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November 30, 2003
Employer Simkanin Prosecution Ends in MistrialFrom WeThePeople: 11-26-03 Employer Simkanin Prosecution Ends in Mistrial Judge Stymies Both Jury & Defense Jury Hung at 11-1 Favoring Acquittal After almost 6 months of incarceration in isolation awaiting his federal trial, non-withholding employer Dick Simkanin’s trial ended this evening in a mistrial after the jury was unable to reach a verdict on federal charges that Simkanin failed to Withhold taxes from his employees. Simkanin, a successful Bedford, Texas business owner, had been charged with 12 counts of Willful Failure to Withhold employment taxes for his employees and 15 counts of filing False Claims for requesting refunds of tax pre-payments that had been made by Simkanin on behalf of those employees. Facing years in federal prison, his trial lasted only hours, beginning and ending yesterday – largely because the Court denied Simkanin the opportunity present any expert defense witnesses or legal evidence regarding the contested legal obligations under US income tax statutes. Jury deliberations started this morning and the mistrial was declared around 6 PM Central time. A report from several sources close to the Simkanin team was that the jury hung 11-1 in favor of acquittal. US Attorney Jarvis stated that he intended to retry Simkanin “as soon as possible.” Simkanin, who has NO criminal record, was immediately ordered back into federal custody by Judge John McBryde. ...
Bruce Sterling: Cosmic Reality CheckSurprise! Our little corner of the universe is even smaller than we thought. By Bruce Sterling Since the days of Galileo's telescope, new and better scientific instruments have steadily transformed our conception of the universe. Now we've got the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. This superb gizmo, launched in June 2001, is floating 1 million miles from Earth in the second Lagrange Point, measuring the density of the universe with unheard-of digital accuracy and sending data back to mission control. Already, the probe's findings have provided a few salient new notions about the nature of cosmic reality. For starters, the universe is 13.7 billion years old. Unlike previous figures, this is not a rough estimate; the margin of error is about 1 percent. In addition, the universe is flat. Forget all that mind-boggling space-time-is-curved stuff. Euclid was right all along. And the space-time pancake will expand infinitely. There's no such thing as an end to this particular universe. Now here's the really wacky part: Everything we're made of or can measure - from atoms to energy - is only 4 percent of the whole shebang. The rest is dark matter (about 23 percent) and, best of all, dark energy (73 percent). ... Human societies are always reshaped by their concepts of the basic nature of the universe. Copernicus damaged the infallibility of the church; Newton laid the foundation for the Enlightenment; Einstein spurred moral relativism. What will we make of our new knowledge? Are there political implications to the idea that most of the universe is untouchable, endlessly expanding, scarcely knowable? Will we finally get over our obsession with static utopias, sudden armageddons, limits, and closure? Is there philosophical comfort to be found in a silent, never-ending steady bang?... 'We could lose this situation''We could lose this situation' · CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad Thursday November 13, 2003 The Guardian The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control. The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands. One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe. An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger". "It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said. "There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that." ... U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the NorthU.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: November 30, 2003 Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded. Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker. Guerrilla war in Iraq spreadingGuerrilla war in Iraq spreading US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country. The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months. ... |
'Punkvoter' founder aims to unify youth vote
'Punkvoter' founder aims to unify youth vote
Nov. 4, 2003
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Would a plea from the lead singer of "Anti-Flag," "Bouncing Souls," "Frenzal Rhomb" or "Sick Of It All" get you to turn out and vote in the 2004 presidential election?
Probably not if you're a mainstream music fan downloading the latest tune from Britney Spears. But, if you're an avid young punk music lover, it just might do the trick.
At least that's what "NOFX" lead singer and founder of "Punkvoter" Mike Burkett is hoping. Burkett or "Fat Mike" as he's known to his legion of fans, is teaming up with roughly 50 punk bands and a dozen record labels to form Punkvoter, a group designed to register, educate and push 500,000 18-24 year-olds to the polls next year.
"So many millions of people don't feel like their vote has any meaning," says Burkett. "There is no reason why younger people can't be a unified force."
...
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 27, 2003
Kidd: This is What Your FEAR is Protecting
This is What Your FEAR is Protecting
By Devvy Kidd
November 22, 2003
Millions of Americans have read the Joseph Banister story. For those who may not know of this courageous individual, a short refresher is in order. Joseph was an IRS CID agent (Criminal Investigation Division) for a little over five years. In late 1996, he happened to hear some information about the nature of the income tax on a radio show. After two years of trying to prove the so-called "tax protesters" wrong regarding their beliefs, he finally concluded that the "tax honesty" individuals were indeed correct in their analysis of the income tax and its voluntary nature.
Joseph had no choice but to resign his job, which at that time paid $80,000 per year. You see, this remarkable young man could no longer perform his duties as a CID agent after he discovered the truth. He could not look in the mirror every morning knowing that it was the IRS, his employer, who was breaking the law and committing fraud against the American people. How many people do you know would give up their $80,000 a year job for something called integrity?
With no paycheck coming in, times got tough for this young man; a husband and father of two young boys who attended private Catholic school. However, as a college graduate with a CPA license, Joseph began the process of building a clientele, appearing at numerous events throughout the country and in his soft spoken manner, he told his story and why he could no longer participate in this fraud against his fellow Americans.
As time has gone by, the IRS attempted to silence this courageous young man by making sure he knew a grand jury was sniffing around him. Then the IRS began contacting Joseph's clients and scaring them off so that his income began to once again dwindle. When that didn't work, suddenly the State of California took an interest in him. Stepping up this Nazi style persecution, the State of California is now attempting to take away his CPA license. Not because he has violated any law, but to shut up this courageous young man and deny him the right to work in his profession - all because he told a truth which threatens the powerful, global, banking cartel.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Mack Daddy
Local Libertarian gubernatorial candidate leans to the left and speaks to the right.
by Kristy Davis
Meet “Sheriff” Richard Mack: FBI Academy graduate, former militiaman and devout Mormon. Mack’s Libertarian Party leanings run the gamut. Down with leftie love, he wants to legalize marijuana and pimp-slap Sen. Orrin Hatch out of office. Uptight and right, Mack wants to can government welfare, public schools and public Section 8 housing. If Mack had his way, charity would be the sole domain of churches and private nonprofits.
“The bottom line is, I don’t fit the mold,” he says.
Mack wants Utah voters to punch his name on the 2004 gubernatorial ballot. But some politicos say the day a Libertarian takes office will be the day the Utah Legislature legalizes marijuana (insert Beavis laugh here).
Here’s the Libertarian platform in a nutshell: They are pro-constitution and antigovernment. They don’t like taxes. They favor open immigration. While they support the notion of national defense, they don’t like it when the United States pokes around in foreign affairs or goes to war without provocation. Most Libertarians, including Mack, oppose the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. Party positions on some issues are still up for grabs, however, such as abortion and the legalization of drugs.
...
Tall, dark, handsome but inherently dorky, Mack has come a long way since his early-’80s, undercover-cop days. In the tradition of Starsky & Hutch, Mack—posing as “Gary Layton”—busted junkies, intercepted drug deals and made the streets of Provo a little bit safer.
“Are you going to ask me if I smoked pot?” Mack asks. “Well, never illegally, but [while] undercover, yes.”
Mack went on to become sheriff of Arizona’s Graham County, where he formed a 5,000-member posse to “help with traffic matters and parades,” he says. While working as sheriff, Mack challenged federal gun-control legislation, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, that required local police to run background checks on potential gun owners. In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Mack’s favor, striking down background checks. Later, he co-wrote a book about the experience, titled From My Cold, Dead Fingers.
During a University of Utah forum on legalizing marijuana, Mack told the story of his transformation from a DARE instructor and police officer to a constitutionalist who wants government off your back.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 55%
November 26, 2003
Guantanamo treatment is 'monstrous', says law lord
Guantanamo treatment is 'monstrous', says law lord
By Robert Verkaik
Legal Affairs Correspondent
26 November 2003
One of the country's most senior judges launched an unprecedented attack on US treatment of the 660 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay last night, saying they will become martyrs in the Muslim world.
Breaking with the convention that law lords do not speak out on politically sensitive issues, Lord Steyn described their imprisonment as a "monstrous failure of justice" and the military tribunals that will try them as kangaroo courts.
Lord Steyn, one of 12 judges who sits in the country's highest court, is understood to have been wrestling with his conscience for weeks. His comments would make it almost impossible for him to hear any appeal from the nine British prisoners held at the US naval base in Cuba if President George Bush agreed to send them for trial in this country.
...
"As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would have to say that I regard this a monstrous failure of justice. The military will act as interrogators, prosecutors and defence counsel, judges, and when death sentences are imposed, as executioners. The trials will be held in private. None of the guarantees of a fair trial need be observed."
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 25%
Probation Granted to 3 Who Grew, Sold Pot as a Medicine
Probation Granted to 3 Who Grew, Sold Pot as a Medicine
By Jean Guccione, Times Staff Writer
In a victory for advocates of medicinal marijuana, officers of a defunct West Hollywood cannabis club were sentenced Monday to one year of probation for growing and selling marijuana to hundreds of people with cancer, AIDS and other serious ailments.
In imposing the minimum allowable sentence, U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz chastised the prosecution.
"To allocate the resources of the Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. attorney's office in this case … baffles me, disturbs me," the judge said.
...
The judge noted that 85% of the center's 960 members have AIDS or are HIV-positive; 10% have cancer; and the rest have various other medical conditions.
"It is difficult to imagine a case where a defendant has contributed to the distribution of a controlled substance for more humanitarian reasons than what occurred here," his defense attorney, Ronald O. Kaye, argued in court papers.
...
Under federal drug forfeiture laws, authorities seized $56,000 in the center's bank account and sold its building at 7494 Santa Monica Blvd. for $1.2 million.
The city of West Hollywood and Wells Fargo Bank, which financed the purchase, are trying to force the federal government to return a portion of the money.
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 35%
Zero Patience for Zero Tolerance
Zero Patience for Zero Tolerance
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
By Wendy McElroy
News shows recently showed video of 14 police officers charging a crowded high-school corridor with guns drawn in a drug sweep. Students at Stratford Creek High School in Goose Creek, S.C., were forced onto their knees or against walls, while dogs sniffed their backpacks for drugs.
None were found. Although the incident was extreme, it was not an aberration but the logical consequences of "zero tolerance" policies, defended by both the school and the police. Zero tolerance must be abandoned, especially in connection with children.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 25%
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November 25, 2003
Early suicide bombing attempt against President-elect Kennedy
Kennedy presidency almost ended before he was inaugurated
3 years before he would die in Dallas, Kennedy escaped a man with a car packed with dynamite
By ROBIN ERB
BLADE STAFF WRITER
On a bright Sunday morning nearly 43 years ago, a ramshackle Buick crept through the posh streets of Palm Beach, Fla., toward a sprawling, Mediterranean-style mansion.
At the wheel was a disheveled, silver-haired madman. His aged right hand rested near a switch wired to seven sticks of dynamite.
Inside the two-story stucco home was his target - president-elect John F. Kennedy - readying for morning Mass.
Richard Pavlick stopped a short distance from the house and waited, unnoticed by U.S. Secret Service agents outside.
It was decades before today’s proliferation of suicide bombers, but Pavlick’s plan on Dec. 11, 1960, was as simple: ram the president-elect’s car and detonate the dynamite.
...
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 80%
Bill Clinton's Favorite Books
Clinton Releases List of Favorite Books
President Clinton Releases List of 21 Favorite Books, Including Wife's 'Living History'
The Associated Press
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. Nov. 21 — Ah, nothing like curling up in front of the fireplace with 21 of President Clinton's favorite books.
To coincide with the opening of a Clinton Library-related exhibit of books and gifts he received while president, Clinton has released a list of his 21 favorite books from his wife's "Living History" to Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" to Thomas a Kempis' "The Imitation of Christ."
Clinton's presidential library is to open next November on the south bank of the Arkansas River in downtown Little Rock. A nearby office building, the Cox Creative Center, has hosted a number of preview exhibits, and on Monday opens "America Presents: A Collection of Books and Gifts of the Clinton Presidency." The exhibit runs through Jan. 3.
Copies of Clinton's 21 favorite books will be on display at the Cox building.
Besides Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's autobiography, Ellison's soaring novel of a black man's journey through white America and Kempis' 15th-century treatise on Christian living, other books of note include Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again."
The entire list of Clinton's favorite books, listed alphabetically by author:
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Maya Angelou.
"Meditations," Marcus Aurelius.
"The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker.
"Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963," Taylor Branch.
"Living History," Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"Lincoln," David Herbert Donald.
"The Four Quartets," T.S. Eliot.
"Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison.
"The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First Century," David Fromkin.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude," Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
"The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes," Seamus Heaney.
"King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa," Adam Hochschild.
"The Imitation of Christ," Thomas a Kempis.
"Homage to Catalonia," George Orwell.
"The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis," Carroll Quigley.
"Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics," Reinhold Niebuhr.
"The Confessions of Nat Turner," William Styron.
"Politics as a Vocation," Max Weber.
"You Can't Go Home Again," Thomas Wolfe.
"Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny," Robert Wright.
"The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats," William Butler Yeats.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
November 24, 2003
Man chokes to death hiding pot
Man chokes to death hiding pot
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- A man changing a flat tire choked to death on a bag of marijuana he had stuffed down his throat in an apparent attempt to hide it from police who stopped to help him, authorities said.
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 75%
Review: "Waiting" by Doug Hoekstra
Doug Hoekstra is one of my favorite musical artists, and probably deserves to be considered one of America's greatest living singer-songwriters. All in due time, hopefully.
This is a short review of his album followed by an interview with Doug, from PennyBlackMusic.com:
Review & Interview: "Waiting" by Doug Hoekstra
‘Waiting’ is the sixth solo album of the much acclaimed Nashville-based musician and songwriter, Doug Hoekstra. Perhaps predictably for a singer-songwriter coming from the Tennessee capital, Hoekstra has strong roots in country. Hoekstra's other influences, however, include blues, avant-garde, jazz, folk, gospel and pop, and his albums are fluent, eclectic affairs, which flit effortlessly, sometimes several times in the same song, from one genre to another.
The subject matter of ‘Waiting’ , like its five predecessors, ‘When the Tubes Begin to Glow (1994)’, ‘Rickety Stairs’ (1996), ‘Make Me Believe’ (1999), ‘Around the Margins’ and “The Past is Never Past’ (both 2001), is typically broad in theme and scope. ’Theresa’ examines the plight of a Brazilian street child, while ‘Dark Side of a Pearl’, which is written from the slant of a baffled close friend, tells of the rapidly dissolving, violent relationship of a once perfect couple. ‘Screwball Comedy’, in contrast, however, is richly comical.
In all other senses though, even by the ever-eclectic Hoekstra’s standards, ‘Waiting’ , however, represents a change in direction. While previously Hoekstra, who has experimented with strings, horn sections and gospel choirs, has teamed up in the studio often with scores of other musicians to make his albums, ‘Waiting’, in contrast , is stripped down and bare. Recorded last winter at home while Hoekstra and his wife, Molly, awaited the birth of their first child, Jude Aaron, its tracks, while again diverse in tone,return to basics, and usually feature Hoekstra on his own, accompanied by just an electric and acoustic guitar.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Learning Percentage: 15%
Austin Free Staters: Onward to New Hampshire!
