In order to save itself from financial oblivion, the state of California seems inclined to just do it. Just say yes. To become Amsterdam.
It may be the biggest thing to come out of the financial meltdown. We won’t get meaningful reform of the banking system, but we’re going to get legalized pot...
So forget health care. Obama is going to be the pot president. Hell, Franklin Roosevelt, in his Depression, saw the end of prohibition.
So the nation elects a black President and pot gets legalized (at least in California, maybe). It's a really good idea to legalize. I'm all for it. Hitching it to Obama is a bad idea. A really bad idea. Lay this one on Schwarzenegger. Let the Republicans have this win. Calling Obama the Pot President is just more fodder for the good-old-boys (and girls).
Like those folks in my home town who thought drugs came to town because of a single black family moving in. It had nothing to do with it being the late 1960's and the town's position at the intersection of a couple of major interstate highways. Nope. It was dem coloreds. Honest injun.
State lawmakers are holding a hearing on Wednesday on the effects of a bill that would legalize, tax and regulate the drug — in what would be the first such law in the United States. Tax officials estimate the legislation could bring the struggling state about $1.4 billion a year, and though the bill’s fate in the Legislature is uncertain, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has indicated he would be open to a “robust debate” on the issue.
In addition to the California politicians weighing the issue, three ballot initiatives aimed at legalization are quickly gaining the signatures needed to put them before the citizenry in 2010.
The federal government maintains its position of prohibition of marijuana for recreational use. They also maintained the prohibition of marijuana in all of its forms, raiding California clinics and arresting medical marijuana users, up until this year.
Given the previous time line, if California decides to legalize, they only have to put up with federal intervention for about 13 years. Or until an anti-prohibition President is elected. Or until they say to hell with those bastards on the other side of the continent and break away to create the first incarnation of my proposed secessionist government, Nuevo Sodom.
Note: I've recently been wondering... if a person has a marijuana prescription, can they go to the dispensary and ask for the less expensive generic version of OG Kush?
Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico.
If they ever fully legalize in the United States those mom-and-pop operations will be forced out of business by big American cartels conglomerates. Most likely due to vaguely stated regulations passed by the US government at the behest of the corporations under the guise of 'consumer protection'.
* Image at right, world's happiest marine destroying Mexican crop.
When my dog developed a tumor and I was faced with huge veterinary costs, I chose euthanasia. He was a dog. A well loved dog that I still miss, but a dog none-the-less. Pet owners are often forced with these hard choices.
People can choose for themselves. While I might end up choosing euthanasia for myself some day (and might put on a dog collar and beg for it just to have some fun with the situation), there are many who choose to fight and have done so for many years. They are not dogs.
I was the first wheelchair-bound student "mainstreamed" in the schools of Broward County, Florida. I became a poster child for the Muscular Dystrophy Association and president of my high school class. I entered college in 1990 with plans to work in politics and patient advocacy, but at 19, I had a severe setback and I was confronted with a stark choice. My survival would require a machine to breathe and round-the-clock nursing care.
A breathing machine usually means life in a nursing facility. But my father's small business had health insurance from Guardian Life Insurance Co., which promised "Solutions for Life." The health policy had no lifetime benefit cap and covered home nursing care. Relying on that contract with a 149-year-old company, I decided to go on a mechanical ventilator for the rest of my life.
Since then, I've endured life-threatening medical complications and long hospitalizations. I've lost my privacy and ability to travel. But I never regretted my decision to live, to continue to learn and write, and to share in the lives of family and friends.
After decades of medical emergencies, we still weren't prepared for the latest crisis -- this one created by the same insurance company that once saved my life. Guardian abruptly withdrew our health plan from all policyholders in New York where my father's business is based. Guardian offered a 'replacement' plan with low benefits and no home nursing benefits. They knew that I would never survive with such a plan, but they didn't care.
Suspecting that this action was related to the high cost of my care, we filed a lawsuit and have asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to enforce existing federal laws and require Guardian to continue my health plan. Without federal intervention, I will lose this insurance, and that would be a death sentence.
