On Safety In America

I chimed in on The Hill's Big Question today.

Has the Obama Administration made us safer? Explain.

To answer this question, you'd have to buy into the idea that the United States wasn't safe to begin with. Nate Silver looked at the airline stats over the last decade and found only a 1 in 10.5 million chance of dying in an act of air terror. On the other hand, it's a 1 in 500,000 chance of being struck by lightening. I'd say both events are rare, but hijackings fall in the extremely, rare category. Most pundits and people approach these issues with a startling lack of perspective.

I'd say America is safer when more of its citizens have health care, access to quality education and a decent standard of living. Obama is working towards those goals.

The Hill: Legalize It! (Or at Least Decriminalize It)

Can we finally start talking about marijuana decriminalization?

Boston voted to do it in November. There was a bill just introduced in California to legalize and tax it; after all, it's their largest cash crop and would bring in $1 billion in taxes per annum. President Obama is certainly open to it.

Public Opinion is catching up. Recent polls have support for legalization at all-time highs, 40 percent, which means, in some ways, that pot is more popular than the Republican Party. Nate Silver did the math, and if support keeps growing at these rates we'll have 60 percent nationwide for legalization by 2022.

Since Obama has taken office, there have been five DEA raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in the state of California. Barack Obama should order the immediate halt of federal intervention in states like California that allow for the use and distribution of medical marijuana. Seventy-two percent of the American people would be behind him, and he pledged to do it during the campaign. These raids should be halted immediately by Attorney General Eric Holder, but the White House says they will wait until a new DEA head is named.

Once Obama clears the ways for the states to move on marijuana legislation, who knows what could happen?

Originally posted on The Hill.

Sean Penn Robs Mickey Rourke And Other Milk Thoughts

Last night Sean Penn stole an Oscar from Mickey Rourke. He won a victory because California voters felt bad about Proposition 8. Penn's performance was irrelevant.

Nate Silver called it as plainly as he could last night, "I blame Prop 8." He went into more detail today, "...politics of Sean Penn playing a gay icon in a year where Hollywood felt very guilty about the passage of Proposition 8. The disadvantage is that human beings have all sorts of cognitive biases, and it's easy to allow these biases to color one's thinking." That's what happened here. Milk is, as Andrew Sullivan calls it, a "less-than-stellar gay movie."

Milk is mis-educating an entire generation of gay activists, wrongly convincing them that they need to just be louder and more obnoxious to get the rights for which they are indisputably entitled. They're wrong, of course. We're in an entirely different phase of the struggle now. We're past rioting outside Mormon Temples to prove we exist. People know we exist and we need to show them we're deserving.

Harvey Milk was an inspiring man - the kind we needed in the 1970s. He's not what we need now. We don't need that kind of in-your-face identity politics. It won't work and it's counterproductive.

And Mickey, if you want an Oscar you're gonna have to play an illiterate-transgendered-quadriplegic community organizer in 1930s Berlin. That role has Oscar gold written all over it.

Oscar Night

Yesterday, to catch up on Oscar-nominated movies, I went to see three - The Reader, Doubt, & Revolutionary Road. One of the great things about Bloomington is that movies only cost $5, so my entire day at the theater cost about as much as one NYC ticket.

I enjoyed all three of the films, but I truly LOVED The Reader. I feel sorta ready for this year's Oscars, but I never did get a chance to see Frost/Nixon. Other than that, I'm in pretty good shape.

Nate Silver (the statistician who called the 2008 election nearly perfectly) has Oscar Predictions based on a mathematical formula. I think he's right on everything, except Best Supporting Actress, which I think will go to Viola Davis in Doubt.

I'm looking forward to Mickey Rourke winning tonight. The Wrestler was AMAZING and one of my favorite films of the year. I would have nominated it for Best Picture and Director. I'd also have nominated Wall-E and The Dark Knight for Best Picture. Slumdog Millionaire was damn good, but paled in comparison to the similar City Of God. Now that's a fucking movie.

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