Effort launched to legalize recreational pot in AZ

Sarah Philyaw, a manager at Arizona Organix in Glendale, one of the first medical dispensaries to open in the state, said she would definitely welcome recreational sellers to the fold, even if it meant more competition. (Cronkite News Photo by Lauren Loftus)

By LAUREN LOFTUS
Cronkite News 

PHOENIX – The people who brought medical marijuana to Arizona four years ago now want marijuana legal for everyone over the age of 21.

The Marijuana Policy Project has filed paperwork with state election officials to form a committee to begin raising funds for a 2016 citizens initiative to legalize recreational marijuana use. Arizona voters narrowly passed Proposition 203 allowing medical cannabis use in 2010.

Communications Director Mason Tvert said the group has plenty of support in Arizona despite the state’s traditionally conservative voting patterns.

“It appears most Arizona voters are ready to adopt a more sensible policy,” he said. “There were a large number of supporters who got on board (in 2010) and are ready to move forward.”

Tvert said the Arizona initiative would be modeled closely on a previous movement in Colorado, which became the first state to legalize recreational marijuana in 2012. Washington was a close second.

According to Tvert, the medical marijuana business here needn’t worry about losing its 52,000 registered cardholders. Like Colorado, there would likely be a differentiation in the medical and recreational business models.

First, only people 21 and older could purchase recreational weed. In both Arizona and Colorado, the threshold for a medical card is 18 years old. Those under 18 can obtain a medical card if their legal guardian is their designated caregiver.

There could also be a marked difference in pricing.

In Colorado, recreational shoppers pay nearly 13 percent in general and special state sales tax, plus a 15 percent excise tax at the wholesale level. Meanwhile, medical cardholders pay the 2.9 percent state sales tax and any local taxes.

Dispensaries for recreational and medical marijuana are kept completely separate, even if the same owner operates both. Tvert said this separation as well as the different tax rates keep existing medical card holders from flocking to the recreational dispensaries en masse.

“If you went into a business in Colorado that was doing both and said, ‘I want Product A, but it’s only on the medical side,’ then you can’t get it if you don’t have a license,” he said.

Sarah Philyaw, a manager at Arizona Organix in Glendale, one of the first medical dispensaries to open in the state, said she would definitely welcome recreational sellers to the fold, even if it meant more competition.

She said one way to differentiate the two business models would be to sell specific strains and products to medical cardholders and recreational users, as Colorado does.

One of the more popular medical products at Arizona Organix, Philyaw said, is a CBD, or cannabidiol, tincture. The sublingual oil doesn’t contain THC, or the main psychoactive property of cannabis.

“We have patients that buy the bottles for anxiety. They feel a decrease in anxiety and there’s other benefits,” she said. “It’s comparable to taking a vitamin C pill.”
Not everyone sees marijuana as so harmless.

The Arizona County Attorney and Sheriff’s Association signed a resolution in July opposing full legalization, citing various detrimental effects of marijuana use.

“It is demotivating, it hurts student achievement, it creates additional crime,” said David Leibowitz, spokesman for the Arizona Association of Counties.

The resolution was sponsored by MATFORCE, an organization aimed at reducing substance abuse in Yavapai County and statewide.

Executive Director Merilee Fowler said there is a lot of misinformation about marijuana use, particularly among young people.

“In kids’ minds, when you say that something is legal, the perception of risk goes down and youth use goes up,” she said.

Fowler also pointed to teens abusing legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco.

“Why would we want to add a third legal substance that’s going to cost our nation?” she asked.

State Rep. Ethan Orr, R-Tucson, disagreed with this perception that minors would be more likely to use marijuana if it was legalized.

“I believe it’s actually less likely to get in the hands of the minor because the people (licensed dispensaries) that are supplying it have an incentive to work with the state because they want to keep their license,” he said.

Orr, who is planning to introduce a proposal of his own to legalize recreational marijuana before the state Legislature next year, said one only has to look at Colorado to see the benefits of legalization.

“I think once they’re stabilized, they’ll be making $100-$150 million in tax revenue now that they’ve overcome some of the federal barriers,” he said. “In addition, I think that by decriminalizing it, you’re going to save $75-$100 million within your criminal justice system.”

Orr said that extra money could then be funneled back into law enforcement, education and possibly tax cuts.

Orr said he also favors a dual-track system that allows medical dispensaries to continue operating independent of the recreational side.

