Newspapers are the sturdy sails that drive the stately ship of state

My family got the Trib. It is what made me a young right winger. I wasn’t all that clear on the details, but what was going on was there was this magnificent patriot McCarthy, and all these craven dogs, mostly democrats, were trying to take him down.

Maybe about my junior year I started up with the Sun-Times because it had that nice tabloid format. The Daily News was classy, and there was something called the Herald American which I thought must be an old person’s paper because my grandpa Janovsky read it.

In my college and my dropout years I didn’t read many papers because they were all fascist hate rags. From the early seventies I read that big fat Sun-Times that made your fingers black every morning, and since I came back to Chicago in 87 I have been reading the Trib and the Sun-Times every day. I read almost all the political stuff, most of the local news, try to sneak through the gaudy celebrity section in the middle of the paper without learning too much about Bieber, and then the comics and some of the features.

I can’t imagine the morning without the paper.

I think your dad and his pals came up with the right idea for the paper drive. I remember going door to door for the boy scouts selling first aid kits so we could buy tents for the troop, but it turned out waking up in one of them on a cold morning was no fun at all.

Tsk tsk. All the news you want to read and no more? That sounds unpatriotic. In college and in edukashun skool they taught us that one of the missions of education was because we were a democracy in order to steer the ship of state past the foaming reefs of tyranny we needed an informed electorate. I love the photos in the National Geographic, and sometimes the writing is informative as to historic events, but as current events it just steers a middle of the road course and doesn’t have much depth.

I make fun of that high school civics, but I admit you are more up on it than I am. Let me see if I get this.

Before the 18th amendment the feds had not stepped into the booze area, but once it did, it sounds like all it did was authorize the states to prohibit the manufacture of etc? That sounds like the states could pass laws making it illegal or not as they so chose. But wait, it said that the feds also could pass laws prohibiting it. So was the amendment not enough, did they also have to pass a law? Seems to me it was the feds enforcing the law, certainly the locals here in Chicago did not do much cracking down.

So the 21st amendment repealed the 18th, so it was like the 18th had never been there? I’m going to have to do some wiki searching over the weekend.

I think it was an act that made pot illegal. The same one that made the opiates and cocaine illegal. Doesn’t the government have the power to do that?

I don’t see much happening on the pot legalization question unless some political group thinks it can make hay out of making it an issue. The dems aren’t going to come down on it because so many of us like smoking it. I don’t know why the reps haven’t come down on it. Maybe they don’t want to offend you libertarians, but you would think the religious right would, but maybe since they are having such success in the fight against abortion they don’t want to upset that applecart.

Absolutely liquor is way more dangerous than pot. If we discovered some drug that had the same effect we would ban it straight away.