By the laws of the country he’s president of he’d of been sent to prison for years and be inelligable to vote let alone enter in to politics and become president. 

Yet I don’t see the police arresting the man for admitting he committed an offence that 1 in 6 current residents of American prisons also committed do you?

Good one, I’m gonna have to remember it.

Even cocaine has its’ benevolent side, in the form of chewable coca leaves as opposed to the powder.  But we ain’t gonna see that at the local farmer’s market anytime soon.

More importantly, is the strategy of attacking him even useful? I mean, given that there are other people involved in the decision, even from the executive side, are you right in targeting only one person? I’m not talking about blame; I’m talking about tactics and strategy…

Anyway, I don’t have any horses in this particular race – it matters to me only in terms of an interesting situation. I don’t particularly care what your internal policies are, as long as you don’t invade my country…

How much day-to-day influence does the person, Barak Hussein Obama, have over the actions of the “Obama administration”? It seems to me that there’s an opacity involved here – policies that are most probably made by a large group are tagged onto a single person, who may or may not personally support them.

If it’s a single person making these decisions, that seems like an awful bottleneck in the process, not to mention that it’s pretty much tantamount to an elected dictator for four years. If on the other hand, it’s a collective process, Penn’s charge re Obama’s having smoked in his early life is misdirected at best. As an individual, he may support legalization, but as a member (the leader, but a member nevertheless) of a team, he may not be free to make that statement in public.

So, is Obama the right target for this attack? Or should you be looking at a finer grained picture of the administration – who supports and who doesn’t – and attack those persons?

Don’t forget the donations from the prison guard union either…

BP gave him a mint last selection cycle and no one went to prison for the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history. The laws were not enforced. Regulators had been taking meth and hookers as bribes and no one went to prison.
He also took a shitload of money from Wall Street in the last selection cycle. Maybe you didn’t notice but the crimes of Wall Street’s execs crashed our economy, and still none of the scumbags went to prison. Instead his administration ended up with a revolving door to the very worst banks who were rewarded for their crimes (and donations).
But… sell a water pipe for the express purpose of “smoking tobacco” and your door could be kicked in at 3am.

The problem with criminalization is the black market.  All of the nasty stuff surrounding the drug trade is purely a function of it being a black market.  When you have a black market, it means you can’t go to the authorities to settle disputes.  When that happens, people get nasty.  Destroy the black market by making it legit, and all of the that nastiness vanishes.

We have already seen this once in history.  Alcohol prohibition gave rise to gangs of unprecedented power. When prohibition ended, the gangs withered and died.  Kill the black market and drugs and you wipe out most criminality in America.  Criminal gangs can’t compete with a local pharmacy.  If there were no illegal drugs to sell, gangs wouldn’t have any way to make money.

Black markets are the greatest of evils.  Marijuana should be made fully legal if for no other reason than to wreak havoc on the black markets in the US.  Without marijuana, the most profitable and widely sold drug, you would seen funding for criminal activities get castrated.  It wouldn’t make the US a perfect happy utopia of peace and leave, but it sure as shit would get you a lot closer than any other single policy measure.

Pointing out that you think the messenger is an asshole on some other topic when they don’t touch said other topic is pointless and dumb.  It is a purely an ad hominem attack on someone delivering a message you freaking agree with.  It would be like spamming the thread where we all cheer Obama for getting around to “evolving” his support for gay marriage with “OMFG, I agree with Obama on this, but that asshole imprisons people who use marijuana and keeps funding Homeland Security.  He is an asshole.”

Perhaps the biggest reason why I find this so annoying is that because I myself am a recovering libertarian who would now call  himself a liberal.  I understand where Cato comes from in all things, even when I violently disagree.  What pisses me off about dismissing Cato because it is Cato is that you are failing to learn a valuable lesson when you agree with them.  Traditional lefty arguments on stuff like this falls on deaf ears when talking to a conservative.  The way Cato frames their objections on the other hand can crack the skull of a conservative in half.  

Beating a conservative over the head with pro-liberty, anti-government intrusion arguments the way Cato does is frighteningly effective.  Sadly, liberals often fail to use this language and revert to their own when trying to win these arguments with people who don’t speak their language.

If you don’t like the source, but love the message, consider it a gift.  You just learned someone’s kryptonite.  You would be better served understanding it rather than trying to dismiss it as only agreeing without you by chance.

I am, by no means, a libertarian.  I support universal access to healthcare and universal access to education.

But I know that libertarians are more liberal than Obama and the Democrats on issues of civil liberties, criminal justice, and foreign policy.

And the vast majority libertarians prefer a strict separation between church and state, even the libertarian ones.

Two of the leading writers on libertarian ideas view abortion as the complex issue that it is, and remain pro-choice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxtAF6Bi0Nk 

But historically, people will do what they’re allowed to do, and especially if they’re rewarded for doing it.  If Obama does something wrong, but is still supported by millions of people, there’s no reason for him to stop.

However, if those millions of people spoke with their votes and said, “If you actively destroy the lives of innocent people for political purposes, we will not support you,” then it’s possible, likely even, that politicians would be less likely to engage in that behavior.

I agree with you 100% that a third party candidate can’t win and that Romney won’t advance a progressive agenda.

But many liberals like myself believe that the reason Obama and the Democrats aren’t progressive on issues of civil rights, criminal justice, and foreign policy, is because they know that people will vote for them no matter what they do, as long as the Republicans are a little worth.

We refuse to lend support to any candidate who actively destroys the lives of innocent people.  If all liberals did this, Democrats might stop their conservative behaviors.

And we’re not setting policy here, Rindan, we’re chatting on the internet. We don’t gain anything by sticking up for ideologues just because they happen to be right twice a day. We don’t have to rationalize away anything.

Because we’re not playing in teams right now, we’re making our own calls. And honestly, I think that is far better for politics than your suggestion to ignore crap from more directions.