The Marijuana Policy Project ’s Mason Tvert said if recreational use passes Arizona, existing medical dispensaries could have first dibs on selling recreational products as long as the inventories are kept separate.

“Those businesses have established themselves and demonstrated they’re willing and able to follow the law,” he said. “It certainly makes sense to let those businesses be among the first to start providing marijuana to adults if the initiative passes.”

Whatever happens with Arizona’s marijuana business, Tvert said the initiative coalition will be sensitive to local needs.

“It will constantly evolve,” he said. “It will be, ‘This is what we believe is the best possible policy right now.’”

Could it be racism?

New post on Thoughts From the Left by a Righty

“The Sky is Falling”: Chicken Little by Global Trekker

Isn't it amazing. President Obama is blamed for almost everything that is wrong with the world: political bi-partisanship; unproductive Congress; political infighting; absenteeism; the Ebola crisis; wars in Irag, Afghanistan, and Irag (again); middle class inequality; over regulation; media bias; saving the auto industry when it should have been let to fail; rising health care costs; excess Wall Street profits - the list goes on and on. There seems to be no end to what he is responsible for.

Readers should remember that it wasn't too long ago that the President was also blamed for a failing economy. Everything, starting in January 2009, was his fault: high unemployment; flagging stock market; poor tax policy; low corporate profits; middle class inequities; artificially low interest rates; slow recovery from the Great Recession - and much more.

Hmmm - isn't it interesting? The economy is booming. The Q3 2014 economic growth just estimated the GDP increases at approximately 3.5% - some of the highest in the world. You don't read of banks or Wall Street complaining of low profits. The stock market is booming and interest rates are low.

So, why don't you hear much about that? Good question!

Another good question: why is it that, really, President Obama is so unpopular?

 Global Trekker | October 30, 2014 at 11:00 AM | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/p3N4An-7w

Wonder Woman: From Hollywood to the White House?

Talking Points

A NationofChange Exclusive Column

---

Feminism hasn't exactly conquered Hollywood, or much less Wall Street, or Washington. But don't you think it surely is overdue?

Published: October 29, 2014 | Authors: Thomas Magstadt | NationofChange | Op-Ed

nationofchange.org 

Superheroes like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are among the most popular and commercially successful cartoon characters of all time. Superman was introduced to young readers in 1938, Batman in 1939, and Wonder Woman in 1941.

Perhaps the real wonder here is how Wonder Woman managed to get a chance at comic book stardom seven years before the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizing “the equal rights of men and women” and decades before the term “glass ceiling” – denoting the gender gap in work and pay – was invented. How did it happen? Here’s how Jill Lepore, Harvard Professor of American History and author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman (New York: Knopf, 2014), explains it: 

Wonder Woman’s origin story comes straight out of feminist utopian fiction. In the nineteenth century, suffragists, following the work of anthropologists, believed that something like the Amazons of Greek myth had once existed, a matriarchy that predated the rise of patriarchy. “The period of woman’s supremacy lasted through many centuries,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in 1891. In the nineteen-tens, this idea became a staple of feminist thought.* 

And in case you’re thinking that the early feminists were not really serious about challenging men for the right to run things, here’s what Lepore has to say about that: 

The word ‘feminism,’ hardly ever used in the United States before 1910, was everywhere by 1913. The suffrage movement had been founded on a set of ideas about women’s supposed moral superiority. Feminism rested on the principle of equality. Suffrage was a single, elusive political goal. Feminism’s demand for equality was far broader. ‘All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists,’ as one feminist explained. They shared an obsession with Amazons. 

Many popular Superman and Batman films have been made in the past four decades, but not one starring Wonder Woman. Some things never change, right?  Wrong: Last December, Warner Bros. announced a deal to produce three future Superman-Batman movies with a prominent role for – you guessed it – Wonder Woman! 

Feminism hasn’t exactly conquered Hollywood – much less Wall Street or Washington – but putting a female superhero alongside Superman and Batman is surely overdue. Like putting a woman in the White House… 

*”The Last Amazon: Wonder Woman Returns,” Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, September 22, 2014.

Pope declares theory of evolution valid

(photo: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)

Pope Francis: Evolution and Big Bang Happened, God Is Not "A Magician With a Magic Wand"

By Adam Withnall, The Independent

28 October 14

readersupportednews.org

he theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not “a magician with a magic wand”, Pope Francis has declared.

Speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pope made comments which experts said put an end to the “pseudo theories” of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI.

Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator – arguing instead that they “require it”.

“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Francis said.

He added: “He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment.

“The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it.

“Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

The Catholic Church has long had a reputation for being anti-science – most famously when Galileo faced the inquisition and was forced to retract his “heretic” theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

But Pope Francis’s comments were more in keeping with the progressive work of Pope Pius XII, who opened the door to the idea of evolution and actively welcomed the Big Bang theory. In 1996, John Paul II went further and suggested evolution was “more than a hypothesis” and “effectively proven fact”.

Yet more recently, Benedict XVI and his close advisors have apparently endorsed the idea that intelligent design underpins evolution – the idea that natural selection on its own is insufficient to explain the complexity of the world. In 2005, his close associate Cardinal Schoenborn wrote an article saying “evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process – is not”.

Giovanni Bignami, a professor and president of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics, told the Italian news agency Adnkronos: “The pope’s statement is significant. We are the direct descendents from the Big Bang that created the universe. Evolution came from creation.”

Giulio Giorello, professor of the philosophy of science at Milan’s University degli Studi, told reporters that he believed Francis was “trying to reduce the emotion of dispute or presumed disputes” with science.

Despite the huge gulf in theological stance between his tenure and that of his predecessor, Francis praised Benedict XVI as he unveiled a bronze bust of him at the academy's headquarters in the Vatican Gardens.

“No one could ever say of him that study and science made him and his love for God and his neighbour wither,” Francis said, according to a translation by the Catholic News Service.

“On the contrary, knowledge, wisdom and prayer enlarged his heart and his spirit. Let us thank God for the gift that he gave the church and the world with the existence and the pontificate of Pope Benedict.”

BANNER DAY: Gila Co. records first gay marriage

Marriage licenses issued in every county for same-sex couples

TOP: Michael Berg and Rodney Eckersley display their marriage license outside Maricopa County Superior Court on the same day a federal judge overturned Arizona’s same-sex marriage bans. The two said they had waited 18 years for the right to marry. (Cronkite News photo by Sierra Oshrin)
BOTTOM: Karen Bailey and Nelda Majors were college sweethearts 57 years ago, but only married this mong after a judge overturned the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Bailey took Majors’ name after the ceremony, which occurred on the afternoon of the ruling. (Cronkite News photo by Sierra Oshrin)

By CAMARON STEVENSON Cronkite News 

WASHINGTON – In the week since Arizona’s bans on same-sex marriage were overturned, clerks in all 15 of the state’s counties say they have issued at least one marriage license to same-sex couples. 

Not all counties have kept track of licenses to same-sex as opposed to opposite-sex couples, but it appears that about 300 of the newly legal licenses had been issued in the first few days after the court ruling.

That means that state coffers have benefited along with same-sex couples: At $76 a pop, licenses to those couples had already brought in an estimated $20,000 or more in fees.

While the court ruling was a victory for gay-rights advocates, it was quickly attacked by groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, which last week called it “a terrible decision” that it vowed to fight.

One of its first post-ban actions was a memo to county clerks throughout Arizona, telling them that they have the right to deny issuing licenses to same-sex couples for religious reasons and instructing them in how to do it.

But for the majority of clerks, the memo seems to have gone unheeded.

Evan Wolfson, president of the national marriage-equality organization Freedom to Marry, said he has “not heard of any clerk disrespecting their oath and their job duty” by refusing to issue a license.

Every county in Arizona has reported issuing at least one marriage license to a same-sex couple since the ban was overturned, though not all kept specific numbers.

Maricopa County officials, who said they issue 98 marriage licenses on an average day, issued 292 licenses last Friday and another 184 on Monday – a net increase of 280 licenses over the regular volume. They did not immediately have numbers for the rest of this week.

The Williams Institute, a California-based think tank, estimated this summer that 7,909 same-sex couples would marry in Arizona in the first three years if the state’s ban was lifted. That would bring in more than $600,000 in license fees to the state if the numbers held true.

But the Williams Institute said the greater tax benefit would come from wedding spending by same-sex couples. Once taxes are collected on spending for wedding festivities, out-of-town guests and the like, the take could reach more than $5 million for the state over the three-year period, according its estimate.

