Editorial voices from elsewhere
Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States:
In words from Nobel laureate Bob Dylan’s seminal 1966 album “Blonde on Blonde”: “But I would not feel so all alone / Everybody must get stoned.”
He’s not feeling so alone after November’s elections.
Voters in California, Maine, Nevada and Massachusetts approved recreational marijuana initiatives. Arkansas, Florida, Montana and North Dakota also approved their own medicinal marijuana initiatives.
Once those laws go into effect, more than 20 percent of Americans will live in states or territories with legal recreational marijuana. And nearly 40 percent will live with legal medical marijuana.
The people have spoken. It is time to end the war on marijuana.
The next Congress needs to remove the drug from the Controlled Substances Act and eliminate federal criminal penalties for low-level possession. President Obama should also try to pardon as many marijuana-related convicts as possible.
Marijuana is neither particularly dangerous nor deadly, and personal use doesn’t merit a trip through the expensive and unforgiving criminal justice system.
However, there should be no illusion about the real health risks that marijuana can pose. Evidence shows that marijuana can be particularly damaging to teenagers’ growing brains.
The law should reflect this reality. This means treating marijuana as a public health concern instead of a crime.
Whatever harm marijuana poses to a person’s life, arrests and jail are far more damaging.
Besides, if Bob Dylan is going to get a Nobel Prize, marijuana reform is the least Texas can do for Willie Nelson, our own genius singer-songwriter.
Flag burning is disrespectful to all who have served America proudly and shows an utter lack of perspective that takes for granted how blessed United States citizens are in comparison to the rest of the world.
Flag burning is due absolute legal protection and is a right to which every American is entitled.
The national conversation on flag burning has heated up after President-elect Donald Trump tweeted that anyone who burns an American flag should face “consequences,” such as jail or a loss of citizenship.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag-burning is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. It should also be noted, the Constitution forbids the government from removing the citizenship of a natural-born American.
If we truly embrace all the flag stands for, we must recognize the right to disrespect that flag is also part of what makes America a bastion of freedom across the globe.
President-elect Donald Trump had something to say – of course via Twitter – about the recount effort in three states being instigated by Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
“I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted Sunday. Later, he claimed there was “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.”
Ladies and gentleman, this is your new president: A man who without a shred of evidence or proof has no problem whatsoever laying out to the American people an outrageous allegation as plain truth. A man who doesn’t know the word measured, mindful, restrained, diplomatic or graceful. A man who, despite his victory, still seeks to inflame and aggravate the divisions in this country through the use of rhetoric that lacks a factual basis, and for which no evidence can be produced.
Trump is above all else a showman, and Americans would be well served to not confuse that stage presence with leadership. He has garnered fame and notoriety by embracing the absurd, saying the ridiculous and acting out the worst in American culture.
And while that behavior might make him popular enough to have won the presidency, it does not, and never will, make it right.