Monday, February 9, 2009

Media Bias? Palin gets away with pot; not Michael Phelps

MPP on Sarah Palin's visit with Puff:

Noting that his just-announced vice presidential pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has acknowledged having smoked marijuana, reform advocates today urged Sen. John McCain to respect states' rights to set their own marijuana policies if he is elected president.

On Aug. 6, 2006, the Anchorage Daily News reported, "Palin said she has smoked marijuana -- remember, it was legal under state law, she said, even if illegal under U.S. law -- but says she didn't like it and doesn't smoke it now.

"'I can't claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled.'"

And in today's Sun-Times, Joe Conason expands the list of luminaries (ea):

Of course, it isn't only athletic stars who have been known to indulge in reefer madness. Important scientists such as Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, Margaret Mead and Carl Sagan, billionaire executives like Richard Branson and Bill Gates, and a great many of the literary and musical geniuses of the last century or so -- William Butler Yeats, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Bob Dylan among them -- got high. So have many of our top elected officials, notably including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a highly successful actor and businessman whose pot habit was immortalized on film in "Pumping Iron"; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, another hard-driving billionaire who once told a magazine interviewer that he had not only smoked dope but "enjoyed" it; Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Al Gore, former vice president, Google director, and winner of an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize.