Chronic Politics

Washington DC's newest advocacy group has come out in support of President Obama's reelection, but the WaPo reports there are doubts about the group's grassroots bona fides.

When the U.S. Medical Marijuana Chamber of Commerce this week endorsed President Obama for reelection, folks in the media were surprised that an industry that hadn’t been too thrilled with the administration was rallying behind it.

Even more surprised by the development? Mainstream marijuana activists, many of whom have never heard of the organization or its founder, Tom Leto. The major lobbying and advocacy groups have so far held off on endorsing a presidential candidate — they say Obama hasn’t lived up to a vow to back off raids.

-- snip --

Leto, a California-based promoter of hydroponic equipment, explained the gen­esis of the company, a story that only adds a bit of mystery: He was working with the New York PR firm Todd Shapiro Associates to help market his hydroponics business when the concept snowballed into a nationwide organization advocating federal legalization of medical marijuana.

The U.S. Medical Marijuana Chamber of Commerce evidently consists of just Tom Leto plus a website that features a marvelously incoherent statement of endorsement for Obama. Check out the stoner syntax of this sentence:

“Recent research has shown that Obama’s Medical Marijuana usage is a big reason in which he understands the value of Federally allowing this industry to exist.”

Here's a good rule for all weed legalization lobbyists: don't toke up until after you're done drafting policy papers, because otherwise you might come across like a self-parody of a doper wasteoid.

Leto's legislative proposal, which has the heading "HR TK420" - oh, 420, I get it! - would make the USMMCOC the sole authority to tax, regulate and control the newly legalized marijuana industry. That would be a sweet deal if he could get it, but I think there are some heavily armed Mexicans and others who might take issue with that monopoly.

The WaPo story suggests that stoners may tend to be a bit paranoid. Maybe so. Or maybe you're freaking out, man.

Mexican Standoff Over August 24 Shooting Incident

Mexican authorities are still being tight-lipped about Friday's shooting incident, in which two U.S. Embassy employees and a Mexican Navy officer were wounded by gunfire while driving to a naval facility south of Mexico City. The first report from the Associated Press called the incident "a confused running gunbattle," and that remains the case nearly three days later. See Diplopundit's write-up (here) for details of what little is known.

The first official Mexican press release came from the Naval Ministry, and it placed blame on the federal police for misidentifying the embassy vehicle. A Mexican Attorney General's Office spokesman confirmed Saturday that all the shots were fired by federal police units, and he added that Mexico's top police official, Public Security Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, personally went to the site of the shooting, indicating how seriously he is taking the incident. I've seen unconfirmed reports that twelve federal policemen were relieved of duty pending investigation, however, federal police spokesman Ramon Salinas told CNN yesterday that he would have no further comment and that in the future all information must come from the office of Mexican President Felipe Calderon. President Calderon's office did not respond to a request from CNN.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City waited about twelve hours before sending out its first, and so far only, press release.

So, what exactly happened? Did narcos attempt to stop the embassy vehicle, thereby provoking a chase by federal police? If so, it seems they got away clean, leaving no trace behind. Or did federal police mistakenly assume the embassy vehicle was operated by narcos using fake diplomatic plates - which would be an entirely plausible scenario - and fire on it when it evaded their ambush? Did the embassy employees mistake a cluster of federal police vehicles for a narco ambush and flee, leading to mutual confusion? Were the federal police posing as narcos, in some kind of a ruse? Were the federal police themselves narcos?

That last question is the big one, and such suspicion is warranted. Just last week Mexico announced that it replaced all 348 federal police officers assigned to security details at the Mexico City International Airport as a result of the June 25 incident in which three officers were shot to death by fellow officers who were involved in trafficking drugs through the airport.

Mexican press reports say the two embassy employees were treated at a hospital in Cuernavaca for only two hours before they were taken elsewhere. From that, I conclude that somebody thought it prudent to get them into U.S. control as soon as their conditions were stable enough for them to travel.

Since there are two witnesses to the incident who are not under the control of the Mexican government, I assume we will eventually get a satisfactory explanation of what happened.

FYI, Google Earth has good overhead and Street View imagery of the location of the incident. Search for "El Capulin, Morelos, Mexico" and look for the intersection of two east-west highways, Mexico 95D and the Cuernavaca-Ciudad De Mexico. The shooting reportedly took place on a side road about 100 meters north of the large square paved space (which is a Pemex gas station) in between the two highways.

The Mexican news media report that I've embedded above has a depiction of the incident starting at about the 1 minute mark, and well as more still photos and video of the Mexican response to the crime scene than I've found anywhere else.

Most Eyebrow-Raising Headline Of The Week

"Nepali man bites snake to death in revenge attack"

Apocalypse Not

Obama's fundraising appeals went off the deep end again today. Obama wonders: is this ‘the end?’

“It’s August 23rd,” Obama wrote in a fundraising email with “the end?” as its subject line. “And 75 days from now, I’ll either be looking at another four years in the White House — or the end of this opportunity.”

He asked for contributions of $5 or more, saying “we’re getting outspent by wide margins in critical battleground states — and what we do about that today could be the difference between winning and losing on November 6th.”

How desperate is Obama for campaign cash? According to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission (summarized here) Obama has raised and spent way more than Romney so far in 2012. He raised $348 million to Romney's $193 million. He spent $263 million to Romney's $163 million. And he has nearly three times more cash on hand than Romney, $87,747,678 to $30,181,373.

This is the end? My only friend, the end? Of our elaborate plans, the end? Of everything that stands, the end?

Yes, in the silly season that hits Washington every fourth year this qualifies as The End.   

[Colonel Kurtz voice] "the horror ... the horror."

