Bridge of Sighs

Bridge of Sighs

(Robin Trower 1974)

Dick(head) Cheney Jokes About WV Incest

Are you rednecks proud of your VP?

McCain Proves His Ignorance

B’Man: I read this at Alternet and it gives me some reason for hope…

All Indicators Point to a Softening of America’s Harsh Marijuana Laws

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted June 3, 2008.

You have to hand it to the Republican National Committee: Those guys really know how to pick the wrong fight.

John McCain, already running against the public opinion grain in support of the Iraq War and Bush tax cuts, received no help from headquarters last month when the RNC made medical marijuana a campaign issue. After Barack Obama told an Oregon weekly that he would end federal raids on medical marijuana users and providers in states with compassionate use laws, the RNC pounced. Obama’s position, said an RNC statement, “reveals that (he) doesn’t have the experience necessary to do the job of President (and) lacks the judgment to carry out the most basic functions of the Executive Branch.” Because the Supreme Court has ruled that federal drug laws trump state drug laws, the RNC reasons that halting federal raids would be tantamount to ignoring the law.

They’re right. But the RNC might want to get some new pollsters. What they and their candidates don’t seem to realize is that a steadily shrinking minority of Americans oppose the controlled medicinal use of cannabis — around 20 percent, according to the last Gallup poll. It’s a safe bet that an even smaller number considers paramilitary raids on the homes of peaceful cancer patients to be among the “basic function of the Executive Branch.” During the New Hampshire primary, every Democratic candidate recognized this political reality by promising to end federal harassment of state-approved medical marijuana facilities and users. Republican candidates Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul pledged the same.

And John McCain? When pressed by activists from the group Granite Staters for Medical Marijuana, the Arizona senator responded in lockstep with most of his GOP peers, sounding less like a maverick than a Reagan-era after-school special. “I do not support the use of marijuana for medical purposes,” McCain said. “I believe that marijuana is a gateway drug. That is my view, and that’s the view of the federal drug czar and other experts.”

B’Man: Excuse me you cancerous old fuck: Are you going to suggest that a cancer patient’s use of marijuana to help alleviate pain and sickness will be a gateway drug to WHAT? Morphine? As the pain becomes so excruciating before death. You piss-poor, cold and unfeeling piece of ancient, out-of-touch, SHIT.

Given current trend lines, it may not be long before it’s possible to count McCain’s “other experts” on two hands. In February, the 125,000-member American College of Physicians, the second-largest physicians group in the country, published a position paper endorsing the merits of medical marijuana and recommending the end of marijuana’s classification as a Schedule 1 drug. “The ACP endorsement is massive,” says Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group. “It blows to splinters the assertion that the medical community doesn’t support medicinal cannabis.”

As goes the ACP, so may go the American Medical Association, an endorsement from which would leave the anti-medical marijuana position of the Food and Drug Administration very lonely indeed.

To its credit, the country has not waited for the medical establishment before moving forward on marijuana policy reform. Over the last decade, support for compassionate use laws and broader decriminalization efforts has been growing, if not at weed’s pace, then fast enough for one veteran marijuana reform lobbyist to now speak of being “within striking distance of a national tipping point.”…

…But whatever happens inside Michigan, Massachusetts and New York, the 2005 Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Raich still leaves marijuana users open to federal prosecution under the Controlled Substances Act. As highlighted by the RNC statement critical of Obama’s pledge, this decision will continue to undermine state- and local-level reforms until Congress changes federal law. Although only 1 percent of marijuana cases are prosecuted at the federal level, DEA raids on patients, caregivers and providers have been on the rise in states that have passed medical marijuana laws. This is especially true of California and Oregon, where in many cases individual patients have been detained and terrorized. In Los Angeles, the DEA has begun threatening the owners of buildings used for medical marijuana activities with seizure of their property, a development the Los Angeles Times has called “a deplorable new bullying tactic.” According to Mirken, “The DEA has become the single largest obstacle to effective regulation of (medical marijuana) establishments.”

B’Man interjects: Who benefits by keeping marijuana illegal? Isn’t it the same people who benefitted from alcohol prohibition? Politicians, the police state, alcohol & tobacco interests… basically, corporate America involved in the drug industry or the prison industrial complex. Of course the illegal purveyors tend to make money, still, on this failed effort.

In reality, marijuana is one of the best crops for production of biofuel material and could be one way to rid ourselves from the Petro-Chemical (Big Oil) stronghold that has America gripped.

At the moment there are three bills in Congress that seek to put a stop to these raids and set a precedent for federal-level reform.

