didn’t some snowboarder get disqualified for failing a pot test? If it is listed as performance enhancing, then it doesn’t matter what the actual effect is- fail a test and you can’t compete.

So smug and condescending. So ready to ascribe motives to others, so sure you understand their objections to what you approve of – arrogance. Is “puritanism” really such a big deal in this country, Sean? Porn is a national pastime and is widely available, half the Internet is streaming porn videos, 26% of adult New Yorkers have genital herpes (look it up). So even these detestable Americans haven’t reached the creamy sexual ideal you judge them by, but is it really “puritanism”? I know many hispanic Catholics families who are much more “sexually uptight” than loose WASP girls I went to school with (more directly related to the Puritans, but even so the analogy is asinine from a historical perspective). Modern America has shifted so far from the early Puritan settlers who formed but a part of its early history. So unpoint your finger.

It will help business be more efficient in a global market and simplify education etc, etc … but there seems to be a right wing taboo against it be cause ‘it ain’t ‘mericun!’

Really? I think the direction is crystal clear. As Christopher Hitchens says, “Religion poisons
everything.”

I think they should plan out business cycles in a more effective way next time. The government should literally have ready to go big project plans already setup for stimulating recesionary phases in case monetary policy fails as opposed to wasting billions of dollars on less effecient spur of the moment shovel ready projects that don’t really have big multiplier effects.

Hopefully you don’t have to use them, but its never a bad idea to actually have the groundwork in place.

Hyperbole fails me. This is the quintessential ICEBERG issue of which 80% is sub-surface, yet with political warming in DC, more of the iceberg becomes visible, and will hopefully all melt one day.
The Phelps Phiasco is particularly, painfully poignant ! He did indeed have it all in the palm of his hand, but did not possess the testicular fabric to thrust it into the air, in a gesture which would’ve ranked with the John Carlos/Tommie Smith black power salute in the 1968 Olympic games.

Pot is a recreational drug, not one that enhances performance, and is completely irrelevant to Phelps prior Olympiad achievements. But the `image thing’ is what they have crucified Phelps over: young Americans should hold their Olympians `high’ as moral role-models, or so the hypocrites demand. Burning the scepter, burned those bridges, and the powers that be threatened to burn Phelps if he did not recant.

It was a sad day when he missed the opportunity of a lifetime, as the linked letter made clear, but perhaps this is the first shot across the bow of puritanical America, that a new Boston Tea Party is waiting in the wings to happen, and cast off the 40-year hamperings of an utterly failed 10-Billion$$ per year drug war against otherwise law-abiding Americans, a multi-billion dollar prison industry, and a S.of the border horror-story which will only continue to get worse.