Californians voted-- 5,382,915 (55.6%) to 4,301,960 (44.4%)-- to legalize medical marijuana in a 1996 proposition written by an old friend and coworker of mine, Dennis Peron. Our state was the first to do so, although half the states in the union have followed suit, blue states like New York and Massachusetts, red states like Alaska and Arizona and purple states like Nevada and New Hampshire.
Japan's Parliament is debating the TPP this week. But our Congress isn't. For all the GOP bullshit about letting the voters decide who the next Supreme Court just will be, they certainly have no intention of letting the voters decide who their next congressmembers will be based on a TPP vote. The strategy for thwarting the voters-- rigging the system, if you will-- is to keep it as quiet as you can and then vote on it after the election, probably during the lame duck session so that defeated members have been bribed and blackmailed into supporting it.
Long before she was ever appointed DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was widely considered one of the most dishonest and sleazy players in American politics. Watch, in the video above, how she extolled the virtues of debates... and then refused to answer a question from a reporter about why she is refusing to debate her primary opponent, Tim Canova. She's a reprehensible character who disgraces the entire concept of democratic government. (Please consider contributing to Canova's grassroots campaign to defeat her.
The fairytale about a Democratic wave taking back the House from the Republicans has reared its head again, this time from Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley at Sabato's Crystal Ball.
If you follow this blog, you may be aware that I stopped using drugs in 1969-- December 1, 1969, to be precise... in my VW van at the Ganda Singh Wala border crossing parking lot between Pakistan and India. Last year, suffering from the side effects of massive chemotherapy treatments, I reluctantly decided to try to cope with the pain and other side effects by using marijuana again, which my doctor approved of.
Hillary was a big booster of the catastrophic Bush-Cheney decision to invade Iraq and disrupt the stability of the Middle East. Bernie was adamantly opposed. It turned out it be the worst American foreign policy decision in at least a century. And it is far from the only example of Hillary's instinctually bad, Republican-oriented decision-making in terms of foreign policy. Take a look at the video up top that shows her shilling for the terrible Panama Free Trade Agreement, juxtaposed with Bernie carefully laying out why that agreement was a terrible idea.
John Fetterman, the Bernie supporter and progressive mayor in the Pennsylvania Senate race, called on Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign as DNC chair in an interview on Pittsburgh TV station, WTAE. He then sent out a tweet (above) endorsing her South Florida primary opponent, Tim Canova.
"It’s remarkable to me that anyone, Republican or Democrat, when given the breathtaking power to choose the rules by which we all live, would be so impoverished in spirit that he or she would be unable to come up with anything useful to do-- whether before, during or after an election."Matt Fuller did a very smart column for HuffPo Tuesday about how anti-Establishment Republicans want to
Why is our government such a mess? Follow the moneyBy 2008, no one considered reactionary Georgia Blue Dog John Barrow an actual Democrat. He was voting for the toxic Republican agenda more consistently than a dozen Republicans were! That year progressives in Georgia felt they had finally found a candidate who could beat him in a primary, highly respected and accomplished state Sen.
