Morning after

[mamajoan]

I'm so disappointed in California. :( But still so amazed and thrilled and just awe-struck that Obama actually won! I still can't hold back the tears.

Part of me wishes that Isaac were a little older so he would really understand the impact of this. But then another part of me is thinking, when my kids reach adulthood, they'll never have known an America where a black person couldn't be president. And that's just awesome. And now I'm crying again.

Newseum.org has a gallery of newspaper front pages from around the world, but I can't get it to load right now. Here's a smaller gallery from boston.com. See also images of Obama's triumph in lolcat form, here and here (thanks to angledge for the latter).

Here in Massachusetts, we voted to ban dog racing; to keep the state income tax; and to decriminalize the possession of less than one ounce of marijuana. Go us.

In non-election-related news, I sooooo need an 'I void warranties' t-shirt for Ruthie. lol.

Comments

oh maybe you can explain this

[jorend.livejournal.com]

So, two years ago there was a ballot initiative in Mass. to allow grocery stores to sell wine. Do you know why that failed?

I mean, the wine thing and the weed thing are two very, very different issues, I understand that. I just don't see why someone would vote for the latter and against the former. Who is this mysterious anti-wine voter?

Anyway, please don't take this as criticism of how y'all run y'all's state. I'm sure we've done dumber things down here in the past 2 years...

Re: oh maybe you can explain this

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

Well, primarily, the "wine in grocery stores" initiative was opposed by a pretty powerful and vocal lobbying group of liquor-store owners, who argued that it would put them out of business due to the increase in competition. That was actually a pretty smart move, because by painting it as an economic issue (stores going out of business = lost jobs and revenue etc.) rather than a moral one, they could reach people like me who frankly don't give a crap about alcohol but do care about the state's economy.

There was also a fairly convincing (to me?) point about the added burden on the state regulatory system, to be inspecting and certifying a suddenly greatly increased number of establishments selling wine; plus the burden on the stores to re-train their employees, and so forth. To me, as a non-drinker, it boiled down to a lot more effort and red tape than I felt necessary in order to solve what I saw as a non-problem, i.e., the fact that you have to go to two different stores if you want to buy groceries and wine. So I voted against it.

By contrast, the anti-pot arguments are largely moral/ethical (or health-based, but those tend to get drowned out) and we were talking about eliminating a lot of effort spent on what I see as a non-problem (namely, people possessing small amounts of pot for personal recreational use). So I voted in favor of that one. But I think the answer boils down to who was doing the lobbying: who they were, and how powerful they were or weren't. Clearly the liquor-store lobbyists were more powerful/effective than whoever was lobbying against the decriminalization of marijuana.

Re: oh maybe you can explain this

[jorend.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That was a much more thoughtful answer than I expected. :)

Re: oh maybe you can explain this

[jorend.livejournal.com]

OK, and maybe my reply-reply was a lot less thoughtful than you expected, so let me at least disagree with you a little :)

Grocery stores in TN don't sell wine. They seem to compensate by selling 300 kinds of olive oil. This I do not understand.

Grocery stores in NH do sell wine, and (for an occasional drinker like me) it was lovely. It led to nicer dinners for us in practice--Olivia claims that taking three kids into a pretty-bottle store is stressful. :-P NH has state-run liquor stores, though, so it's kind of a completely different story economically.

I dunno, any change in the rules causes some economic disruption, and I guess some marginal liquor stores could have gotten wiped out. To look at it from another angle, though, those guys' business model right now, apparently, is to have a state law that inconveniences the many to keep them, the few, in business. Lame!