Arizona Mandatory DUI tests unconstitutional????
SourceArizona Supreme Court bars DUI blood tests without warrant
HOWARD FISCHER Capitol Media Services
PHOENIX -- Police cannot use the state's traffic laws to draw blood from suspected drunk drivers without a warrant absent their specific permission at the time of the test, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
In a unanimous decision, the justices rejected the contention by the Pima County Attorney's Office that all Arizona motorists give "implied consent" to having blood, breath or urine tests as a condition to be licensed to drive. They said that means, absent a clear -- and voluntary -- consent immediately prior to the blood draw, it is an illegal search without a warrant.
In a wide-ranging ruling, the high court also said that the ability of juveniles to give that voluntary consent is not absolute -- and not the same as an adult. Justice Scott Bales, writing for the court, said a trial judge must consider all the factors, including the age of the suspect and the failure to notify parents.
But the justices refused to rule that the absence of a juvenile's parents automatically means any consent is not voluntary.
Thursday's ruling most immediately means that charges of driving under the influence of drugs will be dropped against the youth, identified in court records only as Tyler B. because he was 16 at the time of the arrest.
But he is not out of the legal woods yet. Deputy County Attorney Nicolette Kneut said Tyler, who has since turned 18, still faces charges of possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia in justice court as an adult.
Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall said Thursday's ruling will complicate the job that police statewide are required to do. She said the high court has provided no guidance.
"How is the officer supposed to know whether or not it's been an express consent," she said. "It just makes it really, really tough because there isn't any bright line." [Duh, the 4th Amendment you idiot!!!!]
LaWall said the ruling means that her office will advise police to get a court-ordered warrant whenever possible before drawing blood, even when a motorist -- and now, especially a juvenile -- gives approval for a blood draw. That, she said, eliminates any possibility of having that consent later ruled involuntary.
According to court records, Tyler and two friends arrived late to school. A school monitor smelled marijuana on the boys and also saw drug paraphernalia in Tyler's car.
The boys were detained in separate rooms while sheriff's deputies were contacted.
A deputy read Tyler his Miranda warnings against self-incrimination and the right to an attorney. But the court files said that Tyler, in the presence of several school officials, admitted he had driven his car to school after smoking marijuana and that he owned some of the paraphernalia in the car.
When the deputy placed Tyler under arrested, the youth became agitated and was placed in handcuffs while the deputy retrieved a blood-draw kit from his car.
On returning, he saw Tyler had calmed down and he removed the cuffs. He then read Tyler from the law which says that Arizona motorists must consent to blood or other tests and that refusal will result in automatic suspension of driving privileges.
Tyler agreed verbally and in writing to the blood draw. But when the case went to court, Tyler argued his consent was not voluntary and that, as a minor, he lacked capacity to consent.
When the court commissioner agreed and suppressed the evidence, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Bales said the issue has never been decided in Arizona.
Bales rejected arguments by prosecutors that "implied consent" law means there is no need to determine whether a consent at the time of the blood draw is voluntary.
"A compelled blood draw, even when administered pursuant to (the implied consent law) is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment's constraints," he wrote for the court. "Such an invasion of bodily integrity implicates an individual's most personal and deep-rooted expectations of privacy."
He said the law says only that an officer must ask a suspect to submit to the test -- and that if a person refuses, a warrant is needed and the suspect's licenses is suspended.
Bales said a motorist can allow a warrantless search "provided the consent is voluntary." But that, he said has to be decided by a court based on all the circumstances, including the suspect's age -- and even whether a parent is present.
In this case, Bales wrote, the court commissioner was correct in ruling that, based on the evidence she had, Tyler's consent was not voluntary.
He said Tyler was detained for about two hours in a room in the presence of school officials and a deputy, without his parents.
"Tyler initially was shaking and visibly nervous," Bales wrote, and placed in handcuffs until he calmed down. And he said that the law read to him about "implied consent" ended with the statement, "You are, therefore, required to submit to the specified tests."
It was only then, Bales said, Tyler consented to the blood draw.
Thursday's ruling drew a special comment from Justice John Pelander. He said his own review of the evidence leads him to believe Tyler did voluntarily consent.
But Pelander said Arizona law requires he and the other justices not to reweigh the evidence but only to consider whether the court commissioner abused her discretion in suppressing the evidence.
Steve Benson - Gun Grabber
While Steve Benson may have his act together when it comes to realizing that God is a bunch of superstitious nonsense he still has to figure out that guns are the solution to the problem of government. In this cartoon Steve Benson shows he is a gun grabber.
