Friday Open Thread [12.14.12]

It’s just hilarious. And entertaining. That is all.

President Obama told ABC News that the federal government has better things to do than prosecute marijuana users in Colorado and Washington where voters chose to legalized in the last election.

“We’ve got bigger fish to fry. It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal.”

Good. Make sure your Attorney General knows that. And perhaps Governor Markell can now implement the Medical Marijuana law.

It looks like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) is running for President.

“As a conservative Republican, I believe that we have been stupid to let the Democrats demagogue the contraceptives issue and pretend, during debates about health-care insurance, that Republicans are somehow against birth control. It’s a disingenuous political argument they make. As an unapologetic pro-life Republican, I also believe that every adult (18 years old and over) who wants contraception should be able to purchase it.

Unfortunately for him, unless something drastic in the Republican Party base changes, he just ended his presidential campaign.

“The time for Republicans to win the tax debate was during the 2012 election. They lost. That doesn’t mean they need to give away the store, but it does mean that they’ll have to make some accommodation for reality,” – Phillip Klein.

Noam Scheiber says we need to ride down the Fiscal Slope, if only to destroy once more the Republican Party:

“[Republicans] will see that they have been completely repudiated by the public in a way that even the election didn’t impress on them. It will, in other words, be as close as you get in politics to a total victory for one side. It will highlight the perils of following one’s base too slavishly, a lesson that will come in handy not just on future fiscal policy fights (there will in all likelihood still be a debt ceiling to raise next year), but, one can imagine, also on an issue like immigration. Which is to say, it’s only by forcing the GOP off the cliff that Obama will find the space he needs to govern.”

I agree we must go down the slope, but I am not foolish to believe that Republicans will learn any lessons. They don’t have the brain power or IQ for that.

A petition demanding the President Barack Obama administration build a Death Star like the one in Star Wars reached 25,000-plus signatures Thursday, a threshold requiring the government to respond whether it will build the fictional weapon capable of annihilating planets with its super laser.

The petition on the White House website’s “We the People” page demands the Death Star project begin by 2016.

“By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense,” the petition says.

The administration promises it will publicly respond to petitions if they get 25,000 signatures in a month’s time. – via wired