By Mark Lisheron
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Alan Weiss, Michael Badnarik and Rick McGinnis want to experience their ideal of liberty in their lifetimes.
To secure their freedom, they have pledged to move from Austin to New Hampshire along with men and women from all over the country.
Once there, these people, members of the Free State Project, intend to set about creating a place to prosper without government interfering in how citizens live. Now, if they can only put up with the cold.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 30%
November 23, 2003
F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies
F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies
By Eric Lichtblau
New York Times
Sunday 23 November 2003
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum.
The memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters have sometimes used "training camps" to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money and gas masks to defend against tear gas. The memorandum analyzed lawful activities like recruiting demonstrators, as well as illegal activities like using fake documentation to get into a secured site.
F.B.I. officials said in interviews that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying anarchists and "extremist elements" plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters.
The initiative has won the support of some local police, who view it as a critical way to maintain order at large-scale demonstrations. Indeed, some law enforcement officials said they believed the F.B.I.'s approach had helped to ensure that nationwide antiwar demonstrations in recent months, drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters, remained largely free of violence and disruption.
But some civil rights advocates and legal scholars said the monitoring program could signal a return to the abuses of the 1960's and 1970's, when J. Edgar Hoover was the F.B.I. director and agents routinely spied on political protesters like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 20%
E-Votes Must Leave a Paper Trail
E-Votes Must Leave a Paper Trail
By Kim Zetter
Wired News
Friday 21 November 2003
California will become the first state requiring all electronic voting machines produce a voter-verifiable paper receipt.
The requirement, announced Friday by California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, applies to all electronic voting systems already in use as well as those currently being purchased. The machines must be retrofitted with printers to produce a receipt by 2006.
With a receipt, voters will be able to verify that their ballots have been properly cast. However, they will not be allowed to keep the receipts, which will be stored at voting precincts and used for a recount if any voting irregularities arise.
Beginning July 1, 2005, counties will not be able to purchase any machine that does not produce a paper trail. As of July 2006, all machines, no matter when they were purchased, must offer a voter-verifiable paper audit trail. This means machines currently in use by four counties in the state will have to be fitted with new printers to meet the requirement.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating:0
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 20, 2003
Students must take personal responsibility
Students must take personal responsibility
Thursday Debate: What do you think about AU's new drug policy?
By Aaron Biterman
AU's new drug policy, which notifies parents of students for anything from a minor infraction to major abuse of illegal drugs, is a flawed policy. The administration appears to recognize the maturity level of its students in some areas of campus life -University bureaucrats aren't calling parents when their son or daughter is doing poorly in a class or doesn't attend enough classes. But such is not the case when it comes to drug or alcohol use.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1.2
Learning Percentage: 20%
Remains of Howard Dean's Long-Missing Brother Found
Remains of Dean's Long-Missing Brother Found
By Jodi Wilgoren and Michael Slackman
New York Times
Wednesday 19 November 2003
BEDFORD, N.H., Nov. 18 — Every day on the campaign trail, Howard Dean wears an unfashionable black belt that belonged to his younger brother Charlie, a silent memorial to the man who vanished while traveling the Mekong River 29 years ago.
On Tuesday, Dr. Dean, who rarely mentions his family on the stump, interrupted his schedule to announce that a search team had found his brother's remains buried in a rice paddy in central Laos.
"This has been a long and very difficult journey for my mother and for my brothers Jim, Bill and myself," Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, said after a Democratic presidential candidates' forum at a hotel here. "We greet this news with mixed emotions, but we're gratified and grateful that we're now approaching closure on this very difficult episode in our lives."
The Pentagon will not try to make an official identification until after the remains are flown to a forensic laboratory in Hawaii next week, but personal items found with the bodies — shoes, a sock and a P.O.W.-M.I.A. bracelet with the name of a Texan, all similar to those worn by the 23-year-old Charles Dean — strongly suggest the crude grave was his. Remains believed to belong to his traveling companion, Neil Sharman of Australia, were also recovered at the site.
Charles Dean is one of 1,875 Americans, including 35 civilians, still missing in connection with the Vietnam War.
...
Full story @ TruthOut
NY Times original
Read It Rating: 6.6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
New Study Explains How Pot Kills Cancer Cells
This article by Steve kubby has some overlap with the previously posted article by Richard Cowan. Cowan's article is more extensive; Kubby's is more succinct.
New Study Explains How Pot Kills Cancer Cells
by Steve Kubby
A new study published in Nature Reviews-Cancer provides an historic and detailed explanation about how THC and natural cannabinoids counteract cancer, but preserve normal cells.
The study by Manuel Guzmán of Madrid Spain found that cannabinoids, the active components of marijuana, inhibit tumor growth in laboratory animals. They do so by modulating key cell-signalling pathways, thereby inducing direct growth arrest and death of tumor cells, as well as by inhibiting the growth of blood vessels that supply the tumor.
The Guzman study is very important according to Dr. Ethan Russo , a neurologist and world authority on medical cannabis: "Cancer occurs because cells become immortalized; they fail to heed normal signals to turn off growth. A normal function of remodelling in the body requires that cells die on cue. This is called apoptosis, or programmed cell death. That process fails to work in tumors. THC promotes its reappearance so that gliomas, leukemias, melanomas and other cell types will in fact heed the signals, stop dividing, and die."
"But, that is not all," explains Dr. Russo: "The other way that tumors grow is by ensuring that they are nourished: they send out signals to promote angiogenesis, the growth of new blood vessels. Cannabinoids turn off these signals as well. It is truly incredible, and elegant." ...
Read It Rating: 9.1
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 15%
If Cannabis Could Cure Cancer, They Would Tell Us, Right?
This is a somewhat clunky and jaded story, but it still makes for worthy reading, if for no other reason than the story which is embedded within it, entitled "POT SHRINKS TUMORS; GOVERNMENT KNEW IN '74". Also, this article by Richard Cowan (who has good cause to be jaded, as he has been fighting against the drug war for avery long time) is linked to a great many other articles and resources which offer a lot of background information.
If Cannabis Could Cure Cancer, They Would Tell Us, Right? No.
by Richard Cowan, MarijuanaNews.com
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 55%
Kubbys await refugee ruling
by Pete Brady (10 Nov, 2003)
Courageous couple grow medical marijuana on television
Medical marijuana advocates Michele and Steve Kubby are anticipating a ruling "any day now" on their historic bid to become Canada's first officially-sanctioned reefer refugees.
...
Earlier this year, Michele Kubby acted as her own lawyer in hearings before an immigration judge. The Kubbys are seeking official refugee status. They argue that Steve would die in America if he was sent back to face incarceration or other actions relating to his earlier conviction, because authorities will not guarantee him access to medpot. They also claim they would be victims of political persecution as individuals, and as part of a persecuted minority - pot smokers - who are targets of a "genocidal" US-government war. If the Kubbys win refugee status, it will be historic, because the ruling will in effect mean that the Canadian government has acknowledged that the US is a country that routinely violates the human rights of its citizens.
The refugee hearings were contentious and controversial, with government lawyers accused of lying by the Kubbys. Michele Kubby, who has no formal training as a lawyer, won plaudits from attorneys for her skillful attacks on the government's attempts to send her and her family back to the United States, and for her spirited defense of the Kubbys' right to stay in Canada.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 18, 2003
Arrested Development's Name Claim
Arrested Development's Name Claim
by Lia Haberman
Nov 6, 2003, 9:30 PM PT
Arrested Development is:
A. What makes Ashton Kutcher tick.
B. An Atlanta-based hip-hop group.
C. The title of a new Fox sitcom.
And the answer is…to be determined in court.
Pioneering hip-hop ensemble Arrested Development has filed a trademark-infringement suit against Fox claiming ownership of the moniker, which the network is using for one of its new series.
...
Read It Rating: 2
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -.05
Learning Percentage: 40%
November 16, 2003
Appeals court overturns machine gun conviction
So much for the idea that the 9th Circuit Court is some sort of liberal juggernaut I guess. This is a pretty impressive ruling -- I hadn't realized that there were still courts around who thought the Commerce Clause had limits to its reach. Good for them! It probably won't have much impact on the gun movement, as the lawyer asserts in the article, but it's still and interesting ruling, in the consitutional sense.
Next thing you know, some court might figure out that the DEA has no business busting medical marijuana clinics or growers that do all their business locally (meaning the commerce is not "among the several states", as the abused Commerce Clause specifies). But I digress.
Appeals court overturns machine gun conviction
DAVID KRAVETS
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - A federal appeals court Thursday overturned a Mesa, Ariz. man's federal conviction of possessing five machine guns.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals of San Francisco reversed the conviction, ruling that the congressional ban does not apply to homemade machine guns and their parts because they were never in the stream of commerce.
The court ruled that there was neither a transfer nor sale of the weapons or their parts, so Congress did not have the power under the Commerce Clause to regulate homemade guns crafted from scratch.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 55%
Elfin Singer Delights Viewers
I found this article in a search for Andy Milonakis' age. (27!)
by Jason Gay
On the morning of Jan. 26, an apple-cheeked unknown from Astoria, Queens, named Andy Milonakis crawled out of bed and made the most important decision of his life.
He decided not to attend a friend's Super Bowl party.
Instead, Mr. Milonakis picked up a guitar he can't really play, turned on a video camera in his bedroom and began to sing a really, really, really stupid song.
The Super Bowl is gay, he sang.
The Super Bowl is gay.
Super Bowl, Super Bowl, Super Bowl
Is gaaaaaaay.
At the top of his lungs, Mr. Milonakis went on to condemn the following things as "gay": the Oakland Raiders, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, water, cologne, DVD players, DVD's, stray cats, the sky, cottage cheese, yogurt, shirts, McDonald's, K.F.C., vacuum cleaners, dollar bills, coins, scanners and CD burners, among others. He concluded by singing, "We're all gaaaaaay!"
Then Mr. Milonakis posted the video, called "The Super Bowl Is Gay," on an Internet Web site, angrynakedpat.com, which contained a reservoir of his short, juvenile films.
That was it. Word spread, and "The Super Bowl Is Gay" received zillions of hits on the Internet. A writer for ABC’s new late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, spotted it and got Mr. Milonakis on the program. Mr. Kimmel joked that he wants to adopt him. He’s shown "The Super Bowl Is Gay" and two other videos Mr. Milonakis made, and wants him to cover spring break in Florida. MTV is calling. A guitarist from Ozzy Osbourne’s band who’s starting his own group wants Mr. Milonakis to sing "The Super Bowl Is Gay" before he plays. Adult women are sending him their photographs saying, "We love you, Andy."
...
What some of Mr. Milonakis’ fans may not have known is that the Chunky Peanut Butter Boy and Cuppy and the "Super Bowl Is Gay" kid isn’t a kid at all. Mr. Milonakis has a medical condition—"a growth-hormone thing," he said—that makes him look considerably younger than his age. He could easily pass for a wise-ass junior high schooler.
But Mr. Milonakis isn’t a wise-ass junior high schooler. At 27, he’s a wise-ass network administrator at a midtown accounting firm who’s been quietly moonlighting in comedy for years.
Mr. Milonakis was completely up front about his age—it’s no secret—but didn’t want to go into great detail about his condition. Too "Barbara Walters Special," as he put it. "I do comedy," he said. Though his appearance did make it "harder to get girls," he said he’s in good health. "I don’t have any liver or kidney disease like Gary Coleman," he said.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 4.5
Learning Percentage: 55%
November 14, 2003
DownsizeDC.com Radio Ads: Scripts and MP3s
These ads are pretty cool. They're put out by the American Liberty Foundation, which is also quite cool.
Read the ads, listen to them if you can, and then donate some money to help keep them on the air. Three simple steps to becoming an instant freedom activist. Who would have believed it could be so easy?
- "We Believe..." Play
believe.mp3 (935k)
- "Talk Radio" Play
talk_radio.mp3 (935k)
- "Broken Promises" Play
promises.mp3 (935k)
- "Suzie and the Senator" Play
senator.mp3 (936k)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: R.5
Freedom Rating: 4.5
Learning Percentage: 20%
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
Knapp on Party Loyalty of Libertarian Leaders, Part II
This is Tom Knapp's follow-up article to his first article about "Libertarians for McClintock", the break-off group that supported the conservative Republican in last month's recall election here. He does a good job of clarifying and responding to people who had problems with his first article -- which sort of includes me, although I wrote my response to his first commentary before I read his follow-up. In other words, he had answered my complaint before I wrote it. ;-)
He does make one factual error, however:
There was no particular reason that the California LP couldn't have said "none of the three registered Libertarians running represent our positions as well as Tom McClintock does. We're endorsing him."
There was a particular reason that they couldn't do such a thing: they are prohibited from doing so by the Bylaws of the California LP.
And he makes one error of judgment, in my opinion (though he seems to hedge this point in a way that corrects the error when he mentions these points elsewhere):
It's a matter of public record that the California LP's executive committee chose, instead, to endorse Ned Roscoe, one of the three registered Libertarians running in the election. Once that endorsement was undertaken, officers in the California LP had two reasonable and ethical options:
* Endorse and support Roscoe;
* Resign their positions of trust within the California LP and endorse or support McClintock.
There was a third reasonable and ethical option, in my opinion: to wash one's hands of the whole torrid waste of time that the recall ended up being, and take no firm position, nor engage in any substantial action, relating to the candidates in said election.
To say that because 10 people made a misguided decision via e-mail relating to a rushed, nontraditional election (that would be the LPC Executive Committee voting to endorse Ned Roscoe), that all the leaders of the California LP had to get behind them or resign their position, is going too far with the "positions of trust" angle. Nothing about my Chairmanship of the Nevada County LP, to my knowledge, mandates that I have to endorse and support anyone that the "higher-ups" choose to endorse. To borrow a popular phrase, they're not the boss of me. And that's especially true in an election that defies the conventional mold, as this past one did, big time.
My job is to support Libertarian candidates, and nominally, I did so. I didn't think it was a good idea to support Ned Roscoe's campaign, and I didn't think I had much of a chance of convincing anyone to vote for Jack Hickey. Our executive board, like most regjonal boards (I think), decided not to try and come up with an endorsement under the rushed schedule and weird format of the election. So, Hickey got my glancing support, for all the good it did. All things considered, there were better ways for me to serve the LP as a regional leader during that time, and that's what I focused on. The recall, candidate-wise, was a wash for the California LP, and that's being generous. Making us look silly and tiny, by campaigning actively for Jack Hickey, or making us look ridiculous and foolish by helping Ned Rosoce promote his "smoker's candidacy", would, in both cases, not have helped advance liberty, or the LPC.
It didn't have to be that way, but that's how it ended up. I don't oppose or disparage Tom Knapp's view that the "Libertarians for McClintock" who were currently holding LP offices were wrong to to do both things at once (though I think to include gubernatorial candidates from 5 years ago is an untenable stretch). I do oppose his view that leaders should have supported Ned Roscoe or left the party.