Non Sequitur - Danae & Jeffery get Pinged by NSA thugs????
Use to make a web page on this photos
Propone Vicente Fox legalizar la mariguana en Latinoamérica
El expresidente mexicano, consideró que legalizar el enervante traerá más beneficios que perjuicios a los países que despenalicen su comercialización con fines de uso social.
El ex presidente mexicano Vicente Fox dijo que para reducir el crimen en la frontera, Estados Unidos tiene que decidirse entre aplicar la ley o legalizar el consumo recreacional de la mariguana.
Fox, presidente durante el sexenio 2000-2006, consideró que legalizar la mariguana traerá más beneficios que perjuicios a los países que despenalicen su comercialización con fines de uso social.
El ex mandatario se ha declarado abiertamente a favor de la legalización de la mariguana como una alternativa para combatir la violencia que generan los carteles de la droga que operan en países de Latinoamerica como México.
"México no es productor ni consumidor de la mariguana... la producción fuerte de mariguana está aquí en California", señaló el ex funcionario.
Estados Unidos va en la dirección correcta al permitir el uso medicinal de la mariguana como primer paso hacia la legalización total de la droga, consideró.
Fox estuvo en Peoria el pasado 12 de septiembre para presidir una serie de eventos cuyo tema central fue el desarrollo económico binacional. El ex presidente fue invitado por el Instituto McCain de Liderazgo Internacional y Fundación United Peoria.
Durante una conferencia de prensa, Fox habló de la inmigración y la necesidad de que Estados Unidos apruebe una reforma para legalizar a 11 millones de indocumentados, así como del conflicto en Siria.
Sobre el tema de la legalización de la mariguana, declaró que México y Estados Unidos no han podido combatir el cáncer del narcotráfico.
"Estados Unidos es el principal consumidor de droga en el mundo, y debe reconocer que tiene dos opciones para frenar la violencia en sus fronteras, o aplica la ley o legaliza la mariguana", dijo Fox.
"La legalización de la mariguana y un control adecuado pueden abrir una oportunidad para una industria perfectamente legal", dijo.
En su opinión, al legalizar esta droga, los millones de dólares que genera su venta ilegal a los cárteles y narcotraficantes pasarán al gobierno.
El ex presidente, quien es agricultor en México, dijo que cuando la legalización de la mariguana ocurra, él quiere ser parte de su producción.
"Una vez que sea legal por supuesto puedo hacerlo, soy un agricultor", declaró.
La legalización de la mariguana, aseguró, ya está en proceso en varios estados de los Estados Unidos.
"Si Estados Unidos decide expandir la legalización para fines recreativos estará avanzando en una dirección correcta en la lucha para combatir el contrabando de drogas, tráfico sexual y muchos otros delitos que ocurren en la frontera", enfatizó.
Blaring block party raises noise concerns in Scottsdale
By Edward Gately The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Sep 26, 2013 7:44 AM
A weekend block party in downtown Scottsdale generated dozens of noise complaints from nearby residents, and city officials now are evaluating how they will deal with a similar situation next time.
The Sound Wave Block Party in the entertainment district closed several streets in an area south of Camelback Road and east of Scottsdale Road from Saturday afternoon well into the night.
It featured outdoor live DJ music and included Maya Day + Nightclub and the W Scottsdale hotel.
Police Sgt. Mark Clark said his department received 37 noise complaints connected to the event.
There were no law-enforcement problems during the event, which attracted 5,500 people, police Cmdr. Jeffrey Walther said.
“We had zero problems other than noise events,” he said. “We had more (complaints) than a normal Friday or Saturday night due to the size of the stage and the level of the bass that was there.”
The Police Department will “tally the noise complaints and find out exactly what the issues were from the neighborhood and then we’ll move forward from there for any future events,” Walther said.
According to the special-event permit, the live DJ music was required to end at 11 p.m., he said.
The entertainment district is south of Camelback and north of Indian School Road, between Scottsdale and Miller roads. It has the highest concentration of bars in Maricopa County and attracts thousands of patrons every weekend from throughout the Valley.
Steve LeVine of Steve LeVine Entertainment received a special-event permit from the city for the block party. Developer Shawn Yari, who owns Maya and the W, submitted a letter to the city authorizing the event.
Mayor Jim Lane said that he is aware of the complaints and that “we are going to be taking a look at that process to make sure we are tending to the elements and guidelines of the special-event process.”
When contacted about the complaints, LeVine said, “I don’t know if that’s true or not, so I have no comment.”
