Don’t Tase Me Bro!

I saw this video on BoingBoing the other day.   Legal arguments of whether this was excessive force aside, this seems morally excessive.   Maybe “morally” is the wrong word, but holding down someone whose only crime is being naked at an outdoor music festival and tasing them seems excessive.

What is our big hang up with nudity anyway?  This was Coachella, not Disney Land.  As long as this man wasn’t assaulting anyone, what is the big deal?  I’m guessing Coachella itself has rules concertgoers have to abide by, and maybe a prohibition against nudity is one of them, but are the police there to enforce concert rules?  Or did this man really pose a threat to the public?

Come on.  Let the naked hippie dance.

Dear Texas,

We get it.  You are a big state, you have a lot of people, and you may or may not be blessed by a higher power.  You’re independent, you don’t like to be pushed around, and many of your residents identify themselves as “Texans” first, Americans second.  We get it.  You’re awesome.  You have a hip capital city, a sweet music festival, and Dillon High School football.  You have three NBA basketball teams, King of the Hill, and the Alamo.  You have big hair and speak with a long, slow drawl.  Clearly you are superior.

So, Texas, if you want to, go for it.  You know what we’re talking about.  Now, yes your governor never said anything specific about Texas seceding from the United States, but we know you’re all thinking it.  So – do it.

You can do all sorts of wonderful things in the Republic of Texas.  You can limit all the civil liberties you want, abolish all government-funded social programs, teach religion in school, eliminate income taxes, eliminate barriers to buying guns, build walls along your borders, stockpile weapons, privatize education and health care and social security, invade Oklahoma, conduct private enterprise unregulated – whatever it is you want to do, you can do it in the Republic of Texas.  Think of all the free time you’ll have when you don’t have to go to all those tea bagging parties anymore.

But if you want to trade with us, well, sorry.  And we’d like our corporate branches, federal agency offices, banks, and anything else we paid for back.  And when you find yourself ill-equipped to provide for your out-of-work citizenry, do not send them to us.  They can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, literally.

So, Good Luck and thanks again for the first season of Friday Night Lights.  The other seasons weren’t as good, but that’s okay.

Oh, and go Portland Trail Blazers.

Sincerely,

The Other 49 States (& Washington DC)

PS.  THANKS again for George W. Bush.

State of Play

State of Play

I just got back from a free showing of this movie –> “State of Play” based on a BBC Television series and starring Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck.

Actually I thought it was an alright movie.  It was entertaining, held my interest through most of it, and was pretty well-cast.  I thought it would have been better with the final plot twist, but I haven’t seen the BBC series, so what do I know?  If you want to see a really good thriller, watch Tell No One.

My top ten observations about this movie:

1.  Old people love free movie showings.

2. People will wait in line for 45 minutes to see a free movie.

3. The popcorn at a free movie showing is not free.

4. Jason Bateman’s character is the best part of “State of Play”.

5. Ben Affleck remains one of my least favorite actors, although not THE least favorite (I’m looking at you, Nicholas Cage).

6. House of Representatives’ office buildings are not at all secure.

7. There CAN be too many plot twists in a movie.

8. Russell Crowe does not need to sleep or drink coffee.  Ever.

9. Never hide in a parking garage (a lesson learned over and over again).

10.  “Funny People” looks like another hit for Judd Apatow.

I’m new in town.

Hi!  My name is Candice and I live in Portland, Oregon.  I have been keeping a blog for almost a year, but with blogspot.  I needed a change and I like Word Press, so here I am….

Farewell, The Cat’s Meow

As I previously posted, The Cat’s Meow, a Portland landmark for over 23 years is shutting its doors. Today I made my final trip to The Cat’s Meow, to say good-bye and also take advantage of the going-out-of-business discount.

I first stumbled upon The Cat’s Meow during the summer of 2007. I had just moved to Portland (for the first time) and was spending 99% of my time studying for the Oregon Bar Exam. While I was studying I decided that if the whole “law thing” didn’t work out, I would open a store called “The Cat’s Meow” and sell cat toys, food, and cat-themed merchandise for cat enthusiasts like myself. One evening I visited the Hawthorne Avenue neighborhood for the first time and I saw it: The Cat’s Meow: a corner building with cats and yarn painted on the side. Inside the store the displays were filled with cat toys, food, and cat-themed merchandise for cat enthusiasts like myself. I couldn’t believe it.

In February 2008 I moved to Portland (a second time) and settled in the Hawthorne neighborhood. I frequented The Cat’s Meow whenever I needed treats or toys or food. For a short period, The Cat’s Meow even sold dog stuff.