The Narco War in Ciudad Juarez Has A Winner

It looks like the narco war in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, that sub-state conflict on our southern border that has raged on with such excessive violence, and which two years ago reached into the U.S. Consulate staff and their families, has now settled down.

Good news, to be sure, but maybe for a bad reason, as the WaPo reports today - In Mexico’s Murder City, the War Appears Over:

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — When this city was among the most murderous in the world, the morgue ran out of room, the corpses stacked to the ceiling in the wheezing walk-in freezers.

Medical examiners, in plastic boots, performed a dozen autopsies a day as families of victims waited outside in numbers sufficient to require a line.

For all this, Mexico has not made much sense of one of the most sensational killing sprees in recent history, which has left 10,500 dead in the streets of Juarez as two powerful drug and crime mafias went to war. In 2010, the peak, there were at least 3,115 aggravated homicides, with many months posting more than 300 deaths, according to the newspaper El Diario.

But the fever seems to have broken.

In July, there were just 48 homicides — 33 by gun, seven by beatings, six by strangulation and two by knife. Of these, 40 are considered by authorities to be related to the drug trade or criminal rivalries.

Authorities attribute the decrease in homicides to their own efforts — patrols by the army, arrests by police, new schools to keep young men out of gangs and in the classroom.

Yet ordinary Mexicans suspect there is another, more credible reason for the decrease in extreme violence: The most-wanted drug lord in the world, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, and his Sinaloa cartel have won control of the local drug trade and smuggling routes north.

Put that crown squarely on Guzman's head, because "El Chapo" (Shorty) is by acclamation the biggest drug lord ever. How big is that, exactly? Well, no one on the outside knows exactly, but the New York Times had a very informative essay last June on Cocaine Incorporated that gives you a pretty good idea of how big:

So in a spirit of empirical humility, we shouldn’t accept as gospel the estimate, from the Justice Department, that Colombian and Mexican cartels reap $18 billion to $39 billion from drug sales in the United States each year. (That range alone should give you pause.) Still, even if you take the lowest available numbers, Sinaloa emerges as a titanic player in the global black market. In the sober reckoning of the RAND Corporation, for instance, the gross revenue that all Mexican cartels derive from exporting drugs to the United States amounts to only $6.6 billion. By most estimates, though, Sinaloa has achieved a market share of at least 40 percent and perhaps as much as 60 percent, which means that Chapo Guzmán’s organization would appear to enjoy annual revenues of some $3 billion — comparable in terms of earnings to Netflix or, for that matter, to Facebook.

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Even so, the business generates such volumes of currency that there is only so much you can launder or reinvest, which means that money can start to pile up around the house. The most that Martínez ever saw at one time was $30 million, which just sat there, having accumulated in his living room. In 2007, Mexican authorities raided the home of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is believed to have supplied meth-precursor chemicals to the cartel, and discovered $206 million, the largest cash seizure in history. And that was the money Zhenli held onto — he was an inveterate gambler, who once blew so much cash in Las Vegas that one of the casinos presented him, in consolation, with a Rolls-Royce. “How much money do you have to lose in the casino for them to give you a Rolls-Royce?” Tony Placido, the D.E.A. intelligence official, asked. (The astonishing answer, in Zhenli’s case, is $72 million at a single casino in a single year.) Placido also pointed out that, as a precursor guy, Zhenli was on the low end of the value chain for meth. It makes you wonder about the net worth of the guy who runs the whole show.

When the Sinaloa cartel got that kind of crazy-big it could afford to mop up its remaining enemies and consolidate control over its market. That consolidation allows it to operate as a true cartel for the first time, and when cartels are cartels, public safety wins:

To anyone conversant with economics, reading stories about the Mexican drug wars has long come with a bit of irony. The drug trafficking organizations are commonly known as cartels, but the horrific violence stems precisely from the fact that they aren't cartels. In a legal competitive marketplace in a country with an effective legal and law enforcement apparatus, firms compete by trying to offer a good value proposition to their customers. In an illegal market, firms can compete by trying to kill one another. And in Mexico, that kind of violent competition has been running amok leading to a massive body count. Insofar as you get true cartels—stable, anti-competitive arrangements—then a lot of the problems associated with the drug market go away. There are no competitors to kill, leading to less violence and fewer risks to bystanders.

The U.S. Government once offered a reward of 5 million Gringo dollars for the capture of Guzman, but I can no longer find that offer online, so it may be that we have withdrawn it out of embarrassment. After all, five million would hardly be enough to motivate anyone who is close enough to Guzman to rat him out. He and his crew probably spill that much money.

Watch Obama Fight Budget Numbers With Psychokinesis

Big Tip 'o the Hat to Naked DC for this C-SPAN clip in which Barack Obama spends a solid six minutes trying to kill Paul Ryan using nothing but the concentrated power of his mind. It's even better than The Men Who Stare At Goats.

Oh, and Joe Biden was there, too.

This year I will definitely watch the VP debates.

"The Star Spangled Banner" Sung In The Key Of 18,000 Revs Per Minute

Now that the U.S. Army has decided to cut back on NASCAR sponsorships, I suggest that it look into Formula One racing.

NASCAR isn't bringing in enough Army recruits to justify the sponsorship costs (which are considerable - $26 million went to Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his No. 88 Chevrolet alone), so the Army might want to try something new.

You may say, "Well, Formula One is way too Euro to go over in the American heartland" and I wouldn't disagree. NASCAR has deep Appalachian roots while F1 is all about blatantly foreign stuff, like open-wheel cars and the metric system. F1 even has umlauts, such as in "Nürburgring."

But the Red Bull racing team's stroke of genius takes all that foreign taint away. The Army ought to hire those guys to play the national anthem at every racing event we have. If that doesn't make American motorheads stand up and salute, I don't know what will.