Links: sex, assassination, and drug war wins and losses

I'm gonna try something new – a list of links! This is mostly so that I can practice being concise.

1. Apparently Bill Clinton had a girlfriend during Hillary's presidential campaign. Gawker demands to know who.

2. New Jersey legalizes medical marijuana (first state in the Northeast to do so), but definitely will not go the way of California.

3. "Medvedev tells FSB to 'regularly' kill rebels," quoteth the Moscow Times.

4. Chewing tobacco and snus are "10-1,000 times less hazardous than smoking" says Britain’s Royal College of Physicians, but tobacco companies are legally forbidden from advertising this fact (constitutionality to be determined).

Millionaire corn farmers of the world, unite!

For all the farmer couples out there earning earning $2 million a year, never fear: you're still getting your subsidies! In case there was any doubt, the latest incarnation of the farm bill passed the Senate with flying colors (only fifteen senators had the common sense to vote against it). Though Bush promised to veto the bill (a rare moment of sanity), the point is moot, given that the bill passed both the House and Senate with enough votes to override a veto.

And how do the presidential candidates compare on this issue? The SF Gate has no love for Obama on the issue:

Democratic presidential contender Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who has based his campaign on a promise to end special-interest politics in Washington, issued a statement praising the farm bill, which is laden with special-interest subsidies. Obama said the bill will "provide America's hard-working farmers and ranchers with more support and more predictability."

The incredibly irrelevant Hilary Clinton had the gall to chide McCain for his opposition to the bill. Though McCain is admittedly bad on economics, he took the high road and voted against this bill (from Time: "For now, we need to put an end to flawed government policies that distort the markets, artificially raise prices for consumers, and pit producers against consumers. We’ve once again failed farmers in that regard, which is why I oppose this bill.").

In addition to the absurd economic distortions and general government waste in the bill, the soon-to-be law is guaranteed to piss off the world and hamper the Doha round of trade liberalization.

Obama backpedals on ethanol

Barack Obama, this campaign season's über-champion of ethanol subsidies, is starting to retreat from his position:

With the world teetering on the edge of a full-blown food crisis, it may be time to cut back on biofuel, said Barack Obama yesterday.

In an interview on NBC's Meet the Press, the Democratic presidential candidate said "there's no doubt that biofuels may be contributing" to falling food supplies and rising prices.

Ya think!? This being politics, I know it's too much to ask, but it would be nice to hear an apology from Obama for almost single-handidly pushing ethanol to the forefront of the presidential campaign, inspiring a chorus of me-toos from Camp Hillary (though McCain's generally held the high ground, he too occasionally becomes intoxicated on the Iowa spirits).

Edit: Obama's been pretty quiet about the subject of ethanol subsidies since his almost mea culpa, but the NYT didn't give his change of heart any play in an A1 article it ran about his stance on ethanol in June 2008.

Lying would-be presidents

During this election season, an article from Reason reminds us of something very important: the presidential candidates are lying. George Bush lied about shrinking government (and yet was the first president in history to sign off on a $2 trillion federal budget, and then later the first to sign off on a $3 trillion budget) and about a "humble foreign policy" with no "nation building" (and here we are with wars fast approaching the cost of WWII, and which have lasted longer than it did, anyway). But what's most interesting about the article is something I'd never known before: FDR campaigned on a platform that looks downright libertarian in retrospect. An excerpt from the article on the Democrats' manifesto for the 1932 election:

The very first plank calls for "an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than twenty-five per cent in the cost of the Federal Government." (It also asks "the states to make a zealous effort to achieve a proportionate result.") Subsequent planks demand a balanced budget, a low tariff, the repeal of Prohibition, "a sound currency to be preserved at all hazards," "no interference in the internal affairs of other nations," and "the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise except where necessary to develop public works and natural resources in the common interest." The document concludes with a quote from Andrew Jackson: "equal rights to all; special privilege to none." It sounds more like Ron Paul than Pelosi.

And of course, the Democratic primaries aren't even over and we already have some hard evidence that Obama hasn't been exactly been honest with his anti-NAFTA electioneering, and then there's the strong anecdotal evidence that Hilary Clinton hasn't been, either (as I recall, someone very close to her championed the passage of that bill as president in the early '90s...now if I could just remember his name!).

The bigger issue, I think, is why this isn't an issue. Why do presidential candidates get to lie their way through the elections, and then totally change their position when they're actually in office? Why, during their inevitable incumbent campaigns, are they not shamed for their lies four years earlier? You'd think that in the world of 24/7 cable news, with constant harping on the smallest of issues, these bald-faced lies would be rating-gettings for the networks. But apparently not.

Why politicians wouldn't want to talk about science

The headline on wired.com today is an article about Clinton, Obama, and McCain spurning a debate that was supposed to be about science. You'd think that would be a warm place for Democrats: there is no fundamentalist Christian base out there asking them to refute basic tenants of modern science, and yet neither of them wanted to show up at the event. It's pretty telling, though, of electoral strategies: debating science is a very technical topic, and actually requires expertise. Which isn't a bad thing – if a president is going to be making decisions that are ultimately rooted in science, they ought to know something about it. But people don't campaign on facts, they campaign generalities. What's Obama going to say when someone confronts him about the environmental and humanitarian costs of ethanol subsidies? Or when McCain is questioned about his statement that marijuana has no unique medicinal value? Or when any of the candidates are pressed on how likely any of their plans are to actually address America's contribution to general environmental degradation? So much of electioneering is based on trying to get people to not pay attention to numbers and facts, so it doesn't seem to be in anyone's advantage to embarrass themselves when they have to concede that they really don't know much about science at all.

Murtha's myrrh*

The WaPo has an article about Rep. John Murtha's endorsement of Hilary Clinton, and doesn't skimp on the filth that is this man. All from the man with institutionalized bribe sessions and a penchant for directing federal anti-terror/anti-drug money to his rusting town on the Pennsylvania side of the PA/WV border. And yet, somehow, despite the Democrats' rhetoric about Bush's fiscal irresponsibility, an endorsement from the House's largest recipient of pork seems to be the best thing that Clinton has going for her in Pennsylvania. Thankfully, the last two paragraphs of the article do Murtha's sliminess justice:

In 1980, Murtha testified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Abscam trial of two House members after an FBI sting in which agents offered several lawmakers $50,000 to help a fictitious sheik with immigration problems. In a conversation that agents videotaped, Murtha responded characteristically: He refused to take the money, but he indicated that he might be able to help later if the man invested in local businesses and helped unemployed miners get new jobs.

"He understands the system, and he knows how to work it better than anybody," Rooney said. "I'm not sure there's anybody from around here who wields more influence."

* From Wikipedia: "Myrrh was burned in ancient Roman funerals to mask the smell emanating from charring corpses."