The big political news today, of course, was President Obama's press conference. While the subject matter largely revolved around the National Security Agency reforms Obama is belatedly proposing, I found the rest of the presser to be more interesting, personally -- mostly because the excerpt we're going to provide will in all likelihood be virtually ignored in most media reports. But we'll get to all that in the remainder of the column.

Sometimes, come Friday, I give in to the urge to just unleash a rant. Usually, this is provided at the end of the column, in lieu of the talking points. Today, we're switching things around a bit, and instead are leading off with a little mini-rant (mostly because it's so off-subject). So we'll get to Obama's comments in a bit, but first, my advice for anyone who donates regularly to the Public Broadcasting System (I've been meaning to rant on this for a while, but it's now pledge season once again, so it's definitely time to speak up).

If you haven't heard this story already and are a supporter of public television, I heartily encourage you to read up on what has been going on there. And then I also heartily encourage you to phone up your local PBS station during pledge-break hours and say to them something similar to the following:

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Attorney General Eric Holder seems to be signaling that he'll soon be announcing major changes in the federal government's policies on illegal drugs. If this turns out to be true, it will indeed be a welcome change in the approach the Justice Department has taken under President Barack Obama. Obama is now the third president to have admitted smoking marijuana before he entered office (well, OK, the second one who admitted inhaling, technically, but still...), so any changes are indeed long overdue.

The focus of Holder's comments in a recent interview seemed to be on the vast number of people who are in federal prison on drug charges. This is an important aspect of the War On Drugs which desperately needs changing, as is brutally shown in this simple chart. When First Lady Nancy Reagan decided to make drugs her "pet issue," the War On Drugs went into overdrive. The results are plain to see, as the chart clearly shows. Two big parts of this problem were the "mandatory minimum" laws Congress passed back then, and the 500-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine (which are chemically the same thing, in essence). The cocaine problem was lessened by Obama in his first term, but not completely equalized. The mandatory minimum problem seems to be what Holder may announce changes to, at least from reading between the lines of his recent interview.

This is all well and good. Any steps the federal government takes away from its own addiction to a senseless "war" on its own citizens has to be seen as a good one, at this point. But there are two festering issues which Holder really also should address.

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The Republican Party is busily choosing sides in an upcoming fight. Now, in normal times that sentence would be parsed as: the Republican Party -- as a whole -- was choosing their strategy in a looming battle with Democrats. These days, due to the ever-more-visible deep divisions within the party itself, Republicans are instead choosing which side to take in an upcoming battle with itself. Which makes the entire exercise enjoyable for Democrats, who have a number of options of their own. But we'll get to that in a moment.

The fight is what could be termed the last battlefield for the anti-Obamacare absolutists. Choose your battlefield metaphor; there are a lot to select from (Thermopylae, Waterloo, the Alamo, the OK Corral, Custer's Last Stand, etc.). Conservatives know full well that this is the last bite they're ever going to get at the "repeal!" apple. Because if they fail this time around (as virtually everyone is predicting), then Obamacare will be fully implemented, and there simply will be no turning back.

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I had fully intended to write a column today on the sale of the Washington Post to Amazon's Jeff Bezos, but the more I pondered the matter, the less sure I was of drawing any kind of conclusions. Will it be a good thing or a bad thing? Well, the only real answer is that it's too soon to tell. I mean, if they decided to revamp their op-ed page and hire an outside-the-Beltway blogger to provide snarky political commentary, well, that might be a good thing (ahem). Kidding aside, though, the real reason I'm so fuzzy-headed on the issue might just be that I was up past 4:00 in the morning dealing with site maintenance. Which is why I decided to punt today, and just run this program note instead.

User purge complete

As I mentioned last week, ChrisWeigant.com has been overwhelmed by bogus users of late. Users register, and then attempt to post "comment spam" to get some useless link posted. My spam filter catches all of these (I don't think in the six years this site has been active that a single one of these has ever been seen publicly), so in the end it is a pointless exercise for the spammers, but try telling them that.

In any case, to clean up our database, I've personally gone through each and every user login and email and deleted a whopping 1,400-1,500 of them, finishing up last night. Because of this purge, I may have inadvertently deleted valid users. I apologize if this is the case, for anyone. But this presents a problem, if you have been affected. Since to use my "Email Chris" page you must be a valid user and logged in, this is now impossible if your login has been deleted.

