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.
Denny Crane!
It’s quite telling that Rush Limbaugh would compare getting quality health care to the relative size of one’s housing. It’s just another commodity to conservatives, just another business. If you’re rich, then you get health care, if you’re poor, then you just do us all a favor and slink away and die.
But see, Rush, that’s exactly what doesn’t happen. Viruses and bacteria don’t care how big your mansion is. Eventually, sometime, you have to go out among the public, and it benefits you in the short-term and the long-term if that public isn’t sick and dying and spreading their germs and infections to the people you love.
The very first sentence of the document that defines this country, our Founders wrote:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
I’m educated enough to know that the Founders’ “Welfare” does not equal the modern notion of “welfare”, as in “government assistance payments for food or rent”. But it does mean “health, happiness, or prosperity; well-being.” And we willingly accept government regulation and support of myriad organizations that promote the “health, happiness, or prosperity” of the general public, from student loans to public fire departments to meat inspections to small business assistance. If “general Welfare” of a nation doesn’t include its collective health, then the term is meaningless.
Rush is the cheerleader for the “I gots mine, you gets yours” amorality that infects the modern conservative movement he leads. It’s a narcissistic myopia that allows them to believe that “no man is an island” is a falsehood, that somehow a taxpayer-funded program to protect the public health is a case of Marxist distribution of wealth, and that funding basic health care for less-fortunate Americans is tantamount to cutting checks to promote laziness.
Today the California Supreme Court upheld Prop 8, the constitutional amendment that took away the right of gay people to marry in the state. The majority may now invalidate a minority’s rights at the ballot box.
Remember, this isn’t the same as the other couple of dozen states, like Oregon, that have banned gay marriage in their constitution. In those states, the right for gays to marry did not exist. In California, the court declared the right for gays to marry to be a constitutional right, and then the haters passed the constitutional amendment to take away that existing right.
Strangely enough, the Court left intact the marriages of some 18,000 gay couples who exercised their right before Prop 8 passed. I guess somehow that 18,001st gay couple to get married would’ve been the trigger for gaypocalypse or something. Weird, isn’t it, that 18,000 gay Californians have a right that hundreds of thousands of other gay Californians do not, a right the 18,000 would lose if they ever got divorced.
Conceivably, a majority of Californians could pass constitutional amendments to ban anyone from anything, so long as they didn’t touch the federally-protected classes of gender, religion, race, ethnicity, age, national origin, familial status, disability, or veterans status. No decision on rights from the California Supreme Court can be considered final, because the majority could always overturn it. This is much bigger than a ban on gay marriage, this sets precedent for the majority to take anyone’s rights! A right isn’t a right if it can be taken away; it’s a privilege. The California Supreme Court just decided that all rights in the Republic not granted by the federal constitution are now just privileges, granted unto you by the majority.
The reaction from some of the knuckle-draggers has been predictable. This on from the HuffPo comments is typical:
There is ONE and only ONE fair solution to this problem and it is the same solution that has been proposed by many people including Elton John. Homosexuals should be granted all of the same rights, benefits of married heterosexual couples, the union should be identified by a different term than “marriage”.
Homosexuals don’t seem willing to accept that and I think that it speaks volumes to the underlying intentions.
Great point! Just like little black kids in the 1950s should be granted all the same rights and benefits of education as the white kids, but they should be housed in separate buildings identified by a different term than “schools”.
Strange how gay folks don’t seem willing to accept their lifelong loving partnerships being trivialized by straights as some sort of “sub-marriage” or “alternamarriage”. Homobigots don’t seem willing to see gay folks as equals and their need to cling to a word speaks volumes to the underlying intentions. You’d grant an equal marriage so long as it isn’t called “marriage”? It’s really just an eight letter word you’re hung up on?
Is marriage religious? Fine, keep it in your church, take government out of it completely, and ban anyone from it who makes you uncomfortable. But if marriage is a civil institution with government benefits, all citizens get to participate equally. Restricting one’s choice of lifelong partners to just half the population isn’t just homophobic, it’s sexist!
It will be fun being a cynical old coot, someday telling my grand-nieces and nephews about the days when we used to openly discriminate against gay people… if I can get past their holo-tattoos and cyber-implants.
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Richardson bows out of cabinet, Israel/Gaza conflict with Saleem Siddiqui from HotConflict.com, compromising with a failed ideology.
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Torture Prosecutor Tops 70,000 Questions for Obama on Change.Gov
A whopping 70,000 questions poured into Change.gov over the past week, in response to the Obama transition team’s call for citizen queries to the President-Elect. After votes from about 100,000 people, the top ranked question asks Obama whether he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture and illegal surveillance by the U.S. government.
The national press corps has not raised this issue with Obama since his victory. (When it surfaced in April, Obama said he would order his attorney general to “immediately review” the potential crimes.) And while the leading question in the last Change.gov forum was dispatched breezily — Will you legalize marijuana? No. — this one is far more challenging, both substantively and politically.
The Times notes that Obama’s team has “not said” whether it will even answer [the torture prosecutions] question, though ignoring the question that came in first out of 74,000 would turn this exercise into a farce. A terse, evasive answer would be similarly unacceptable. After all, there would be little point in this online dialogue if it reiterates things we already know, (Obama is not in N.O.R.M.L.), and refuses to provide new information.
Yeah, let’s see if the call for Patrick Fitzgerald as an special prosecutor investigating allegations of torture gets this eleven-word response:
President-Elect Obama is not in favor of the investigation of torture.
I doubt it. I believe it will get a very thoughtful, reasoned response, much like the other four questions that were answered in the first round. Which just goes further in showing us how marginalized the drug war discussion is in Washington.
