Sex scandal lights up the Marijuana Policy Project

Hmmm…

(Washington Examiner) While Cheech and Chong were the main attraction at the 15th annual Marijuana Policy Project gala Wednesday, the real buzz in the room was over the slew of employees who have resigned since summer.

Seven of the organization’s 38 employees left because of what four former employees described as inappropriate behavior by Executive Director Robert Kampia after an office happy hour on Aug. 6.

One of the former employees who immediately resigned spoke to Yeas & Nays on condition of anonymity. “It was so egregious that I, and a number of other employees, that even in the most generous telling of the story, made it impossible to work for Rob,” the ex-employee said.

Department heads at the organization unanimously asked Kampia to resign but their request was rebuffed with word from Kampia that Chairman Peter Lewis would no longer fund the organization without Kampia as the head, according to Pearce and a former employee at her level.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/blogs/yeas-and-nays/81590192.html#ixzz0ceQSZckT

I’ve met Rob Kampia.  I’ve spoken to him on numerous occasions.  I’ve even been a guest in his apartment in Washington, DC.  Never once has Rob Kampia ever directed any sexually inappropriate advances toward me.

Just for the record.

Back to the Blog! And Very Very Important Subjects!

Howdy, Radicals!  It’s been a long time since I posted here.  I took the end of my show pretty hard and every time I thought about posting here again it just made me sad.  Thank you so much for all the emails and comments expressing your love for the show and missing it.  I miss it, too.

Many people have asked if I am returning to the air anytime soon.  Probably not.

Here’s the deal: Not only was I the host of the show, but I also had to produce it, engineer it, record it, write it, sell it, promote it… basically aside from Stevie doing a fantastic job with answering phones and running the live engineering, everything about The Russ Belville Show was done by me.  I won the talk radio contest and they put me on XM with no budget, no staff, no advertising, and no promotions.  In fact, they were going to dump me six months into the deal when I rose a stink about being promised “a year-long contract” for winning the contest.  As it turned out, being on for twenty months was 14 months longer than they expected and 8 months longer than I expected.  Every show I put on the air actually ended up costing me $67 by the time you work through all the income vs. expenses.

(You want an idea why progressive talk radio is in the shitter?  Do you think it is the talent of the hosts, or… y’all discuss it; any speculation from me would be seen as ’sour grapes’.)

Now, if someone from a progressive talk radio network called up and said, “Hey, we found your old shows and thought you’d be a hit.  We’ve got a studio for you, a producer, and an engineer.  We’ll begin a big ad campaign and we can start you on five of our network’s stations right off the bat.  Interested?”, I’d be in the air faster than freeway chase in LA.  But doing it all myself?  No, never again.

So, what after three months has inspired me to return to the Radical Writ?  Is it Obama backing away from nearly every campaign pledge?  Is it the not closing Gitmo, not prosecuting torture, bringing in the insurance industry to ruin health care talks, giving money hand over fist to Wall Street thieves, snickering at the marijuana legalization question, not ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and tacitly endorsing every right-wing fraidy-cat terrists-gonna-kill-us FOX talking point?

Yeah, sure.  But first, I want to talk about something REALLY important: the embarrassment that was the selection of Kris Allen as the next American Idol.

Michael Glitz writes at HuffPo:

But for a theory about how Kris pulled an upset over the wildly popular Adam Lambert, the Christian vote is a pretty good one. It’s certainly one factor. (So is talent, Tiger Beat ready looks and viewers who get tired of being told someone is a lock when they haven’t even voted yet.) In fact, look at seasons past and where there’s a clear Christian vs secular showdown, the Christians have been winning handily. Take that, Charles Darwin! Sometimes the survival of the fittest goes to the person with the best telephone prayer chain. Check it out. (And please keep in mind I’m not talking about their personal faith, just our perception of it from what we told on the show at the time they were competing. Someone I describe as worldly might be exceptionally devout while the contestant prominently sporting a cross might be at the juke joint on Saturday and never even make it to church on Sunday.)

Season One featured wholesome Kelly Clarkson vs the worldly, media savvy Justin Guarini. Clarkson won big time and set the standard for Idols to come.

Season Two: Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard both held forth on their faith. Ruben had an edge perhaps from the tight-knit black churches that came out strong for him. But this was a Christian vs Christian finale so you can’t draw any conclusions from this one.

He continues on through the current season, pointing out how the contestant with the most “God cred” wins the Finals.  (However, for Season 2, while both Ruben and Clay had the God card, don’t forget that Clay was “teh gay” for those Christian viewers.)

But I think the true theory is the Southern AT&T Text Messaging theory, only with the Christian vote acting as tiebreaker. In Idol voting, you’re allowed to call or text in ten votes per line. However, calls get you busy signals and you have to keep redialing to get just two votes, much less ten.

Text messaging, though, gets no busy signal and you can send in ten of them in the time it would take to get through one Idol phone call. Now, understand that anyone can call, but only AT&T subscribers can text, and AT&T’s subscriber base is largest in the South.

So when watching Idol Season 9, ask yourself, “Who would a 13-year-old girl in Mobile vote for?”

Evidence?

Allen (Arkansas) vs. Lambert (California)
7) Cook (Missouri) vs. Archuleta (Utah)
6) Sparks (Arizona) vs. Lewis (Washington) (Religion wins tiebreaker)
5) Hicks (Alabama) vs. McPhee (California)
4) Underwood (Oklahoma) vs. Bice (Alabama) (Religion breaks tie)
3) Fantasia (North Carolina) vs. DeGarmo (Georgia) (Religion breaks tie)
2) Studdard (Alabama) vs. Aiken (North Carolina) (”Not gay” breaks tie)
1) Clarkson (Texas) vs. Guarini (Pennsylvania)

What are the chances you’d get three finalists from Alabama and only two from California? Or that ten of sixteen finalists would be from former Confederate States and zero from the Northeast?

Bristol Palin Syndrome

ATLANTA – Mississippi now has the nation’s highest teen birth rate, displacing Texas and New Mexico for that lamentable title, a new federal report says. Mississippi’s rate was more than 60 percent higher than the national average in 2006, according to new state statistics released Wednesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The teen birth rate for that year in Texas and New Mexico was more than 50 percent higher.

More than a year ago, a preliminary report on the 2006 data revealed that the U.S. teen birth rate had risen for the first time in about 15 years. But the new numbers provide the first state-by-state breakdown.

The new report is based on a review of all the birth certificates in 2006. Significant increases in teen birth rates were noted in 26 states.

Some experts have blamed the national increase on increased federal funding for abstinence-only health education that does not teach teens how to use condoms and other contraception. They said that would explain why teen birth rate increases have been detected across much of the country and not just in a few spots.

I wonder what else might explain that..

Dr. Phil focuses on cannabis, ignores antidepressants, in Omaha Mall Shooting

Last year there was a horrible tragedy in Omaha when Robert Hawkins, 19, went to the mall and began shooting innocent people, killing eight and himself. Yesterday, Hawkins’ mother Molly appeared on the Dr. Phil television program so the two of them could “get real” (to mock one of Dr. McGraw’s favorite catchphrases) about what led her son to go on a shooting rampage.

While Dr. Phil did emphasize Robert’s troubled family life, history of depression and psychotic episodes, and easy access to an AK-47 assault rifle in exploring the reasons behind Robert’s suicidal rampage, he also goes to great lengths to emphasize Robert’s use of cannabis. (I hope you enjoy this… Dr. Phil charged me $6 just to get the transcript of the program…)

TRANSCRIPT from JANUARY 07, 2009

McGRAW: Robert Hawkins’ mother says she did not see the warning signs because it was one year ago that her 19-year-old son walked into the Von Maur department store at Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska, with an AK-47 and killed eight people. According to the police chief, Robert fired more than 30 rounds, then he took his own life.

… Your questions to me–and I get so many of them–are, `Dr. Phil, why? Why, why does this happen? Who does this? How can we spot it before it happens to protect ourselves or our children?’ Maybe it’s one of your own children acting strange. Maybe it’s one of their friends. Maybe it’s a co-worker or somebody that you’re around. You say, `How can we protect ourselves?’ We’ve seen this all too often. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, the Utah Trolley Square shooting. There are tragically just too many to name. But could these have been prevented?

… Did you smoke marijuana with this kid?

MOLLY: Yes, I did.

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Thinking about the Election

I spent the evening at an election-watching party sponsored by a local auto dealer who is a huge supporter of progressive talk radio. What fun it was, for once, to be in a room full of cheering, crying people who weren’t dressed in Green Bay Packers clothing. Out here in Portland, we all counted down from :45 seconds to 8pm our time, because we knew that would be the moment CNN would call the election for Barack Hussein Obama.

(Now that he’s elected, I will be calling him “Barack Hussein Obama” because it will will irritate the righties and not saying his middle name, when we routinely do that for every other president, gives that anti-Muslim smear more power than it deserves. I’m proud of our president Barack Hussein Obama and his middle name, too!)

We’re biting our nails still over Merkley/Smith in the Senate. Smith lieads by about 1,000, but votes from Multnomah (Portland Metro – strongly Merkley) haven’t all been counted yet. I’m biting my nails for Al Franken in Minnesota, because while we’ve had Actor-Americans in government (Fred Grandy, Fred Thompson, Ronald Reagan) and Athlete-Americans (Steve Largent, Jack Kemp) and Former Cokehead-Americans (George W. Bush) in office, I believe Franken will be our first Former Cokehead-Actor-Comedian-American to sit in the Senate.

Oregon passed Measure 57 and Measure 61, so Measure 61 failed. If you said, “Huh?”, welcome to Oregon initiative politics. Our rightwing nutjobs sponsored 61, which increases mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes, which will cost us up to $400 million to build new prisons. So the legislature sponsored 57, which increases mandatory minimums on fewer certain crimes, which will cost us up to $200 million to build new prisons, but if 57 passes with more votes than 61, 61 is invalidated. This is how Oregon fights an awful bill, by proposing a less-awful counter bill, instead of just fighting the awful bill.

Michigan passed it’s medical marijuana measure with 63% of the vote and Massachusetts passed it’s marijuana decriminalization measure. 13 states with 1/4th the US population now recognize and protect medical users of marijuana, and 13 states now no longer arrest and incarcerate social users of marijuana (six states do both).

And yet, California, where I had just been three weeks ago, sitting in a downtown dispensary enjoying a gourmet choice of vaporized cannabis without fear of law enforcement…

California, the capital of the worldwide pornography industry, thanks to lenient laws…

California, where I can buy hundred-proof liquor store on the shelves of the local grocery store…

Californians voted to amend their constitution to revoke a right from people already granted that right – the right to marry for gays and lesbians.

Wow. What a precedent. So, like, if enough Californians decided to do it, they could revoke just about anybody’s right to do anything, couldn’t they? Well, no, not if that right were something protected in the US Constitution. They couldn’t, for example, create an amendment to define marriage as only between one man and one woman of the same race, religion, or ethnicity.

Civil rights groups are petitioning the California Supreme Court, saying that you can’t really use the initiative process to take away people’s constitutional rights. Good luck with that.

And there are the other anti-gay marriage and anti-gay adoption amendments that passed this time around in other states. It’s going to keep happening like this, election after election, as homophobic majorities will keep voting to discriminate against LGBT.

This can only be solved federally. Either federal legislation, constitutional amendment, or Supreme Court decision. You’re not likely to get #1, even less likely to get #2. Maybe President Barack Hussein Obama will get us the Justices on the bench to give us #3.

Teen could get 16 years for fatal crash because of first-time pot use two weeks prior

Teen pleads in crash that killed 3 | www.jconline.com | Journal and Courier
A Crawfordsville teenager has admitted to smoking marijuana about two weeks before causing a two-vehicle crash a year ago that killed two of his classmates and an Indianapolis woman.

Tyler R. Sutton, 18, pleaded guilty this morning in Tippecanoe Superior Court 2 to three counts of operating a vehicle with a controlled substance causing death and feticide, all Class C felonies.

If Judge Thomas Busch accepts Sutton’s plea with the Tippecanoe County prosecutor’s office, at least two of those counts would have to be served concurrently – meaning the former North Montgomery High School student could spend up to 16 years in prison.

Toxicology tests taken after the crash showed that Sutton had marijuana metabolites in his blood, though Sutton’s Indianapolis-based attorney, Dennis Zahn, disputed in court that the drug was present in the teen’s urine.

Indiana law requires only that narcotic metabolites be present to establish impaired driving.

Though Sutton also admitted to smoking marijuana, he said today that it was his first and only time.

The teenager was 17 years old at the time of crash, but juvenile court Judge Loretta Rush waived him to adult court in March.

Indiana is one of the states with a per se DUID statute. In layman’s terms, that means if you test positive for any drug metabolite, you’ve been driving impaired in the eyes of the law. That’s metabolites, not the actual drug, as would be the case with someone failing an alcohol breathalyzer.

In the case of marijuana, inactive, non-impairing marijuana metabolites can remain detectable in one’s system for weeks. Tyler Sutton was no more an impaired driver than any other sober driver on the road; he just had the misfortune to smoke a joint a couple of weeks prior to the wreck

These insane per se statutes that count metabolites as impairment essentially mean that anyone who smokes marijuana in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, South Dakota, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, or Georgia and then drives anytime within the next few days (for light, occasional tokers) to up to a month and a half (for chronic tokers like me) is as guilty of a DUI as a drunk who blows over .08 BAC on a breathalyzer.

