Recreational marijuana has only been legal in the state of Washington for a few hours now, as a result of a landmark ballot initiative passed last month on Election Day but residents are already celebrating. Organizations such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws also known as “NORML,” have been fighting for the legalization of marijuana since it was founded in 1972. NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre joins “Starting Point” this morning to discuss the new Washington state law and the broader implications of how this law could lead to more states enacting laws to legalize marijuana.

St. Pierre says the midnight public festivities by Washington state residents were, “a celebration to be sure that’s pent up 75 years of marijuana prohibition in America.” The NORML Executive Director went on to predict that just like the 18 states that have passed the use of medical marijuana, other states will follow suit with legalizing it as well. St. Pierre says, “Almost the entire West Coast and all of New England are going to move in this direction. It will take decades to infill the middle of the country.”

On the subject of tourism St. Pierre says he suspects, “a few hundred other thousand people” will be frequent visitors of the centennial state and the nation’s capital. He adds, “Why go to Amsterdam? Why go to Jamaica? I love trout fishing and skiing, so I think I’ll be making more trips this year to Colorado and Washington.”

For the first time in a week, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner spoke about the fiscal cliff over the phone, but there’s no word of progress made or future talks planned with only twenty-six days to go before the fiscal cliff.

Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-OH), who is a member of the Appropriations Committee, believes that there’s a growing sense in the Republican party that “the President has won this round relative to the rates” but they still need to sit down and work out the spending part of the deal, which he feels can be reached if the President moves forward with entitlement reform.

LaTourette comments that the Republicans’ walk out yesterday, heading home because there are no votes between now and the weekend, is not as significant as it appears. “We’re not doing anything to get this done because there’s nothing we can do,” he says. “This is going to be a negotiation between the President of the United States and House Speaker John Boehner.”

A new law legalizing recreational marijuana use in Washington takes effect today. Adults 21 and over are allowed to possess up to one ounce of marijuana, and while many in the state are lighting up and celebrating the law today, not everyone is supporting it. Steve Sarich is the Executive Director of the Cannibis Action Coalition and runs a local dispensary for medical marijuana patients. He’s also the Manager of the "No on I-502" Committee, which was the most vocal opponent of the Washington law being passed. He shares his view live from Seattle on “Starting Point” this morning.

Sarich and the “No on I-502” group have filed a lawsuit attempting to get the law overturned. The committee sites new DUI rules for their opposition. “My job is to protect patients in the state of Washington,” Sarich says. “And this law criminalizes every single medical marijuana patient every single time they drive,” especially for those under 21. Sarich explains that active THC can stay in the system for up to 30 days. So “that legal joint you smoked two weeks ago is still in your system today, and under the new law if you get pulled over, and they take your blood, you’re going to be guilty of per se DUID” which is “a life changing crime for those under 21.”

He considers the new driving laws and possession limit arbitrary. “We’re not talking about impairment. We’re not taking about highway safety. We’re talking convicting people simply for having trace amounts of THC in their blood,” Sarich says. “Now they’re saying you can legally have an ounce of marijuana, you just better not put it in your body.”

Detroit, the “Motor City”, is brought to the screen in a haunting documentary by co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady called “Detropia”. The film, which shows a city in urban decay, follows the lives of four city residents who lament Detroit's glory days and regret what it has become.

“Detropia” has garnered great praise from critics and already earned a Sundance Film Festival Award. Its latest honor could even be an Oscar nod. The filmmakers find out on Jan 10, but "Detropia" just made the final 15 Academy Awards documentary short list. Co-directors Ewing and Grady come to the studio to talk about their gripping documentary.

House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama finally breaking silence by speaking on the phone yesterday, but with twenty-six days left before we tumble over the fiscal cliff, there’s still no sign of progress, and we could be facing massive tax hikes and spending cuts at the start of the new year.

This morning on “Starting Point”, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), member of the Budget Committee, supports the president’s plan, saying that it is consistent with his campaign promises to extend tax cuts for the middle class, but not for the wealthiest Americans. He adds that the Republicans’ “unspecified proposal” is an “unacceptable” response to the president’s plan.

Merkley believes Republicans are playing a “game of chicken” with the fiscal cliff: “It’s not acceptable that this game of chicken continue… There need to be very specific negotiations. If they need to keep them private and contained for awhile to get into the details, so be it, but action is required.”