The institute based its June estimate on 2010 Census data, the American Community Survey, and other data sources.

Last week’s ruling followed a rapid series of court decisions that have led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in more than 30 states so far.

On Oct. 6, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down appeals of five rulings from lower courts that had voided bans on same-sex marriage in different states. The next day, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned bans in Nevada and Idaho.

U.S. District Judge John Sedwick cited the circuit court’s ruling – Arizona is in the 9th Circuit – and gave parties in two different cases challenging Arizona’s same-sex marriage bans several days to argue why he should not overturn the ban.

On Oct. 16, he ruled that an amendment to the Arizona Constitution and two state laws banning same-sex marriage were unconstitutional violations of equal protection.

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne said Oct. 17 that he disagreed with the ruling but would not challenge it, saying the higher courts’ rulings made an appeal an “exercise in futility.”

“The only purpose served by filing another appeal would be to waste the taxpayer’s money,” Horne said then. “That is not a good conservative principle.”

Same-sex couples started heading to courthouses in Arizona to get married that afternoon.

While o Opponents have vowed to keep fighting, supporters say they are confident same-sex marriage in Arizona is here to stay.

“The gays aren’t using up all the marriage licenses,” Wolfson said. “There is plenty of room for marriage for all.”

 

 LICENSE TO BILL 

County clerks in Coconino, Maricopa, Pima, Yavapai and Yuma counties said they did not track the number of same-sex couples who took out marriage licenses, but all issued at least one – and perhaps hundreds for some. Licenses to same-sex couples as of Wednesday:

- Apache County, 1

- Cochise County, 6

- Gila County, 1

- Graham County, 1

- Greenlee County, 1

- La Paz County, 1

- Mohave County, 7

- Navajo County, 1

- Pinal County, 9

- Santa Cruz County, 1

Two weeks of single lanes on Beeline

Safety project on SR 87 south of the SR 188 junction requires daytime lane restrictions

Drivers should expect minimal delays

 

As work continues on the new safety improvement project along State Route 87 approximately 14 miles south of the SR 188 junction, crews will narrow the highway to a single lane in both directions during the day for the next two weeks between mileposts 227 and 236.

Work hours are Monday through Thursday from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

Drivers need to be aware of alternating daytime single-lane restrictions and some shoulder closures as crews continue to make progress on the reconstruction of the curve at milepost 227 and the building of a new northbound truck escape ramp at milepost 228. Minimal delays are expected.

The work zone will be clearly marked by temporary barricades and signage. ADOT advises drivers to allow additional time to reach their destinations and to proceed through the work zone with caution, comply with the reduced speed limit, and be alert for construction equipment and personnel.

How stupid does GOP think voters are?

The Republican Governing Vision: Not

October 27, 2014

Robert Borosage

Campaign for America's Future

ourfuture.org 

 

This should be a banner year for Republicans. To pick up the six seats they need to take control of the Senate, Republicans need only to pocket three open seats in red-state South Dakota, West Virginia, and Montana, and knock off endangered incumbents in states Obama lost in 2012 like Louisiana, Alaska, Arkansas, and North Carolina. 

 

This should have been a dead-pipe cinch, given an economic recovery that still hasn’t reached most families, a dysfunctional Washington, two-thirds of voters thinking the country is headed in the wrong direction, the growing disapproval of the president, the millions in “dark money” flowing into right-wing attack ads and the lousy turnout predictable in a sixth-year bi-election. 

 

Yet with the election a week away, Republicans still haven’t been able to close the deal. Karl Rove, conservatism’s twisted guru, while urging big money to dig deep, advised that “it is not enough for Republicans to remind [voters] of Mr. Obama’s many failings; voters want to know how the GOP would move the country forward.” 

 

Republicans are relentless at pointing out the “failings.” From the start, “Not Obama” was their mantra, and fear – ISIS, Ebola, immigrants, Those People – their currency. They would handcuff Democratic incumbents to Obama and let them sink together. However, what Rove calls a “governing vision” has proved to be the problem. The Republican agenda for the economy? Republicans are glib at saying what it is not – not Obama – but get tongue-tied when trying to explain what it is. 

