrain if there was a plausible path to the nomination.
Alas, there is not, which makes the anonymous sources cited credible enough.

(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

A tale of two cites

By Carl 

So, it was the best of times last week as I took a week's break from the news and the grind of ordinary life and went on a tropical vacation to central America. Specifically, I went to the Honduran Bay Island of Roatan. And I couldn't help but take a critical eye to my surroundings.

Now, none of this should in any way, shape or form being construed as a reflection on either the people of or the government on the island. Everyone I met was very nice, hard-working, and friendly. But it was hard not to notice one glaring problem.

A little history is in order.

Honduras was originally two nations: Spanish Honduras, and British Honduras (now Belize). As you can imagine, Hondurans spoke Spanish, and Belizeans spoke English.

However, the Bay Islands were mostly populated by the Caracol people, originally black slaves from Jamaica and the Caymans who moved to the Bay Islands when Great Britain repealed slavery in the mid-1800s.

That population has moved out in large numbers over the past twenty years, primarily due to the devastation caused by 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, which devastated the island. Mainland Hondurans then moved in, as Roatan is one of the few places in Honduras where work is plentiful and easy to come by. It is a huge tourism destination, and has a deep water port that fits a cruise ship nicely.

Also, as part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second largest in the world, the waters off the island are teeming with fish. And scuba divers.

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The Gregory Brothers take on the war on drugs

By Richard K. Barry

I went into my digital New York Times account this morning and found this interesting video on page one. It was produced by a group called The Gregory Brothers. The Wiki on this says that "The Gregory Brothers digitally manipulate recorded voices of politicians, news anchors and political pundits to conform to a melody, making the figures appear to sing."

 Yes, that would seem to be what they do. I thought it was fun for a Saturday.



(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

Don't primary red-state Democrats

By Frank Moraes 

After a string of clueless attempts to be iconoclastic, Jonathan Chait managed to write something that is both iconoclastic and right, "Senate Democrats Wise to Block Background Checks." His argument is very simple: red-state Democrats have to make some non-liberal votes to maintain credibility with their voters; this bill was almost completely useless, or, as Chait puts it, "a compromise of a compromise"; therefore, this was a good bill to vote against. And as I noted on Monday, the final law could have been much worse than nothing at all.

One thing that Chait doesn't mention is that as much as these red state Democrats may annoy us from time to time, they are very strong members of the team. In fact, currently the Democratic Party has more discipline in the Senate than the Republican Party. So the calls I'm hearing from certain corners that we could to primary these red-state Democrats are just crazy.

There is a related issue that I think is really important. Democratic politicians from blue states are often quite conservative, especially on economic issues. Dianne Feinstein, from my own great state of California, comes to mind. When it comes to red-state Democrats, a primary challenge might end with a Republican winning the general election. But why aren't we primarying Democrats in blue states?

One of our biggest political problems is that the Republican Party is too extreme and the Democratic Party not extreme enough. One way to fix this would be to enforce a little ideological purity on our representatives from liberal areas. After all, what makes the Republican Party unacceptable is not that Orrin Hatch of Utah is an extremist. He's from an extremist state; he should be extremist. But why do the people of the very liberal state of New York have an economic conservative as governor?

So we need to stop this nonsense about primarying red-state Democrats and start talking about primarying their blue-state counterparts who have no good reason for being as conservative as they are.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Pretend liberals

By Frank Moraes 

Eric Alterman had a great article in last week's print edition of The Nation, "Cuomo vs. Cuomo" (it's behind a pay wall, but a subscription only costs $9.50 per year -- I think The New York Times charges more per month). In it, he talks about the two sides of Cuomo the Younger (Andrew): Socially Progressive Economically Conservative. This is so common that some clever pundits have coined an acronym: SPEC.

I have a better term for such people: Pretend Liberals. It is really quite simple: it doesn't matter what laws you have if the power of individuals is too unequal. If you have the money, you can get around most laws. Wanna launder drug money? That might cost you a few bucks, but certainly not your freedom. If you don't have money, you just better be lucky. Wanna launder drug money? You're looking at life imprisonment. Hell, you don't have to do anything at all for the state to kill you.

(It's interesting to think about this for a moment. There is a great test case: OJ Simpson. Rich OJ had no problem getting a not guilty verdict against a case that was pretty strong. Poor OJ got 33 years for a fairly trumped up charge. Rich man, poor man: free man, caged man.)

Thus, I think we really need to do something about the Democratic Party. Over the last 20 years, the party really has abandoned economic issues. Just watch MSNBC. It is frightening. Now, I'm not suggesting that the people on MSNBC don't believe in economic liberalism. Rather, they are all well-to-do, and are more than willing to overlook the economic issue if they can get some decent policy (or lip service!) on guns or gay rights. What's more, we have our great liberal president whose idea of fair is for the rich to pay an extra percent in taxes while the elderly get their benefits cut by substantially more. That's not liberalism; that's conservatism; it's just not fascism.

