Legalizing both medicinal and recreational marijuana will be on the ballot in Ohio this November. But this news is actually dividing marijuana activists once again, which might have some political repercussions for the entire movement. Because of the way the proposed law was drafted, it would create an official oligopoly of only ten growers for the entire state. Ohio has over 11 million people, so each official farm would serve the needs of over one million people. That's pretty unbalanced, to put it mildly, since the other 75,000 farmers in the state would be out in the cold.

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Donald Trump is unique. Let's start off with that. He's an outsider to the political process, he's got name recognition other candidates would die for, and he makes his own rules out on the campaign trail. He is (to use a word I coined a while back) a "celebritician" -- a celebrity who decided he'd become a politician. This horrifies many, mostly because he's been so successful (so far). But he's certainly not the first celebrity to toss his hat into the political ring, although he is the first big one to emerge on the Republican side in a while (ever since the days of Senator Fred Thompson, by my reckoning). But since each celebritician is unique, can anything be learned from the past history of quixotic celebrity political campaigns?

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I am no different than most other political commentators, in at least two respects. I love a good presidential race, and I mostly only pay attention to the frontrunners on both sides. To put this another way, I don't write many articles about Jim Webb's campaign or how Lindsey Graham is fairing. So today, in the midst of the political dog days of August, I thought I'd concentrate on the bottom end of the polls, in an attempt to answer the question: "Who will drop out first?"

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The entire political punditry world has been holding its collective breath since last Thursday night, waiting for some polling numbers to interpret. As usual, polling takes longer than most people think. The first Republican debate, after all, was held Thursday night. Most pollsters take at least two days to conduct a poll, then maybe another day of number-crunching, before the results are made public. Due to this process, a lot of new polls will likely appear in the next two or three days. NBC beat them all to the punch, though, and released their first poll results over the weekend. The numbers -- if they prove to be valid, and not outliers -- show a remarkable shakeup happening in public opinion as a direct result of the debates, at least in the field right below the frontrunner. One question in particular from this poll seems to show some very bad news for the Republican Party, but before we get to that let's take a look at the whole field.

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Well, that was entertaining, wasn't it? We refer, of course, to the grand spectacle of the first Republican presidential debates, held last night on Fox News. Since this is all anyone's talking about in the political world today, we are going to follow suit and devote most of this column (with the exception of the awards) to our reactions to seeing all the Republican candidates under one roof for the first time.

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I have to begin by immediately offering my apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein for that title, but the lyrics from The Sound Of Music's "Maria" have indeed been running through my head -- as I contemplate what all the other Republican candidates are going to do in the debate tomorrow night to differentiate themselves from their party's frontrunner, Donald Trump. Especially the ever-so descriptive line: "A flibbertigibbet... A will o' the wisp... A clown."

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Barack Obama doesn't usually have very good summers, as measured by his public opinion job approval numbers. Last month, he finally broke this curse and posted some solid gains -- the first time he's ever done so in July. The daily polling was a bit of a rollercoaster, though, so he could just as easily go back down in August, but let's focus on the good news for Obama fans first. Take a look at the new chart, for starters.

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I just finished watching the first "candidates' forum" (don't call it a debate!) of the season, where 14 of the 17 Republicans running for president all appeared on the same stage in New Hampshire. The "one person on the stage at a time" format was an odd one, meant to get around the Republican National Committee's strict rules on how many debates they're going to tolerate this time around (it seems the more the public hears Republicans debate, the more it harms the Republican candidates).

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In normal years, this would be the official kickoff to the political Silly Season -- the dog days of August when Congress scarpers off for five or six weeks to have fun in the sun at taxpayer expense, and the political chattering classes have so little material to work with that they pick one silly issue and just absolutely obsess over it. This year, however, is not normal, as instead we're right at the kickoff of Presidential Debate Season, and the votes are already in -- the silly subject we're all going to obsess over this year is named Donald Trump. Whether this obsession takes the form of crushing depression (headline: "A GOP Led By Donald Trump Will Fail, And Deserve It") or unconcealed glee (headline: "Christmas Comes Early This Year -- Anticipating The Gift Of A Trump-Fueled GOP Debate") depends, of course, on the viewpoint of the pundit.

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It's time to think about what has previously been in the realm of the unthinkable: Donald Trump might just become the Republican nominee for president. Two months ago, that statement would have elicited nothing but a big old belly laugh from just about anyone who pays any attention to politics. Nowadays, though, nobody's laughing. The very concept has moved from the surreal to the possible. So it's time to actually think about what it would mean for the country and for the Republican Party.

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