Frank Schnarr, Frankie's Sports Bar & Grill Owner, Welcomes Pot Smoking In Bar

OLYMPIA, Wash. Dec 10 (Reuters) - Thanks to a successful ballot initiative last month, Washington state residents can legally smoke marijuana in the privacy of their living rooms as of Thursday.

When that gets old, bar owner Frank Schnarr suggests, area stoners have another option: grab a booth at Frankie's Sports Bar & Grill in Olympia and toke up there.

The US Department of Homeland Security, despite budget cuts and construction delays, is planning to add 17,000 employees into its consolidated headquarters in southeast Washington.

Under the "Smart ID" program, ID badges have been issued with a tracking chip, which students must wear when attending school. The school badges, worn like a necklace, contain a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip and links to their social security number. This allows the school to track the student's location after leaving campus and for as long as the badge is on the student's person.

VIDEO - TV news reporter Ben Swann speaks to a crowd about the dangerous results of prohibition and what it does to communities around the US-Mexico border.

Honorable mentions go to New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission for driving out Uber’s online taxi-hailing service and to automobile dealers’ groups in four states for trying to have Tesla dealerships declared illegal. But the grand prize in this week’s unexpectedly heated competition for most creative use of government to stifle innovation has to go to Minnesota.

One might expect the lady in charge of the US Federal Government's Homeland Security department—the person leading US "cyber security" policy—to have an inbox full of briefings, encrypted strategies, and plans for keeping America safe from "Terrorists." But, she doesn't. In fact, Janet Napolitano, in her own words, doesn't use email "at all."

From the "when all else fails, lower your standards" department: Average reading and writing SAT scores for high school students declined to their lowest levels (dropping 1 point to 496, while math remained the same at 514). The article does note that more lower-income students with less access to high-quality education are taking the test, possibly providing an explanation for the lower test scores.

Students in Greeley, Colorado have been told they can't wear Peyton Manning jerseys to class because the new Denver Broncos quarterback's No. 18 has an affiliation with gangs in the area.

"They told me I couldn't wear 18 anymore because it's a gang number and I had to take it off," Konnor Vanatta, a third grader in the Weld County School System, told Fox News on Tuesday. Greeley is in Weld County, less than 50 miles from Denver.

A very large segment of the population has figured out that it can use voting as a tool to get more money and benefits from the government...the federal government has become a giant deluded "Santa Claus" that distributes goodies to the American people far beyond its actual capacity to do so. In fact, we are borrowing trillions of dollars that we do not have so that our politicians can continue to buy votes with handouts.

According to a report in The New Orleans Times-Picayune, funds from NIDA helped create the dangerous marijuana alternative known as "Spice" and "K2."

The funds were disbursed in the mid-1990s to a Clemson University researcher named Dr. John W. Huffman. It was while searching for a cure to marijuana "addiction" that Huffman developed the formula for Spice: