November 21, 2013

OK ... NOW I believe it.

I said I would not actually believe Reid "would" do it, until he actually fucking DID it.

Harry made a believer out of me today. Woot!

November 21, 2013

Feds raid Denver-area marijuana dispensaries and grow operations. WTF???

Feds raid Denver-area marijuana dispensaries and grow operations
The Denver Post * By Jeremy P. Meyer and Eric Gorski * 11/21/13

Federal authorities Thursday morning were executing search warrants and seizure warrants at multiple Denver-area medical marijuana facilities, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The raids are occurring at both medical marijuana dispensaries and at warehouses where pot is grown.

At one raid in Boulder, a pile of seized marijuana lay in the snow like Christmas trees. At the VIP Cannabis dispensary in Denver, broken glass from a shattered front window littered the parking lot while agents hauled boxes of evidence into a U-Haul truck.

"The Drug Enforcement Administration, Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigations, the Denver Police Department and state and local law enforcement are today executing lawfully obtained search warrants and seizure warrants," said Jeff Dorschner, spokesman for the DOJ.

"Although we cannot at this time discuss the substance of this pending investigation, the operation under way today comports with the Department's recent guidance regarding marijuana enforcement matters," Dorschner said in his e-mailed statement to The Denver Post.

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_24570937/feds-involved-enforcement-actions-at-denver-area-marijuana

November 6, 2013

A Rare Glimpse into the Psyche of a National Security State Enthusiast

November 5, 2013

Advice To Enjoy Being Young Came Out Way Sadder Than Intended

Advice To Enjoy Being Young Came Out Way Sadder Than Intended
NEWS IN BRIEF • ISSUE 49•45 • Nov 4, 2013

NEW YORK—An attempt Monday to impart a piece of upbeat, life-affirming wisdom about enjoying one’s youth reportedly conveyed a desperate, melancholy tone that made the message feel considerably sadder than intended, sources confirmed. “Enjoy all the freedom and all the options you have now because you can never go back,” a well-meaning Jeff Gibbons, 48, told Eric Portman, 24, in what observers said sounded far less like a motivational appeal to seize the day, as he meant it to, and more like a naked cry for help.

“Sooner than you think you’ll wake up and you won’t have your whole life ahead of you. And those carefree days when it seemed like anything was possible will be over. So enjoy it while it lasts.” At press time, instead of coming across as playful and lighthearted, Gibbons sounded like he would absolutely kill somebody if it meant he could be Portman’s age again.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/advice-to-enjoy-being-young-came-out-way-sadder-th,34451/

October 24, 2013

Millington Navy Base shooting? yawn. ho-hum.

These mass shootings are becoming literally a DAILY event.
Like some macabre game-show. Who's "Shooter of the day"?

Maybe one upside is that the luster may start to fade when a wacked out
shooter becomes just another statistic, rather than having their names
blaring on headline news for weeks on end.

Perhaps then we can start addressing the real issues behind this tragic
pointless national bloodbath.

October 6, 2013

Why are Guv-mint HATERS even allowed to run for guv-mint office in the first place?

Shouldn't these TeaBaggers be out in the wild somewhere stockpiling weapons & food?
... rather than pretending to care about governing the nation, the very same guv-mint
they claim to hate so much?

Government-haters ought to be the last people on earth anyone would actually vote for
to run their guv-mint.

Small wonder TeaBaggers are so piss-poor at governing. Can the American People say
"Never again" will we elect one of these boneheads.?

September 19, 2013

Why American Exceptionalism Is a Dangerous Sham

Why American Exceptionalism Is a Dangerous Sham
Perhaps we're not the hero of every story and God has not blessed us over all others.
The American Prospect via Alternet * By Paul Waldman * September 18, 2013

In a democracy, politicians seldom counsel the public to be modest. They flatter and praise the voters, telling them that they are just and wise, hardworking and principled, possessed of boundless vision and common sense. And here in America at least, they also generalize those virtues from the people to the nation itself. America, Americans are endlessly reassured, is unique and special among the world's countries. It isn't just that we're the most important country, which is undeniable, since we have the biggest economy, the biggest (and most frequently deployed) military, and the most influential popular culture. Those things could change someday. Instead, what voters are told over and over again is that we're "exceptional." We're not just stronger or richer; we're better. Indeed, we're stronger and richer because we're better. And we may well be exceptional in how often we're told that we're exceptional. My knowledge of the electoral politics of other nations may be limited, but I don't recall hearing about presidential candidates in Portugal or Peru who feel the need to convince voters that their country is superior to all others and they are the world's best people.

