Marijuana seems to be all over the news today, so I thought I'd just give a quick rundown of the recent developments, with a little call to action at the end.

The biggest news comes from New Hampshire, where the governor just signed a medical marijuana bill into law, making the Granite State the nineteenth state to have legalized cannabis for medicinal purposes. Nineteen states plus the District of Columbia means that almost 40 percent of the country has now approved for medical use a substance the federal government continues to define as having "no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States." Except for, you know, the 19 states plus the Nation's Capital, where it is accepted for medical use.

This is doublethink of the purest sort, of course. Of those states which have legalized medical marijuana, not a single one has had such a bad experience with doing so that they've reconsidered and made it illegal again. Not one. So much for the doomsayers who predicted the end of civilization as we know it, eh?

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[The Scene: A warm Philadelphia evening, 226 years ago. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention -- after a long and miserably-hot day of respectful debate (and quite a lot of just plain bickering) over the text of Article I, Section 10 of the proposed draft of the new United States Constitution -- take up the final item on the agenda. We join the Founding Fathers as they (somewhat-wearily) begin discussion of the final subject of the day. Since the debate was conducted behind closed doors, this re-creation uses no names for the participants, to protect their anonymity.]

Founding Father Number One: And so, fellow delegates, we come to the final item of the day -- should our new United States government confer titles of royalty?

Founding Father Number Two: This is an easy issue to dispose of, so that we may all adjourn to [gestures towards elderly member of the Convention] our beds for a well-deserved rest... or possibly to [gestures towards a crowd of younger, more-boisterous delegates in the back of the room] the local tavern to slake the thirst this long, hot day has raised. [laughter and huzzahs from back of room]. I move that we sweep all the trappings of monarchy aside, and utterly forbid all titles and any other hint of royalty from these newly United States.

FF1: While we can all appreciate adjourning for the day quickly, let us not make haste. Are there any other voices which should be heard?

FF3: [from back of room] Let us all just vote and repair to the ale-house! Enough delay! Nobody wants titles in a nation where all will be equal!

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As usual this week, there were several stories the mainstream media was obsessing over which I am just largely going to ignore. The most inane of these was, of course: "This just in! It gets hot in the summer! Who knew?!?" The most ridiculous one was the foofaroo over Rolling Stone using a photograph on its cover which many other media outlets had used for front-page stuff, but which somehow Rolling Stone wasn't supposed to use, for some inexplicable reason. Even though -- on the same cover -- they called the guy "a monster." Lots of out-of-context outrage ensued, including one call to buy the magazine and then burn it. Um, yeah, that'll show them! Just hand over your money, in protest!

There was one big story this week that even President Obama chimed in on, but I really feel that just about everything that could be said about the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman case already has been said by a multitude of others (see: the entire rest of the media universe), already.

I guess the real prize in "media chasing shiny, shiny idiocy instead of reporting the news" this week, however, was the continuing coverage ("No news yet, but we're not going to let that get in the way of our continuing updates!") of a royal heir who is about to be born in Great Britain -- while all but ignoring the newsworthy thing the currently-reigning monarch actually did this week. With little fanfare and little fuss, the Queen signed the legalization of gay marriage in Britain. But you wouldn't know it, watching the teevee. Sigh.

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The news that Liz Cheney is going to run for a Senate seat in Wyoming has certainly provoked a number of interesting reactions from the inside-the-Beltway set. From the Right, there has been consternation over Cheney primarying a sitting Republican, which mostly focuses on the unseemliness of it all. From the Left, there has been a mixture that I would call "horrified fascination" over the prospects of Dick Cheney's daughter sitting in the upper chamber of Congress (that's the horror part), tempered by the unrestrained glee of watching an internal Republican knife-fight. One thing's for certain, this will be one of the closest-watched primary races in the country next year.

My reaction, however, is a bit different. I actually support Liz Cheney's ambitions, for a rather bizarre reason I'll get to at the end. This may surprise some, because there are so many valid reasons for me to decry Liz Cheney running for public office. Let's run through these first, before I get to why I support her right to run.

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I was listening to a random Republican in a television interview recently (which is a dignified way of saying I forgot who it was and am too lazy to look it up), and was struck by how open he was about his party's 2014 election strategy, over a year in advance. Essentially, this strategy will be: "We're running against Obamacare, again." Obamacare will be the number one issue Republicans are building their election strategy around, the politician easily admitted. This sounds pretty plausible to me, especially considering that the House is spending its time attacking Obamacare once again (I forget, is this the 38th time or the 39th? Another factoid I'm too lazy to look up, I suppose). But I can't help but wonder whether running an anti-Obamacare strategy is going to turn out more like 2012 for Republicans than 2010.

Fear and hatred for Obama's signature and now-eponymous law worked wonders for the Republican Party in 2010, in Obama's first midterm election. The year of the Tea Party swept a whole bunch of Republicans into office, and handed them the House of Representatives. This magic will, obviously, be what Republicans are trying to recapture in 2014 when no presidential nominees are on the ballot. But they tried a similar thing in 2012, and it flat-out didn't work. Perhaps because Republicans were asking the public to believe something that was not just false, but 180 degrees counter to reality ("Republicans are the saviors of Medicare!"), the issue just never gained the traction they thought it would, and Republicans got trounced in the polls. So will the Obamacare issue play out more like 2010 or 2012 this time around?