(As I noted, he does clarify this elsewhere by saying, effectively "or at least don't support the other party's candidate" -- but in his maxim about the "two options", he includes no such clarification, and implies that to do other than one of those options indicates a lack of integrity, among other things. That's wrong. It simply wasn't that simple.)
Tom's column:
Party loyalty redux:
The Life of the Party, part 10
by Thomas L. Knapp
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .9
Learning Percentage: 22%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Thursday, November 6, 2003 Posted: 4:36 PM EST (2136 GMT)
NEW YORK (AP) -- Rosie O'Donnell taunted a cancer survivor working at her now-defunct magazine by saying people who lie "get sick and they get cancer," the woman testified. O'Donnell said she later apologized.
Cindy Spengler, who was head of marketing at "Rosie" magazine, said Wednesday that O'Donnell made the remark after a meeting to discuss the magazine's problems. Spengler said O'Donnell told her that her silence in the meeting was tantamount to lying.
"You know what happens to people who lie," the witness tearfully quoted O'Donnell as saying. "They get sick and they get cancer. If they keep lying, they get it again."
Spengler testified in Manhattan's State Supreme Court, where O'Donnell and "Rosie" publisher Gruner Jahr USA are suing each other for breach of contract.
Washington man admits 48 murders
Washington man admits 48 murders
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEATTLE, Nov. 5 — Uttering the word “guilty” 48 times with chilling calm, former truck painter Gary Leon Ridgway admitted Wednesday that he was the Green River Killer and confessed to murdering four dozen women over the past two decades.
"I KILLED SO many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in a confession read aloud in King County Superior Court by a prosecutor.
Ridgway, 54, a short figure with glasses, thinning hair and a sandy mustache, pleaded guilty to more murders than any other serial killer in U.S. history.
He struck a plea agreement that will spare him from execution for those killings and will result in a sentence of life in prison without parole for one of the most baffling and chilling serial killer cases the nation has ever seen.
"I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," he said in the statement. He said he left some bodies in "clusters" and enjoyed driving by the sites afterward, thinking about what he had done.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
LP News Online: December 2003: Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
Twenty Libertarians emerged victorious in local elections held around the country on November 4, including five who made a "clean sweep" of contested offices in Michigan.
LP Executive Director Joe Seehusen said he was "delighted" with the results.
"I'm especially thrilled that 16 of our 20 victories were higher-level offices such as city and county council, which means Libertarians are going to have a positive impact on many Americans' lives," he said.
In addition, several Libertarian candidates were victorious against incumbents, noted Seehusen.
"Libertarians booted out seven incumbents, which shows that when our candidates run aggressive, properly funded campaigns, they can compete with Democrats and Republicans," he said.
In all, about 210 LP candidates were on the ballot in local elections in 28 states.
Libertarian victories included:
* In Michigan, three incumbent Libertarian city council members were re-elected in a "clean sweep" for LP officeholders, said Oakland County LP Communications Director Greg Dirasian.
In addition, two other Libertarians were elected to city councils for the first time.
"The Libertarian Party of Michigan had the biggest night in its history on November 4," said Michigan LP State Chair Bill Gelineau.
...
Kidd: This is What Your FEAR is Protecting
This is What Your FEAR is Protecting
By Devvy Kidd
November 22, 2003
Millions of Americans have read the Joseph Banister story. For those who may not know of this courageous individual, a short refresher is in order. Joseph was an IRS CID agent (Criminal Investigation Division) for a little over five years. In late 1996, he happened to hear some information about the nature of the income tax on a radio show. After two years of trying to prove the so-called "tax protesters" wrong regarding their beliefs, he finally concluded that the "tax honesty" individuals were indeed correct in their analysis of the income tax and its voluntary nature.
Joseph had no choice but to resign his job, which at that time paid $80,000 per year. You see, this remarkable young man could no longer perform his duties as a CID agent after he discovered the truth. He could not look in the mirror every morning knowing that it was the IRS, his employer, who was breaking the law and committing fraud against the American people. How many people do you know would give up their $80,000 a year job for something called integrity?
With no paycheck coming in, times got tough for this young man; a husband and father of two young boys who attended private Catholic school. However, as a college graduate with a CPA license, Joseph began the process of building a clientele, appearing at numerous events throughout the country and in his soft spoken manner, he told his story and why he could no longer participate in this fraud against his fellow Americans.
As time has gone by, the IRS attempted to silence this courageous young man by making sure he knew a grand jury was sniffing around him. Then the IRS began contacting Joseph's clients and scaring them off so that his income began to once again dwindle. When that didn't work, suddenly the State of California took an interest in him. Stepping up this Nazi style persecution, the State of California is now attempting to take away his CPA license. Not because he has violated any law, but to shut up this courageous young man and deny him the right to work in his profession - all because he told a truth which threatens the powerful, global, banking cartel.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Mack Daddy
Local Libertarian gubernatorial candidate leans to the left and speaks to the right.
by Kristy Davis
Meet “Sheriff” Richard Mack: FBI Academy graduate, former militiaman and devout Mormon. Mack’s Libertarian Party leanings run the gamut. Down with leftie love, he wants to legalize marijuana and pimp-slap Sen. Orrin Hatch out of office. Uptight and right, Mack wants to can government welfare, public schools and public Section 8 housing. If Mack had his way, charity would be the sole domain of churches and private nonprofits.
“The bottom line is, I don’t fit the mold,” he says.
Mack wants Utah voters to punch his name on the 2004 gubernatorial ballot. But some politicos say the day a Libertarian takes office will be the day the Utah Legislature legalizes marijuana (insert Beavis laugh here).
Here’s the Libertarian platform in a nutshell: They are pro-constitution and antigovernment. They don’t like taxes. They favor open immigration. While they support the notion of national defense, they don’t like it when the United States pokes around in foreign affairs or goes to war without provocation. Most Libertarians, including Mack, oppose the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. Party positions on some issues are still up for grabs, however, such as abortion and the legalization of drugs.
...
Tall, dark, handsome but inherently dorky, Mack has come a long way since his early-’80s, undercover-cop days. In the tradition of Starsky & Hutch, Mack—posing as “Gary Layton”—busted junkies, intercepted drug deals and made the streets of Provo a little bit safer.
“Are you going to ask me if I smoked pot?” Mack asks. “Well, never illegally, but [while] undercover, yes.”
Mack went on to become sheriff of Arizona’s Graham County, where he formed a 5,000-member posse to “help with traffic matters and parades,” he says. While working as sheriff, Mack challenged federal gun-control legislation, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, that required local police to run background checks on potential gun owners. In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Mack’s favor, striking down background checks. Later, he co-wrote a book about the experience, titled From My Cold, Dead Fingers.
During a University of Utah forum on legalizing marijuana, Mack told the story of his transformation from a DARE instructor and police officer to a constitutionalist who wants government off your back.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 55%
Guantanamo treatment is 'monstrous', says law lord
Guantanamo treatment is 'monstrous', says law lord
By Robert Verkaik
Legal Affairs Correspondent
26 November 2003
One of the country's most senior judges launched an unprecedented attack on US treatment of the 660 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay last night, saying they will become martyrs in the Muslim world.
Breaking with the convention that law lords do not speak out on politically sensitive issues, Lord Steyn described their imprisonment as a "monstrous failure of justice" and the military tribunals that will try them as kangaroo courts.
Lord Steyn, one of 12 judges who sits in the country's highest court, is understood to have been wrestling with his conscience for weeks. His comments would make it almost impossible for him to hear any appeal from the nine British prisoners held at the US naval base in Cuba if President George Bush agreed to send them for trial in this country.
...
"As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would have to say that I regard this a monstrous failure of justice. The military will act as interrogators, prosecutors and defence counsel, judges, and when death sentences are imposed, as executioners. The trials will be held in private. None of the guarantees of a fair trial need be observed."
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 25%
Probation Granted to 3 Who Grew, Sold Pot as a Medicine
Probation Granted to 3 Who Grew, Sold Pot as a Medicine
By Jean Guccione, Times Staff Writer
In a victory for advocates of medicinal marijuana, officers of a defunct West Hollywood cannabis club were sentenced Monday to one year of probation for growing and selling marijuana to hundreds of people with cancer, AIDS and other serious ailments.
In imposing the minimum allowable sentence, U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz chastised the prosecution.
"To allocate the resources of the Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. attorney's office in this case … baffles me, disturbs me," the judge said.
...
The judge noted that 85% of the center's 960 members have AIDS or are HIV-positive; 10% have cancer; and the rest have various other medical conditions.
"It is difficult to imagine a case where a defendant has contributed to the distribution of a controlled substance for more humanitarian reasons than what occurred here," his defense attorney, Ronald O. Kaye, argued in court papers.
...
Under federal drug forfeiture laws, authorities seized $56,000 in the center's bank account and sold its building at 7494 Santa Monica Blvd. for $1.2 million.
The city of West Hollywood and Wells Fargo Bank, which financed the purchase, are trying to force the federal government to return a portion of the money.
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 35%
Zero Patience for Zero Tolerance
Zero Patience for Zero Tolerance
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
By Wendy McElroy
News shows recently showed video of 14 police officers charging a crowded high-school corridor with guns drawn in a drug sweep. Students at Stratford Creek High School in Goose Creek, S.C., were forced onto their knees or against walls, while dogs sniffed their backpacks for drugs.
None were found. Although the incident was extreme, it was not an aberration but the logical consequences of "zero tolerance" policies, defended by both the school and the police. Zero tolerance must be abandoned, especially in connection with children.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 25%
Buy The Little Brown Reader Here
This site is not The Little, Brown Reader, the popular English writing guidebook. If you're looking to get your hands on that, you can get it Amazon.com by clicking here, or below.
November 25, 2003
Early suicide bombing attempt against President-elect Kennedy
Kennedy presidency almost ended before he was inaugurated
3 years before he would die in Dallas, Kennedy escaped a man with a car packed with dynamite
By ROBIN ERB
BLADE STAFF WRITER
On a bright Sunday morning nearly 43 years ago, a ramshackle Buick crept through the posh streets of Palm Beach, Fla., toward a sprawling, Mediterranean-style mansion.
At the wheel was a disheveled, silver-haired madman. His aged right hand rested near a switch wired to seven sticks of dynamite.
Inside the two-story stucco home was his target - president-elect John F. Kennedy - readying for morning Mass.
Richard Pavlick stopped a short distance from the house and waited, unnoticed by U.S. Secret Service agents outside.
It was decades before today’s proliferation of suicide bombers, but Pavlick’s plan on Dec. 11, 1960, was as simple: ram the president-elect’s car and detonate the dynamite.
...
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 80%
Bill Clinton's Favorite Books
Clinton Releases List of Favorite Books
President Clinton Releases List of 21 Favorite Books, Including Wife's 'Living History'
The Associated Press
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. Nov. 21 — Ah, nothing like curling up in front of the fireplace with 21 of President Clinton's favorite books.
To coincide with the opening of a Clinton Library-related exhibit of books and gifts he received while president, Clinton has released a list of his 21 favorite books from his wife's "Living History" to Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" to Thomas a Kempis' "The Imitation of Christ."
Clinton's presidential library is to open next November on the south bank of the Arkansas River in downtown Little Rock. A nearby office building, the Cox Creative Center, has hosted a number of preview exhibits, and on Monday opens "America Presents: A Collection of Books and Gifts of the Clinton Presidency." The exhibit runs through Jan. 3.
Copies of Clinton's 21 favorite books will be on display at the Cox building.
Besides Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's autobiography, Ellison's soaring novel of a black man's journey through white America and Kempis' 15th-century treatise on Christian living, other books of note include Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again."
The entire list of Clinton's favorite books, listed alphabetically by author:
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Maya Angelou.
"Meditations," Marcus Aurelius.
"The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker.
"Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963," Taylor Branch.
"Living History," Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"Lincoln," David Herbert Donald.
"The Four Quartets," T.S. Eliot.
"Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison.
"The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First Century," David Fromkin.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude," Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
"The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes," Seamus Heaney.
"King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa," Adam Hochschild.
"The Imitation of Christ," Thomas a Kempis.
"Homage to Catalonia," George Orwell.
"The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis," Carroll Quigley.
"Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics," Reinhold Niebuhr.
"The Confessions of Nat Turner," William Styron.
"Politics as a Vocation," Max Weber.
"You Can't Go Home Again," Thomas Wolfe.
"Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny," Robert Wright.
"The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats," William Butler Yeats.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
November 24, 2003
Man chokes to death hiding pot
Man chokes to death hiding pot
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- A man changing a flat tire choked to death on a bag of marijuana he had stuffed down his throat in an apparent attempt to hide it from police who stopped to help him, authorities said.
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 75%
Review: "Waiting" by Doug Hoekstra
Doug Hoekstra is one of my favorite musical artists, and probably deserves to be considered one of America's greatest living singer-songwriters. All in due time, hopefully.
This is a short review of his album followed by an interview with Doug, from PennyBlackMusic.com:
Review & Interview: "Waiting" by Doug Hoekstra
‘Waiting’ is the sixth solo album of the much acclaimed Nashville-based musician and songwriter, Doug Hoekstra. Perhaps predictably for a singer-songwriter coming from the Tennessee capital, Hoekstra has strong roots in country. Hoekstra's other influences, however, include blues, avant-garde, jazz, folk, gospel and pop, and his albums are fluent, eclectic affairs, which flit effortlessly, sometimes several times in the same song, from one genre to another.
The subject matter of ‘Waiting’ , like its five predecessors, ‘When the Tubes Begin to Glow (1994)’, ‘Rickety Stairs’ (1996), ‘Make Me Believe’ (1999), ‘Around the Margins’ and “The Past is Never Past’ (both 2001), is typically broad in theme and scope. ’Theresa’ examines the plight of a Brazilian street child, while ‘Dark Side of a Pearl’, which is written from the slant of a baffled close friend, tells of the rapidly dissolving, violent relationship of a once perfect couple. ‘Screwball Comedy’, in contrast, however, is richly comical.
In all other senses though, even by the ever-eclectic Hoekstra’s standards, ‘Waiting’ , however, represents a change in direction. While previously Hoekstra, who has experimented with strings, horn sections and gospel choirs, has teamed up in the studio often with scores of other musicians to make his albums, ‘Waiting’, in contrast , is stripped down and bare. Recorded last winter at home while Hoekstra and his wife, Molly, awaited the birth of their first child, Jude Aaron, its tracks, while again diverse in tone,return to basics, and usually feature Hoekstra on his own, accompanied by just an electric and acoustic guitar.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Learning Percentage: 15%
Austin Free Staters: Onward to New Hampshire!
By Mark Lisheron
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Alan Weiss, Michael Badnarik and Rick McGinnis want to experience their ideal of liberty in their lifetimes.
To secure their freedom, they have pledged to move from Austin to New Hampshire along with men and women from all over the country.
Once there, these people, members of the Free State Project, intend to set about creating a place to prosper without government interfering in how citizens live. Now, if they can only put up with the cold.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 30%
November 23, 2003
F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies
F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies
By Eric Lichtblau
New York Times
Sunday 23 November 2003
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum.
The memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters have sometimes used "training camps" to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money and gas masks to defend against tear gas. The memorandum analyzed lawful activities like recruiting demonstrators, as well as illegal activities like using fake documentation to get into a secured site.
F.B.I. officials said in interviews that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying anarchists and "extremist elements" plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters.
The initiative has won the support of some local police, who view it as a critical way to maintain order at large-scale demonstrations. Indeed, some law enforcement officials said they believed the F.B.I.'s approach had helped to ensure that nationwide antiwar demonstrations in recent months, drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters, remained largely free of violence and disruption.
But some civil rights advocates and legal scholars said the monitoring program could signal a return to the abuses of the 1960's and 1970's, when J. Edgar Hoover was the F.B.I. director and agents routinely spied on political protesters like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 20%
E-Votes Must Leave a Paper Trail
E-Votes Must Leave a Paper Trail
By Kim Zetter
Wired News
Friday 21 November 2003
California will become the first state requiring all electronic voting machines produce a voter-verifiable paper receipt.
The requirement, announced Friday by California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, applies to all electronic voting systems already in use as well as those currently being purchased. The machines must be retrofitted with printers to produce a receipt by 2006.
With a receipt, voters will be able to verify that their ballots have been properly cast. However, they will not be allowed to keep the receipts, which will be stored at voting precincts and used for a recount if any voting irregularities arise.
Beginning July 1, 2005, counties will not be able to purchase any machine that does not produce a paper trail. As of July 2006, all machines, no matter when they were purchased, must offer a voter-verifiable paper audit trail. This means machines currently in use by four counties in the state will have to be fitted with new printers to meet the requirement.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating:0
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 20, 2003
Students must take personal responsibility
Students must take personal responsibility
Thursday Debate: What do you think about AU's new drug policy?
By Aaron Biterman
AU's new drug policy, which notifies parents of students for anything from a minor infraction to major abuse of illegal drugs, is a flawed policy. The administration appears to recognize the maturity level of its students in some areas of campus life -University bureaucrats aren't calling parents when their son or daughter is doing poorly in a class or doesn't attend enough classes. But such is not the case when it comes to drug or alcohol use.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1.2
Learning Percentage: 20%
Remains of Howard Dean's Long-Missing Brother Found
Remains of Dean's Long-Missing Brother Found
By Jodi Wilgoren and Michael Slackman
New York Times
Wednesday 19 November 2003
BEDFORD, N.H., Nov. 18 — Every day on the campaign trail, Howard Dean wears an unfashionable black belt that belonged to his younger brother Charlie, a silent memorial to the man who vanished while traveling the Mekong River 29 years ago.
On Tuesday, Dr. Dean, who rarely mentions his family on the stump, interrupted his schedule to announce that a search team had found his brother's remains buried in a rice paddy in central Laos.
"This has been a long and very difficult journey for my mother and for my brothers Jim, Bill and myself," Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, said after a Democratic presidential candidates' forum at a hotel here. "We greet this news with mixed emotions, but we're gratified and grateful that we're now approaching closure on this very difficult episode in our lives."
The Pentagon will not try to make an official identification until after the remains are flown to a forensic laboratory in Hawaii next week, but personal items found with the bodies — shoes, a sock and a P.O.W.-M.I.A. bracelet with the name of a Texan, all similar to those worn by the 23-year-old Charles Dean — strongly suggest the crude grave was his. Remains believed to belong to his traveling companion, Neil Sharman of Australia, were also recovered at the site.
Charles Dean is one of 1,875 Americans, including 35 civilians, still missing in connection with the Vietnam War.
...
Full story @ TruthOut
NY Times original
Read It Rating: 6.6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
New Study Explains How Pot Kills Cancer Cells
This article by Steve kubby has some overlap with the previously posted article by Richard Cowan. Cowan's article is more extensive; Kubby's is more succinct.
New Study Explains How Pot Kills Cancer Cells
by Steve Kubby
A new study published in Nature Reviews-Cancer provides an historic and detailed explanation about how THC and natural cannabinoids counteract cancer, but preserve normal cells.
The study by Manuel Guzmán of Madrid Spain found that cannabinoids, the active components of marijuana, inhibit tumor growth in laboratory animals. They do so by modulating key cell-signalling pathways, thereby inducing direct growth arrest and death of tumor cells, as well as by inhibiting the growth of blood vessels that supply the tumor.
The Guzman study is very important according to Dr. Ethan Russo , a neurologist and world authority on medical cannabis: "Cancer occurs because cells become immortalized; they fail to heed normal signals to turn off growth. A normal function of remodelling in the body requires that cells die on cue. This is called apoptosis, or programmed cell death. That process fails to work in tumors. THC promotes its reappearance so that gliomas, leukemias, melanomas and other cell types will in fact heed the signals, stop dividing, and die."
"But, that is not all," explains Dr. Russo: "The other way that tumors grow is by ensuring that they are nourished: they send out signals to promote angiogenesis, the growth of new blood vessels. Cannabinoids turn off these signals as well. It is truly incredible, and elegant." ...
Read It Rating: 9.1
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 15%
If Cannabis Could Cure Cancer, They Would Tell Us, Right?
This is a somewhat clunky and jaded story, but it still makes for worthy reading, if for no other reason than the story which is embedded within it, entitled "POT SHRINKS TUMORS; GOVERNMENT KNEW IN '74". Also, this article by Richard Cowan (who has good cause to be jaded, as he has been fighting against the drug war for avery long time) is linked to a great many other articles and resources which offer a lot of background information.
If Cannabis Could Cure Cancer, They Would Tell Us, Right? No.
by Richard Cowan, MarijuanaNews.com
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 55%
Kubbys await refugee ruling
by Pete Brady (10 Nov, 2003)
Courageous couple grow medical marijuana on television
Medical marijuana advocates Michele and Steve Kubby are anticipating a ruling "any day now" on their historic bid to become Canada's first officially-sanctioned reefer refugees.
...
Earlier this year, Michele Kubby acted as her own lawyer in hearings before an immigration judge. The Kubbys are seeking official refugee status. They argue that Steve would die in America if he was sent back to face incarceration or other actions relating to his earlier conviction, because authorities will not guarantee him access to medpot. They also claim they would be victims of political persecution as individuals, and as part of a persecuted minority - pot smokers - who are targets of a "genocidal" US-government war. If the Kubbys win refugee status, it will be historic, because the ruling will in effect mean that the Canadian government has acknowledged that the US is a country that routinely violates the human rights of its citizens.
The refugee hearings were contentious and controversial, with government lawyers accused of lying by the Kubbys. Michele Kubby, who has no formal training as a lawyer, won plaudits from attorneys for her skillful attacks on the government's attempts to send her and her family back to the United States, and for her spirited defense of the Kubbys' right to stay in Canada.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 18, 2003
Arrested Development's Name Claim
Arrested Development's Name Claim
by Lia Haberman
Nov 6, 2003, 9:30 PM PT
Arrested Development is:
A. What makes Ashton Kutcher tick.
B. An Atlanta-based hip-hop group.
C. The title of a new Fox sitcom.
And the answer is…to be determined in court.
Pioneering hip-hop ensemble Arrested Development has filed a trademark-infringement suit against Fox claiming ownership of the moniker, which the network is using for one of its new series.
...
Read It Rating: 2
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -.05
Learning Percentage: 40%
November 16, 2003
Appeals court overturns machine gun conviction
So much for the idea that the 9th Circuit Court is some sort of liberal juggernaut I guess. This is a pretty impressive ruling -- I hadn't realized that there were still courts around who thought the Commerce Clause had limits to its reach. Good for them! It probably won't have much impact on the gun movement, as the lawyer asserts in the article, but it's still and interesting ruling, in the consitutional sense.
Next thing you know, some court might figure out that the DEA has no business busting medical marijuana clinics or growers that do all their business locally (meaning the commerce is not "among the several states", as the abused Commerce Clause specifies). But I digress.
Appeals court overturns machine gun conviction
DAVID KRAVETS
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - A federal appeals court Thursday overturned a Mesa, Ariz. man's federal conviction of possessing five machine guns.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals of San Francisco reversed the conviction, ruling that the congressional ban does not apply to homemade machine guns and their parts because they were never in the stream of commerce.
The court ruled that there was neither a transfer nor sale of the weapons or their parts, so Congress did not have the power under the Commerce Clause to regulate homemade guns crafted from scratch.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 55%
Elfin Singer Delights Viewers
I found this article in a search for Andy Milonakis' age. (27!)
by Jason Gay
On the morning of Jan. 26, an apple-cheeked unknown from Astoria, Queens, named Andy Milonakis crawled out of bed and made the most important decision of his life.
He decided not to attend a friend's Super Bowl party.
Instead, Mr. Milonakis picked up a guitar he can't really play, turned on a video camera in his bedroom and began to sing a really, really, really stupid song.
The Super Bowl is gay, he sang.
The Super Bowl is gay.
Super Bowl, Super Bowl, Super Bowl
Is gaaaaaaay.
At the top of his lungs, Mr. Milonakis went on to condemn the following things as "gay": the Oakland Raiders, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, water, cologne, DVD players, DVD's, stray cats, the sky, cottage cheese, yogurt, shirts, McDonald's, K.F.C., vacuum cleaners, dollar bills, coins, scanners and CD burners, among others. He concluded by singing, "We're all gaaaaaay!"
Then Mr. Milonakis posted the video, called "The Super Bowl Is Gay," on an Internet Web site, angrynakedpat.com, which contained a reservoir of his short, juvenile films.
That was it. Word spread, and "The Super Bowl Is Gay" received zillions of hits on the Internet. A writer for ABC’s new late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, spotted it and got Mr. Milonakis on the program. Mr. Kimmel joked that he wants to adopt him. He’s shown "The Super Bowl Is Gay" and two other videos Mr. Milonakis made, and wants him to cover spring break in Florida. MTV is calling. A guitarist from Ozzy Osbourne’s band who’s starting his own group wants Mr. Milonakis to sing "The Super Bowl Is Gay" before he plays. Adult women are sending him their photographs saying, "We love you, Andy."
...
What some of Mr. Milonakis’ fans may not have known is that the Chunky Peanut Butter Boy and Cuppy and the "Super Bowl Is Gay" kid isn’t a kid at all. Mr. Milonakis has a medical condition—"a growth-hormone thing," he said—that makes him look considerably younger than his age. He could easily pass for a wise-ass junior high schooler.
But Mr. Milonakis isn’t a wise-ass junior high schooler. At 27, he’s a wise-ass network administrator at a midtown accounting firm who’s been quietly moonlighting in comedy for years.
Mr. Milonakis was completely up front about his age—it’s no secret—but didn’t want to go into great detail about his condition. Too "Barbara Walters Special," as he put it. "I do comedy," he said. Though his appearance did make it "harder to get girls," he said he’s in good health. "I don’t have any liver or kidney disease like Gary Coleman," he said.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 4.5
Learning Percentage: 55%
November 14, 2003
DownsizeDC.com Radio Ads: Scripts and MP3s
These ads are pretty cool. They're put out by the American Liberty Foundation, which is also quite cool.
Read the ads, listen to them if you can, and then donate some money to help keep them on the air. Three simple steps to becoming an instant freedom activist. Who would have believed it could be so easy?
- "We Believe..." Play
believe.mp3 (935k)
- "Talk Radio" Play
talk_radio.mp3 (935k)
- "Broken Promises" Play
promises.mp3 (935k)
- "Suzie and the Senator" Play
senator.mp3 (936k)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: R.5
Freedom Rating: 4.5
Learning Percentage: 20%
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
Knapp on Party Loyalty of Libertarian Leaders, Part II
This is Tom Knapp's follow-up article to his first article about "Libertarians for McClintock", the break-off group that supported the conservative Republican in last month's recall election here. He does a good job of clarifying and responding to people who had problems with his first article -- which sort of includes me, although I wrote my response to his first commentary before I read his follow-up. In other words, he had answered my complaint before I wrote it. ;-)
He does make one factual error, however:
There was no particular reason that the California LP couldn't have said "none of the three registered Libertarians running represent our positions as well as Tom McClintock does. We're endorsing him."
There was a particular reason that they couldn't do such a thing: they are prohibited from doing so by the Bylaws of the California LP.
And he makes one error of judgment, in my opinion (though he seems to hedge this point in a way that corrects the error when he mentions these points elsewhere):
It's a matter of public record that the California LP's executive committee chose, instead, to endorse Ned Roscoe, one of the three registered Libertarians running in the election. Once that endorsement was undertaken, officers in the California LP had two reasonable and ethical options:
* Endorse and support Roscoe;
* Resign their positions of trust within the California LP and endorse or support McClintock.
There was a third reasonable and ethical option, in my opinion: to wash one's hands of the whole torrid waste of time that the recall ended up being, and take no firm position, nor engage in any substantial action, relating to the candidates in said election.
To say that because 10 people made a misguided decision via e-mail relating to a rushed, nontraditional election (that would be the LPC Executive Committee voting to endorse Ned Roscoe), that all the leaders of the California LP had to get behind them or resign their position, is going too far with the "positions of trust" angle. Nothing about my Chairmanship of the Nevada County LP, to my knowledge, mandates that I have to endorse and support anyone that the "higher-ups" choose to endorse. To borrow a popular phrase, they're not the boss of me. And that's especially true in an election that defies the conventional mold, as this past one did, big time.
My job is to support Libertarian candidates, and nominally, I did so. I didn't think it was a good idea to support Ned Roscoe's campaign, and I didn't think I had much of a chance of convincing anyone to vote for Jack Hickey. Our executive board, like most regjonal boards (I think), decided not to try and come up with an endorsement under the rushed schedule and weird format of the election. So, Hickey got my glancing support, for all the good it did. All things considered, there were better ways for me to serve the LP as a regional leader during that time, and that's what I focused on. The recall, candidate-wise, was a wash for the California LP, and that's being generous. Making us look silly and tiny, by campaigning actively for Jack Hickey, or making us look ridiculous and foolish by helping Ned Rosoce promote his "smoker's candidacy", would, in both cases, not have helped advance liberty, or the LPC.
It didn't have to be that way, but that's how it ended up. I don't oppose or disparage Tom Knapp's view that the "Libertarians for McClintock" who were currently holding LP offices were wrong to to do both things at once (though I think to include gubernatorial candidates from 5 years ago is an untenable stretch). I do oppose his view that leaders should have supported Ned Roscoe or left the party.
(As I noted, he does clarify this elsewhere by saying, effectively "or at least don't support the other party's candidate" -- but in his maxim about the "two options", he includes no such clarification, and implies that to do other than one of those options indicates a lack of integrity, among other things. That's wrong. It simply wasn't that simple.)
Tom's column:
Party loyalty redux:
The Life of the Party, part 10
by Thomas L. Knapp
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .9
Learning Percentage: 22%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Thursday, November 6, 2003 Posted: 4:36 PM EST (2136 GMT)
NEW YORK (AP) -- Rosie O'Donnell taunted a cancer survivor working at her now-defunct magazine by saying people who lie "get sick and they get cancer," the woman testified. O'Donnell said she later apologized.