The young granddaddy of this legislation is the bipartisan Hinchey-Rohrabacher Amendment, which has been introduced every year since 2003. Essentially, the amendment would strip the Department of Justice of funds to prosecute medical marijuana cases in states that have medical marijuana laws on the books. Named after Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., the legislation wouldn’t legalize marijuana at the federal level or prevent the feds from prosecuting medical marijuana use in states without medical marijuana laws. It would simply enforce respect for state marijuana laws. When first introduced in 2003, Hinchey-Rohrabacher received 152 votes. Last year, that number had risen to 165. Later this summer, Congress will tackle the amendment again when it votes on the Department of Justice Appropriations bill. Reform advocates hope the amendment will benefit from racking up endorsements from groups like the right-leaning Citizens Against Government Waste, which came out in favor of Hinchey-Rohrabacher as a way for Congress to “start sending a signal that its priorities are in order.”

But every year so far has been a 10-yard fight, and its sponsors don’t expect that to change this year. “This will continue to be a tough battle,” says Jeff Lieberson, Hinchey’s spokesperson. “Many politicians are still behind the voters on this issue.” Other analysts also warn against high expectations, pointing out that the timing is especially unfavorable for drug policy reform at the federal level.

“The movement on this issue in 2008 is going to be almost nonexistent because politicians are focused on the election,” says Alex Coolman, a former attorney with the Drug Policy Alliance and author of the Drug Law Blog. “Nobody in Washington wants to do anything that could be perceived as controversial.”

In April, Hinchey-Rohrabacher was joined by two other marijuana policy reform bills, both co-sponsored by Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Ron Paul, R-Texas. HR5842, the Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act, would deny the federal government the right to employ the Controlled Substances Act to intervene in states that have legalized medical marijuana; it would also remove marijuana from the list of Schedule 1 drugs. HR5843, meanwhile, known as the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act, would effectively decriminalize possession of up to 1 ounce. “We’re in the early stages here,” says Frank spokesperson Peter Kovar. “Nothing like this ever comes quick.”

But it may be coming more quickly than some people expect. “All the indicators are prompting in the right direction,” says Kampia. “Every major new ballot initiative looks set to pass. Infrastructure is growing: email lists, organizations, allies — it’s across the board. Public opinion is moving steadily in favor of decriminalization. State laws are moving forward, and none are going backward. We’re constantly picking up votes in the House. The 110th is the most supportive Congress we’ve ever had.”

If the RNC keeps attacking Democrats on medical marijuana, the 111th will be that much better.

B’Man: Our representatives ALWAYS lag behind the populate. This year is no different and with the elections happening, there may not be much more headway made. But, it is absolutely insane to continue this idiocy when people could use this source of medicine.

Follow the money and you will understand why and who profits from the continued fallacy called prohibition.

A NEW Declaration of Independence

Declaration of Independence

Presented at the “Building a New World” Conference

May 22, 2008

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, a decent respect for the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that the entirety of humanity, the entire creation, constitutes one family in which no individual has been given the right to hoard wealth while the remainder of the family dies for lack of a handful of grain; in which no individual has been given the right to mass murder, in the name of perverse patriotism, for a small piece of this planet; in which no individual has been given the right to exterminate countless animal and plant species in the pursuit of profit. Rather, we affirm our commitment to fulfill our responsibility to every member of our family as part of our human family values.

We further hold that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable political and human rights – among them the right to free speech, free assembly, free press, free worship, trial by jury, and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. These are our most fundamental rights to life and liberty. We assert that as all human beings are created equal, there can be only one chosen people, and that is the entire human and ecological family. No member of this family can be considered an outcast, heathen, foreigner or exploitable natural resource.

We further hold that all human beings are endowed with the inalienable right to be provided with the five basic necessities of life – including food, clothes, housing, free health care and free education. Fundamental morality demands that no human being be denied these five basic necessities of life.

We further hold that all human beings are endowed with certain inalienable economic rights – among them the right to adequate purchasing power. These are our rights to economic security and economic independence – an absolute necessity in the pursuit of happiness.

Inalienable economic rights include the right to a useful and remunerative job; the right to earn enough to provide adequate food, shelter, and clothing; the right of every farmer to raise and sell his produce at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; the right of every person to join a business cooperative in their locality; and the right to full protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, with those governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government.

Prudence will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; experience has also shown that human beings are more disposed to suffer, so long as oppression is sufferable, than to abolish the systems to which they are accustomed and which are the source of their oppression. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same goal, evinces a design to reduce the people under them to absolute despotism, it is the right of the people, it is their duty, to throw off such a government, and to bring strict moralists and lovers of humanity to positions of leadership for the welfare of all.

