A non-starter
California voters will be able to vote on marijuana legalization in November, but the state's Democratic delegation may have started using a little early.
The delegation, perhaps not grasping the electorate's anger at illegal immigration, sent a letter to the Obama administration last week, suggesting the state become the first exemption to the Affordable Care Act's provision preventing illegals from purchasing health care plans on the state exchanges.
State Sen. Richardo Lara, forgetting the president's "you can keep your insurance plan," "you can keep your doctor," the plan will save everyone money promises, had the temerity to say covering illegals would not cost taxpayer dollars or affect the state budget.
Say what?
And state Rep. Janice Haan went so far as to say not allowing illegals access to the plan is discriminatory.
State Republicans said some illegals, due to fraud, are already receiving health care subsidies.
"The president and his party said a great many things about the Affordable Care Act that clearly did not turn out to be true," U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa told The Daily Caller News Foundation. "This (not costing taxpayers) would be one more."
He added that since illegal immigrants already can buy insurance, "it's really a question of something for which there would clearly be a subsidy, and it becomes a question of subsidizing health care for people who are unlawfully in this country."
Alternate universe
President Obama often appears to be living in an alternate universe from a majority of Americans, but he uttered a few sentences at a fundraiser last week that must have made even his most slavish followers cringe.
Ripping Republican nominee Donald Trump for the flattering words he's said about Russian President Vladamir Putin (and forgetting his own about communists in China and Cuba), he attempted to tie the two together by saying the GOP has nominated "a guy who actively promotes and admires a guy who jails dissidents and controls all state media - all media in his country, and hence has an 82 percent approval rating."
Then he invited the audience to "imagine" how high his approval rating "would be if all those folks lined up in the back (media) worked for me - and I was writing their stories. I'd be doing really well."
Obama, who previously has praised the media for "working side by side" with him to advance his agenda and could easily thank the media for putting him into office, has had perhaps the most lapdog press in American history. And he has repaid that press by having one of the least "open" White Houses to media in modern history.
And he, further, was campaigning for a woman in Hillary Clinton who has been far more distant from the press than has Trump.
Oh, they don't need the money
The director of community relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has an idea for reducing the occasional bad actor among police personnel: Don't prosecute cases of people who steal from large discount stores.
After all, claimed Everett D. Mitchell, who also is an attorney and pastor, the stores have insurance.
"I just don't think they should be prosecuting cases for people who steal from Wal-Mart," he said during a panel discussion called "Best Policing Practices." "I don't think that. I don't think that Target, and all them [sic] other places - the big boxes that have insurance - they should be using the people that steal from there as justification to start engaging in aggressive police behavior."
Mitchell didn't detail whether it would be all right for everyone to shoplift or just certain people. Or what it might do to prices at those stores when the additional cost of thievery is passed on to customers. But he says communities should decide for themselves which laws should be enforced and which should not be to better recognize what safety means for a specific community.
But why stop at shoplifting? Perhaps assaults, rapes and murders in some communities could be understood. And certainly if the police weren't involved, they wouldn't have to worry about jails and courts and all that mean stuff.
Irony, meet Jerry
Jerry Ford Jr., the Black Lives Matter leader for Houston, was forced to walk a few steps in another man's shoes last week when he was robbed.
When he arrived at his apartment and opened the door, a man he'd spoken to outside the apartments was behind him with a gun. The man, described as a black male, forced him to hand over his wallet and cell phone.
Ford, after the fact, said he would have given the man money if he'd asked and talked to him to find out "why is he in that position that he feels the need to come and rob people of stuff they worked for."
As a representative of the group which has walked through some U.S. streets and called for cops to die, he also was hopeful a few more cops would hang around his area.
"It's becoming a pattern," Ford said. "I hope they would take a bigger stance and put more security over here because you have a lot of people walking back and forth to class [at the nearby University of Houston]."