Here’s an infuriating article that just blew all the circuitry in my irony detector.

A Justice Department lawyer compared the enforcement of idiotic federal marijuana laws to ending Jim Crow in the South.

California and other states that want to make marijuana available to sick or dying patients are flouting federal drug laws in much the same way that Southern states defied national civil rights laws, a senior Bush administration lawyer said.

And here’s a wonder of understatement by his debating opponent:

When government agents shut down marijuana growers who serve sick people, it is “not acting with the same degree of moral propriety as it did to end civil rights abuses,” said Taylor Carey, a California special assistant attorney general who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief backing medical marijuana.

That’s putting it mildly. In fact, in this case, even ignoring the rights of patients to get the potentially most efficacious medicine, the federal government is enforcing civil rights abuses with this insanity. Recall that the point at issue was one of free speech and doctor-patient privilege–the right of a doctor to recommend a course of treatment for a sick client, which the federal law forbids.

It would almost be enough to make me vote Democrat, except for the war, and, of course, the fact that this was a policy initiated by the Clinton Administration…

The Federal Review has some advice for California Republicans.

The Federal Review has some advice for California Republicans.

The Federal Review has some advice for California Republicans.

Kevin McGehee points out the disturbing trend of increasing teen and even pre-teen prostitution in the U.S.

I think it should be legalized, but not for non-adults. Like drugs, the fact that it remains illegal, and thus outside of state control, makes it much more difficult to stop children from doing it. I’d be curious to know how much of this occurs in, say, Reno, relative to other cities of similar size and demography…

Jim Davis over at sci.space.policy points out an article with an interesting example of how smart markets can be. They figured out which company was responsible for the Challenger disaster within minutes of the event, and long before the Rogers Commission was even convened, let alone issued its report six months later.

As the news broke, the authors write, the stock prices of all four companies fell anywhere from 2.83 percent to 6.12 percent in the 21 minutes after the crash. But trading was halted only on the stock of Morton Thiokol. “The fact that market liquidity was available to maintain a market in Lockheed, Martin Marietta, and Rockwell while the market for Morton Thiokol dried up suggests that the stock market discerned the guilty party within minutes of the announcement of the crash,” Maloney and Mulherin conclude. By the end of the day?when the cause of the accident was still a mystery?Morton Thiokol was down 11.86 percent, while the other three contractors lost 2 percent to 3 percent.

Everyone is getting into the governor’s race. Isn’t that just precious?

[Update at 12:30 PM PDT]

There’s some hilarious photoshopping in this related Free Republic thread. James Carville is involved. Also note the one about Davis’ people already starting to dig up dirt on him (the candidate, that is, not Carville–they already have all the dirt on him…)

Next Sunday will be exactly one year since Jeff Goldstein last posted on the Protein Wisdom blog. It remains an enduring mystery.