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.
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?
The Financial Times reported that Merrill Lynch accelerated its normal time schedule for awarding bonuses and distributed $ 4 billion dollars on Dec 29, just 3 days before its takeover by Bank of America. At the same time Merrill posted $15 billion in losses for the fourth quarter. The total compensation for Merrill Lynch employees in 2008 was $15 billion.
That’s way more than just an outsized sense of entitlement, that’s flat-out stealing. And the money for this comes from, you guessed it, the US government. The Bank of America was prepared to back out of the deal once the size of the Merrill Lynch loss became apparent. The deal was completed only after guarantees of government money by the US Treasury.
What’s more, because Congress is so up close and personal with all their friends on Wall Street who donate so generously to their re-election campaigns, those bonuses are not subject to payroll tax and are treated as long term capital gains income, taxed at a mere 15%. Since the payroll tax is just over 15% (half paid by the employer), they essentially are paying less tax on their income than minimum income wage slaves.
I read another blogger who had compared the financial bailout to the incident of Colin Powell waving around the vial of anthrax. There was no anthrax, but boy, the fear of the anthrax made everyone forget commonsense and asking questions and taking things slowly. Same with the Wall Street “crisis”, waving around these “toxic securities” like anthrax, screaming that if we didn’t do something immediately there would be grave consequences, right now, no questions asked, give us money, no oversight!
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..
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.
Continue Reading…
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 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.
Somebody at Obama HQ finally heard me (and millions others) screaming for someone to put “Current Wall Street Bailout” + “1980’s Keating S&L Financial Bailout” together.  Looks like we’re going to get a lesson in Keating Economics.  Finally!
To me it looks like the Obama campaign is far smarter than I am. Â (Good!) Â I was all over this Keating 5 thing, wondering why nobody else would go there with me (aside from us bloggy types).
Turns out, they were just keeping the powder dry. Â It’s as if they kept this one in the bag just in case the McCainiacs tried to play the Ayers / Wright / Rezko game again just shy of the election. Â Good call, people.
So now, please, let me hope you’ve got something in the bag to rebut the upcoming terror attack / terror alert / Osama tape / next distraction.
Also, the Dow dropping another loaf (below 10,000!) sure helps keep the focus on issues, doesn’t it? Â Tell me now this would be worse if we didn’t fork over $700B to these guys?
I spent some time out at the BarackObama.com website. Â Man, does his team have their Web 2.0 shit together! Â 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. Â 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
©2009 Au Gratin Productions Inc.
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