In order to become a lawyer you have to pass the bar and in order to become a doctor you have to take a medical licensing exam – but what about teachers? A new report, released by the American Federation of Teachers, is recommending that new teachers should have to pass their own equivalent of a bar exam before stepping into a classroom. This morning, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten joins “Starting Point” to discuss the reasons behind the suggestion that teachers be required to take a standardized test.

Weingarten says, “When you look at the countries that out-compete us they spend a lot of time preparing teachers.” The AFT president adds that, “Finland prepares teachers like we prepare doctors.” When it comes to teaching Weingarten says, “experience matters a lot...you need to have a body of knowledge and some clinical experience to do what we consider the most important job in America.”

Weingarten explains the report recommends that standards be governed by educators because there is currently “too much control in education by testing companies and by testing as opposed to what the profession thinks is important.” She adds educators should be able to control their own profession just like people in the fields of medicine, law and engineering are, “controlled by the profession.”

In Canby, Oregon a husband and wife were trapped in a car in their driveway after a tree fell on their vehicle. The 100-foot tall fir tree ended up crushing the roof and shattering the front windshield. Somehow, the couple inside the car survived and escaped relatively unharmed. Chris Natelborg who was in the driver's seat of that car suffered a fractured shoulder, while his wife Tymona walked away with barely a scratch. This morning the couple joins “Starting Point,” to share their story.

Mr. Natelborg says, “We had just pulled up and were parked sitting in the car and we heard the sound of just like a tree blowing in the wind but then we saw the tree in front of us to our left coming at us and we hardly had time to react.” Mr. Natelborg adds that he and his wife “just instinctively got down as low as [they] could.”

Mrs. Natelborg says the tree “fell pretty quickly” but once it had fallen, “it was nice to be able to talk with Chris and be able to …talk to each other about not having any injuries and pull out my phone and call 911.”

Mr. Natelborg adds, that he was later told the paramedics when arriving on the scene, “were probably more nervous than we were.”

Most Americans learn about the Revolutionary War through textbooks, movies and the occasional "history channel" documentary, but in Todd Andrlik's, "Reporting the Revolutionary War," Americans can now see a different side of the birth of our country, as it was reported in real-time by the journalists of the day.

Author Todd Andrlik is the curator of Raglinen.com, an online historical archive of newspapers dating back to the sixteenth century. He says the purpose of his book is to "invert the traditional history book and provide full color access to the original newspapers that were the only mass media of the day."

Andrlik adds that the newspaper editorials were extremely powerful because they "fanned the flames of rebellion and sustained loyalty to the cause throughout the war." He believes, like many historians, that "without newspapers, there would have been no American Revolution."

In the United States of America in 2012, what does black look like? Who defines black? And why is there an argument – or disagreement at all – about who counts as black? Can someone choose to be black? Isn't race assigned at birth, just like gender? If race is a choice for some people, why pick black? Why not? What does your choice mean for your future? What does it mean for the future of your children?

CNN's Soledad O'Brien examines these important and provocative questions in an hour-long documentary, "Who is Black in America?" She follows two 17-year-olds, Becca Khalil and Nayo Jones, on their journeys to find their racial identities. "I'm from Africa, says Becca, whose parents were born in Egypt, "but the black kids don't seem to really want me, and the white kids don't seem to really want me." She says Egyptians are dismissed as Middle Eastern or Arab, but she is neither of those things. Nayo Jones was raised by her white father, and doesn't really know her black mom. "I can say that I'm African-American, but I see being black as being more of a cultural thing," she says. "I was raised in a. white environment, and a mostly white neighborhood." She insists that makes her less black. The man guiding Becca and Nayo is Perry "Vision" DiVirgilio, a spoken word poet who calls himself a "biracial black man." He struggled with his own identity issues for years.

Soledad O'brien's “Who is Black in America?” premieres this Sunday at 8 PM ET/PT.

The U.S. is just 27 days away from falling over the fiscal cliff, but there is still no deal in sight. Texas Republican Congressman Jeb Hensarling offers his take on the stalemate this morning on “Starting Point”. Hensarling is the newly-named Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and he Co-Chaired the Super Committee on Deficit Reduction.

Hensarling refuses to budge on raising revenue, though he thinks the president will achieve it regardless. “There’s nothing we can do to stop that,” he says, “but the bottom line is you can’t solve this problem through revenue.”

Hensarling refuses to raise tax rates because he says “the fiscal cliff, relative to our nation’s spending driven debt crisis, is a pothole...What’s changed is on the spending side, and yet all this discussion is on the tax revenues.”