To recap: anyone caught with an ounce or less of weed will owe nothing more than a $100 civil fine.  No arrest.  No criminal record.  No criminal anything.  But it gets better!

A complicating factor, said Mr. Capeless, the district attorney in Berkshire County, is that state law bans the police from demanding identification for civil infractions.

“Not only do you not have to identify yourself,” he said, “but it would appear from a strict reading that people can get a citation, walk away, never pay a fine and have no repercussion.”

That’s one way to hit Johnny Lawman where it hurts.  A further complication affects Williams less than, say, MCLA in nearby North Adams.

Mr. Capeless said that in particular the department needed to address a clause in the new law that said neither the state nor its “political subdivisions or their respective agencies” could impose “any form of penalty, sanction or disqualification” on anyone found with an ounce or less of marijuana.

“It appears to say that you get a $100 fine and they can’t do anything else to you,” he said. “Can a police officer caught with marijuana several times get to keep his job and not be disciplined in any fashion? Can public high schools punish kids for smoking cigarettes but not for having pot?”

Either way, pot-smoking Ephs are likely to feel a lot more comfortable by the end of Winter Study.

The decriminalization measure passed about 65-35 back on Election Day.

Even in confessing to preening, [John] Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic? Given his diagnosis, I’m sure his H.M.O. would pay.

The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.

So narcissist walks into a New York bar and meets a legendarily wacky former Gotham party girl — whose ’80s exploits were chronicled in a novel by her former boyfriend Jay McInerney because the behavior of her and her friends “intrigued and appalled me.” When you appall Jay McInerney, you know you’re in trouble.

Cheap shot! McInerney deserves better.

One of Rielle Hunter’s old boyfriends did everything but call John Edwards a bum Saturday.

“To say that he slept with her but he wasn’t in love with her – that’s not very chivalrous,” said “Bright Lights, Big City” author Jay McInerney, who dated Hunter in the late 1980s. “He’s trying to distance himself from her.”

“I don’t feel my questions have been answered with regard to Edwards,” McInerney told the Daily News in an exclusive interview. “It was a half-assed confession.”

Indeed.

Always trust content from the National Enquirer.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike…

From BREATHE MAGAZINE JAN/ FEB 05

After years of frantic spiritual seeking, actress Rielle Hunter says she literally woke up enlightened on May 4, 2004. Now she plans to bring the light, free of charge, to all those who are open to it. Distant ex and esteemed novelist McInerney has a few questions.

The way I remember it, I first met Rielle Hunter in a nightclub called Nells in early 1987, although the circumstances of our first meeting seem to be in dispute (see below). In my defense I can only say that events of that decade are not always as clearly etched in memory as we might wish, and neither of us was living a very sober or reflective life back then. At that time Rielle’s name was Lisa Druck, and when she wasn’t out at nightclubs she was taking acting classes. We dated for only a few months, but in that period I spent a lot of time with Lisa and her friends, whose behavior intrigued and appalled me to such an extent that I ended up basing a novel on the experience. The novel was called Story of My Life, and it was narrated in the first person from the point of view of an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year-old who was, shall we say, inspired by Lisa. I certainly thought of Alison Poole as a sympathetic and ultimately endearing character. One of her most striking traits was her obsession with truth-telling and her horror of being lied to, something that I certainly took directly from Lisa. When Lisa moved to Calfornia and got married I lost track of her, though I was reminded of her whenever someone would ask me, at book signings and lectures, what I imagined happened to Alison Poole after the book ended — whether I saw her as turning her life around or not. Through the grapevine I picked up occasional reports from the West Coast. I heard that Lisa had changed her name to Rielle, that she’d gotten divorced, and that she was increasingly engaged in various spiritual quests which she attempted to explain to me when I finally ran into her; all I could tell for certain was that she was a far happier person than I remembered. Recently she returned to Manhattan and one sunny afternoon in Washington Square Park, attempted to enlighten me on the subject of her own enlightenment.

…

JM: It’s kind of weird to me because I wrote this book that was partly based on you and your friends…

RH: What do you mean partly?

JM: Well, I mean partly. It’s a novel. I freely made up when I needed to.

RH: You did freely make up but so much of it was real.

JM: Yeah it’s not necessarily a great thing to be close to a fiction writer. For me you’re a little bit frozen in time, a little bit Alison Poole, the 21-year-old party girl in that book who runs around New York going to night clubs, doing drugs, and abusing credit cards. And I’m sure that your life wasn’t that simple or that extreme or that wasteable.

RH: When I reread it, I was amazed by the character’s need for truth.

JM: That was a theme in the book.

RH: And that’s definitely a theme in my life — seeker of truth.The book is dark and sad and it’s hilarious. It’s all of those.

Just like EphBlog!

No need to do Drudge’s dirty work for him, David. That story has already been pulled from the site after the woman apparently denied that the baby was Edwards’.

This is trash. The story never had a leg to stand on. Why do you keep trying to keep it alive?

Ephs everywhere thank you for making EphBlog part of a shameless home-stretch smear attempt against the Edwards campaign.

But, alas, I was right. Always trust content from EphBlog.

Time for McInerney to write the sequel . . .

On the deleted pages, the 44-year-old Hunter (formerly known as Lisa Druck) discusses her former hard partying days, her search for enlightenment, and her issues with drugs and debt. There is a 2005 interview she did with one-time boyfriend Jay McInerney, in which the celebrated novelist reveals that Hunter was the basis for Alison Poole, the main character of his book, Story of My Life.

“It was narrated in the first person,” McInerney writes in the intro to the interview, “from the point of view of an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year old who was, shall we say, inspired by Lisa [aka Rielle].”

Or perhaps having ex-girlfriends in the news is not a good metric for coolness . . .