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Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on top of the world

By Richard K. Barry

I'm still betting that Hillary Clinton will make a run for the White House in 2016, but, if she doesn't, Andrew Cuomo certainly might.

A new Sienna College poll has him with impressive approval numbers at the start of his third year in office:

As he starts his third year as Governor, Andrew Cuomo continues to enjoy strong support from voters, with a 71-24 percent favorability rating (down slightly from 72-21 percent last month) and 60-38 percent job performance rating (unchanged), according to a new Siena College Research Institute poll of New York voters released today.

Wow, those are Chris Christie-like numbers.

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If the voters say it's your time, it's your time.

By Richard K. Barry 

For quite a while I have been in the camp of those who think Hillary Clinton will almost certainly make a run for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. I don't expect a pat on the back for my brilliance. From my point of view, it's been a no-brainer. For those who think she will be too old by then, forget about it. She'll be fine. This ageist crap gets on my nerves. It never seems to be an issue for older men, for some reason.

I think she'll run if she thinks she can win, and I think she'll think she can win.

The likelihood of Hillary running got some notice over the weekend when The New York Times decided to draw attention to the obstacle this places in front of a potential run by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who, they write, has done a good job to position himself for the Democratic nomination:

He has challenged — and outmaneuvered — Albany's wily Legislature. He has kept his once-notorious temper from spilling over. He has built a prodigious fund-raising operation and earned poll numbers that are the envy of governors nationwide.

But now Mr. Cuomo, a man who likes to determine his own destiny, faces a variable beyond his control: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

We all know what Cuomo would be up against. Hillary Clinton has been a very popular secretary of state; the Big Dog is a rock star; and Hillary, though originally from Illinois, is now considered virtually a New Yorker, which crowds the neighbourhood for a New York governor.

I don't know that Cuomo would be foolish enough to go up against Clinton should she decide to run, but, if he did, I know there will be plenty of people who would cry foul as if there is a rule about it being his time and that she would be violating some unwritten law of nature to run.

But that's not the way it works. Sometimes when it looks like it's your time, it isn't. I don't suppose Hillary Clinton thought some guy by the name of Barack Obama was going to get in her way.

I don't necessarily keep a book of rules about politics, but, if I did, one of them would be that anyone legally qualified to run in any given race ought to be allowed to let the voters decide if that's a good idea or not. Loudmouths and other pundits, and not a few misogynists among the supposedly progressive class of commentators, will make it known they think Hillary Clinton should go away quietly.

They can all go to hell. I hope she runs. Hang in there, Andy. Your time will come too.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

No cliffhanger for New York's Electoral College votes

By Richard K. Barry

2016. Oh, yeah!

Quinnipiac has a new poll out on voter preferences in New York State. One finding is that Gov. Cuomo has an approval rating of 69 to 19 percent to the good. Better hold on to him while you can, New York. He'll be in the White House in four and a half years. It'll be good to have an Italian-American president, which will make my mother very happy.

On the presidency, well, it's over. Obama has a 55 to 32 percent lead over Romney. I vote in New York, so it's good to know my ballot will be absolutely useless.

The same is true for the Democratic incumbent U.S Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who appears to have an insurmountable lead.

Of course, getting to vote against Tea Party nutjob Nan Hayworth in NY-19 is some consolation. It would be good to get that seat back.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

A sensible proposal

By Carl 

Andrew Cuomo has not exactly had the worst term in office of any first term governor...he did get gay marriage passed, after all, which is both a progressive coup as well as a logistical one...but as a former state attorney general, he has shown a mean streak about crime and punishment. 

Until yesterday:

Wading into the debate over stop-and-frisk police tactics, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo plans to ask legislators on Monday for a change in New York State law that would drastically reduce the number of people who could be arrested for marijuana possession as a result of police stops.

Here's the deal: During Mayor Giuliani's tenure, a political philosophy was applied to police tactics. Called "Broken Windows," it assumed that by cracking down and arresting people for minor crimes like turnstile jumping or possession of a joint, a message would be sent that crime would not be tolerated, thus discouraging larger crimes.

Did it work? It's a quaint notion to believe it did and it may have had some small positive impact on the level of crime in the 1990s in NYC.

During the first half of the '00s, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly applied this theory more broadly. Rather than spot a crime, he went out of his way to find them, insituting the "stop and frisk" practice where police would pull over a person for the crime of being Latino or black, and pat them down, then if they were carrying anything illegal or could be shown to be implicated in an unsolved crime, arrest them.

Nice, huh? The average percentage of people who were innocent of anything hovered around 87% over the past ten years. Some white people were stopped, of course, and ironically white people were arrested and/or issued summonses about twice as often as blacks and Latinos. Representing about 11% of the stops while representing two-thirds of the criminal outcomes, you'd think cops would focus on more whites as the years progressed, but not so.

Many of the crimes involved the possession of small amounts of marijuana which, despite its alleged "decriminalized" status in New York -- it merely means possession of pot has been bifurcated from drug possession laws -- is an offense, which results in a ticket.