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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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The Associated Press: Sheriff profits as Ala. inmates claim lack of food
DECATUR, Ala. (AP) — Complaining of paper-thin bologna and cold grits, skinny prisoners testified Wednesday about meals so skimpy and unappetizing they have lost weight behind bars as a federal judge considered Alabama’s unusual practice of letting sheriffs profit from feeding inmates.
U.S. District Judge U.W. Clemon held the hearing to determine whether the Morgan County Jail is violating a 2001 agreement that required the sheriff to provide adequate meals to prisoners.
One after another, 10 prisoners told Clemon about receiving meals that are so small they are forced to buy additional snacks from a for-profit store jailers operated inside the lockup. Most of the inmates appeared thin, with baggy jail coveralls hanging off their frames.
Inmates told of getting half an egg, a spoonful of oatmeal and one piece of toast most days for breakfast, served at 3 a.m. daily. Lunch is usually a handful of chips and two sandwiches with barely enough peanut butter to taste.
Bartlett said he personally made about $95,000 last year feeding inmates after also receiving money from the county and the U.S. government for housing federal prisoners. Despite rising food costs, Bartlett said he made a $62,000 profit in 2007 and $55,000 in 2006.
Yet another example of profiting from prisons that needs to fixed now. There should be no profit motive whatsoever in caging human beings. I’m not some namby-pamby who doesn’t realize there are some bad people out there who need to be caged, but the caging needs to be a civic duty, not a commercial one. The goal should be to have as few people in cages as possible, not as many as possible.
Posted by "Radical" Russ on January 8, 2009 at 9:15 am.
Categories: No Justice No Peace
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CNN’s Sanjay Gupta Is Approached for Surgeon General Job – NYTimes.com
WASHINGTON — Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CNN health reporter, is the leading contender to become the next surgeon general, a pick that will give the moribund office a higher profile but one that has received a mixed reaction among public health advocates.
If Dr. Gupta is picked for the post, he would be the nation’s leading medical advocate. His experience in the media would be beneficial in bringing the Surgeon General’s office back to the prominence it held when C. Everett Koop was successfully battling tobacco smoking.
But is Dr. Gupta ready to deliver the Obama Administration’s promised end to the politicization of science and medicine? More specifically, will Dr. Gupta toe the federal line that cannabis is lacking in any medical value, or will he recognize what thirteen US states and the past twelve years of research prove — that cannabis is a beneficial medicine for some people and an intoxicant far less harmful than alcohol for others?
In 2002, Dr. Gupta was more than willing to echo the outrageous claims that smoking pot would lead to psychosis, depression, and schizophrenia:
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Rachel Maddow (one of my faves) has a complaint, wondering how could 9 out of 10 marijuana initiatives succeed at the ballot box, while 4 out of 4 anti-gay initiatives succeeded. (Updated with hyperlinks and bumped. — “R”R)
To be fair, I understand Rachel’s point about the anti-gay ballot amendments in California, Arizona, Florida, and Arkansas all passing – it’s despicable that we would treat gays and lesbians any differently under the law than we treat straights. However, that doesn’t mean there is some equivalence between reforming marijuana laws and discrimination against gays.
For one thing, I’d note that the only state that had statewide gay and marijuana initiatives was California, the only state where a marijuana initiative (Prop 5) failed. (Arkansas had anti-gay adoption, but Fayetteville, not the whole state, approved cannabis as lowest priority for law enforcement.) It wouldn’t be fair to say the anti-gay amendment also brought out anti-pot voters in California, would it?
I’ll admit, Rachel, that the results seem ironic and sad, though no more sad that Californians approving humane treatment of chickens at the slaughter while also taking away marriage rights from humans that already have those rights. But your casual dismissal of some very important gains by the cannabis community is not in keeping with your usual inclusive and tolerant beliefs.
In dismissing marijuana initiatives with “whatever, dude” and “Funyuns” comments, you are dismissing the thousands of seriously ill and disabled Michiganders who will no longer fear arrest and incarceration for simply using a plant to alleviate severe pain, nausea, spasticity, seizures, or the wasting that comes with chemotherapy treatments and HIV/AIDS. Rachel, didn’t you begin your career as an activist helping those with HIV/AIDS in prisons? You should know this better than most.
You’re also dismissing residents of Massachusetts who’ve chosen to put their law enforcement resources into crimes more serious than busting a college kid for a baggie of weed. Or are you supportive of criminal penalties for marijuana that endanger students’ financial aid, poor people’s housing, and working people’s jobs and professionals’ careers?
Perhaps we just did a better job of mobilizing our base and convincing the voters of our message. Yes, you had the financial might of the Mormon Church fighting to pass Prop 8 in California, but we’ve had the financial and prosecutorial might of law enforcement fighting us from their bully pulpit using our own tax dollars. And while it is a terrible injustice to deny the rights of gay people to marry or adopt, nobody is arresting 872,000 gay people a year for being gay, nobody is testing gay people’s urine for metabolites of homosexuality and declaring them DUIs, and nobody is incarcerating gay people for their “lifestyle”.
Yes, gay people face revolting acts of violence and discrimination most stoners never face, but we can still be arrested for our “lifestyle”. The government has an entire cabinet bureau dedicated to propagandizing against us, lying about us, defeating our ballot propositions, and arresting and convicting us.
We should be natural allies, Rachel. Our struggles are very different, but also quite similar. We need to come out of the closet, too. We need to educate ignorant people about us. While you may think the big difference is that gay is innate and stoner is a choice, don’t be so sure. We all have an innate desire to alter our consciousness, and for medical users, they really don’t have much of a choice.
Now pass the Funyuns!
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.
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