Steve Venker, the city’s planning and design-services manager, said a group effort with city officials and LeVine took place to ensure that the event was “acceptable to the city.” The permit did not require City Council approval.
Councilman Bob Littlefield said he started receiving several calls around 9 o’clock on the night of the event from residents complaining about the loud noise. He said he could hear the noise from a residence near Highland Avenue and Granite Reef Road.
“It was clearly way louder than it should have been,” he said. “So then, all these people who called me had two common themes. One is that they called the non-emergency (police) number and were told there was nothing that could be done. And then the other thing that really annoyed me is they were told this was a council-approved event.”
In response to the complaints, Assistant Police Chief John Cocca sent a memo to all department employees stating that the “special event approval does not give a person/group/event the authority or permission to create excessive noise or disturb the peace” and that an officer should be dispatched or the event supervisor/officer should be notified when calls are received.
Rick Mauch, who lives near Minnezona Avenue and 75th Street in a neighborhood just north of Camelback Road, sent an e-mail to council members complaining about the noise from the event.
“The noise level generated by this event was clearly excessive and well over code limits,” he said. “I do not have a decibel meter, but any reasonable person would have considered the noise excessive. I called the Scottsdale Police Department to file a disturbing-the-peace complaint. They politely explained that nothing could be done ... except to track how many complaints were received.”
Sigrid Egan, who lives near Camelback and Hayden roads, said that she was awakened by the noise at about 10 p.m. and that it grew louder. She also sent an e-mail to council members.
“After about an hour I got up and went onto the balcony and could see above the roofs of the buildings the various colors of flashing lights and heard the blaring music, annoying beat and voices from loudspeakers,” she said.
Raun Keagy, the city’s neighborhood-resources director, said the city’s noise ordinance exempts special events from its provisions, so the 68-decibel limit isn’t applicable. Code-enforcement staff asked the event promoter to turn down the noise four times, he said. Each time, the volume was turned down.
The noise issue isn’t considered a violation of the special-event permit, Keagy said. A violation of the special-event stipulation “may be subject to civil penalties,” he said.
Bill Crawford, president of the Association to Preserve Downtown Scottsdale’s Quality of Life, encouraged residents who were disturbed by the noise to write to the mayor and council.
Crawford said he and other residents were bracing for problems.
“Even though we have been able to provide influence to bring about and strengthen many public-safety ordinances specifically targeting the bar district,” he said, “there is still work to do strengthening our weak noise ordinance in order to protect quality of life in downtown Scottsdale and the surrounding residential areas.”
Editorial: Ex-Chicago alderman scores corruption three-peat
5:43 p.m. CDT, September 25, 2013
"In a state that has earned a reputation for having its share of corruption, defendant Ambrosio Medrano stands out."
That's the first line of federal prosecutors' memo urging a judge to throw the book at the former Chicago alderman for his second public bribery conviction. On Tuesday, Medrano became even more outstanding, pleading guilty in a third scheme.
"Incorrigibly corrupt" is how Assistant U.S. Attorney Chris Stetler described Medrano. Being forced from office in disgrace and spending time in prison didn't stop Medrano from re-offending. "Indeed, the tapes showed that Medrano was nothing but enthusiastic about pursuing another corrupt endeavor," Stetler wrote. "He commented on how he had been thanking God for giving him the corrupt opportunity."
Ald. Medrano first became defendant Medrano in 1996, when he was snared in the Operation Silver Shovel probe. He pleaded guilty to taking $31,000 in bribes while in office and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
In June he was convicted of conspiring to bribe a Los Angeles County official to rig a prescription drug contract. That earned him the distinction of being the first Chicago City Council alum convicted in two separate corruption cases. His guilty plea to wire fraud Tuesday sealed the three-peat.
In that case, he admitted to scheming with ex-Cook County Commissioner Joseph Mario Moreno and others to take kickbacks from the sale of bandages to public hospitals. Moreno pleaded guilty in July.
Medrano faces up to five years in prison for his second conviction, and prosecutors want the judge to sentence him to every minute of it. On Tuesday they indicated they'd ask for 20 years for the third conviction. Medrano's attorney thinks two years would be more like it.
Incorrigible indeed. The guy just doesn't get it. It took an Illinois Supreme Court ruling in 2007 to convince him that no, he could not be re-elected to the City Council after serving time for bribery. (He'd tried in 2003 and lost, but was back for another run when a legal challenge knocked him out.)
"To Medrano, the concept of paying a bribe to get a contract was not some foreign idea that caused reflection or apprehension, even after going to jail for accepting a bribe," the sentencing memo says. "Instead, to Medrano bribery was part of the government process, something that went without saying."