Our lawsuit uncovered insurance company documents that confirmed my suspicion that I'm a target of discrimination. The documents revealed Guardian had compiled a "hit list" of its costliest members, including patients with muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, brain injury, and paralysis. Guardian executives referred to us all as "dogs" and "trainwrecks," and they debated how and when to dump us from the rolls. Laws prohibited the cancellation of the individual members with serious chronic health problems, so Guardian opted to cancel the plan for all members of this specific health plan in New York, an action that violates federal law.
This is a call to arms for all the pro-lifers out there. Give up on the abortion clinics for a couple of weeks and go chant in front of Guardian Life Insurance Co., home of the broken promise and the privatized death panel.
Now excuse me while I fantasize about letting others make all my choices for me.
Of all the wingnut mythology surrounding healthcare reform, nothing has stirred greater fury or louder denials than the suggestion that government might somehow provide insurance to America's undocumented workers and their families. "You lie!" screamed Rep. Joe Wilson as the President told Congress that his plan would provide no coverage to them. "No, we don't!" replied the Democrats, who scrambled to make sure that the undocumented are excluded by statute.
Yet as the nation prepares for a possible swine flu pandemic this winter, we are learning that the firm determination of both parties to deny medical care to people without papers is actually quite flaccid. Even the most hysterical immigrant-bashers seem content to allow the government to vaccinate immigrants against the H1N1 virus (unless, that is, they happen to be among the right-wing chorus that suspects vaccination itself to be a nefarious socialist plot). Even they seem to realize that viruses don't discriminate on the basis of citizenship -- although they wrongly tried to blame last spring's first outbreak of swine flu on the Mexicans among us.
We must provide health care to all to protect ourselves. I love it!
Police and grounds keepers at a Massachusetts golf course are trying to figure out how someone snuck onto the grounds and carved a giant swastika message for Barack Obama onto the field – and what exactly did they mean with their message.
The swastika two traditional messages. When rotating counter-clockwise, it is the symbol used by National Socialist Germany and is widely considered a "hate" icon. However, Hindu and Buhdist faiths use the a clockwise-rotating swastika in their religion and is a considered to be symbol for good luck, hope, and peace...
Police are not sure if the vandal or vandals made a mistake or not.
In case the police need a little help with their investigation, given the spacing between the O and the BAMA, the vandal is probably Irish. Just round up all the Irish in Boston and start asking questions. How many can there be?
The real crime was screwing up some poor lawyer's game when his ball landed in the rough of the swastika.
Sean Hannity's unsupported decree doesn't bother me much. The double-speak warps the brain.
The vanquished Vice President doesn't think there's room for debate on climate change. I do. The debate's over. There's no global warming.
Is there room for debate or is the debate over? Or was there room for debate but now the debate is over? Or is there room for debate because the debate is over? Like when there is room in the ring for Sesame Street Live because Wrestlemania is over.
Obama had the good fortune of being elected President of the United States of America directly after the worst President in our nation's history. For this...
The Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled religious leader -- brushed aside by U.S. President Barack Obama in favor of communist China -- was saluted at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday for his work for human rights.
Coworker: Just give me a minute. I can't afford to go out of here in an ambulance again.
It was a blood pressure spike caused by a stressful situation. They took some meds and within an hour had returned to normal. Thank goodness.
But can we really consider ourselves as good as the rest of the developed world when a gainfully employed individual covered by the company insurance plan still feels they can't afford a trip to the hospital? Not even when I find them squatting and sweating by a machine in a panic and have to fetch their medicine from twenty feet away because they can't stand up? How screwed up is that?
Among Ardipithecus's ancestors, such a strategy could catch on if searching for food required a lot of time and exposure to predators. Males would be far more successful food-providers if they had their hands free to carry home loads of fruits and tubers—which would favor walking on two legs. Females would come to prefer good, steady providers with smaller canines over the big fierce-toothed ones who left as soon as they spot another fertile female. The results, says Lovejoy, are visible in Ardipithecus, which had small canines even in males and walked upright.
Lovejoy's explanation for the origin of bipedalism thus comes down to the monogamous pair bond. Far from being a recent evolutionary innovation, as many people assume, he believes the behavior goes back all the way to near the beginning of our lineage some six million years ago.
Evangelicals now have a tough choice in front of them. They can either accept this scientific theory that supports their supposed love of heterosexual monogamy or dismiss it in favor of their darling creationism.