 

The problem is when the conversation turns from horse race to issues, “not Obama” isn’t exactly persuasive. Obama is for health care reform, for comprehensive immigration reform, for raising the minimum wage, for equal pay for equal work, for free all-day preschool, for rebuilding our infrastructure and putting people to work, for paid family leave, for making college more affordable, for insuring that the rich and corporations pay a more fair share of our taxes to help pay for this stuff. Republicans voted virtually in lock step against all these in Congress and oppose them on the campaign trail. While Obama hasn’t exactly been a forceful advocate of these reforms, the reforms themselves are popular. 

 

So what are Republicans for instead? They have nothing beyond pretense to replace the health care reforms they would repeal. They have learned nothing from the conservative debacle that drove the economy off the cliff. They are for lowering taxes on the rich and corporations, for deregulating Wall Street and corporations, for slashing spending on “bloated government.” Their public works agenda is to build the Keystone pipeline, and charter Big Oil even more to plunder public lands and offshore areas. They pledge to do to the U.S. what right-wing ideologues have done to Kansas – and there even Republicans are outraged. There is no there there. 

 

The conservative mantra about the economy – lower taxes, less spending, less regulation – is political comfort food. Voters have heard it for decades: it is familiar and it offers assurance in an unsure time. Only it is way beyond its due date. Even country-club conservatives find it less than compelling. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants a big infrastructure project to rebuild the country. More and more insurance companies are factoring in the projected costs of climate change. Even purblind education reformers agree on the benefits of universal pre-k. Mitt Romney helped Occupy make inequality and fair taxes compelling concerns. 

 

By all rights, this should be a big Republican year – and it still could be. Only instead of Mitch McConnell choosing the color of the drapes for the office of the Senate Majority Leader, he’s fighting a pitched battle to hold his own seat. Democratic incumbents have struggled to show their independence from the president, while focusing on various popular reforms that the president actually supports. But while they are pretzeled, Republicans haven’t sealed the deal for one simple reason. They have no plan to make this economy work for the many and not the few. They can’t govern because they have no governing vision. And increasingly, the old gospel no longer summons belief, nor covers up that glaring reality.

Five things that will kill you before Ebola

Members of the Reston-Herndon Alliance To End Gun Violence hold a vigil against the National Rifle Association. (photo: AFP/Paul J. Richards)

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

26 October 14

readersupportednews.org

 

he odd hysteria about ebola is being driven more by a media frenzy than the actual public health risks. Ebola is not the sort of disease that is likely to turn into a pandemic, becoming really wide spread. It is too hard to contract (it doesn’t spread by infected persons just breathing on others) and kills too many of its victims (diseases don’t survive well if neither do their hosts). Moreover, countries that are relatively well-governed, with good public health systems are not at high risk from this sort of disease. Even Senegal and Nigeria in West Africa have dealt with small outbreaks professionally and right now have no ebola cases, in contrast to countries ravaged by years of civil war like Sierra Leone and Liberia (wars, by the way, in which former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi played a major and cynical role).

You never know whether corporate media spread such panics to make money off the news (the definition of corporate media) or to take working peoples’ minds off more important issues, such as how American Neoliberal capitalism is increasingly screwing them over.

But here are some things that will kill more Americans this year than ebola.

1. Largely unregulated, often military-grade firearms in the hands of civilians will typically be deployed in 11,000 homicides and nearly 20,000 suicides every year in the US. Background checks at gun shows for all purchasers, including from private sellers there, would much reduce this toll, but this measure has been blocked by the gun manufacturers (a.k.a. the NRA). It would be fairly easy to address this enormous public health debacle, but bought-and-paid-for American politicians play down the issue, in contrast to the ebola hype, which they have tried to tie to immigrants and have used to promote Islamophobia.

2. Smoking will kill on the order of 430,000 Americans this year. The US government allows corporations to spray extra nicotine and other addictive substances on the tobacco leaves so as to addict youngsters who experiment with smoking and make it difficult for them to quit. Nearly half a million people killed a year should cause a panic, especially since most of us have a loved one or close friend who smokes, but there is no pressure at all on government to stop the corporate promotion of nicotine addiction for the express purpose of making money off killing working people.

3. The public seems to want government to make the investments necessary to dealing with infectious diseases such as ebola. But too many Americans mind Obamacare, which has added millions to the rolls of the insured. Back in 2009, it was estimated, some 45,000 people died every year just from not having access to health care. Now that number will decrease significantly.