Before today I had never visited a store that was on the verge of no longer existing. Everything is for sale: fixtures, display cases, rugs, everything. It is like going to a funeral, but at the funeral they let everyone pick over the items that belonged to the person who died.

With a heavy heart I made my last purchase: a candle, a toy, a mug, a rug, a basket, some cards, and some reindeer antlers for Wink and Sheba. It all came to $30.

In the end, neither the “law thing” nor The Cat’s Meow worked out…and only one of those things I am sad about.

Farewell and Thank You, The Cat’s Meow!

Sometimes it’s Good to be the Underdog

When you’re the underdog the pressure is off: the expectations are low, and in the off-chance you do win a handful of people stand to win big in their NCAA Basketball Tournament office pools.

The same principle works for the minority party in Congress. The expectations of you actually passing your legislation is low, so you may as well shoot for the stars. Both parties do this when they find themselves in the minority and the House Republicans are no exception. They unveiled a revised budget proposal, that, unlike their last alternative to the Obama budget, is heavy on details. And, in the off-chance these underdogs win, a handful of people do stand to win big, but at a greater cost to the losers than $10 and the shame of watching Louisville lose in the Elite Eight.

From the Washington Post:

House Republicans Unveil Revised Budget Proposal

By Lori Montgomery

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 2, 2009; Page A06

After getting blasted last week for presenting a budget plan light on details, House Republicans yesterday unveiled a more complete proposal that would cut taxes for businesses and the wealthy, freeze most government spending for five years, halt spending approved in the economic stimulus package and slash federal health programs for the poor and elderly.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee, said the plan would stabilize the rising national debt by requiring the nation to borrow about $6 trillion over the next 10 years, $3.3 trillion less than would be required under the budget request submitted by President Obama.

Annual deficits also would be slightly lower than under the revised budget plans that emerged last week from the House and Senate budget committees. The revised Democratic proposals would require the nation to borrow about $4 trillion over the next five years, compared with $3.1 trillion in new borrowing under the GOP alternative.

Still, the national debt would continue to climb under the GOP plan, topping out at around 75 percent of the economy, Ryan said — an improvement over Obama’s proposal but a good deal higher than the 40 percent debt the nation was running before the recession began.

The proposal comes as the House and Senate debate Obama’s $3.5 trillion spending plan for the fiscal year that begins in October. Leaders in both chambers expect the Obama plan to pass easily when final votes are held by the end of the week.

While the minority party in Congress typically offers an alternative budget plan that is widely ignored, this year’s proposal has drawn fresh attention thanks to the scathing GOP criticism of Obama’s budget plans and the president’s challenge to the GOP to offer a constructive alternative.

Republicans cast their budget plan as just that, with Ryan saying it offers “lower spending, lower deficits, lower debt and more jobs.” Democrats argued that the GOP proposal relies on massive cuts to social programs, measures that even many Republicans would resist.

“It’s hard to believe you can get to where they say they’re going to get to without doing some things the American people would reject,” said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.).

Okay, John McCrazy

I love old people. They have wonderful stories and everything they’ve seen or done is interesting to me because they involve experiences I will never have. I will never live through the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s. I will never remember what it was like when JFK was assassinated. I will never milk my own cow and sell the cream to buy food for my family. I will never know what it was like to graduate from high school in the 1970’s. Old people are wonderful.

That said – there are some old people who are also crazy. How can you tell if you are just old or old and crazy?

Well, meet Chief Crazy Old Person, aka Nearly Commander-in-Chief Crazy Old Person:

Senator John McCain, as in almost our President John McCain, thinks that the challenge in Afghanistan is “not as tough as Iraq” and success in Afghanistan is not dependent on success in Pakistan.

Old people tell great stories. I work with a few – they start every conversation with how things were twenty years ago. Crazy old people tell especially good stories. Usually though, these don’t end with fundamentalist terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons owned by a very fragile Pakistan.

Live @ The Place 2nite!

I went to a show last night. Over the course of the last year I’ve been to a few pretty amazing shows: Of Montreal @ The Roseland last November and Broken Social Scene @ Wonder Ballroom in February immediately come to mind.

Of Montreal blew me away. It was a real “show” in every sense of the word: it was visually entertaining, it was funny, it was thought provoking, the crowd was engaged, and the sound was good too. Aside from the dirty dreadlocks on the girl next to me repeatedly hitting me in the face, it was an amazing show. A delight for the senses.

Broken Social Scene was amazing because they are amazing – more of an art collective than a band, BSS is a stage full of instruments, sounds, and sweatiness. Concert-goers are treated to not only an hour and a half of BSS, but showcases from member’s solo efforts, like my favorite: Charles Spearin’s Happiness Project.