If it's the only crime of which the offender is cited. Or, more relevant, his first arrest and conviction. After that, Katie bar the door.

Needless to say, possession of even a joint in those circumstances make you a repeat offender and even though it's considered a violation and dismissed the first time, the next time a possessor will face a judge. And then it becomes either a good lawyer or a conviction. A criminal record and all that implies.

Bleak prospects for a young minority youth in a city like New York. You can't get a job easily with a criminal record, you will always have a handicap in terms of income and housing and god knows what happens to you in jail.

It's not marijuana that's a gateway drug; it's being arrested for possession that is the gateway.

Cuomo's idea, to completely decriminalize possession of small amounts of pot, makes a lot of sense.

This is legislation who's time has long come.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Cuomo targets government employees, will call for pay freeze

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As the Times is reporting, new New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is targeting government employees as part of a broader program of fiscal tightening:

ALBANY — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo will seek a one-year salary freeze for state workers as part of an emergency financial plan he will lay out in his State of the State address on Wednesday, senior administration officials said.

The move will signal the opening of what is expected to be a grueling fight between the new governor and the public-sector unions that have traditionally dominated the state's political establishment.

It will also come days after the New Year's Eve layoffs of more than 900 state workers, an event that union representatives marked with a candlelight vigil on the steps of the Capitol and outside government offices in five other cities.

"The governor said during his campaign that the difficult financial times call for shared sacrifice," said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the governor's address. "A salary freeze is obviously a difficult thing for many government workers, but it's necessary if the state is going to live within its means."

I have very much the same response to this as I had to President Obama's targeting of federal employees. It's a stupid and cynically symbolic move: Big headlines, minimal actual impact on the actual budget. As I put it at the end of November:

Of course, government is an easy target. People generally want government to do what they want -- and to be there when they need something (you know, like disaster relief or police protection) -- but don't want to pay for it.

And while even in this time of economic crisis companies are making huge profits and CEO are taking home huge salaries and bonuses, government employees can easily be scapegoated as the problem, or at least as a large part of the problem, even if they aren't.

It's not about reality, it's about public perception -- and conservatives have managed to convince much of the public that government employees are all a bunch of overpaid layabouts with their snouts in the public trough.

To be fair to Cuomo, things appear to be a bit more challenging at the state level, particularly in New York, where there isn't a bloated military budget that could be significantly pared down and where there aren't tax cuts for the wealthy that ought to be repealed. 

But what I also objected to was Obama's language. He talked back then about how "getting this deficit under control is going to require some broad sacrifice and that sacrifice must be shared by employees of the federal government." Fair enough, but who else is being asked to sacrifice other than those who are already having so much difficulty dealing with the ongoing economic situation? It is likely that any deal with Republicans over the deficit will require cuts to Social Security, and of course Republicans federally have blocked various efforts to extend unemployment and other benefits to those who need help the most. So the rich get their ridiculous tax cuts for another two years while the poor struggle even to put food on the table. And government employees (while, admittedly, not poor) face a pay freeze while Wall Street execs, bailed out by the government, end up with bonuses as massive as ever and corporate America piles on the profits while refusing to hire.

Where exactly is the shared sacrifice?

Look, I get it. Obama and Cuomo have to appear to be doing something about their respective deficits and, as government executives, they're in a position to target government employees, not Wall Street bigwigs and corporate bloodsuckers. And I'm not saying that government should regulate the pay of the private sector -- yes, I'm still a capitalist.

But stop it with the "shared sacrifice" nonsense. We all know who's being asked to sacrifice -- or, rather, who's being forced to sacrifice -- and who isn't.

And we all know that what Cuomo is doing, like what Obama is doing, is almost purely symbolic. As the Times notes, "the immediate budget savings from the freeze would be relatively modest -- between $200 million and $400 million against a projected deficit in excess of $9 billion -- achieving it would be politically meaningful." It's a way around the Assembly, a way around his own state Democratic Party, and a way around the public-sector unions -- a way to look aggressive and non-partisan. The good thing is that any freeze would have to be collectively bargained, and the unions should demand a good deal in return should they agree to it. (A good thing, too, is that a freeze would likely just be for one year -- so it's possible that a fair deal could be reached.)

And remember, the pay that government employees don't get is money that won't be spent, that won't help stimulate the economy at a time when economic stimulation, far more than fiscal restraint, is most needed to get the economy moving again.

I understand the need for all of us -- individuals, corporations, and governments alike -- to live within our means. It is deeply irresponsible, not to mention deeply unfair to future generations, for governments to rack up massive debt. And, yes, tough choices need to be made. But now is not the time for tightening before all else, for restraint over stimulation, for stupid, cynical moves that target the public sector, moves dressed up in the high-falutin', hypocritical, and simply dishonest rhetoric of shared sacrifice.

I have high hopes for Gov. Cuomo and for the most part I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. We'll have to wait for Cuomo's State of the State address on Wednesday for the details of the plan, but I'm just not sure targeting government employees at this time of economic uncertainty and widespread despair is really the way to go.