The history of the American Presidency has been one of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having as its direct object absolute tyranny over the common people. It is an unholy fusion of corporations, governments and organized crime networks. To prove this, let the Facts be submitted to the oppressed American people. — The American Presidency is the single most dangerous institution in the world. The President has the power to murder, and obliterate by bombing, anyone, anytime, anywhere. The President is bound by no laws, domestic or international. To speak of obliterating other nations is to be a global tyrant. We are no longer a nation and planet of laws – we are at the mercy and whim of Presidential tyrants, for whom constitutions and the rights enshrined therein are mere pieces of paper. This cannot be reformed or controlled by the electoral process. — The Government has adopted a policy of serial, imperialist wars, for the sole goal of profit for members of the military-industrial complex. The cry of “terrorism” is a hoax and a fraud to hoodwink the people of America and the world. The US Government has long supported terrorists who are allies of the Empire. The government lures the people to fight its brutal and bloody wars and calls it patriotism. While committing such crimes against humanity, they propose to be our moral instructors. — The American president is now the Torturer-in-chief, who presides over a vast network of illegal torture prisons in the US and around the world, all the while piously presiding over prayer breakfasts. — The Government promotes covert military actions that include illegal drug trafficking, illegal weapons trade and assassinations. It maintains nearly 700 military bases in other countries, often against the wishes of the population. — The Government uses depleted uranium, napalm, phosphorous and laser weapons in direct violation of international law, hence relegating itself to the status of a renegade country, and rendering its leaders open to war crimes trials. — The President repeatedly subverts legislation with signing statements and uses presidential orders to override constitutional rights. It has built more than 600 new prison camps in the U.S. in order to imprison people who might be regarded as enemies of the Government.

— The Government has willingly allowed itself to be infiltrated and criminalized by corporate and elite regimes that now direct all branches of government to serve purposes wholly contrary to the true and proper purpose of government. — The Government promotes economic profit over humanity by failing to punish corporations that participate in sweatshop slavery, agricultural slavery and sex trafficking in America and around the world. It engages in economic wars to destabilize nations that resist corporate takeover. Millions have died due to US economic terrorism and genocide.

— The Government has carried out a campaign of heightened racism, evidenced by ruthless police brutality directed at minorities and the poor. It keeps inner cities in conditions of acute poverty, passes laws designed to incarcerate generations of African-American youth, whom corporations then exploit inside prisons. On their release, they are denied the right to vote, to be educated and to return to their families. They are forced back into a life of crime, and ultimately, back into prison. — The Government has turned over control of United States currency to private individuals, operating through the Federal Reserve, who manipulate it for their own personal gain rather than for the benefit of the world. — The Government supports corporate financial strangulation of the American masses who labor in poverty, often forced to work at two or more jobs and working up to 80 hours per week, only to profit those who do no labor. Furthermore it supports a judicial system that passes laws which serve to keep the working class perpetually chained in poverty, neglect, vice, disease and soon starvation. — The Government has made the word “democracy,” for which our ancestors fought and died, into a mockery, by giving corporations control over our legislators. Through this control, speculators have freed themselves from all regulatory controls and have made immense fortunes while bringing the global economy to its knees. It has blocked state governments from prosecuting criminals responsible for the current economic crisis and coming Great Depression. Instead, the Presidency has financed the survival of these corrupt financial institutions with the money of the American people. If a hungry man robs a store, he is jailed as a criminal, but if a financial executive robs millions of people of millions of dollars, he is bailed out by the Government and his debts are paid by the American public. This is the morality of our plutocracy. Those criminals who made money in the housing bubble now speculate on the prices of food and fuel, while people in this country face inflation and people in American economic colonies face starvation.

— The Government has created a global economic order in which countless people face starvation so that a few nations can monopolize the world’s resources. Developing countries, in the process of raising their own living standards, now keep their own raw materials out of the grasp of Western countries. It is the greatest threat to the American Empire, and hence the US Pentagon, in the name of democracy and freedom, bombs those who resist. — The Government has accrued a national debt of over one trillion dollars, potentially causing untold economic suffering to future generations.

— The Government forces struggling people to pay an inordinate share of the taxes, which are used to carry out the criminal activities of the Government, including wars, assassinations and domestic oppression.

— The Government has promoted a medical-industrial complex that provides obscene profits to pharmaceuticals, private hospitals, doctors and insurance companies, and has silenced development of far less profitable but often far safer alternative medical treatments. Senators and congressmen who vote to deny health care to millions, while provided their own health care at taxpayer expense, are complicit in the premature death, nay murder, of thousands of American citizens.

— The Government has intentionally promoted a system of education that keeps the people dumbed down rather than developing their vast intellectual potential. There is a total lack of accountability to parents and student and communities in the inner cities and a diluted accountability elsewhere. The Government has further allowed corporations and organized religions to control school curriculums.

