I got mine. Get yours here.

H/t: Patterico.

Just got back from Sam’s Club, where cupcakes with red frosting and plastic heart-thingies were going for half of what they were selling for earlier the same day. Damned price gougers.

On Saturday, March 7 I will go bowling to benefit Big Brothers / Big Sisters. Donations woud be greatly appreciated. Pledges are a flat amount unrelated to my score, so I’m thinking if using the occasion to repeat Mary K’s experiment.

UPDATE: Thanks to Patty, Steve and Pigilito. Keep ‘em coming.

“Mr. Putin, rebuild this wall.”

Apologists for Gavin Newsom have long excused his 2004 gay “marriage” stunt on the theory that he was adhering to his oath to defend the Constitution. This phony argument became even stronger after the Supreme Soviet Court appeared to vindicate his position by ruling traditional marriage unconstitutional. There’s only one problem with this theory: the California Constitution itself, specifically Article 3, Section 3.5, says precisely the opposite:

An administrative agency, including an administrative agency created by the Constitution or an initiative statute, has no power:
(a) To declare a statute unenforceable, or refuse to enforce a statute, on the basis of it being unconstitutional unless an appellate court has made a determination that such statute is unconstitutional;
(b) To declare a statute unconstitutional;
(c) To declare a statute unenforceable, or to refuse to enforce a statute on the basis that federal law or federal regulations prohibit the enforcement of such statute unless an appellate court has made a determination that the enforcement of such statute is prohibited by federal law or federal regulations.

So even if Newsom’s view of the Constitution was correct, as a bare majority of the soviet court ruled it was, he was still in violation of the Constitution. As is Attorney General Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown, I suspect, unless anyone can provide a credible theory of why his office is not an administrative agency.

Opponents of the war in Iraq frequently cite Afghanistan as the “good” war. Granted, 9/11 didn’t leave us with much of a choice, but lest anyone get too excited about our alleged victory there, one has to wonder what we’ve accomplished when a post-Taliban government sentences two citizens to death for translating the Koran.

It’s nice that Caroline Petrie is still allowed to work as a nurse, seeing as she hasn’t, like, done anything wrong, but for Christ’s … errr, I mean, reason’s sake, why on earth aren’t the idiots who threatened to fire her now out of jobs themselves? All she did was ask a patient if he’d like her to pray for her. The patient wasn’t even offended by the offer, but can someone please explain why anyone in his right mind would be? If you’re a Christian yourself, the idea of another Christian praying for you can only be a good thing. If you’re an atheist, or if you are a member of another religion who thinks God won’t hear that person’s prayers, oh well. The prayer itself won’t accomplish anything, but it’s still nice to know someone else is wishing you well, isn’t it? The only way I can conceive of someone else praying for me being a bad thing would be if I were a member of some bizarre cult that believes in a God who prefers to be left alone, and punishes those who pray to him by doing the opposite of what they prayed for. Does anyone actually subscribe to such a view, and if not, why this goofy complaint ever taken seriously to begin with?

At 12, I very nearly drowned. No need to bore you with the details, so long story short, I did something incredibly stupid even for a 12-year old, ended up trapped under water, and passed out knowing for sure that I was gone. After that I sank to the bottom of the pool, only to be rescued by my brother, who miraculously appeared on the scene minutes afterward. So sure I was that I was a goner, that when I started to come to I was still convinced I had died and gone to … well, not heaven or nirvana, but to some mildly unpleasant place about halfway between hell and New Jersey. As a result, I am one of the very few living individuals who know what it’s like to drown. Trust me: it sucks. However, it’s always pleasant to learn of famous people who know where you are coming from, so I was pleased as punch to learn that Cher and Lindsey Lohan recently had near-death experiences of their own.

At the risk of sounding like Andrew Sullivan, I hereby bestow this dubious award on the Sacramento Bee for making it even easier than it otherwise would be for the anti-Prop 8 mafia to pin down their victims. Reached for comment, Rebecca Schaeffer said … nothing.

I had originally planned a full-blown meta-fisking of JRM’s uncommonly silly fisking of Radley Balko’s recent Reason/Culture11 article on the war on drugs, but I see Radley himself has beat me to the punch and made most of the points I would have made (and some that I did make, namely that the mere fact of overall police shootings being down since 1996 is congruent with the overall drop in crime being down for the same period, not evidence for or against Radley’s premise). And Radley doesn’t need me to defend him; after all, he’s got the traffic while I’m just some dim-witted, quick-tempered, angry douchebag that nobody reads.

So rather than defending Radley (though he’s clearly got the better argument here) I’ll just say this: drugs have become a religion on both sides. On the one hand, drug prohibitionists have an annoying tendency to ignore the fact that prohibiting a substance causes the price to skyrocket, thereby creating the motive underlying most “drug-related” crime. On the other, legalization and decriminalization advocates have an equally annoying tendency to ignore the fact that repealing the prohibition (or reducing enforcement efforts) on that same substance would cause the price to plummet, thereby causing recreational use (and, inevitably, abuse) to increase. It seems as though one side of the debate can’t wrap its head around the law of supply and demand, while the other fails to grasp the law of … errrr … supply and demand. For those who do understand that raising the price of anything is bound to deter someone from doing it, it seems to me there are only three defensible positions on the legalization or prohibition of any particular drug, to wit:

1. Drug X [a variable, not a nickname for Ecstasy or any other particular drug] is so bad that it is worth reducing our civil liberties and accepting more violent crime in return for fewer people using it.
2. Drug X is bad, sure, but most people who don’t use X now have the good sense to stay away from it even if it were legal and as cheap as aspirin, so saving 3 addicts a year is NOT worth reducing our civil liberties and accepting all that crime associated with the black market.
3. Drug X is very bad, and banning it almost certainly benefits society on balance by any objective measure, but dammit, this is still supposed to be a free country, and if people want to muck up their own lives without hurting others, that’s nobody’s business but their own. [See this comment for a mirror image of this argument.]

Note that I deliberately set this up on a drug-by-drug basis, to reflect that some drugs are far worse than others. A rational person could, for example, take the view that all currently illicit drugs are bad for you, but marijuana isn’t bad enough to be worth the costs of prohibition, while cocaine probably is and PCP almost certainly is. But I don’t think there are any other rational options as to any particular drug. Do you?