So some people were taken aback last week when Vladimir Putin, in his op-ed inThe New York Times last week, took exception to Barack Obama's talk of exceptionalism. "I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States' policy is 'what makes America different. It's what makes us exceptional,'" Putin wrote. "It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation." He probably didn't realize that every American president says that sort of thing; it's our national program to build self-esteem. That's how politicians put a gold star sticker on our papers, pat us the head and tell us that we're smart and kind and good-looking, and if the other countries don't like us then that's their problem, not ours.

It was a bit amusing to see Barack Obama being chastised by Putin for his comments on American exceptionalism, since it put conservatives in the uncomfortable position of defending the president for the very thing they spent so much time criticizing him for in the past. It seems like a distant memory now, but Republicans spent most of their 2012 presidential primary competing to see who was most appalled by Obama's allegedly insufficient belief in America's uniqueness. There was barely a Republican contender's stump speech that didn't feature thunderous insistence that, unlike that anti-American socialist in the White House, they knew deep in their red, white, and blue bones that this great land stands alone. Mitt Romney titled his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness; Newt Gingrich offered A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters. "America is different," wrote Tim Pawlenty in his book. "And what makes us different makes us great. Barack Obama doesn't see it that way." Or as Sarah Palin put it in her inspiring tome America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, Obama "seems to see nothing admirable in the American experience."

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/why-american-exceptionalism-dangerous-sham

September 14, 2013

US & Russia Reach Deal on Syria's Chemical Weapons (US still holds to possibility of military force)

US, Russia Reach Deal on Syria's Chemical Weapons
Despite agreement, US still holds to possibility of military force
Saturday, September 14, 2013 * Common Dreams * Andrea Germanos, staff writer

The U.S. and Russia reached a deal on a process to remove or destroy Syria's chemical weapons by mid-2014, officials for the two countries announced in Geneva on Saturday.

After a third day of talks, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov outlined the details of the deal, including a condition that Syria must provide a comprehensive list of its chemical weapons stockpiles within a week.

Kerry told reporters, "I have no doubt that the combination of the threat of force and the willingness to pursue diplomacy helped to bring us to this moment."

Echoing Kerry, President Obama said on Saturday, "This this plan emerged only with a credible threat of U.S. military action."

However, as Howard Friel and Noam Chomsky have pointed out, the threats of force against Syria the U.S. has issued are illegal.

Obama also emphasized that the deal did not mean that the possibility of force was off the table. "We will maintain our military posture in the region to keep the pressure on the Assad regime," he said. "If diplomacy fails, the United States and the international community must remain prepared to act."

The "Framework for Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons" released by the State Department on Saturday states, in part:

In furtherance of the objective to eliminate the Syrian chemical weapons program, the United States and the Russian Federation have reached a shared assessment of the amount and type of chemical weapons involved, and are committed to the immediate international control over chemical weapons and their components in Syria. The United States and the Russian Federation expect Syria to submit, within a week, a comprehensive listing, including names, types, and quantities of its chemical weapons agents, types of munitions, and location and form of storage, production, and research and development facilities.

We further determined that the most effective control of these weapons may be achieved by removal of the largest amounts of weapons feasible, under OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical] supervision, and their destruction outside of Syria, if possible. We set ambitious goals for the removal and destruction of all categories of CW related materials and equipment with the objective of completing such removal and destruction in the first half of 2014. In addition to chemical weapons, stocks of chemical weapons agents, their precursors, specialized CW equipment, and CW munitions themselves, the elimination process must include the facilities for the development and production of these weapons. The views of both sides in this regard are set forth in Annex B.

The United States and the Russian Federation have further decided that to achieve accountability for their chemical weapons, the Syrians must provide the OPCW, the UN, and other supporting personnel with the immediate and unfettered right to inspect any and all sites in Syria. The extraordinary procedures to be proposed by the United States and the Russian Federation for adoption by the OPCW Executive Council and reinforced by a UN Security Council resolution, as described above, should include a mechanism to ensure this right.

MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/09/14

(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License)

September 11, 2013

The Roots of Terror: Hiroshima, Viet Nam & Other US Military Misadventures.

The Silent Military Coup That Took Over Washington
This time it's Syria, last time it was Iraq. Obama chose to accept the entire Pentagon of the Bush era: its wars and war crimes
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 * The Guardian/UK * by John Pilger

On my wall is the Daily Express front page of September 5 1945 and the words: "I write this as a warning to the world." So began Wilfred Burchett's report from Hiroshima. It was the scoop of the century. For his lone, perilous journey that defied the US occupation authorities, Burchett was pilloried, not least by his embedded colleagues. He warned that an act of premeditated mass murder on an epic scale had launched a new era of terror.

