Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Obama drug czar: We will go after marijuana distributors in Wash. and Colo.
In an interview with Canadian news magazine Maclean’s last week, Gil Kerlikowske, President Obama’s Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, stated that despite recreational legalization in Washington and Colorado, they would still go after distributors and growers in both states.
“You’ll continue to see enforcement against distributors and large-scale growers as the Justice Department has outlined. They will use their limited resources on those groups and not on going after individual users,” said Kerlikowske, who is also a former Seattle Police Chief.
In an interview with ABC News, soon after the November legalizations in Washington and Colorado, President Obama said, “We’ve got bigger fish to fry. It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal.”
It is likely President Obama chose his words carefully by only mentioning individual users and not distributors or growers, despite many being led to believe there would be no federal interference at all within the two states.
Back when running for president in 2008, Barack Obama stated that medical marijuana was an issue for state governments, not the federal government. “I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” he said, promising to end raids on medical marijuana dispensaries seen under the Bush Administration. Many soon learned his real intentions when the DEA raided four times as many marijuana dispensaries as Bush, in half the time.
DOJ ‘admits’ to targeting Aaron Swartz over his activism
Aaron Swartz’s past activism and ‘Guerilla Open Access Manifesto’ played a part in his prosecution, sources told US media. Prosecutors pursued him even though he had not yet leaked anything, as his manifesto proved his alleged “malicious intent.”
Swartz’s manifesto “demonstrated his malicious intent” in downloading documents on a massive scale, reads a Huffington Post’s report quoting anonymous Justice Department representatives.
In his manifesto, Aaron Swartz stated that sharing information was a “moral imperative” and advocated “civil disobedience” against copyright laws. He called for action against the “privatization of knowledge,” which he dubbed a “fight for Guerilla Open Access.”
Swartz’s statements played a role in federal prosecutors plan to indict him for downloading millions of scholarly articles from the JSTOR database in 2011, congressional staffers were reportedly told during a recent congressional briefing.
The briefing, held for the Congressional Oversight Committee, was part of an investigation into the government’s prosecution of the late activist and coder, who committed suicide on January 11 at the age of 26.
Family, friends and supporters of Swartz have maintained the aggressive prosecution was a decisive factor in his suicide. At the time of his death, Swartz was facing a felony conviction, a prison sentence of up to 35 years and a $1-million fine.
The Justice Department has defended the federal prosecutors, denying the claims. Steven Reich, an associate deputy attorney general, reportedly said at the briefing the prosecutors acted “in a reasonable manner” and within the frame of “adequate deterrence to criminal conduct,” in order to deter others from committing similar offenses.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Acceptance of Defense Cuts Signals Shift in G.O.P. Focus
With Congress unlikely to stop deep automatic spending cuts that will strike hard at the military, the fiscal stalemate is highlighting a significant shift in the Republican Party: lawmakers most keenly dedicated to shrinking the size of government are now more dominant than the bloc committed foremost to a robust national defense, particularly in the House.
That reality also underscores what Republicans, and some Democrats, say was a major miscalculation on the part of President Obama. He agreed to set up the automatic cuts 18 months ago because he believed the threat of sharp reductions in military spending would be enough to force Republicans to agree to a deficit reduction plan that included the tax increases he favored.
“Fiscal questions trump defense in a way they never would have after 9/11,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma. “But the war in Iraq is over. Troops are coming home from Afghanistan, and we want to secure the cuts.”
Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee and one of the lawmakers Democrats had hoped would never accept the military cuts, went almost as far. “Republicans aren’t cookie cutter,” he said, “but we do agree on the basic premise of where we’re trying to go. And if we don’t get our fiscal house in order, it’s very hard to provide for the defense of the nation.”
As lawmakers prepared to return to Washington, the White House tried to raise the ante by highlighting the effects the cuts would have on programs in every state.
But at the heart of the battle over sequestration — the nearly $1 trillion in budget cuts that are scheduled to begin on Friday and accelerate over the next decade — are fundamental misunderstandings between the two parties over their respective priorities.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Amash testifies feds can ’snatch Americans from homes’ under indefinite detention law
U.S. Rep. Justin Amash last week took his fight against a controversial federal detention law he argued could lead to the “snatching of Americans from their homes” thousands of miles away from his West Michigan district.
Amash, of Cascade Township, submitted written testimony to a Washington state legislative committee that last week debated a bill condemning contentious aspects of the National Defense Authorization Act critics say allow the indefinite detention of terrorists or other enemies.
House Bill 1581, called the Preservation of Liberty Bill, was reintroduced to the Washington legislature in January after failing to become law in 2012. It would, if enacted, prohibit law enforcement in the state from “assisting in the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens in Washington state.”
The measure is similar to a handful of others introduced in state legislatures, including Michigan’s, to nullify the detention provision at the state level.
In nearly four pages of testimony for a Feb. 21 public hearing for the bill by the Washington legislature’s Public Safety Committee, Amash continued his long-time assault on the NDAA.
HR 748: Require All Young Americans to Enlist in a National Service Program
Earlier this week, House Representative Charles Rangel has introduced HR 748 that will “require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 25 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or as civilian service in a Federal, State, or local government program or with a community-based agency or community-based entity, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, to provide for the registration of women under the Military Selective Service Act, and for other purposes.”
HR 748 has been brought forth to the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) are instrumental in the implementation of the annual defense authorization bill; as well as the functionality of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Energy (DoE).
Mainstream propaganda supports the idea of national service by admonishing Americans that if our Constitutional Republic is to survive we need to give our consent to the government to govern us and actively participate in our freedom in order to remain free.
The connotation is the “diversity seems to breed distrust and disengagement” which is the antithesis of a communal foundation. The answer “is universal national service . . . that is in our enlightened self-interest as a nation.”
By devoting “a year or more to national service, whether military or civilian, should become a countrywide rite of passage, the common expectation and widespread experience of virtually every young American.” In this way, every American “can harness the spirit of volunteerism that already exists and make it a permanent part of American culture.”