— The Government has deliberately employed deceit and violence to rob the indigenous people of America of their lands and their resources. It has deliberately sponsored puppet leaderships in these communities so that their members continue to live in conditions of abject poverty and exploitation. — The Government has promoted an unsustainable culture of waste that multiplies corporate profits while devouring natural resources and producing mountains, rivers and seas of toxic wastes. It further allows corporations to carry out unbounded torture of cows, pigs and poultry, destroy groundwater and farmlands, carry out rampant deforestation, and create dependence on pesticides and fertilizers that eviscerate economies but rake in huge profits for those corporations.

— The Government colludes in the monopolization of the world’s media by a handful of corporations, which promote a culture of violence and vulgarity throughout the world. These corporations first debased American culture and now market that pseudo-American culture to the rest of the world. They encourage their minions in other countries to debase their own cultures. While criminalizing dissent, the Government allows criminal networks to globalize pornography, which promotes violence against women. — The Government, in an unholy nexus with corporations, promotes the infiltration of GM organisms into the general food chain, for the express profit of those corporations and potential endangerment to humanity.

— The Government, in an unholy nexus with other governments, promotes the rise of a global police state in which every person will be monitored with cameras, ID cards, thumb prints, retina scans and microchips. Much dissent is either criminalized, suppressed or punished in any number of ways.

— The Government consistently legislates in favor of a petro-based economy that multiplies corporate profits while causing ecological havoc in the form of greenhouse gases, to the point that entire humanity is threatened with the dire effects of global warming and consequent climate change. The Government has bound us to filling our gas tanks with oil laced with Iraqi blood or ethanol made from food taken from the mouths of the starving in Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines.

In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by newer and greater oppressions. The American Presidency, when characterized by acts of tyranny, is unfit to rule the people. We have warned the government repeatedly regarding their flaunting of the constitution. We have reminded them repeatedly of the fundamental rights of all human beings as laid down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and numerous other treaties and conventions of international law. We have appealed repeatedly to their sense of justice and magnanimity, but have been met only with inhuman injustice. The government has been deaf to the call for equity and justice by millions of Americans and our brothers and sisters around the world who have suffered the most from its crimes. While our government builds concrete walls at home and abroad, we the people assert that our hearts recognize no borders, because we believe that to live is to love without limits.

If we define evolution as gradual change and revolution as accelerated change, then we the people declare that the time has come for radical, accelerated change – a revolution – in America and in the world. The criminal nature of the present government leaves the moral, law-abiding citizens no alternative. The network of global tyranny mandates that the multitudes of humanity must unitedly resist and remove the dictatorship of multinational corporations and the governments they own. We start this process today by facing the corporate government of America with this Declaration of Independence.

We, therefore, the people of the United States of America, having the sanctity of all life as the basis for our intentions, do, in the name and authority of fundamental human decency and dignity, declare that we the people are absolved from all allegiance to the present government, as well as to any future government that continues to deny the people their political and economic rights; that all political connection between the government and the people is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as interdependent states, we will endeavor to promote economically sovereign and sustainable bioregions.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. Signed: William Blum, Mitchel Cohen, Tom Feeley, Garda Ghista, Stephen Lendman, Larry Pinkney, Ralph Poynter, Lynne Stewart, Charles Sullivan, Clark Webb, William Woodward ************************************************** For those wishing to join us as endorsers, please fill out the following information and send to wpaeditor@gmail.com. Name __________________________________________________________________ Street __________________________________________________________________ Town/State _____________________________________________________________ Zip Code _______________________________________________________________ Telephone Number _______________________________________________________ Email Address __________________________________________________________

Tata Finalizes Jaguar/Land Rover Purchase

Tata completes acquisitions of Land Rover, Jaguar.

The AP reports that “Ford Motor officially unloaded its storied Jaguar and Land Rover businesses on Monday — netting the cash-strapped automaker a $1.7 billion boost that’s a mere third of what it paid for the two luxury brands.” According to India’s Tata Motors, “it had completed the purchase of the brands in a deal first announced March 26.” Under the deal, “Tata is paying about $2.3 billion for the British brands.”

Ford “has contributed about $600 million to the Jaguar and Land Rover pension plans, and long-term agreements have been entered into for the supply of engines, stampings and other components,” according to Reuters. The deal also “includes all necessary intellectual property rights, manufacturing plants, two advanced design centers in the U.K., and a worldwide network of sales companies.” Tata’s Chairman Ratan Tata said that “Jaguar and Land Rover are two iconic British brands (and) will retain their distinctive identities and continue to pursue their respective business plans as before.”

“We are looking forward to extending our full support to the Jaguar Land Rover team to realize their competitive potential,” Dow Jones quotes Ratan Tata as saying.

The BBC notes, “Ford has been forced to sell” Jaguar and Land Rover “in order to concentrate on its loss-making core U.S. car business, which it hopes to turn around in the next two years.”