Understanding Government

The Chicago Tribune’s John Byrne reports that the city’s new top cop, Garry McCarthy, says that he might want to give citations, instead of court summons, to people arrested for marijuana possession. This comes shortly after Toni Preckwinkle, the head of the Cook County Board, declared marijuana arrests an unduly expensive burden on the judicial system.

Missing here, of course, is the argument that pot arrests don’t just drain resources but are a needless use of police powers that, in Chicago at least, unfairly target African Americans. A purely budgetary argument implies that once Cook County’s finances turn around, the city will again make casual marijuana users appear in court.

A federal prosecutor will investigate the misuse of public funds in the East St. Louis, Illinois school district — one of the poorest and most mismanaged school districts in the country, reports Nicholas J.C. Pistor. The investigation comes three months after the East St. Louis District ceded control of its operations to the Illinois Board of Education.

The legally murky world of medicinal marijuana cultivation has grown even more Byzantine. A recent old memo, penned by James Cole, a deputy U.S. attorney general, threw a curve-ball to everyone from growers to dispensaries to their customers, raising fears that federal authorities are about to upend a laissez-faire ethos announced in 2009 and begin raids and prosecutions, according to Peter Hecht of The Sacramento Bee.

The memo, somewhat contradicting the earlier statement that federal officials would not intervene in states where medicinal marijuana use is permitted, said state laws are “not a defense” from federal prosecution and that “Congress has determined that marijuana is a dangerous drug.” (more…)

Robert Snell of the Detroit News reports that blogger and Michigan professor Juan Cole has sued the CIA and FBI, demanding that the intelligence agencies turn over any documents that relate to him. As Snell reports, the lawsuit comes less than a month after James Risen of the New York Times broke the story that a former CIA official said the Bush administration wanted dirt on Cole’s personal life. Cole’s Informed Comment blog was one of the first, and most articulate and persistent, media outlets, that exposed the emerging fiasco that was/is the Iraq War. (more…)

James Walsh of the Chicago Sun-Times uses the conviction of Rod Blagojevich as a vehicle to look at all the other public corruption cases the FBI is pursuing. Walsh writes that there is “lots” of work to be done on the corruption front, as the FBI is “investigating more than 2,000 public corruption cases around the country.”

But is that a lot? Left unsaid is how this number compares to prior years and what percentage of elected officials nationally are investigated by the FBI. Also, even if the number of investigations has increased, is this because more public officials are on the take — or because the FBI itself has decided to do more to root out corruption?