4. Burning coal to produce electricity directly kills some 12,000 people a year, in addition to helping cause 200,000 heart attacks annually. Coal’s release of mercury into the atmosphere also causes fatalities and disabilities, since mercury is a nerve poison. And of course, burning coal causes rapid and disruptive climate change, which will kill far more people than ebola ever will.

5. An analysis of the food combinations available on the menus of 34 restaurant chains that offer children’s meals showed that 50 percent of the meal combos came to over 600 calories, while 430 calories is a more ideal meal for children. These restaurants are clearly contributing to the obesity crisis in children and youth. Being obese in childhood is highly correlated with being obese in adulthood. Some 300,000 Americans die every year from conditions associated with obesity. As for children, the CDC reports,

“Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years.

The percentage of children aged 6–11 years in the United States who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 18% in 2012. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents aged 12–19 years who were obese increased from 5% to nearly 21% over the same period.

In 2012, more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese.

Just demanding that American restaurants offer less toxic meals to children would save many more lives than will ever be taken by ebola in the US. But it would mean standing up to the food corporations.

Whether it is the lobbyists for Big Coal who want to go on spewing poison into the atmosphere, or the NRA lobbyists for the four major corporations that manufacture hand guns or the restaurant lobbyists who want to evade regulation and want to be able to kill their customers with 4,000-calorie meals, or the cigarette manufacturers and distributors who are, like 007, licensed by the government to murder, the common denominator here is that our corporations are often much worse for our health than a mere infectious disease outbreak. But these health deficits are almost never reported on in the media owned by the corporations. Instead, we’re encouraged to think about something else while our pockets are being picked– say, an exotic disease.

6 Reasons Liz Warren Should Run for President

Presidential candidate? (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

By Ezra Klein, Vox

25 October 14

readersupportednews.org

s Elizabeth Warren running for president? Maybe!

In the past, when asked if she's running for president, Warren has been pretty clear: "I am not running for president," she said in June of 2014. "Do you want to put an exclamation point at the end of that?"

But in a recent interview with People, Warren was rather less emphatic. "I don't think so," she replied, before saying: "If there's any lesson I've learned in the last five years, it's don't be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open."

Warren's office, of course, insists "nothing has changed."

The truth is that at this point, Elizabeth Warren has no idea whether she'll run for president. The election is too far away, and too much could change, and she doesn't need to make a decision yet.

The more interesting question is the one she's probably asking herself: should Elizabeth Warren run for president? Luckily, the answer to that is easy, and obvious: of course she should. There are six reasons why. 

1) She can

In 2012, 416 people registered as presidential candidates with the Federal Election Commission. But you probably haven't heard of most of them. Being taken seriously as a presidential candidate requires a rare mixture of money, supporters, staff, volunteers, poll numbers, luck, elite credibility and more. Warren has it.

There are already Draft Warren campaigns popping up around the country. There are already willing donors. There's intense media interest. She would instantly be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. She would be in every debate. She would have press at every campaign stop. She would have volunteers in every state. Not many people get that opportunity. Warren should take her shot. 

2) She has something to gain

The best argument against Elizabeth Warren running for president is that she'll almost certainly lose — at least as long as Hillary Clinton is also running. I agree with that. It's just not a very good argument against Warren running for president.

There are a lot of reasons to run for president. One of them, of course, is that you just may win. But with the exception of the presidency itself, there's no better platform for forcing your ideas to the top of the political agenda. This is true even if you lose.

One of the ways that front-runners squash challengers is by co-opting their best ideas. Mitt Romney scrapped a perfectly sensible tax plan and replaced it with something much more mathematically inventive after Herman Cain got traction with his 9-9-9 pitch. Barack Obama brought out a serious health-reform bill and promised to make it a top priority in his first term after John Edwards and Hillary Clinton forced it to the front of the Democratic agenda.

But once the idea is co-opted, it becomes a campaign promise — and presidential candidates hew much closer to their campaign promises than most people realize. There's a good argument that Obamacare only happened because Edwardscare was a threat during the Democratic primaries. 

3) She has something to say

Elizabeth Warren is an unusual politician: she ended up in politics because she had big ideas that people really liked. That's a departure from most politicians, who basically don't have any original ideas at all, and who end up in politics because they badly want to be politicians.

Warren made her name as a Harvard law professor who became something of a public intellectual. She was early in recognizing how squeezed middle-class families had become, and in arguing for a consumer financial protection bureau, and in making the case against the spiraling complexity of Wall Street.

