Primarily Speaking

In case you missed it, Senator Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with MSNBC's Joy Reid over the weekend, while Harris was in Iowa. It's a detailed and informational interview, and I highly recommend it if you're looking to get a better feel for Harris.

Today, Senator Cory Booker is re-introducing legislation that would legalize marijuana at the federal level.

The Marijuana Justice Act would also expunge the records of those who have been charged with a crime for using or possessing it, and direct resources toward re-entry and job training programs.

"The War on Drugs has not been a war on drugs; it's been a war on people, and disproportionately people of color and low-income individuals," Booker said in a statement announcing the bill. "The Marijuana Justice Act seeks to reverse decades of this unfair, unjust, and failed policy by removing marijuana from the list of controlled substances and making it legal at the federal level."

Among the Senate sponsors of the bill are some of Booker's fellow candidates: Senators Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Bernie Sanders.

Speaking of Sanders, this column in the Chicago Tribune by the "vaguely libertarian" Steve Chapman is absolutely brutal:

Policy is not everything. Trump has reminded Americans that in the Oval Office, qualities such as restraint, moderation, good humor, and flexibility are indispensable. These are not traits generally attributed to Sanders. He brings to mind Winston Churchill's description of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as a bull who carries his own china shop around with him.

Sanders is no Trump, but his humorless dogmatism bodes ill both for how he would formulate policy and for how he would try to achieve it.

...In the Democratic primaries, liberals and progressives will be able to vote for a host of candidates who have shown sensible judgment, pragmatic skills, and the ability to appeal beyond the hardcore faithful. Or they could choose Sanders.

OUCH.

As you may recall, I spent a lot of time documenting how absolutely appalling the coverage of Hillary Clinton was during the 2016 election, and, at one point, noting how abysmal the New York Times' coverage specifically had been, I wrote that the political press had been "unrelentingly unfair and often straight-up cruel to her, a dynamic in which the Times was a repeat offender, reaching their nadir in August with a 900+ word piece engaging body language experts to declare Clinton inauthentic because of a hand gesture people quickly noted she'd been using for decades." Every female 2020 candidate is already getting one piece or another of the Hillary Clinton treatment, and here is an actual headline about Senator Amy Klobuchar at Refinery29: "When Amy Klobuchar Talks About Being a Tough Boss, Her Body Language Is Revealing." For fuck's sake.

Oh boy. Sources tell the Dallas News that Beto O'Rourke "has decided not to run for U.S. Senate next year against Texas Republican incumbent John Cornyn and likely will announce a campaign for president soon."

Let me be frank: I honestly question the judgment of anyone who looks at the field of candidates already running and calculates: You know what this primary needs? ME!

Any one of the Democratic Senators running could defeat Donald Trump in a free and fair election. Everyone else should just let the Democratic voters choose between them and work their own asses off to ensure election integrity.

Now that would impress me.

Talk about these things! Or don't. Whatever makes you happy. Life is short.