Speaking of Things Too Big to Fail Being Too Big to Exist...

There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb's impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that. Webb's interest in the issue was prompted by his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession. After decades of mindless "tough-on-crime" hysteria, an increasingly irrational "drug war," and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan -- and virtually every other country in the world -- to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a "a nation of jailers" whose "prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history.

  Glenn Greenwald

And then Greenwald echos my thoughts about that town meeting comment of Obama’s on the fact that there were lots of online questions about marijuana criminalization:

And, most important of all, Webb is addressing head-on one of the principal causes of our insane imprisonment fixation: our aberrational insistence on criminalizing and imprisoning non-violent drug offenders (when we're not doing worse to them). That is an issue most politicians are petrified to get anywhere near, as evidenced just this week by Barack Obama's adolescent, condescending snickering when asked about marijuana legalization, in response to which Obama gave a dismissive answer that Andrew Sullivan accurately deemed "pathetic."

[...]

I don't think anyone expected him to advocate legalization or was angry that he didn't. It was his mocking, childish snickering about the issue and his refusal to address it seriously (even if to explain why he didn't favor legalization) that prompted the objections.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.