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Harry Reid and John McCain apparently just cut a deal which will avoid the "nuclear" or "constitutional" option of changing the Senate's rule that allows filibustering presidential (non-judicial) appointees. Yesterday I wrote about the meeting which produced this deal, so I thought it was worth writing a followup article now that a deal has been reached.

Was it a good deal or a bad deal? Well, that's rather subjective. Even answering whether it was a good deal or a bad deal specifically for Democrats or Republicans involves some degree of bias. On the whole, personally, I think it's a pretty good deal, but then others may see it differently, I realize.

The deal will allow immediate up-or-down votes on something like 15 presidential appointees, and the first one voted on was symbolically important. Richard Cordray's nomination moved forward with a whopping 71 "yea" votes, which included 17 Republicans and all the chamber's Democrats. The fight over Cordray's appointment (and, previously, Elizabeth Warren's nomination for the job) has been a long and ugly one, so it's no wonder Reid moved that one to the front of the line. Finally, after a multi-year delay caused by Republican obstructionism, there will be a confirmed leader of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- that is reason enough to call the deal a pretty good one, in my book.

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An extraordinary meeting is taking place today, which all 100 senators have been invited to attend. This should really not be an extraordinary thing -- you'd think that all senators meeting together would just be an actual floor session in the Senate -- but it is because it is actually a political meeting, with the doors closed. The senators aren't meeting to pass legislation, they're meeting to have a political showdown of sorts (hence the closed doors). Normally, each party's caucus meets separately behind closed doors to hash out party strategy, but what's extraordinary about today's confab is that both parties are meeting at once.

The meeting is a last-ditch effort by Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell to avoid what some people call the "nuclear option" and others call the "constitutional option". This refers to what Harry Reid is threatening to do should Republicans keep up their almost-universal obstructionism by filibustering pretty much every vote the Senate takes these days. It's gotten so bad that the lazier members of the media often say things like "Well, as everyone knows it takes 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate," without any acknowledgement that (1) this is not true, it's supposed to take only a majority vote (as the Constitution specifies), and (2) this is a recent development, since the Senate has not always operated this way.

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OK, we've got somewhat of a backlog to take care of here, due to summertime laziness striking early this year. So we're just going to plow through the swirling storm of craziness as fast as possible. Insert your own "Sharknado" joke, if you feel so inclined.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid cried "Wolf!" this week... oh, wait, that can't be right... let me check my notes. Sorry for the snark, but the news that Reid is once again considering the "nuclear option" (or the "constitutional option" if you prefer) to end at least part of the rampant and unprecedented obstructionism from Senate Republicans wasn't exactly greeted with joy even among supporters of the idea -- because Harry's led us down this path before, only to wimp out at the end.

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This is going to get a little wonky, just to warn everyone from the start.

Earlier this year, after the new Congress was seated, there was a rhetorical push from Republicans lauding the sanctity of "regular order" for Congress to follow. The term was used constantly, although few outside the Beltway knew what they were talking about.

The movement to return to regular order was a reaction against the leadership of the House and the Senate essentially dictating what bills come to the floor with little opportunity for the rank-and-file to debate or amend. Republican lawmakers were calling for this sort of thing to end, hence their calls for returning to regular order.

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The recent developments in Egypt have caused an interesting reaction from American political commenters, because real-world events have an annoying way of not fitting neatly into our prepackaged political pigeonholes. The basic questions (such as: "Is the overthrow of Morsi a good thing or a bad thing?") have complex answers, because while many argue that Morsi was bad for Egypt, the way he was removed from office is certainly nothing to celebrate. The United States government can't use the word "coup" because that would mean we'd have to cut off aid, but outside the world of diplomatic fictions, that's exactly what happened: a military coup d'état. As coups go it was a fairly restrained one, but celebrating a populist/military overthrow of a democratically-elected leader is an unusual stance for Americans to take, for obvious reasons. Even if we do like the new guy better than the old guy.

Which brings us to a lesson many Americans find very hard to accept -- we do not actually get to dictate what happens in every country in the world. We just don't. It doesn't matter how militarily advanced we are as a nation or how super-duper a superpower we are, we still do not (and should not strive to) have the ultimate say in who governs foreign countries. Egypt (or Iraq, or Syria, or Israel, or Libya, or Iran, or any other country) is a sovereign nation -- not a U.S. state or territory. I am always struck by this disconnect in far too many politicians and pundits whenever anything happens in foreign lands -- the debate immediately begins as to "what we should have done" or "what we should be doing" to procure an outcome that we approve of. But you know what? Sometimes nothing we do makes much of a difference. It's a hard fact for those in the "America, world policeman" frame of mind to accept, especially when things don't turn out the way we like.

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