Thursday, March 5, 2009
NIN: Burn Live from on stage, Melbourne 2.25.09 [HD] from Nine Inch Nails on Vimeo.
Filmed by Rob Sheridan with the Canon 5D Mark II. Audio mix by Blumpy.
It’s the Pot Economy, Stupid............
Marijuana already plays a huge role in the California and national economies. It’s a revenue opportunity we literally can’t afford to ignore. It looks like the pot debate just got real. As the nation faces its worst economic crisis in generations, California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has introduced a trailblazing bill to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol. Hard on the heels of Michael Phelps’ nationally-resonant bong demo, Ammiano’s gesture is a whole lot more intentional. One hopes it will stir the long-overdue national examination of the financial and human price that we pay for criminalizing pot. The most widely used illicit drug in the western world, marijuana is a fact of life that’s been sampled by upwards of 100,000,000 Americans. Officially prohibited since 1937, we finally seem on the threshold of a promising moment in our nation’s tortured relationship to the drug. On November 4 alone, Massachusetts decriminalized personal pot use, Michigan became the thirteenth state to allow its medical use, and we elected a president who’s openly admitted to smoking it. National polls and the yawn that greeted the Phelps media frenzy indicate that Americans are reconciled to pot’s largely benign role in our culture....Link
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Not the man of Steele...........
A month after Michael Steele became the first African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee, key party leaders are worried that the GOP has made a costly mistake — one that will make it even harder for them to take back power from the dominant Democratic Party. Steadily becoming a dependable punch line, Steele has brushed back Rush Limbaugh, threatened moderate Republican senators, offered the “friggin’ awesome” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal some “slum love,” called civil unions “crazy” and promised more outreach to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings” via an “off the hook” public relations campaign....Link
'very definition of tyranny'..............
Since the release on Monday of nine previously-secret Bush administration legal memos claiming that the president has the power to ignore the Constitution when fighting terrorism, experts have almost unanimously denounced both their legal reasoning and their conclusions. "These memos provide the very definition of tyranny," Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Tuesday. "These memos include everything that a petty despot would want." Turley believes, however, that there may be worse revelations yet to come. "These memos weren't written in a vacuum," he noted. "The question is what did they do in response? We know, among other things that they created a torture program. ... I think we're going to find out that this was the mere foundation for a greater edifice that has yet to be disclosed."....Link
Bush's Secret Dictatorship.................
The memo issued by the acting director of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel just five days before Barack Obama took office comes across almost as, among other things, a bit whiny. Steven Bradbury wrote to officially retract a series of memos in which his former colleagues secretly rewrote the Constitution. He acknowledged that their reasoning was at various points "unconvincing" and "not sustainable." But Bradbury was also making excuses for them. They were afraid, he wrote: "The opinions addressed herein were issued in the wake of the atrocities of 9/11, when policymakers, fearing that additional catastrophic terrorist attacks were imminent, strived to employ all lawful means to protect the nation." They were rushed, confronting "novel and complex legal questions in a time of great danger and under extraordinary time pressure."No excuse. Not even close....Link
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