Cannabis Community for Obama

I spent some time out at the BarackObama.com website.  Man, does his team have their Web 2.0 shit together!  There’s a logo, wallpaper, and group widget for just about every group under the sun… Obama Pride, First Americans for Obama, Seniors for Obama, Republicans for Obama, etc.

Every group except the 25,000,000 of us who used cannabis last year.

My colleague Steve Bloom at CelebStoner.com put together a “Stoners for Obama” campaign, but I’m not too fond of the word “stoner” for public consumption.  It’s like my group’s “n-word” — we can say it and call each other it, but you shouldn’t.

So I spent a little time putting together my own Cannabis Consumers for Obama graphics.  Feel free to copy them and spread them far and wide.

Wallpaper 1680×1050 – 1280×1024 – 1024×768 – 800×600

Heart to McCain/Palin: Back off on ‘Barracuda’

Heart to McCain/Palin: Back off on ‘Barracuda’ – Sound Effects – Boston.com
The rock group Heart has sent a message to John McCain and Sarah “Barracuda” Palin: quit playing our 1977 hit ”Barracuda.”

It seemed the cleverest musical choice of both conventions. Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson, like Alaska Governor Palin, are outspoken products of the Pacific Northwest, and the sisters’s tune also could refer to Palin’s Dazed-and-Confused-Era nickname of Sarah Barracuda, given for her intense high-school basketball play.

“Sarah Palin’s views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women. We ask that our song ‘Barracuda’ no longer be used to promote her image. The song ‘Barracuda’ was written in the late 70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women. (The ‘barracuda’ represented the business.) While Heart did not and would not authorize the use of their song at the RNC, there’s irony in Republican strategists’ choice to make use of it there.”

No word so far on whether the tune would be dropped from the GOP playlist. “If the real thing don’t do the trick,” Ann Wilson sang in “Barracuda,” “You better make up something quick.”

The problem for the GOP is nearly all the great musicians support Democrats.  You can’t have every event end with country songs about John McCain as a dried-up grape.

To rebut rumors, Palin says daughter, 17, pregnant

OK, the rumor that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy with fifth child Trig to cover for her 16-year-old daughter (who coincidentally was pulled from school for four or five months during Palin’s pregnancy) can be put to bed.  Sarah Palin is the mother of Trig, and she did indeed have her water break in Dallas, then finish a 30-minute speech, then ride to the airport, then fly from Dallas to Seattle (because there’s no good hospitals in Dallas), then transfer over to the Seattle to Anchorage flight (because there’s no good hospitals in Seattle), then ride from the airport to Wasilla, AK to have her baby (because there’s no good hospitals in Anchorage), her fifth pregnancy, a high-risk pregnancy due to her age (43) and the baby’s condition (Down Syndrome) and the timing (five weeks premature).  For a pro-baby mom, you sure put that fetus at risk for ten-plus hours, didn’t you?

We can put the rumor to rest because Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, supporter of rapist’s reproductive rights, a strong believer in abstinence-only sex education and government-enforced procreation, just announced that her daughter (now 17) is pregnant.

To rebut rumors, Palin says daughter, 17, pregnant | U.S. | Reuters
ST. PAUL (Reuters) – The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.

Bristol Palin, one of Alaska Gov. Palin’s five children with her husband, Todd, is about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, the Palins said in a statement released by the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said.

Uh, what do you mean Bristol made the decision on her own?  She’s a minor.  You’re the parent.  You don’t believe there is any “choice” in this matter, so how could Bristol make “the decision?”  (I suppose she means, “decided not to give the baby up for adoption.”)

“Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family. We ask the media, respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates,” the statement concluded.

By the way, Bristol, CT, is the home of ESPN.  Sarah Palin was once a sportscaster who wanted to work for ESPN.  And Levi?  Bristol and Levi?  Wonderful.  Nice to see that abstinence-only education and top-notch pro-Jesus parenting paid off.

Discussions with the Pro-Government-Enforced-Procreation demonstrators

Pam’s House Blend:: Discussions with the Pro-Government-Enforced-Procreation demonstrators

As I rode my free bike around Downtown Denver I found some of the fun groups gathered for the convention.

The “Stop the Torture” demonstration down at the park.

Pro-Choice Girl, Pro-Gun Cop

One of the under-dressed and under-epuipped police at the convention center making sure the free speech doesn’t lead to violence, alongside one of the NARAL volunteers countering this kind of crap pic after jump so you don’t have to see an aborted fetus if you don’t want to…

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