If you have been deleted, you have two options. You can either create a new login and use the new name here, or if you'd like me to attempt to reinstate your older account, you can contact me and ask me to do so. You can contact me on Twitter, or by writing to the following email address:

iexist ("at" symbol) chrisweigant (dot) com

This address is temporary -- it will only remain active for another few weeks -- so please contact me soon if you got inadvertently deleted from the site. And, again, my apologies -- deciding who is a spammer and who is real is more of an art form than a hard science, so I'm sure I made a few mistakes.

Columns will resume their normal schedule tomorrow.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

More bad news for Obama

President Barack Obama's job approval polling numbers continued a rather dramatic slide in July, resulting in the lowest public approval yet of his second term. He hasn't quite hit the low point of his first term, but he is getting dangerously close. Whether he can turn this trend around in August remains to be seen, but he's certainly got his work cut out for him. A quick look at this month's chart shows the size of the problem Obama's going to have to overcome, to do so.

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

July, 2013

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It was a busy week in Washington, since all the congresscritters were eager to get out of town for their not-so-well-earned five weeks of vacation. It'll take awhile for the dust to settle, so let's take a look at some of what's been happening while it does.

The Republican Party is apparently going full-bore with what appears to be their campaign strategy of: "Government doesn't work -- elect us and we'll prove it!" The infighting among Republicans has been nothing short of spectacular this week, with Rand Paul and Chris Christie insulting each other regularly, Ted Cruz calling his own party the "surrender caucus," and a House bill that just proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that John Boehner has lost whatever remaining shreds of control over his caucus he previously clung to.

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First, the news (as they say). Even though today's news is just taunting me to write a column ("20th state legalizes medical marijuana"...), I am not going to. I am taking a day off because I can finally state that I have reached a milestone on my writing project. Every "I" has been dotted, every "T" crossed (or should that, more pedantically, be "every 'i' has been dotted," one wonders?)... where was I? Oh, right, milestone!

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Senator Max Baucus, the Democrat known as the "Senator from K Street" for his legendary gluttony at the lobbyists' trough, has just decreed a minimum of 50 years of secrecy for the ongoing negotiations over revamping the federal tax code. Baucus is the committee chair of the tax-writing Senate committee, and he and his pal Orrin Hatch have determined that the best way to serve the American people while rewriting the entire tax code is to allow all their colleagues to defend tax loopholes for special interests painlessly -- because the public won't be allowed to know who fought for which bit of corporate welfare until the year 2065.

Yes, you read that right. I wish I was making this up as some sort of bad parody about why the approval rating for Congress is lower than that of cockroaches or communism, but (sadly enough, for us all) this story is actually true. The Hill brings us the shameful details:

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The news of Bradley Manning's conviction today on multiple charges (and his acquittal on the most serious one) has people lining up to either defend or denounce the verdict. We'll probably be hearing about it all week, in fact. When he is sentenced, it will spur another round of this debate, no doubt.

Whenever the subject is discussed by serious and sober "security experts," however, I find myself scratching my head over one claim made repeatedly -- that Manning should have availed himself of the "right ways" to blow the whistle, if he thought there was wrongdoing which needed exposing.

These "right ways" to be a whistleblower are never adequately explained, however. Sometimes mentions are made of contacting elected officials, or contacting inspectors general. But I've never heard an example yet of any of this exposing any actual wrongdoing.

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President Obama, for the first time in memory, is not going to ignore August. Augusts haven't been kind to Obama in the past. But this time around it appears he's going to proactively go on the offensive for the month, rather than sitting on the sidelines during what is now known as "town hall season." How successful he will be in this effort remains to be seen, but it is at least refreshing to see him make the attempt.

Augusts have traditionally been long and languid on the political scene. Congress scarpers off to avoid the Washington miasmic heat, and up until the advent of YouTube, not much political news was ever made during this vacation lull. Then came the Tea Party Era, where videos of people screaming at their elected representatives became high entertainment. Politicians were caught rather flat-footed, since these "chat with the folks back in the home district" events had always been so low-key and low-risk. If some lunatic interrupted an event by ranting about his pet conspiracy theories, it might be a one-day story in the local newspaper -- but it certainly wouldn't even rate the front page of the Podunk Gazette, much less national airtime.

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