Almost every day now, he is vindicated. The intrinsic criminality of the atomic bombing is borne out in the US National Archives and by the subsequent decades of militarism camouflaged as democracy. The Syria psychodrama exemplifies this. Yet again we are held hostage by the prospect of a terrorism whose nature and history even the most liberal critics still deny. The great unmentionable is that humanity's most dangerous enemy resides across the Atlantic.

John Kerry's farce and Barack Obama's pirouettes are temporary. Russia's peace deal over chemical weapons will, in time, be treated with the contempt that all militarists reserve for diplomacy. With al-Qaida now among its allies, and US-armed coupmasters secure in Cairo, the US intends to crush the last independent states in the Middle East: Syria first, then Iran. "This operation [in Syria]," said the former French foreign minister Roland Dumas in June, "goes way back. It was prepared, pre-conceived and planned."

When the public is "psychologically scarred", as the Channel 4 reporter Jonathan Rugman described the British people's overwhelming hostility to an attack on Syria, suppressing the truth is made urgent. Whether or not Bashar al-Assad or the "rebels" used gas in the suburbs of Damascus, it is the US, not Syria, that is the world's most prolific user of these terrible weapons.

In 1970 the Senate reported: "The US has dumped on Vietnam a quantity of toxic chemical (dioxin) amounting to six pounds per head of population." This was Operation Hades, later renamed the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand – the source of what Vietnamese doctors call a "cycle of foetal catastrophe". I have seen generations of children with their familiar, monstrous deformities. John Kerry, with his own blood-soaked war record, will remember them. I have seen them in Iraq too, where the US used depleted uranium and white phosphorus, as did the Israelis in Gaza. No Obama "red line" for them. No showdown psychodrama for them.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/11-3

September 10, 2013

NYTimes Newsfeed: Freed Captives (of Syrian Rebel Forces) Differ on Claim Rebels Framed Assad

Freed Captives Differ on Claim Rebels Framed Assad
The Italian war correspondent Domenico Quirico, who reported sympathetically on the uprising in Syria before being taken hostage in April by rebel fighters, told reporters on Monday after his release that two years of bloody, armed conflict had changed the nature of the rebellion. “I was a hostage in Syria, betrayed by the revolution that no longer exists and has become fanaticism and the work of bandits,” he said.

Mr. Quirico, a veteran reporter, added, “It is not the revolution that I encountered two years ago in Aleppo — secular, tolerant. It has become something else,” in remarks published by his newspaper, the Turin daily La Stampa.

La Stampa also published video of Mr. Quirico’s emotional return to his newsroom and an English translation of his statement taking issue with part of an account given by a fellow captive, the Belgian academic Pierre Piccinin. As the Belgian newspaper Le Soir reported, Mr. Piccinin said in a television interview on Monday, after he too returned home, that “it was not the government of Bashar al-Assad that used sarin or some other gas during combat in the Damascus suburbs” last month.

According to Mr. Piccinin — who described himself as a previously “fierce supporter of the Free Syrian Army in their just struggle for democracy” — at one stage during their captivity, he and Mr. Quirico overheard rebels saying that the deadly gas attacks last month had been carried out by anti-Assad forces to frame the government and provoke intervention.

Mr. Quirico confirmed the incident but disagreed sharply with Mr. Piccinin on what it meant. “We heard some people we didn’t know talking through a half-closed door,” he said. “It’s impossible to know whether what was said was based on real fact or just hearsay.”

According to La Stampa, Mr. Quirico called it “madness” to say that the overheard conversation was definitive proof of a rebel plot.

“During our kidnapping, we were kept completely in the dark about what was going on in Syria, including the gas attacks in Damascus,” Quirico said. “But one day, we heard a Skype conversation in English between three people whose names I do not know. We heard the conversation from the room in which we were being held captive, through a half-closed door. One of them had previously presented himself to us as a general of the Syrian Liberation Army. The other two we had never seen and knew nothing about.”

“During the Skype conversation, they said that the gas attack on the two neighborhoods in Damascus had been carried out by rebels as a provocation, to push the West towards a military intervention. They also said they believed the death toll had been exaggerated,” Quirico said in his statement.

“I don’t know if any of this is true and I cannot say for sure that it is true because I have no means of confirming the truth of what was said. I don’t know how reliable this information is and cannot confirm the identity of these people. I am in no position to say for sure whether this conversation is based on real fact or just hearsay and I don’t usually call conversations I have heard through a door, true,” Quirico said.

“You must bear in mind the conditions in which we were; we were prisoners and heard things through doors. I have nothing to judge whether the things that were said are true or not. I am used to checking my facts before I speak and confirm something as true. In this case I was unable to check anything. It is madness to say I knew it wasn’t Assad who used gas.”

THIS ARTICLE IS AT 9:15AM TIME-MARK AT NYTimes Syria Updates LINK:
http://projects.nytimes.com/live-dashboard/syria#sha=a87302193