Cindy Spengler, who was head of marketing at "Rosie" magazine, said Wednesday that O'Donnell made the remark after a meeting to discuss the magazine's problems. Spengler said O'Donnell told her that her silence in the meeting was tantamount to lying.
"You know what happens to people who lie," the witness tearfully quoted O'Donnell as saying. "They get sick and they get cancer. If they keep lying, they get it again."
Spengler testified in Manhattan's State Supreme Court, where O'Donnell and "Rosie" publisher Gruner Jahr USA are suing each other for breach of contract.
Washington man admits 48 murders
Washington man admits 48 murders
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEATTLE, Nov. 5 — Uttering the word “guilty” 48 times with chilling calm, former truck painter Gary Leon Ridgway admitted Wednesday that he was the Green River Killer and confessed to murdering four dozen women over the past two decades.
"I KILLED SO many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in a confession read aloud in King County Superior Court by a prosecutor.
Ridgway, 54, a short figure with glasses, thinning hair and a sandy mustache, pleaded guilty to more murders than any other serial killer in U.S. history.
He struck a plea agreement that will spare him from execution for those killings and will result in a sentence of life in prison without parole for one of the most baffling and chilling serial killer cases the nation has ever seen.
"I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," he said in the statement. He said he left some bodies in "clusters" and enjoyed driving by the sites afterward, thinking about what he had done.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
LP News Online: December 2003: Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
Twenty Libertarians emerged victorious in local elections held around the country on November 4, including five who made a "clean sweep" of contested offices in Michigan.
LP Executive Director Joe Seehusen said he was "delighted" with the results.
"I'm especially thrilled that 16 of our 20 victories were higher-level offices such as city and county council, which means Libertarians are going to have a positive impact on many Americans' lives," he said.
In addition, several Libertarian candidates were victorious against incumbents, noted Seehusen.
"Libertarians booted out seven incumbents, which shows that when our candidates run aggressive, properly funded campaigns, they can compete with Democrats and Republicans," he said.
In all, about 210 LP candidates were on the ballot in local elections in 28 states.
Libertarian victories included:
* In Michigan, three incumbent Libertarian city council members were re-elected in a "clean sweep" for LP officeholders, said Oakland County LP Communications Director Greg Dirasian.
In addition, two other Libertarians were elected to city councils for the first time.
"The Libertarian Party of Michigan had the biggest night in its history on November 4," said Michigan LP State Chair Bill Gelineau.
...
Early suicide bombing attempt against President-elect Kennedy
Kennedy presidency almost ended before he was inaugurated
3 years before he would die in Dallas, Kennedy escaped a man with a car packed with dynamite
By ROBIN ERB
BLADE STAFF WRITER
On a bright Sunday morning nearly 43 years ago, a ramshackle Buick crept through the posh streets of Palm Beach, Fla., toward a sprawling, Mediterranean-style mansion.
At the wheel was a disheveled, silver-haired madman. His aged right hand rested near a switch wired to seven sticks of dynamite.
Inside the two-story stucco home was his target - president-elect John F. Kennedy - readying for morning Mass.
Richard Pavlick stopped a short distance from the house and waited, unnoticed by U.S. Secret Service agents outside.
It was decades before today’s proliferation of suicide bombers, but Pavlick’s plan on Dec. 11, 1960, was as simple: ram the president-elect’s car and detonate the dynamite.
...
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 80%
Bill Clinton's Favorite Books
Clinton Releases List of Favorite Books
President Clinton Releases List of 21 Favorite Books, Including Wife's 'Living History'
The Associated Press
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. Nov. 21 — Ah, nothing like curling up in front of the fireplace with 21 of President Clinton's favorite books.
To coincide with the opening of a Clinton Library-related exhibit of books and gifts he received while president, Clinton has released a list of his 21 favorite books from his wife's "Living History" to Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" to Thomas a Kempis' "The Imitation of Christ."
Clinton's presidential library is to open next November on the south bank of the Arkansas River in downtown Little Rock. A nearby office building, the Cox Creative Center, has hosted a number of preview exhibits, and on Monday opens "America Presents: A Collection of Books and Gifts of the Clinton Presidency." The exhibit runs through Jan. 3.
Copies of Clinton's 21 favorite books will be on display at the Cox building.
Besides Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's autobiography, Ellison's soaring novel of a black man's journey through white America and Kempis' 15th-century treatise on Christian living, other books of note include Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again."
The entire list of Clinton's favorite books, listed alphabetically by author:
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Maya Angelou.
"Meditations," Marcus Aurelius.
"The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker.
"Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963," Taylor Branch.
"Living History," Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"Lincoln," David Herbert Donald.
"The Four Quartets," T.S. Eliot.
"Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison.
"The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First Century," David Fromkin.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude," Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
"The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes," Seamus Heaney.
"King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa," Adam Hochschild.
"The Imitation of Christ," Thomas a Kempis.
"Homage to Catalonia," George Orwell.
"The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis," Carroll Quigley.
"Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics," Reinhold Niebuhr.
"The Confessions of Nat Turner," William Styron.
"Politics as a Vocation," Max Weber.
"You Can't Go Home Again," Thomas Wolfe.
"Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny," Robert Wright.
"The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats," William Butler Yeats.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Man chokes to death hiding pot
Man chokes to death hiding pot
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- A man changing a flat tire choked to death on a bag of marijuana he had stuffed down his throat in an apparent attempt to hide it from police who stopped to help him, authorities said.
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 75%
Review: "Waiting" by Doug Hoekstra
Doug Hoekstra is one of my favorite musical artists, and probably deserves to be considered one of America's greatest living singer-songwriters. All in due time, hopefully.
This is a short review of his album followed by an interview with Doug, from PennyBlackMusic.com:
Review & Interview: "Waiting" by Doug Hoekstra
‘Waiting’ is the sixth solo album of the much acclaimed Nashville-based musician and songwriter, Doug Hoekstra. Perhaps predictably for a singer-songwriter coming from the Tennessee capital, Hoekstra has strong roots in country. Hoekstra's other influences, however, include blues, avant-garde, jazz, folk, gospel and pop, and his albums are fluent, eclectic affairs, which flit effortlessly, sometimes several times in the same song, from one genre to another.
The subject matter of ‘Waiting’ , like its five predecessors, ‘When the Tubes Begin to Glow (1994)’, ‘Rickety Stairs’ (1996), ‘Make Me Believe’ (1999), ‘Around the Margins’ and “The Past is Never Past’ (both 2001), is typically broad in theme and scope. ’Theresa’ examines the plight of a Brazilian street child, while ‘Dark Side of a Pearl’, which is written from the slant of a baffled close friend, tells of the rapidly dissolving, violent relationship of a once perfect couple. ‘Screwball Comedy’, in contrast, however, is richly comical.
In all other senses though, even by the ever-eclectic Hoekstra’s standards, ‘Waiting’ , however, represents a change in direction. While previously Hoekstra, who has experimented with strings, horn sections and gospel choirs, has teamed up in the studio often with scores of other musicians to make his albums, ‘Waiting’, in contrast , is stripped down and bare. Recorded last winter at home while Hoekstra and his wife, Molly, awaited the birth of their first child, Jude Aaron, its tracks, while again diverse in tone,return to basics, and usually feature Hoekstra on his own, accompanied by just an electric and acoustic guitar.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Learning Percentage: 15%
Austin Free Staters: Onward to New Hampshire!
By Mark Lisheron
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Alan Weiss, Michael Badnarik and Rick McGinnis want to experience their ideal of liberty in their lifetimes.
To secure their freedom, they have pledged to move from Austin to New Hampshire along with men and women from all over the country.
Once there, these people, members of the Free State Project, intend to set about creating a place to prosper without government interfering in how citizens live. Now, if they can only put up with the cold.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 30%
November 23, 2003
F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies
F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies
By Eric Lichtblau
New York Times
Sunday 23 November 2003
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum.
The memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters have sometimes used "training camps" to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money and gas masks to defend against tear gas. The memorandum analyzed lawful activities like recruiting demonstrators, as well as illegal activities like using fake documentation to get into a secured site.
F.B.I. officials said in interviews that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying anarchists and "extremist elements" plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters.
The initiative has won the support of some local police, who view it as a critical way to maintain order at large-scale demonstrations. Indeed, some law enforcement officials said they believed the F.B.I.'s approach had helped to ensure that nationwide antiwar demonstrations in recent months, drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters, remained largely free of violence and disruption.
But some civil rights advocates and legal scholars said the monitoring program could signal a return to the abuses of the 1960's and 1970's, when J. Edgar Hoover was the F.B.I. director and agents routinely spied on political protesters like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 20%
E-Votes Must Leave a Paper Trail
E-Votes Must Leave a Paper Trail
By Kim Zetter
Wired News
Friday 21 November 2003
California will become the first state requiring all electronic voting machines produce a voter-verifiable paper receipt.
The requirement, announced Friday by California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, applies to all electronic voting systems already in use as well as those currently being purchased. The machines must be retrofitted with printers to produce a receipt by 2006.
With a receipt, voters will be able to verify that their ballots have been properly cast. However, they will not be allowed to keep the receipts, which will be stored at voting precincts and used for a recount if any voting irregularities arise.
Beginning July 1, 2005, counties will not be able to purchase any machine that does not produce a paper trail. As of July 2006, all machines, no matter when they were purchased, must offer a voter-verifiable paper audit trail. This means machines currently in use by four counties in the state will have to be fitted with new printers to meet the requirement.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating:0
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 20, 2003
Students must take personal responsibility
Students must take personal responsibility
Thursday Debate: What do you think about AU's new drug policy?
By Aaron Biterman
AU's new drug policy, which notifies parents of students for anything from a minor infraction to major abuse of illegal drugs, is a flawed policy. The administration appears to recognize the maturity level of its students in some areas of campus life -University bureaucrats aren't calling parents when their son or daughter is doing poorly in a class or doesn't attend enough classes. But such is not the case when it comes to drug or alcohol use.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1.2
Learning Percentage: 20%
Remains of Howard Dean's Long-Missing Brother Found
Remains of Dean's Long-Missing Brother Found
By Jodi Wilgoren and Michael Slackman
New York Times
Wednesday 19 November 2003
BEDFORD, N.H., Nov. 18 — Every day on the campaign trail, Howard Dean wears an unfashionable black belt that belonged to his younger brother Charlie, a silent memorial to the man who vanished while traveling the Mekong River 29 years ago.
On Tuesday, Dr. Dean, who rarely mentions his family on the stump, interrupted his schedule to announce that a search team had found his brother's remains buried in a rice paddy in central Laos.
"This has been a long and very difficult journey for my mother and for my brothers Jim, Bill and myself," Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, said after a Democratic presidential candidates' forum at a hotel here. "We greet this news with mixed emotions, but we're gratified and grateful that we're now approaching closure on this very difficult episode in our lives."
The Pentagon will not try to make an official identification until after the remains are flown to a forensic laboratory in Hawaii next week, but personal items found with the bodies — shoes, a sock and a P.O.W.-M.I.A. bracelet with the name of a Texan, all similar to those worn by the 23-year-old Charles Dean — strongly suggest the crude grave was his. Remains believed to belong to his traveling companion, Neil Sharman of Australia, were also recovered at the site.
Charles Dean is one of 1,875 Americans, including 35 civilians, still missing in connection with the Vietnam War.
...
Full story @ TruthOut
NY Times original
Read It Rating: 6.6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
New Study Explains How Pot Kills Cancer Cells
This article by Steve kubby has some overlap with the previously posted article by Richard Cowan. Cowan's article is more extensive; Kubby's is more succinct.
New Study Explains How Pot Kills Cancer Cells
by Steve Kubby
A new study published in Nature Reviews-Cancer provides an historic and detailed explanation about how THC and natural cannabinoids counteract cancer, but preserve normal cells.
The study by Manuel Guzmán of Madrid Spain found that cannabinoids, the active components of marijuana, inhibit tumor growth in laboratory animals. They do so by modulating key cell-signalling pathways, thereby inducing direct growth arrest and death of tumor cells, as well as by inhibiting the growth of blood vessels that supply the tumor.
The Guzman study is very important according to Dr. Ethan Russo , a neurologist and world authority on medical cannabis: "Cancer occurs because cells become immortalized; they fail to heed normal signals to turn off growth. A normal function of remodelling in the body requires that cells die on cue. This is called apoptosis, or programmed cell death. That process fails to work in tumors. THC promotes its reappearance so that gliomas, leukemias, melanomas and other cell types will in fact heed the signals, stop dividing, and die."
"But, that is not all," explains Dr. Russo: "The other way that tumors grow is by ensuring that they are nourished: they send out signals to promote angiogenesis, the growth of new blood vessels. Cannabinoids turn off these signals as well. It is truly incredible, and elegant." ...
Read It Rating: 9.1
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 15%
If Cannabis Could Cure Cancer, They Would Tell Us, Right?
This is a somewhat clunky and jaded story, but it still makes for worthy reading, if for no other reason than the story which is embedded within it, entitled "POT SHRINKS TUMORS; GOVERNMENT KNEW IN '74". Also, this article by Richard Cowan (who has good cause to be jaded, as he has been fighting against the drug war for avery long time) is linked to a great many other articles and resources which offer a lot of background information.
If Cannabis Could Cure Cancer, They Would Tell Us, Right? No.
by Richard Cowan, MarijuanaNews.com
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 55%
Kubbys await refugee ruling
by Pete Brady (10 Nov, 2003)
Courageous couple grow medical marijuana on television
Medical marijuana advocates Michele and Steve Kubby are anticipating a ruling "any day now" on their historic bid to become Canada's first officially-sanctioned reefer refugees.
...
Earlier this year, Michele Kubby acted as her own lawyer in hearings before an immigration judge. The Kubbys are seeking official refugee status. They argue that Steve would die in America if he was sent back to face incarceration or other actions relating to his earlier conviction, because authorities will not guarantee him access to medpot. They also claim they would be victims of political persecution as individuals, and as part of a persecuted minority - pot smokers - who are targets of a "genocidal" US-government war. If the Kubbys win refugee status, it will be historic, because the ruling will in effect mean that the Canadian government has acknowledged that the US is a country that routinely violates the human rights of its citizens.
The refugee hearings were contentious and controversial, with government lawyers accused of lying by the Kubbys. Michele Kubby, who has no formal training as a lawyer, won plaudits from attorneys for her skillful attacks on the government's attempts to send her and her family back to the United States, and for her spirited defense of the Kubbys' right to stay in Canada.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 18, 2003
Arrested Development's Name Claim
Arrested Development's Name Claim
by Lia Haberman
Nov 6, 2003, 9:30 PM PT
Arrested Development is:
A. What makes Ashton Kutcher tick.
B. An Atlanta-based hip-hop group.
C. The title of a new Fox sitcom.
And the answer is…to be determined in court.
Pioneering hip-hop ensemble Arrested Development has filed a trademark-infringement suit against Fox claiming ownership of the moniker, which the network is using for one of its new series.
