A U.S. district judge ruled unconstitutional a law prohibiting transit systems that get federal funds from accepting advertising that advocates drug laws different from existing ones. The suit was in response to legislation that barred drug advocacy groups, such as those wanting to legalize marijuana, from advertising on the D.C. Metro system.

No matter how you might feel about marijuana, this ruling is a victory for free speech in an area that sorely needs it. Federal drug laws that lump marijuana into the same class as harder drugs need to be re-examined.

Federal drug agencies misrepresent the dangers of marijuana. One oft-repeated contention that today’s marijuana is much more potent that marijuana of 30-40 years ago is questionable. Several years ago I contacted a scientist whose studies were cited by federal drug agencies as proof of the more potent marijuana. He said the agencies were misrepresenting his conclusions.

In any case, Judge Paul L. Friedman:

…declared that the case was not about drugs or crime, but about free speech. He called the law a clear case of “viewpoint discrimination” and noted that Metro displayed the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s anti-drug ads when it refused the other ads.
“Congress . . . cannot prohibit advertisements supporting legalization of a controlled substance while permitting those that support tougher drug sentences,” the judge said. He called the law “an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’ broad spending power.”

As I posted yesterday, I was hoping to see how President Bush would relate World War II and Iraq. He did mention WWII in his speech to Air Force Academy graduates yesterday, but I’m still trying to understand the connection – except, of course, the obvious attempt to convince older voters that he’s in the mold of FDR. He’s probably thinks he’s laying the groundwork for overturning the 22nd amendment so he can be President-Forever.

He contended that peace and democracy in Iraq are emerging at a satisfactory pace by drawing parallels with the course of events in Europe following World War II. During the first four years of the Cold War in the 1940s, Bush said, communists threatened civil wars in Turkey and Greece, Berlin was blockaded and the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon. Yet ultimately, he said, freedom has prevailed. By comparison, he said, “We are now about three years into the war against terrorism. . . . This is no time for impatience and self-defeating pessimism.”

So how does this relate to invading a country that hadn’t declared war on us? And how does our Iraqi policy compare to the post WWII Marshall Plan or the fact that we failed to liberate all of Eastern Europe.

The New York Times’s story describes the applause he got during his speech as mostly “modest.” Boy if you can’t get a whoop and a holler out of Air Force cadets for your policy, how do expect the rest of us to get excited?

The Post story said Bush tried to strike “broad philosophical” themes.

Bush said that, in the current generation of terrorists, “we hear the echoes of other enemies at other times — that same swagger and demented logic of the fanatic.”

“Swagger and demented logic”? Probably could have been said by Osama himself.

Speaking of Swagger

CIA Director George Tenet resigned today.

TheRomensko blog today notes the war of words between the L.A. Times and Fox News. Fox Chairman Roger Ailes’s op-ed piece in — where else? — the Wall Street Journal doesn’t refute any of the specific instances where Fox News, as Times Editor John Carroll outlined in his speech to University of Oregon journalism students, fabricated facts to bolster its criticism of the Times. It proves again, that Fox News often justs “makes it up.”

In an analytical piece in this morning’s Washington Post, President Bush is quoted on the threat of more attacks against U.S. forces and civilians in Iraq:

“There’s still violent people who want to stop progress. Their strategy hasn’t changed. They want to kill innocent lives.”

Killing of civilians (innocent lives) is often cited by Bush and his cronies as evidence of an enemy that is inhuman. Help me understand the distinction:

We invaded Iraq; it did not declare war on us or attack us in any way. Iraqis, probably aided by outsiders, are now fighting the invasion by killing civilians, among others.

Almost 60 years ago, we were attacked (but not invaded by ground troops) by Japan. After a long war, at a point where we were clearly winning the Pacific war, we dropped a bomb that killed thousands of civilians.

In the same piece, the reporters preview Bush’s next speech on foreign policy:

Bush will try to generate further momentum behind his Iraq policy today at the Air Force Academy commencement address, when he delivers the second of a weekly series of Iraq speeches until the transition. He will detail his view of how Iraq fits into the broader war on terrorism and why the stakes are high. He plans to argue that the war is a clash of ideologies between the civilized world and al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists, and will describe similarities and differences between this war and World War II, U.S. officials said.

Perhaps he will address how killing of civilians is a perfectly acceptable war tactic for us but not for Iraqis.

On Sunday, the New York Times’s public editor had an extraordinary column critical of his paper’s pre-war coverage and lack of adequate follow-up. Citing similar circumstances more than 80 years ago when the Times, failing to understand the impact, was almost a cheerleader for the Bolshevik revolution, Daniel Okrent demands the Times now examine itself and report how it was duped.

In the column, he makes two key points that should be considered when examining all reporting. First, he believes that if anonymous sources are found later to have lied, reporters have almost an obligation to reveal them:

The contract between a reporter and an unnamed source – the offer of information in return for anonymity – is properly a binding one. But I believe that a source who turns out to have lied has breached that contract, and can fairly be exposed. The victims of the lie are the paper’s readers, and the contract with them supersedes all others.

He also points out that a reporter alone is rarely at fault for poor reporting

The Times’s flawed journalism continued in the weeks after the war began, when writers might have broken free from the cloaked government sources who had insinuated themselves and their agendas into the prewar coverage. I use “journalism” rather than “reporting” because reporters do not put stories into the newspaper. Editors make assignments, accept articles for publication, pass them through various editing hands, place them on a schedule, determine where they will appear. Editors are also obliged to assign follow-up pieces when the facts remain mired in partisan quicksand.

When reading letters to the editor, one finds as often as not that readers are dissatisfied not with the reporting on an issue but the placement, headline or tone of a story or even that a story was reported at all. Some of these decisions are totally out of the control of the reporter (headlines and placement, for example) and even the tone can reflect the editing process. Okrent’s criticism of his own paper can be true of others: “The failure was not individual, but institutional.”