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Index for this page...(Be aware some links below may have expired.)
All The Following Items Were Posted On January 1, 2004 Breakthrough: Fed Court Affirms Right to Medical Marijuana On December 17, 2003, Christmas came early for sick and suffering medical marijuana users -- and for lovers of liberty. In a landmark 2-1 decision, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco affirmed the right of seriously ill patients to grow and use marijuana with a doctor's recommendation. "This is a powerful and an unprecedented victory for patients, their caregivers and advocates," notes the Drug Policy Foundation in a press release (from which the rest of this story is drawn). The Drug Policy Foundation also says "this could put a grinding halt to the cruel arrests of medical-marijuana patients by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, actions which have intensified under Attorney General John Ashcroft." The federal court's ruling means that patients who use marijuana cannot be prosecuted by the federal government for growing their own medicine or obtaining it from others, as long as all activity remains within a state that has legalized medical marijuana, and the individual does not seek to obtain their medicine from others through commercial activity. The Ninth Circuit decision stems from a lawsuit filed against Attorney General Ashcroft by Angel Raich of Oakland, who smokes marijuana to help ease suffering from an inoperable brain tumor and several other illnesses, and Diane Monson of Oroville, California, who uses marijuana to treat chronic pain. The decision also attacked the absurdly broad and tyrannical overuse of the interstate commerce clause in drug cases. The circuit court indicated that the Bush administration and Attorney General John Ashcroft have improperly used the interstate commerce clause to prosecute those who use and provide medical-marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act. Since no commerce occurs and no marijuana travels between states in the case of Raich and Monson, the court ruled the matter to be outside of federal jurisdiction. This decision immediately helps patients in the states with medical marijuana laws that are in the Ninth Circuit: Alaska, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. Though the Bush administration -- relentless in their cruel crusade to torment untold thousands of desperately ill medical marijuana users -- is naturally expected to appeal the Raich decision, it's important to note that last month the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Ninth Circuit Court decision in the case of Conant v. Walters -- which protects the rights of doctors to discuss the use of medical marijuana with their patients -- to stand when it refused to review that case. Source and some text: Drug Policy Alliance press release: http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/12_17_03raich.cfm
Outrage: Congress Wasting Billions on Pork In this time of war, terrorism, vast federal deficits, and economic turmoil, Congress is spending billions of dollars on outrageous and utterly unjustifiable pork barrel projects. And this year, pork spending will be worse than ever. So says a new report from the conservative Heritage Foundation. It's well-documented that Congress has been on a wild spending spree for the past few years. In fact, over the last four years, federal spending has increased from $16,000 per household to $20,000 per household -- the highest level since World War II. The fiscal year 2004 omnibus spending bill is loaded with thousands of utterly unjustifiable pork projects. As Heritage says: "Congress is set to bust its own budget cap in order to protect pork projects such as the Please Touch Museum and trout genome mapping... the number of pork projects skyrocketed from under 2,000 five years ago to 9,362 in the 2003 budget. Total spending on pork projects has correspondingly increased to over $23 billion." Exactly what kind of pork projects are those 23 billion federal tax dollars paying for? Here, have a look. The FY 2004 omnibus appropriations bill (HR 2673), funds (among many, many others) the following pork projects: Amount----------------Pork Project Recipient
...and thousands more. Source: Heritage Foundation - http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/wm377.cfm (Thanks to James W. Harris of the Advocates for Self-Government and The Liberator Online for the above information. If you would like a free subscription to the Liberator Online, visit: http://www.self-gov.org/liberator/maintain.html.)
"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money." -- attributed to David (Davey) Crockett, "King of the Wild Frontier," from a speech he gave while he served as a U.S. Congressman (1827-1835).
Some interesting & provocative articles on other websites What's Wrong with Juries, by James Ostrowski: Martha Stewart goes on trial in January for allegedly lying about committing the imaginary crime of outsider trading. All that stands between her and oblivion is a jury of twelve citizens drawn from the liberal-Democratic Southern District of New York. This is an opportune time to review the role of juries in protecting us from tyranny. It ain't funny until the fascist laughs, by Kathleen Parker: So there's this caveman, see, and he goes to his outhouse in the middle of the night, slams the door and, noticing the aroma therein, says: "Is it just me or does it stink in here?" Get it? Of course you get it. In America we call this bathroom humor. Little boys have been giggling about outhouses and their accompanying olfactory assaults since, well, caveman days. I'm just a lesbian...trapped in a man's body, by Mike S. Adams: I love writing columns on the subject of political correctness. Even more than writing the columns, I enjoy reading the email responses I get from readers all around the world. But there are some emails I get tired of answering. The most annoying are the ones warning me that I will lose my job as a university professor if I continue to criticize the campus diversity movement. The people issuing these warnings seem to know that college administrators are usually intolerant of dissent, despite their emphasis on diversity. But there is one thing they don't know. I have an ace up my sleeve. The Drugs-and-Terror Ad Campaign, by Paul Armentano: "Where do terrorists get their money? If you buy drugs, some of it might come from you." Or so claimed a year-long series of U.S. taxpayer-funded public service announcements (PSAs) alleging that recreational drug use sponsors international terrorism. Nevertheless, despite the Bush administration's having spent tens of millions of dollars on the much-ballyhooed ad campaign, it's painfully apparent that the American public isn't buying their message. Your Innocence Is No Protection, by Harry Browne: When the politicians violate the Bill of Rights with the Patriot Act or some other guaranteed-to-bring-peace-and-security-to-the-world scheme, they always reassure us by saying: "If you aren't guilty, you have nothing to fear." If only that were so. The truth is that innocence is no protection at all against government agencies with the power to do what they think best -- or against a government agent hoping for promotion and willing to do whatever he can get away with. Master of the Quiet Style, bu Joseph Sobran: Forty years ago, on November 22, 1963, I was as shocked as billions of other people by the murder of John F. Kennedy. I didn't even notice the passing of another man the same day, whose name at that time I barely knew: the English writer C.S. Lewis. Glaxo chief - Our drugs do not work on most patients, by Steve Connor: A senior executive with Britain's biggest drugs company has admitted that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who take them. "Free-Speech Zone" -- The administration quarantines dissent, by James Bovard: Is the administration seeking to stifle domestic criticism? Absolutely. Is it carrying out a war on dissent? Probably not&emdash;yet. But the trend lines in federal attacks on freedom of speech should raise grave concerns to anyone worried about the First Amendment or about how a future liberal Democratic president such as Hillary Clinton might exploit the precedents that Bush is setting. How I Became a Christian Libertarian, by Steven Yates: One day, long ago (I think it must have been sometime during 1995), I woke up in the morning and realized that I had ceased to be one of those agnostics or atheists I had known and interacted with while teaching in philosophy departments. Instead, I had become a Christian libertarian. That these two were compatible was one of the important realizations of my adult life. The Anti-Father Police State, by Stephen Baskerville: Columnist Cathy Young is known for her even-handed attempts to cut through the pretensions of both the left and right. She has also shown considerable courage by delving into what for many journalists is a no-go zone: divorce and fathers' rights.
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