I really hadn’t been to many shows before moving to Oregon. I may have went to a show or two in college, but I really don’t remember. In law school I went to a few of one of my classmate’s shows and I saw Dashboard Confessional and Brand New at the Val Air Ballroom in Des Moines.

My boyfriend went to school in Bloomington, Indiana and grew up near Chicago, so he has much more show experience than I do. He went to punk shows in Chicago all the time in high school and was a part of the music and art scene in Bloomington. My friends are also my show guides: they’ve seen everyone from Elliott Smith to Arcade Fire.

After the first couple of shows, I got the hang of it (we just stand here and dance or move awkwardly to the music? What is this?) and I love it. You feel such an intimate connection to the music seeing it live, especially in smaller venues. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself because the people on stage have become one unit to make this wonderful thing happen: sounds, sights, poetry, theater.

In May I will venture into a new world of live music: the outdoor music festival. Some friends and I are going to Sasquatch Music Festival in Washington for three days of awesomeness. I don’t think I’ll ever be the same…

High Times?

There was a time, not so long ago, when only hippie college professors, libertarians, and High Times subscribers openly advocated for an end to marijuana prohibition. Thanks to a global recession and escalation of drug cartel violence in Mexico, the idea is becoming more openly accepted. Here are some excerpts from recent articles and commentaries supporting a lift to the ban on marijuana in the United States:

Publication: The Economist
Article: “How to Stop the Drug Wars“
The Economist, first arguing for legalization in 1989, recently published a series of articles in a special drug edition. This particular article offers a complete argument for legalization and highlights the failures of prohibition. Notable excerpts:

The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

The article also offers some insight into how drugs could be regulated:

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

Finally, the article attempts to alleviate some fears of legalization:

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

Publication: CNN.com
Article: “Commentary: Legalize Drugs to Stop Violence” by Jeffrey A. Mirion
Mirion, a senior economics lecturer at Harvard, argues that only the legalization of drugs can end the escalation of violence in Mexico:

Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground. This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead.

Violence was common in the alcohol industry when it was banned during Prohibition, but not before or after.

Violence is the norm in illicit gambling markets but not in legal ones. Violence is routine when prostitution is banned but not when it’s permitted. Violence results from policies that create black markets, not from the characteristics of the good or activity in question.

Additionally, Mirion argues there other compelling reasons to end the prohibition on drugs, namely that prohibition breeds corruption in law enforcement and politics, and is a huge drain on state and federal financial resources.

“Publication”: As much as I hate citing a 24-hour news network: CNBC
“Article”: ??
This is a clip from CNBC featuring a panel discussing marijuana prohibition, sparked by Attorney General Eric Holder’s comments suggesting a different approach to marijuana laws by the Obama Administration (from the Associated Press: Holder “told reporters federal agents will target marijuana distributors that violate both federal and state law — a departure from the Bush administration which targeted medical marijuana dispensaries in California, even if they complied with that state’s law.”).

Of course, there remains plenty of vocal support against legalization (or legalization’s boring cousin – decriminalization) and according to a recent CBS News poll, only 31% of Americans believe marijuana should be legal. However, perhaps this increase in coverage means we’re ready to have an open conversation about American and international drug policy. Or maybe it just means the hippie college professors, libertarians, and High Times subscribers got jobs as economists and journalists.

Dear Small Business: Thanks for the Memories

Independently owned shops and restaurants have always defined the character of a community or neighborhood. They are places you can visit only on that particular street, in that particular town.

My street is particularly defined by small independent businesses: coffee shops, bars, restaurants, Tibetan clothing and craft shops, herb shops, gift shops and pet food stores. As the recession deepens, my street’s distinct charm is fading as more businesses go under. The Cat’s Meow, a Hawthorne staple for over twenty years, is closing its doors. The two resident cats have to find new homes. My favorite Hawthorne restaurant, The Italian Joint, abruptly closed two weeks ago. Further west a pet food store and Christian store are also going out of business. How can these niche stores survive in this economic climate? Will my street, and streets like it in communities around the country, soon be home to more empty store fronts than shops? Main streets in small towns have long struggled against the superstores popping up outside of town. Why go the local drugstore when you can get your prescription for much less at Walgreens or Wal-Mart?

It’s important to support small business because it is small business that defines our community’s character. By supporting those businesses you support your neighbors and friends. You also support what makes your community special. From the smallest town to the biggest city, it is the small unique businesses that cultivate a sense of pride in community. Support your local small businesses….before the liquidation sale.