She's continued pushing some big thoughts in the Senate. She's been out front arguing for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, for instance. She's made interesting points about the pro-business drift of the federal judiciary. She's pushed hard on the idea that banks shouldn't become so big that they're effectively immune from criminal prosecution.

She's in politics, in other words, because she cares about policy, and because she's got some big ideas for improving it. A presidential campaign is her best shot at making those ideas the Democratic Party's platform rather than just Elizabeth Warren's press releases. 

4) What else is she going to be doing between 2015 and 2016?

If Warren were, say, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, and if Democrats controlled the House and the Senate and the presidency, then there would be a good argument that Warren could do more as a legislator than as a candidate. But Warren is, in real life, the second-most junior senator on the Banking Committee. And she's likely to be serving in a Senate controlled by Republicans, at a time when the White House is controlled by a Democrat, and absolutely nothing is getting done.

So it's not just that running for president could do an enormous amount to push Warren's issues forward. It's that hanging around the Senate isn't going to do anything for Warren's issues at all. It's hard to imagine two better years to spend away from the Senate than 2015 and 2016. 

5) She might not get another chance

This is an argument Ryan Lizza made in December of 2005, in a piece arguing that Obama should do the then-unthinkable and run for president, so I'll just quote him:

The kind of political star power Obama has doesn't last. My favorite law of American politics is that candidates have only 14 years to become president [or vice president]. That is their expiration date … the majority of presidents since 1900 have fallen on the low end of this zero-to-fourteen-year spectrum: zero (Dwight Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover, William Howard Taft), two years (Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt), four years (Franklin Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge), and six years (George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Warren Harding). The lesson is that Obama must strike while he is hot or risk fading into obscurity.

You can pretty much swap Warren's name in for Obama's throughout that whole section. If Warren doesn't run in 2016 and Hillary Clinton does run and wins, then it will be at least eight years until Warren can run again. By then, she will likely have lost all or most of her star power. Wall Street reform will probably have faded as an issue. And she'll be 75 years old. Warren will have missed her moment. 

6) And if she loses? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Warren isn't up for reelection in 2016, so there's no particular conflict between keeping her seat and running for president. And if she loses, there's no particular reason to think she won't join the illustrious ranks of senators who ran for president, fell a bit short, and then became even more important senators. That list includes Democrats like Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, as well as Republicans like John McCain, Bob Dole, and Richard Lugar. Senators don't get penalized for running for president and losing.

Which is all to say that the question isn't, "Why should Elizabeth Warren run for president?" It's, "Why shouldn't she?"

Payson paranoia makes us U.S. laughingstock

A protester in front of the White House calling for a travel ban from West Africa. (photo: Allison Shelley/Getty Images)

Ebola Panic Is Straight From the Twilight Zone

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

25 October 14

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Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Making sense of the overheated Ebola and Klinghoffer panics.

n the two weeks since the death of Thomas Eric Duncan, Ebola hysteria has taken hold in some corners of the U.S., with school closures, paid leaves, and cruise ship quarantines enacted to protect the populace from dozens of people who did not actually have the disease. So far, only two people we know of have been infected by Ebola on U.S. soil (both were nurses who treated Duncan), public health officials have offered clear and consistent explanations of the minimal risks of contracting the disease, and even Fox News — or, at least, Fox News anchor Shep Smith — has tried to quell the panic. Why are Americans still so worked up about this? 

Of all the incidents of runaway Ebola hysteria in America, the one that most grabbed me was reported by the Times on Sunday: A man in Payson, Arizona, decided to submit to a self-imposed quarantine and remain in his house for no other reason than he had been in Liberia as a missionary on a church trip. His good deed did not go unpunished: After taking that extra (and gratuitous) precaution, he found himself the victim of a “lynch-mob mentality” manifested by at least one anonymous threat to burn down his house. The incident made me think of that classic 1960 Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which paranoid suburban neighbors, gripped by fear of an invasion from outer space, do the monsters’ work for them by destroying their community and each other in mob violence.

You know things are bad when a Fox News anchor is the voice of reason, telling his viewers to ignore the “very irresponsible” media voices fueling the Ebola panic. Of course, some of the most irresponsible voices were on his own network, including George Will, who malignantly spread the canard that Ebola was airborne, and Gretchen Carlson, an anchor who somehow found a conspiracy connecting Ebola, the IRS, Obamacare, and, inevitably, Benghazi. Right-wing radio has chimed in, and so have Republican politicians, who have variously called for sealing borders and visa suspensions, as if Ebola were another wave of immigrants in need of a fence.

