US Politics Mega-thread - Page 893

As the movement to expand access to marijuana grows across the country, the Republican Party, with the exception of its kooky libertarian wing, has a bad case of reefer madness. Gov. Rick Perry, who's no stranger to moments of mental madness, equated marijuana use to murder, while Gov. Chris Christie has more or less said he’d prefer dead kids to stoned kids. During the 2012 election, Mitt Romney promised to "fight tooth and nail" against pro-marijuana legalization.

While national polling shows more than 55% of Americans support pot legalization, Republicans remains strongly opposed, and in fact, more than two-thirds of Republicans voted against legalization in Colorado and Washington.

With Republicans likely to remain opposed, marijuana could emerge as a big cultural wedge issue winner in both the 2014 and 2016 elections. The GOP holds a majority in the House of Congress and is threatening in the Senate come November, but in state elections, marijuana on the ballot has big potential to harm Republican candidates. In January, the Florida Supreme Court approved a proposed constitutional amendment that would legalize medical marijuana, assuring that the initiative will appear on the state’s November ballot. The referendum on pot may, in turn, determine the winner of the state’s gubernatorial race. According to the most recent Quinnipiac University poll, 70 percent of Floridians favor medical marijuana, which augers well for Democratic challenger Charlie Christ, given Gov. Rick Scott opposes the bill. There is considerable evidence that vote turnout rises when pot is on the ballot, especially for young voters who would naturally favor a candidate who supports it.

Nate Cohn, a columnist for theNew Republic, writes that assuming Hillary Clinton would be the nominee, she “would be well-positioned to deploy the issue. Her strength among older voters and women mitigates the risk that she would lose very much support, while legalization could help Clinton with the young, independent, and male voters who could clinch her primary or general election victory.”

Democrats are already winning ideological clashes in this country’s cultural war. On issues from same-sex marriage to the death penalty; from abortion to gun control; poll after poll shows a majority of Americans lean left. Pot legalization is shaping up to be another issue Democrats could apply a blowtorch to Republicans in blue and purple states, for the GOP is handcuffed when it comes to dealing intelligently on the war on drugs.

News organizations often disagree about what Americans need to know. MSNBC, for example, apparently believes that traffic in Fort Lee, N.J., is the crisis of our time. Fox News, on the other hand, chooses to cover the September 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi more heavily than other networks. The American people, for their part, disagree about what they want to watch.

But everyone should agree on this: The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.

Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission, where I am a commissioner, does not agree. Last May the FCC proposed an initiative to thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country. With its "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs," or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring.

The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about "the process by which stories are selected" and how often stations cover "critical information needs," along with "perceived station bias" and "perceived responsiveness to underserved populations."