...
Read It Rating: 2
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -.05
Learning Percentage: 40%
November 16, 2003
Appeals court overturns machine gun conviction
So much for the idea that the 9th Circuit Court is some sort of liberal juggernaut I guess. This is a pretty impressive ruling -- I hadn't realized that there were still courts around who thought the Commerce Clause had limits to its reach. Good for them! It probably won't have much impact on the gun movement, as the lawyer asserts in the article, but it's still and interesting ruling, in the consitutional sense.
Next thing you know, some court might figure out that the DEA has no business busting medical marijuana clinics or growers that do all their business locally (meaning the commerce is not "among the several states", as the abused Commerce Clause specifies). But I digress.
Appeals court overturns machine gun conviction
DAVID KRAVETS
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - A federal appeals court Thursday overturned a Mesa, Ariz. man's federal conviction of possessing five machine guns.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals of San Francisco reversed the conviction, ruling that the congressional ban does not apply to homemade machine guns and their parts because they were never in the stream of commerce.
The court ruled that there was neither a transfer nor sale of the weapons or their parts, so Congress did not have the power under the Commerce Clause to regulate homemade guns crafted from scratch.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 55%
Elfin Singer Delights Viewers
I found this article in a search for Andy Milonakis' age. (27!)
by Jason Gay
On the morning of Jan. 26, an apple-cheeked unknown from Astoria, Queens, named Andy Milonakis crawled out of bed and made the most important decision of his life.
He decided not to attend a friend's Super Bowl party.
Instead, Mr. Milonakis picked up a guitar he can't really play, turned on a video camera in his bedroom and began to sing a really, really, really stupid song.
The Super Bowl is gay, he sang.
The Super Bowl is gay.
Super Bowl, Super Bowl, Super Bowl
Is gaaaaaaay.
At the top of his lungs, Mr. Milonakis went on to condemn the following things as "gay": the Oakland Raiders, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, water, cologne, DVD players, DVD's, stray cats, the sky, cottage cheese, yogurt, shirts, McDonald's, K.F.C., vacuum cleaners, dollar bills, coins, scanners and CD burners, among others. He concluded by singing, "We're all gaaaaaay!"
Then Mr. Milonakis posted the video, called "The Super Bowl Is Gay," on an Internet Web site, angrynakedpat.com, which contained a reservoir of his short, juvenile films.
That was it. Word spread, and "The Super Bowl Is Gay" received zillions of hits on the Internet. A writer for ABC’s new late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, spotted it and got Mr. Milonakis on the program. Mr. Kimmel joked that he wants to adopt him. He’s shown "The Super Bowl Is Gay" and two other videos Mr. Milonakis made, and wants him to cover spring break in Florida. MTV is calling. A guitarist from Ozzy Osbourne’s band who’s starting his own group wants Mr. Milonakis to sing "The Super Bowl Is Gay" before he plays. Adult women are sending him their photographs saying, "We love you, Andy."
...
What some of Mr. Milonakis’ fans may not have known is that the Chunky Peanut Butter Boy and Cuppy and the "Super Bowl Is Gay" kid isn’t a kid at all. Mr. Milonakis has a medical condition—"a growth-hormone thing," he said—that makes him look considerably younger than his age. He could easily pass for a wise-ass junior high schooler.
But Mr. Milonakis isn’t a wise-ass junior high schooler. At 27, he’s a wise-ass network administrator at a midtown accounting firm who’s been quietly moonlighting in comedy for years.
Mr. Milonakis was completely up front about his age—it’s no secret—but didn’t want to go into great detail about his condition. Too "Barbara Walters Special," as he put it. "I do comedy," he said. Though his appearance did make it "harder to get girls," he said he’s in good health. "I don’t have any liver or kidney disease like Gary Coleman," he said.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 4.5
Learning Percentage: 55%
November 14, 2003
DownsizeDC.com Radio Ads: Scripts and MP3s
These ads are pretty cool. They're put out by the American Liberty Foundation, which is also quite cool.
Read the ads, listen to them if you can, and then donate some money to help keep them on the air. Three simple steps to becoming an instant freedom activist. Who would have believed it could be so easy?
- "We Believe..." Play
believe.mp3 (935k)
- "Talk Radio" Play
talk_radio.mp3 (935k)
- "Broken Promises" Play
promises.mp3 (935k)
- "Suzie and the Senator" Play
senator.mp3 (936k)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: R.5
Freedom Rating: 4.5
Learning Percentage: 20%
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
Knapp on Party Loyalty of Libertarian Leaders, Part II
This is Tom Knapp's follow-up article to his first article about "Libertarians for McClintock", the break-off group that supported the conservative Republican in last month's recall election here. He does a good job of clarifying and responding to people who had problems with his first article -- which sort of includes me, although I wrote my response to his first commentary before I read his follow-up. In other words, he had answered my complaint before I wrote it. ;-)
He does make one factual error, however:
There was no particular reason that the California LP couldn't have said "none of the three registered Libertarians running represent our positions as well as Tom McClintock does. We're endorsing him."
There was a particular reason that they couldn't do such a thing: they are prohibited from doing so by the Bylaws of the California LP.
And he makes one error of judgment, in my opinion (though he seems to hedge this point in a way that corrects the error when he mentions these points elsewhere):
It's a matter of public record that the California LP's executive committee chose, instead, to endorse Ned Roscoe, one of the three registered Libertarians running in the election. Once that endorsement was undertaken, officers in the California LP had two reasonable and ethical options:
* Endorse and support Roscoe;
* Resign their positions of trust within the California LP and endorse or support McClintock.
There was a third reasonable and ethical option, in my opinion: to wash one's hands of the whole torrid waste of time that the recall ended up being, and take no firm position, nor engage in any substantial action, relating to the candidates in said election.
To say that because 10 people made a misguided decision via e-mail relating to a rushed, nontraditional election (that would be the LPC Executive Committee voting to endorse Ned Roscoe), that all the leaders of the California LP had to get behind them or resign their position, is going too far with the "positions of trust" angle. Nothing about my Chairmanship of the Nevada County LP, to my knowledge, mandates that I have to endorse and support anyone that the "higher-ups" choose to endorse. To borrow a popular phrase, they're not the boss of me. And that's especially true in an election that defies the conventional mold, as this past one did, big time.
My job is to support Libertarian candidates, and nominally, I did so. I didn't think it was a good idea to support Ned Roscoe's campaign, and I didn't think I had much of a chance of convincing anyone to vote for Jack Hickey. Our executive board, like most regjonal boards (I think), decided not to try and come up with an endorsement under the rushed schedule and weird format of the election. So, Hickey got my glancing support, for all the good it did. All things considered, there were better ways for me to serve the LP as a regional leader during that time, and that's what I focused on. The recall, candidate-wise, was a wash for the California LP, and that's being generous. Making us look silly and tiny, by campaigning actively for Jack Hickey, or making us look ridiculous and foolish by helping Ned Rosoce promote his "smoker's candidacy", would, in both cases, not have helped advance liberty, or the LPC.
It didn't have to be that way, but that's how it ended up. I don't oppose or disparage Tom Knapp's view that the "Libertarians for McClintock" who were currently holding LP offices were wrong to to do both things at once (though I think to include gubernatorial candidates from 5 years ago is an untenable stretch). I do oppose his view that leaders should have supported Ned Roscoe or left the party.
(As I noted, he does clarify this elsewhere by saying, effectively "or at least don't support the other party's candidate" -- but in his maxim about the "two options", he includes no such clarification, and implies that to do other than one of those options indicates a lack of integrity, among other things. That's wrong. It simply wasn't that simple.)
Tom's column:
Party loyalty redux:
The Life of the Party, part 10
by Thomas L. Knapp
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .9
Learning Percentage: 22%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Thursday, November 6, 2003 Posted: 4:36 PM EST (2136 GMT)
NEW YORK (AP) -- Rosie O'Donnell taunted a cancer survivor working at her now-defunct magazine by saying people who lie "get sick and they get cancer," the woman testified. O'Donnell said she later apologized.
Cindy Spengler, who was head of marketing at "Rosie" magazine, said Wednesday that O'Donnell made the remark after a meeting to discuss the magazine's problems. Spengler said O'Donnell told her that her silence in the meeting was tantamount to lying.
"You know what happens to people who lie," the witness tearfully quoted O'Donnell as saying. "They get sick and they get cancer. If they keep lying, they get it again."
Spengler testified in Manhattan's State Supreme Court, where O'Donnell and "Rosie" publisher Gruner Jahr USA are suing each other for breach of contract.
Washington man admits 48 murders
Washington man admits 48 murders
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEATTLE, Nov. 5 — Uttering the word “guilty” 48 times with chilling calm, former truck painter Gary Leon Ridgway admitted Wednesday that he was the Green River Killer and confessed to murdering four dozen women over the past two decades.
"I KILLED SO many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in a confession read aloud in King County Superior Court by a prosecutor.
Ridgway, 54, a short figure with glasses, thinning hair and a sandy mustache, pleaded guilty to more murders than any other serial killer in U.S. history.
He struck a plea agreement that will spare him from execution for those killings and will result in a sentence of life in prison without parole for one of the most baffling and chilling serial killer cases the nation has ever seen.
"I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," he said in the statement. He said he left some bodies in "clusters" and enjoyed driving by the sites afterward, thinking about what he had done.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
LP News Online: December 2003: Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
Twenty Libertarians emerged victorious in local elections held around the country on November 4, including five who made a "clean sweep" of contested offices in Michigan.
LP Executive Director Joe Seehusen said he was "delighted" with the results.
"I'm especially thrilled that 16 of our 20 victories were higher-level offices such as city and county council, which means Libertarians are going to have a positive impact on many Americans' lives," he said.
In addition, several Libertarian candidates were victorious against incumbents, noted Seehusen.
"Libertarians booted out seven incumbents, which shows that when our candidates run aggressive, properly funded campaigns, they can compete with Democrats and Republicans," he said.
In all, about 210 LP candidates were on the ballot in local elections in 28 states.
Libertarian victories included:
* In Michigan, three incumbent Libertarian city council members were re-elected in a "clean sweep" for LP officeholders, said Oakland County LP Communications Director Greg Dirasian.
In addition, two other Libertarians were elected to city councils for the first time.
"The Libertarian Party of Michigan had the biggest night in its history on November 4," said Michigan LP State Chair Bill Gelineau.
...
F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies
F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies
By Eric Lichtblau
New York Times
Sunday 23 November 2003
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum.
The memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters have sometimes used "training camps" to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money and gas masks to defend against tear gas. The memorandum analyzed lawful activities like recruiting demonstrators, as well as illegal activities like using fake documentation to get into a secured site.
F.B.I. officials said in interviews that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying anarchists and "extremist elements" plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters.
The initiative has won the support of some local police, who view it as a critical way to maintain order at large-scale demonstrations. Indeed, some law enforcement officials said they believed the F.B.I.'s approach had helped to ensure that nationwide antiwar demonstrations in recent months, drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters, remained largely free of violence and disruption.
But some civil rights advocates and legal scholars said the monitoring program could signal a return to the abuses of the 1960's and 1970's, when J. Edgar Hoover was the F.B.I. director and agents routinely spied on political protesters like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 20%
E-Votes Must Leave a Paper Trail
E-Votes Must Leave a Paper Trail
By Kim Zetter
Wired News
Friday 21 November 2003
California will become the first state requiring all electronic voting machines produce a voter-verifiable paper receipt.
The requirement, announced Friday by California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, applies to all electronic voting systems already in use as well as those currently being purchased. The machines must be retrofitted with printers to produce a receipt by 2006.
With a receipt, voters will be able to verify that their ballots have been properly cast. However, they will not be allowed to keep the receipts, which will be stored at voting precincts and used for a recount if any voting irregularities arise.
Beginning July 1, 2005, counties will not be able to purchase any machine that does not produce a paper trail. As of July 2006, all machines, no matter when they were purchased, must offer a voter-verifiable paper audit trail. This means machines currently in use by four counties in the state will have to be fitted with new printers to meet the requirement.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating:0
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 35%
Students must take personal responsibility
Students must take personal responsibility
Thursday Debate: What do you think about AU's new drug policy?
By Aaron Biterman
AU's new drug policy, which notifies parents of students for anything from a minor infraction to major abuse of illegal drugs, is a flawed policy. The administration appears to recognize the maturity level of its students in some areas of campus life -University bureaucrats aren't calling parents when their son or daughter is doing poorly in a class or doesn't attend enough classes. But such is not the case when it comes to drug or alcohol use.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1.2
Learning Percentage: 20%
Remains of Howard Dean's Long-Missing Brother Found
Remains of Dean's Long-Missing Brother Found
By Jodi Wilgoren and Michael Slackman
New York Times
Wednesday 19 November 2003
BEDFORD, N.H., Nov. 18 — Every day on the campaign trail, Howard Dean wears an unfashionable black belt that belonged to his younger brother Charlie, a silent memorial to the man who vanished while traveling the Mekong River 29 years ago.
On Tuesday, Dr. Dean, who rarely mentions his family on the stump, interrupted his schedule to announce that a search team had found his brother's remains buried in a rice paddy in central Laos.
"This has been a long and very difficult journey for my mother and for my brothers Jim, Bill and myself," Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, said after a Democratic presidential candidates' forum at a hotel here. "We greet this news with mixed emotions, but we're gratified and grateful that we're now approaching closure on this very difficult episode in our lives."
The Pentagon will not try to make an official identification until after the remains are flown to a forensic laboratory in Hawaii next week, but personal items found with the bodies — shoes, a sock and a P.O.W.-M.I.A. bracelet with the name of a Texan, all similar to those worn by the 23-year-old Charles Dean — strongly suggest the crude grave was his. Remains believed to belong to his traveling companion, Neil Sharman of Australia, were also recovered at the site.
Charles Dean is one of 1,875 Americans, including 35 civilians, still missing in connection with the Vietnam War.
...
Full story @ TruthOut
NY Times original
Read It Rating: 6.6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
New Study Explains How Pot Kills Cancer Cells
This article by Steve kubby has some overlap with the previously posted article by Richard Cowan. Cowan's article is more extensive; Kubby's is more succinct.
New Study Explains How Pot Kills Cancer Cells
by Steve Kubby
A new study published in Nature Reviews-Cancer provides an historic and detailed explanation about how THC and natural cannabinoids counteract cancer, but preserve normal cells.
The study by Manuel Guzmán of Madrid Spain found that cannabinoids, the active components of marijuana, inhibit tumor growth in laboratory animals. They do so by modulating key cell-signalling pathways, thereby inducing direct growth arrest and death of tumor cells, as well as by inhibiting the growth of blood vessels that supply the tumor.
The Guzman study is very important according to Dr. Ethan Russo , a neurologist and world authority on medical cannabis: "Cancer occurs because cells become immortalized; they fail to heed normal signals to turn off growth. A normal function of remodelling in the body requires that cells die on cue. This is called apoptosis, or programmed cell death. That process fails to work in tumors. THC promotes its reappearance so that gliomas, leukemias, melanomas and other cell types will in fact heed the signals, stop dividing, and die."