Just goes to show that it’s hard to create a coherent, let alone effective, policy to deal with a medical emergency when you don’t accept the core notion that there is such a thing as empirical scientific knowledge. The point of all this political posturing is not to save lives, in any case, but to somehow smear the president with Ebola for advantage in the election two weeks from now.

It’s my impression that the panic is starting to ebb. Enough sane voices, in the medical community, government, and even the press, have beamed in the message that you are far more likely to be struck down by the flu, guns, air bags, or even lightning than this virus. But surely there will be some new panic to replace it soon. The mood in the country is horrible, and we’ll keep searching for new nemeses and new scapegoats. Once the election has come and gone — and there’s no catharsis or improvement in the public mood, no matter what the result — it will be fascinating to see what monsters will be sighted on Maple Street next. 

The Death of Klinghoffer — John Adams's 1991 opera on the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by Palestine Liberation Front terrorists — premiered at the Met on Monday, inciting a large demonstration from protestors who claimed it was anti-Semitic and a distortion of history. You were at the premiere. Is Klinghoffer anti-Semitic? And what do you make of the uproar around it? 

This is another example of displaced hysteria and it has very little to do with the actual content of this opera, which most of the time has been presented without protest in America (in St. Louis, yet) and elsewhere over its 20-year-plus history. The sad fact is that in the aftermath of this year’s Gaza war, an understandable panic has taken root in some corners of American Jewry, who fear that support for Israel is wavering even in this country — let alone in Europe, where an alarming uptick in anti-Semitism is adding another toxic component to perennial anti-Israeli animus. It’s easier to hyperventilate about an opera giving a total of eight performances at Lincoln Center than to address the graver issues at hand.

Most of those who have cast aspersions on Klinghoffer, starting with Abraham Foxman of the Anti Defamation League and continuing with those who echoed his views on Op Ed pages, have not seen it. If they had been there Monday night, they might have been embarrassed by the vast discrepancy between what was on stage and their public pronouncements about it. Then again, maybe they still wouldn’t pay attention. A heckler at the premiere repeatedly called out “The murder of Klinghoffer will never be forgiven!” — a true head-scratcher since nothing in the opera asks for forgiveness of Klinghoffer’s murder or the terrorists who committed it.

Klinghoffer has zero anti-Semitism. It does have what Justin Davidson of New York has accurately described as a “clumsy libretto” — dramaturgically diffuse, often lyrically banal — though it is far more lucid in this gripping, beautifully sung Tom Morris production than it was in Peter Sellars’s original at BAM. Not for a second does the opera present the terrorists as anything other than cold-blooded killers — in Adams’s score and the staging as well as in words — and not for a second does your heart fail to go out to their victims, led by Leon Klinghoffer. The performance ends with a wrenching solo by the widowed Marilyn Klinghoffer — “They should have killed me / I wanted to die” — and, as Alex Ross of The New Yorker tweeted Monday night, “In the end, the protest failed completely. Marilyn Klinghoffer had the final word, and John Adams received a huge ovation.”

“Never forget” has been a Jewish imperative since the Holocaust. What has been forgotten by the instigators of this manufactured fracas is that many if not most people — non-Jews — have forgotten both the Achille Lauro hijacking and Leon Klinghoffer in the nearly three-decade-long crush of subsequent horrors in the narrative of modern terrorism. The good news about both this production and the extra publicity generated by the protests is that they will keep the memory of Leon Klinghoffer and the barbarity of his killers alive. Most people cannot get to the Met to see it, needless to say, and the cancellation of the originally planned Live in HD theatrical broadcast will further diminish the Met’s audience. But you can watch Klinghoffer on DVD in a previous production from England’s Channel Four or listen to the score in the definitive Nonesuch recording. Such opportunistic Klinghoffer foes as Rudy Giuliani, Alan Dershowitz, and the New York Democratic Congressswoman Carolyn Maloney will not be able to restrict the circulation of these other iterations.

Indeed they and the other protestors have already succeeded in temporarily selling out the Klinghoffer DVD at Amazon. But you can still find either it or the Nonesuch recording at Walmart, Target, and Barnes & Noble, or on iTunes.