"But, that is not all," explains Dr. Russo: "The other way that tumors grow is by ensuring that they are nourished: they send out signals to promote angiogenesis, the growth of new blood vessels. Cannabinoids turn off these signals as well. It is truly incredible, and elegant." ...
Read It Rating: 9.1
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 15%
If Cannabis Could Cure Cancer, They Would Tell Us, Right?
This is a somewhat clunky and jaded story, but it still makes for worthy reading, if for no other reason than the story which is embedded within it, entitled "POT SHRINKS TUMORS; GOVERNMENT KNEW IN '74". Also, this article by Richard Cowan (who has good cause to be jaded, as he has been fighting against the drug war for avery long time) is linked to a great many other articles and resources which offer a lot of background information.
If Cannabis Could Cure Cancer, They Would Tell Us, Right? No.
by Richard Cowan, MarijuanaNews.com
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 55%
Kubbys await refugee ruling
by Pete Brady (10 Nov, 2003)
Courageous couple grow medical marijuana on television
Medical marijuana advocates Michele and Steve Kubby are anticipating a ruling "any day now" on their historic bid to become Canada's first officially-sanctioned reefer refugees.
...
Earlier this year, Michele Kubby acted as her own lawyer in hearings before an immigration judge. The Kubbys are seeking official refugee status. They argue that Steve would die in America if he was sent back to face incarceration or other actions relating to his earlier conviction, because authorities will not guarantee him access to medpot. They also claim they would be victims of political persecution as individuals, and as part of a persecuted minority - pot smokers - who are targets of a "genocidal" US-government war. If the Kubbys win refugee status, it will be historic, because the ruling will in effect mean that the Canadian government has acknowledged that the US is a country that routinely violates the human rights of its citizens.
The refugee hearings were contentious and controversial, with government lawyers accused of lying by the Kubbys. Michele Kubby, who has no formal training as a lawyer, won plaudits from attorneys for her skillful attacks on the government's attempts to send her and her family back to the United States, and for her spirited defense of the Kubbys' right to stay in Canada.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 18, 2003
Arrested Development's Name Claim
Arrested Development's Name Claim
by Lia Haberman
Nov 6, 2003, 9:30 PM PT
Arrested Development is:
A. What makes Ashton Kutcher tick.
B. An Atlanta-based hip-hop group.
C. The title of a new Fox sitcom.
And the answer is…to be determined in court.
Pioneering hip-hop ensemble Arrested Development has filed a trademark-infringement suit against Fox claiming ownership of the moniker, which the network is using for one of its new series.
...
Read It Rating: 2
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -.05
Learning Percentage: 40%
November 16, 2003
Appeals court overturns machine gun conviction
So much for the idea that the 9th Circuit Court is some sort of liberal juggernaut I guess. This is a pretty impressive ruling -- I hadn't realized that there were still courts around who thought the Commerce Clause had limits to its reach. Good for them! It probably won't have much impact on the gun movement, as the lawyer asserts in the article, but it's still and interesting ruling, in the consitutional sense.
Next thing you know, some court might figure out that the DEA has no business busting medical marijuana clinics or growers that do all their business locally (meaning the commerce is not "among the several states", as the abused Commerce Clause specifies). But I digress.
Appeals court overturns machine gun conviction
DAVID KRAVETS
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - A federal appeals court Thursday overturned a Mesa, Ariz. man's federal conviction of possessing five machine guns.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals of San Francisco reversed the conviction, ruling that the congressional ban does not apply to homemade machine guns and their parts because they were never in the stream of commerce.
The court ruled that there was neither a transfer nor sale of the weapons or their parts, so Congress did not have the power under the Commerce Clause to regulate homemade guns crafted from scratch.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 55%
Elfin Singer Delights Viewers
I found this article in a search for Andy Milonakis' age. (27!)
by Jason Gay
On the morning of Jan. 26, an apple-cheeked unknown from Astoria, Queens, named Andy Milonakis crawled out of bed and made the most important decision of his life.
He decided not to attend a friend's Super Bowl party.
Instead, Mr. Milonakis picked up a guitar he can't really play, turned on a video camera in his bedroom and began to sing a really, really, really stupid song.
The Super Bowl is gay, he sang.
The Super Bowl is gay.
Super Bowl, Super Bowl, Super Bowl
Is gaaaaaaay.
At the top of his lungs, Mr. Milonakis went on to condemn the following things as "gay": the Oakland Raiders, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, water, cologne, DVD players, DVD's, stray cats, the sky, cottage cheese, yogurt, shirts, McDonald's, K.F.C., vacuum cleaners, dollar bills, coins, scanners and CD burners, among others. He concluded by singing, "We're all gaaaaaay!"
Then Mr. Milonakis posted the video, called "The Super Bowl Is Gay," on an Internet Web site, angrynakedpat.com, which contained a reservoir of his short, juvenile films.
That was it. Word spread, and "The Super Bowl Is Gay" received zillions of hits on the Internet. A writer for ABC’s new late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, spotted it and got Mr. Milonakis on the program. Mr. Kimmel joked that he wants to adopt him. He’s shown "The Super Bowl Is Gay" and two other videos Mr. Milonakis made, and wants him to cover spring break in Florida. MTV is calling. A guitarist from Ozzy Osbourne’s band who’s starting his own group wants Mr. Milonakis to sing "The Super Bowl Is Gay" before he plays. Adult women are sending him their photographs saying, "We love you, Andy."
...
What some of Mr. Milonakis’ fans may not have known is that the Chunky Peanut Butter Boy and Cuppy and the "Super Bowl Is Gay" kid isn’t a kid at all. Mr. Milonakis has a medical condition—"a growth-hormone thing," he said—that makes him look considerably younger than his age. He could easily pass for a wise-ass junior high schooler.
But Mr. Milonakis isn’t a wise-ass junior high schooler. At 27, he’s a wise-ass network administrator at a midtown accounting firm who’s been quietly moonlighting in comedy for years.
Mr. Milonakis was completely up front about his age—it’s no secret—but didn’t want to go into great detail about his condition. Too "Barbara Walters Special," as he put it. "I do comedy," he said. Though his appearance did make it "harder to get girls," he said he’s in good health. "I don’t have any liver or kidney disease like Gary Coleman," he said.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 4.5
Learning Percentage: 55%
November 14, 2003
DownsizeDC.com Radio Ads: Scripts and MP3s
These ads are pretty cool. They're put out by the American Liberty Foundation, which is also quite cool.
Read the ads, listen to them if you can, and then donate some money to help keep them on the air. Three simple steps to becoming an instant freedom activist. Who would have believed it could be so easy?
- "We Believe..." Play
believe.mp3 (935k)
- "Talk Radio" Play
talk_radio.mp3 (935k)
- "Broken Promises" Play
promises.mp3 (935k)
- "Suzie and the Senator" Play
senator.mp3 (936k)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: R.5
Freedom Rating: 4.5
Learning Percentage: 20%
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
Knapp on Party Loyalty of Libertarian Leaders, Part II
This is Tom Knapp's follow-up article to his first article about "Libertarians for McClintock", the break-off group that supported the conservative Republican in last month's recall election here. He does a good job of clarifying and responding to people who had problems with his first article -- which sort of includes me, although I wrote my response to his first commentary before I read his follow-up. In other words, he had answered my complaint before I wrote it. ;-)
He does make one factual error, however:
There was no particular reason that the California LP couldn't have said "none of the three registered Libertarians running represent our positions as well as Tom McClintock does. We're endorsing him."
There was a particular reason that they couldn't do such a thing: they are prohibited from doing so by the Bylaws of the California LP.
And he makes one error of judgment, in my opinion (though he seems to hedge this point in a way that corrects the error when he mentions these points elsewhere):
It's a matter of public record that the California LP's executive committee chose, instead, to endorse Ned Roscoe, one of the three registered Libertarians running in the election. Once that endorsement was undertaken, officers in the California LP had two reasonable and ethical options:
* Endorse and support Roscoe;
* Resign their positions of trust within the California LP and endorse or support McClintock.
There was a third reasonable and ethical option, in my opinion: to wash one's hands of the whole torrid waste of time that the recall ended up being, and take no firm position, nor engage in any substantial action, relating to the candidates in said election.
To say that because 10 people made a misguided decision via e-mail relating to a rushed, nontraditional election (that would be the LPC Executive Committee voting to endorse Ned Roscoe), that all the leaders of the California LP had to get behind them or resign their position, is going too far with the "positions of trust" angle. Nothing about my Chairmanship of the Nevada County LP, to my knowledge, mandates that I have to endorse and support anyone that the "higher-ups" choose to endorse. To borrow a popular phrase, they're not the boss of me. And that's especially true in an election that defies the conventional mold, as this past one did, big time.
My job is to support Libertarian candidates, and nominally, I did so. I didn't think it was a good idea to support Ned Roscoe's campaign, and I didn't think I had much of a chance of convincing anyone to vote for Jack Hickey. Our executive board, like most regjonal boards (I think), decided not to try and come up with an endorsement under the rushed schedule and weird format of the election. So, Hickey got my glancing support, for all the good it did. All things considered, there were better ways for me to serve the LP as a regional leader during that time, and that's what I focused on. The recall, candidate-wise, was a wash for the California LP, and that's being generous. Making us look silly and tiny, by campaigning actively for Jack Hickey, or making us look ridiculous and foolish by helping Ned Rosoce promote his "smoker's candidacy", would, in both cases, not have helped advance liberty, or the LPC.
It didn't have to be that way, but that's how it ended up. I don't oppose or disparage Tom Knapp's view that the "Libertarians for McClintock" who were currently holding LP offices were wrong to to do both things at once (though I think to include gubernatorial candidates from 5 years ago is an untenable stretch). I do oppose his view that leaders should have supported Ned Roscoe or left the party.
(As I noted, he does clarify this elsewhere by saying, effectively "or at least don't support the other party's candidate" -- but in his maxim about the "two options", he includes no such clarification, and implies that to do other than one of those options indicates a lack of integrity, among other things. That's wrong. It simply wasn't that simple.)
Tom's column:
Party loyalty redux:
The Life of the Party, part 10
by Thomas L. Knapp
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .9
Learning Percentage: 22%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Thursday, November 6, 2003 Posted: 4:36 PM EST (2136 GMT)
NEW YORK (AP) -- Rosie O'Donnell taunted a cancer survivor working at her now-defunct magazine by saying people who lie "get sick and they get cancer," the woman testified. O'Donnell said she later apologized.
Cindy Spengler, who was head of marketing at "Rosie" magazine, said Wednesday that O'Donnell made the remark after a meeting to discuss the magazine's problems. Spengler said O'Donnell told her that her silence in the meeting was tantamount to lying.
"You know what happens to people who lie," the witness tearfully quoted O'Donnell as saying. "They get sick and they get cancer. If they keep lying, they get it again."
Spengler testified in Manhattan's State Supreme Court, where O'Donnell and "Rosie" publisher Gruner Jahr USA are suing each other for breach of contract.
Washington man admits 48 murders
Washington man admits 48 murders
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEATTLE, Nov. 5 — Uttering the word “guilty” 48 times with chilling calm, former truck painter Gary Leon Ridgway admitted Wednesday that he was the Green River Killer and confessed to murdering four dozen women over the past two decades.
"I KILLED SO many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in a confession read aloud in King County Superior Court by a prosecutor.
Ridgway, 54, a short figure with glasses, thinning hair and a sandy mustache, pleaded guilty to more murders than any other serial killer in U.S. history.
He struck a plea agreement that will spare him from execution for those killings and will result in a sentence of life in prison without parole for one of the most baffling and chilling serial killer cases the nation has ever seen.
"I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," he said in the statement. He said he left some bodies in "clusters" and enjoyed driving by the sites afterward, thinking about what he had done.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
LP News Online: December 2003: Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
Twenty Libertarians emerged victorious in local elections held around the country on November 4, including five who made a "clean sweep" of contested offices in Michigan.
LP Executive Director Joe Seehusen said he was "delighted" with the results.
"I'm especially thrilled that 16 of our 20 victories were higher-level offices such as city and county council, which means Libertarians are going to have a positive impact on many Americans' lives," he said.
In addition, several Libertarian candidates were victorious against incumbents, noted Seehusen.
"Libertarians booted out seven incumbents, which shows that when our candidates run aggressive, properly funded campaigns, they can compete with Democrats and Republicans," he said.
In all, about 210 LP candidates were on the ballot in local elections in 28 states.
Libertarian victories included:
* In Michigan, three incumbent Libertarian city council members were re-elected in a "clean sweep" for LP officeholders, said Oakland County LP Communications Director Greg Dirasian.
In addition, two other Libertarians were elected to city councils for the first time.
"The Libertarian Party of Michigan had the biggest night in its history on November 4," said Michigan LP State Chair Bill Gelineau.
...
Arrested Development's Name Claim
Arrested Development's Name Claim
by Lia Haberman
Nov 6, 2003, 9:30 PM PT
Arrested Development is:
A. What makes Ashton Kutcher tick.
B. An Atlanta-based hip-hop group.
C. The title of a new Fox sitcom.
And the answer is…to be determined in court.
Pioneering hip-hop ensemble Arrested Development has filed a trademark-infringement suit against Fox claiming ownership of the moniker, which the network is using for one of its new series.
...
Read It Rating: 2
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -.05
Learning Percentage: 40%
Appeals court overturns machine gun conviction
So much for the idea that the 9th Circuit Court is some sort of liberal juggernaut I guess. This is a pretty impressive ruling -- I hadn't realized that there were still courts around who thought the Commerce Clause had limits to its reach. Good for them! It probably won't have much impact on the gun movement, as the lawyer asserts in the article, but it's still and interesting ruling, in the consitutional sense.
Next thing you know, some court might figure out that the DEA has no business busting medical marijuana clinics or growers that do all their business locally (meaning the commerce is not "among the several states", as the abused Commerce Clause specifies). But I digress.
Appeals court overturns machine gun conviction
DAVID KRAVETS
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - A federal appeals court Thursday overturned a Mesa, Ariz. man's federal conviction of possessing five machine guns.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals of San Francisco reversed the conviction, ruling that the congressional ban does not apply to homemade machine guns and their parts because they were never in the stream of commerce.
The court ruled that there was neither a transfer nor sale of the weapons or their parts, so Congress did not have the power under the Commerce Clause to regulate homemade guns crafted from scratch.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 55%
Elfin Singer Delights Viewers
I found this article in a search for Andy Milonakis' age. (27!)
by Jason Gay
On the morning of Jan. 26, an apple-cheeked unknown from Astoria, Queens, named Andy Milonakis crawled out of bed and made the most important decision of his life.
He decided not to attend a friend's Super Bowl party.
Instead, Mr. Milonakis picked up a guitar he can't really play, turned on a video camera in his bedroom and began to sing a really, really, really stupid song.
The Super Bowl is gay, he sang.
The Super Bowl is gay.
Super Bowl, Super Bowl, Super Bowl
Is gaaaaaaay.
At the top of his lungs, Mr. Milonakis went on to condemn the following things as "gay": the Oakland Raiders, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, water, cologne, DVD players, DVD's, stray cats, the sky, cottage cheese, yogurt, shirts, McDonald's, K.F.C., vacuum cleaners, dollar bills, coins, scanners and CD burners, among others. He concluded by singing, "We're all gaaaaaay!"
Then Mr. Milonakis posted the video, called "The Super Bowl Is Gay," on an Internet Web site, angrynakedpat.com, which contained a reservoir of his short, juvenile films.
That was it. Word spread, and "The Super Bowl Is Gay" received zillions of hits on the Internet. A writer for ABC’s new late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, spotted it and got Mr. Milonakis on the program. Mr. Kimmel joked that he wants to adopt him. He’s shown "The Super Bowl Is Gay" and two other videos Mr. Milonakis made, and wants him to cover spring break in Florida. MTV is calling. A guitarist from Ozzy Osbourne’s band who’s starting his own group wants Mr. Milonakis to sing "The Super Bowl Is Gay" before he plays. Adult women are sending him their photographs saying, "We love you, Andy."
...
What some of Mr. Milonakis’ fans may not have known is that the Chunky Peanut Butter Boy and Cuppy and the "Super Bowl Is Gay" kid isn’t a kid at all. Mr. Milonakis has a medical condition—"a growth-hormone thing," he said—that makes him look considerably younger than his age. He could easily pass for a wise-ass junior high schooler.
But Mr. Milonakis isn’t a wise-ass junior high schooler. At 27, he’s a wise-ass network administrator at a midtown accounting firm who’s been quietly moonlighting in comedy for years.
Mr. Milonakis was completely up front about his age—it’s no secret—but didn’t want to go into great detail about his condition. Too "Barbara Walters Special," as he put it. "I do comedy," he said. Though his appearance did make it "harder to get girls," he said he’s in good health. "I don’t have any liver or kidney disease like Gary Coleman," he said.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 4.5
Learning Percentage: 55%
November 14, 2003
DownsizeDC.com Radio Ads: Scripts and MP3s
These ads are pretty cool. They're put out by the American Liberty Foundation, which is also quite cool.
Read the ads, listen to them if you can, and then donate some money to help keep them on the air. Three simple steps to becoming an instant freedom activist. Who would have believed it could be so easy?
- "We Believe..." Play
believe.mp3 (935k)
- "Talk Radio" Play
talk_radio.mp3 (935k)
- "Broken Promises" Play
promises.mp3 (935k)
- "Suzie and the Senator" Play
senator.mp3 (936k)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: R.5
Freedom Rating: 4.5
Learning Percentage: 20%
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
Knapp on Party Loyalty of Libertarian Leaders, Part II
This is Tom Knapp's follow-up article to his first article about "Libertarians for McClintock", the break-off group that supported the conservative Republican in last month's recall election here. He does a good job of clarifying and responding to people who had problems with his first article -- which sort of includes me, although I wrote my response to his first commentary before I read his follow-up. In other words, he had answered my complaint before I wrote it. ;-)
He does make one factual error, however:
There was no particular reason that the California LP couldn't have said "none of the three registered Libertarians running represent our positions as well as Tom McClintock does. We're endorsing him."
There was a particular reason that they couldn't do such a thing: they are prohibited from doing so by the Bylaws of the California LP.
And he makes one error of judgment, in my opinion (though he seems to hedge this point in a way that corrects the error when he mentions these points elsewhere):
It's a matter of public record that the California LP's executive committee chose, instead, to endorse Ned Roscoe, one of the three registered Libertarians running in the election. Once that endorsement was undertaken, officers in the California LP had two reasonable and ethical options:
* Endorse and support Roscoe;
* Resign their positions of trust within the California LP and endorse or support McClintock.
There was a third reasonable and ethical option, in my opinion: to wash one's hands of the whole torrid waste of time that the recall ended up being, and take no firm position, nor engage in any substantial action, relating to the candidates in said election.
To say that because 10 people made a misguided decision via e-mail relating to a rushed, nontraditional election (that would be the LPC Executive Committee voting to endorse Ned Roscoe), that all the leaders of the California LP had to get behind them or resign their position, is going too far with the "positions of trust" angle. Nothing about my Chairmanship of the Nevada County LP, to my knowledge, mandates that I have to endorse and support anyone that the "higher-ups" choose to endorse. To borrow a popular phrase, they're not the boss of me. And that's especially true in an election that defies the conventional mold, as this past one did, big time.
My job is to support Libertarian candidates, and nominally, I did so. I didn't think it was a good idea to support Ned Roscoe's campaign, and I didn't think I had much of a chance of convincing anyone to vote for Jack Hickey. Our executive board, like most regjonal boards (I think), decided not to try and come up with an endorsement under the rushed schedule and weird format of the election. So, Hickey got my glancing support, for all the good it did. All things considered, there were better ways for me to serve the LP as a regional leader during that time, and that's what I focused on. The recall, candidate-wise, was a wash for the California LP, and that's being generous. Making us look silly and tiny, by campaigning actively for Jack Hickey, or making us look ridiculous and foolish by helping Ned Rosoce promote his "smoker's candidacy", would, in both cases, not have helped advance liberty, or the LPC.
It didn't have to be that way, but that's how it ended up. I don't oppose or disparage Tom Knapp's view that the "Libertarians for McClintock" who were currently holding LP offices were wrong to to do both things at once (though I think to include gubernatorial candidates from 5 years ago is an untenable stretch). I do oppose his view that leaders should have supported Ned Roscoe or left the party.
(As I noted, he does clarify this elsewhere by saying, effectively "or at least don't support the other party's candidate" -- but in his maxim about the "two options", he includes no such clarification, and implies that to do other than one of those options indicates a lack of integrity, among other things. That's wrong. It simply wasn't that simple.)
Tom's column:
Party loyalty redux:
The Life of the Party, part 10
by Thomas L. Knapp
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .9
Learning Percentage: 22%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Thursday, November 6, 2003 Posted: 4:36 PM EST (2136 GMT)
NEW YORK (AP) -- Rosie O'Donnell taunted a cancer survivor working at her now-defunct magazine by saying people who lie "get sick and they get cancer," the woman testified. O'Donnell said she later apologized.
Cindy Spengler, who was head of marketing at "Rosie" magazine, said Wednesday that O'Donnell made the remark after a meeting to discuss the magazine's problems. Spengler said O'Donnell told her that her silence in the meeting was tantamount to lying.
"You know what happens to people who lie," the witness tearfully quoted O'Donnell as saying. "They get sick and they get cancer. If they keep lying, they get it again."
Spengler testified in Manhattan's State Supreme Court, where O'Donnell and "Rosie" publisher Gruner Jahr USA are suing each other for breach of contract.
Washington man admits 48 murders
Washington man admits 48 murders
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEATTLE, Nov. 5 — Uttering the word “guilty” 48 times with chilling calm, former truck painter Gary Leon Ridgway admitted Wednesday that he was the Green River Killer and confessed to murdering four dozen women over the past two decades.
"I KILLED SO many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in a confession read aloud in King County Superior Court by a prosecutor.
Ridgway, 54, a short figure with glasses, thinning hair and a sandy mustache, pleaded guilty to more murders than any other serial killer in U.S. history.
He struck a plea agreement that will spare him from execution for those killings and will result in a sentence of life in prison without parole for one of the most baffling and chilling serial killer cases the nation has ever seen.
"I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," he said in the statement. He said he left some bodies in "clusters" and enjoyed driving by the sites afterward, thinking about what he had done.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
LP News Online: December 2003: Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
Twenty Libertarians emerged victorious in local elections held around the country on November 4, including five who made a "clean sweep" of contested offices in Michigan.
LP Executive Director Joe Seehusen said he was "delighted" with the results.
"I'm especially thrilled that 16 of our 20 victories were higher-level offices such as city and county council, which means Libertarians are going to have a positive impact on many Americans' lives," he said.
In addition, several Libertarian candidates were victorious against incumbents, noted Seehusen.
"Libertarians booted out seven incumbents, which shows that when our candidates run aggressive, properly funded campaigns, they can compete with Democrats and Republicans," he said.
In all, about 210 LP candidates were on the ballot in local elections in 28 states.
Libertarian victories included:
* In Michigan, three incumbent Libertarian city council members were re-elected in a "clean sweep" for LP officeholders, said Oakland County LP Communications Director Greg Dirasian.
In addition, two other Libertarians were elected to city councils for the first time.
"The Libertarian Party of Michigan had the biggest night in its history on November 4," said Michigan LP State Chair Bill Gelineau.
...
DownsizeDC.com Radio Ads: Scripts and MP3s
These ads are pretty cool. They're put out by the American Liberty Foundation, which is also quite cool.
Read the ads, listen to them if you can, and then donate some money to help keep them on the air. Three simple steps to becoming an instant freedom activist. Who would have believed it could be so easy?
- "We Believe..." Play believe.mp3 (935k)
- "Talk Radio" Play talk_radio.mp3 (935k)
- "Broken Promises" Play promises.mp3 (935k)
- "Suzie and the Senator" Play senator.mp3 (936k)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: R.5
Freedom Rating: 4.5
Learning Percentage: 20%
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
Knapp on Party Loyalty of Libertarian Leaders, Part II
This is Tom Knapp's follow-up article to his first article about "Libertarians for McClintock", the break-off group that supported the conservative Republican in last month's recall election here. He does a good job of clarifying and responding to people who had problems with his first article -- which sort of includes me, although I wrote my response to his first commentary before I read his follow-up. In other words, he had answered my complaint before I wrote it. ;-)
He does make one factual error, however:
There was no particular reason that the California LP couldn't have said "none of the three registered Libertarians running represent our positions as well as Tom McClintock does. We're endorsing him."
There was a particular reason that they couldn't do such a thing: they are prohibited from doing so by the Bylaws of the California LP.
And he makes one error of judgment, in my opinion (though he seems to hedge this point in a way that corrects the error when he mentions these points elsewhere):
It's a matter of public record that the California LP's executive committee chose, instead, to endorse Ned Roscoe, one of the three registered Libertarians running in the election. Once that endorsement was undertaken, officers in the California LP had two reasonable and ethical options:
* Endorse and support Roscoe;
* Resign their positions of trust within the California LP and endorse or support McClintock.
There was a third reasonable and ethical option, in my opinion: to wash one's hands of the whole torrid waste of time that the recall ended up being, and take no firm position, nor engage in any substantial action, relating to the candidates in said election.
To say that because 10 people made a misguided decision via e-mail relating to a rushed, nontraditional election (that would be the LPC Executive Committee voting to endorse Ned Roscoe), that all the leaders of the California LP had to get behind them or resign their position, is going too far with the "positions of trust" angle. Nothing about my Chairmanship of the Nevada County LP, to my knowledge, mandates that I have to endorse and support anyone that the "higher-ups" choose to endorse. To borrow a popular phrase, they're not the boss of me. And that's especially true in an election that defies the conventional mold, as this past one did, big time.
My job is to support Libertarian candidates, and nominally, I did so. I didn't think it was a good idea to support Ned Roscoe's campaign, and I didn't think I had much of a chance of convincing anyone to vote for Jack Hickey. Our executive board, like most regjonal boards (I think), decided not to try and come up with an endorsement under the rushed schedule and weird format of the election. So, Hickey got my glancing support, for all the good it did. All things considered, there were better ways for me to serve the LP as a regional leader during that time, and that's what I focused on. The recall, candidate-wise, was a wash for the California LP, and that's being generous. Making us look silly and tiny, by campaigning actively for Jack Hickey, or making us look ridiculous and foolish by helping Ned Rosoce promote his "smoker's candidacy", would, in both cases, not have helped advance liberty, or the LPC.
It didn't have to be that way, but that's how it ended up. I don't oppose or disparage Tom Knapp's view that the "Libertarians for McClintock" who were currently holding LP offices were wrong to to do both things at once (though I think to include gubernatorial candidates from 5 years ago is an untenable stretch). I do oppose his view that leaders should have supported Ned Roscoe or left the party.
(As I noted, he does clarify this elsewhere by saying, effectively "or at least don't support the other party's candidate" -- but in his maxim about the "two options", he includes no such clarification, and implies that to do other than one of those options indicates a lack of integrity, among other things. That's wrong. It simply wasn't that simple.)
Tom's column:
Party loyalty redux:
The Life of the Party, part 10
by Thomas L. Knapp
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .9
Learning Percentage: 22%
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Thursday, November 6, 2003 Posted: 4:36 PM EST (2136 GMT)
NEW YORK (AP) -- Rosie O'Donnell taunted a cancer survivor working at her now-defunct magazine by saying people who lie "get sick and they get cancer," the woman testified. O'Donnell said she later apologized.
Cindy Spengler, who was head of marketing at "Rosie" magazine, said Wednesday that O'Donnell made the remark after a meeting to discuss the magazine's problems. Spengler said O'Donnell told her that her silence in the meeting was tantamount to lying.
"You know what happens to people who lie," the witness tearfully quoted O'Donnell as saying. "They get sick and they get cancer. If they keep lying, they get it again."
Spengler testified in Manhattan's State Supreme Court, where O'Donnell and "Rosie" publisher Gruner Jahr USA are suing each other for breach of contract.
Washington man admits 48 murders
Washington man admits 48 murders
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEATTLE, Nov. 5 — Uttering the word “guilty” 48 times with chilling calm, former truck painter Gary Leon Ridgway admitted Wednesday that he was the Green River Killer and confessed to murdering four dozen women over the past two decades.
"I KILLED SO many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in a confession read aloud in King County Superior Court by a prosecutor.
Ridgway, 54, a short figure with glasses, thinning hair and a sandy mustache, pleaded guilty to more murders than any other serial killer in U.S. history.
He struck a plea agreement that will spare him from execution for those killings and will result in a sentence of life in prison without parole for one of the most baffling and chilling serial killer cases the nation has ever seen.
"I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," he said in the statement. He said he left some bodies in "clusters" and enjoyed driving by the sites afterward, thinking about what he had done.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
LP News Online: December 2003: Libertarians pick up 20 wins in local elections
Twenty Libertarians emerged victorious in local elections held around the country on November 4, including five who made a "clean sweep" of contested offices in Michigan.
LP Executive Director Joe Seehusen said he was "delighted" with the results.
"I'm especially thrilled that 16 of our 20 victories were higher-level offices such as city and county council, which means Libertarians are going to have a positive impact on many Americans' lives," he said.
In addition, several Libertarian candidates were victorious against incumbents, noted Seehusen.
"Libertarians booted out seven incumbents, which shows that when our candidates run aggressive, properly funded campaigns, they can compete with Democrats and Republicans," he said.
In all, about 210 LP candidates were on the ballot in local elections in 28 states.
Libertarian victories included:
* In Michigan, three incumbent Libertarian city council members were re-elected in a "clean sweep" for LP officeholders, said Oakland County LP Communications Director Greg Dirasian.
In addition, two other Libertarians were elected to city councils for the first time.
"The Libertarian Party of Michigan had the biggest night in its history on November 4," said Michigan LP State Chair Bill Gelineau.
...