"Most Americans view government as a system that is meant to represent the interests of the public," it says. "To Medrano, however, government is meant to support powerful people who have connections and who pay public officials."
There's a lot of that attitude going around Illinois, and there has been for a long time. Before Operation Silver Shovel — which netted five aldermen besides Medrano — there was Operation Greylord, which exposed rampant case-fixing in the Cook County court system. Fifteen judges were convicted, along with dozens of lawyers, cops and court officials. Then there was Operation Safe Road, the licenses-for-bribes scandal that sent former Gov. George Ryan to prison. Operation Board Games sent his successor, Rod Blagojevich, to prison.
Right on cue, ex-Cook County Commissioner William Beavers — also a former Chicago alderman — was sentenced Wednesday to six months in prison for failing to pay taxes on money he'd removed from his campaign fund and used for gambling and personal expenses.
It seems like only yesterday that ex-U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and his wife, Sandi, the former Chicago alderman, were sentenced to prison for supporting a lavish lifestyle with money taken from campaign accounts.
Then there are the disgraced governors — four of the last nine have gone to prison — and the 30 Chicago aldermen who have been convicted since 1972. Or is it 31? Or 32? It was hard enough to keep track back when each of them counted only once.
But of course don't expect anything to happen, other then hear a bunch of hot air from the members of the Congress and Senate who will be promising to end all these crimes if they just get reelected.
Reach Robert Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8472.
Posted on September 26, 2013 4:28 pm by Robert Robb
Put NSA in a narrower box
The United States needs to put the National Security Agency into a much more narrowly defined box. It’s out of control. And it’s out of control in a way that violates civil liberties and harms U.S. national interests.
Brazil is Latin America’s leading economy and one of the most important countries in the developing world. The United States wants warmer relations with it and to facilitate that had invited President Dilma Rousseff for a rare full-spectrum state visit, with all the pomp and circumstance such occasions can be vested with. For U.S. diplomacy, it was a big deal.
Rousseff canceled the state visit. She did, however, come to the United States. She went to the United Nations to harshly denounce the United States.
Why? News came out that the NSA was intercepting her phone calls and emails. And those of her staff and government. And of Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company.
The National Security Agency is supposed to be a “security” agency. It is part of the Department of Defense.
So, what threat to U.S. security do the Brazilian president, her government and the state oil company pose?
Earlier it was revealed that the NSA was extensively snooping on European Union officials. And what threat to U.S. national security were they hatching?
The NSA was looking at the emails of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto – before he was ever elected.
This gratuitous spying, with utterly no rational connection to protecting the United States against any conceivable security threat, has consequences.
Obviously, it put the kibosh on an important U.S. diplomatic overture to Brazil, to put it mildly.
Brazil is in the market for some new fighter jets. Boeing, a U.S. company, is a bidder. The NSA making sure there are no terrorist plots emanating from Rousseff’s office is thought to have damaged its prospects.
Brazil is also auctioning off deep-sea oil concessions, in which American companies have an interest. In Brazil, however, the question is whether NSA spying on Petrobras has irredeemably tainted the process.
The United States wants a free trade agreement with the European Union. NSA spying on EU officials has, unsurprisingly, cooled interest in Europe and raised questions about whether the integrity of negotiations for such a treaty could be protected.
Domestically, NSA is also out of the box. It’s not supposed to be prying within the United States. The Patriot Act increased the intelligence gathering power of the FBI, not the NSA. Yet it is the NSA that has the telephone records of virtually every U.S. resident.
The NSA has an important job to do. It’s supposed to gather intelligence about true national security threats. In so doing, it will need periodically to follow leads to sources in this country and in foreign governments.
But that’s not what the NSA is doing. Its indiscriminate collection of data is vastly outside its writ, violates civil liberties domestically and internationally, and is damaging U.S. interests.
It is also jeopardizing NSA’s ability to do its true national security job. NSA can tap so easily into Internet data because so much of it is routed through the United States. The NSA revelations, however, have caused other countries to become more interested in developing Internet routes that avoid the United States. They have also given impetus to calls to put the Internet under some sort of international control, which would be disastrous in numerous respects.
Yes, everyone spies. But no one spies as invasively as the NSA. The invasive capabilities we justifiably develop and use for national security shouldn’t be turned to gaining diplomatic or commercial advantage.
And yes, these rows wouldn’t be taking place except for the leaks by Edward Snowden. But it would be unwise for the United States, in today’s interconnected world, to assume that the agency it assigns to steal the secrets of others will be able to perfectly protect its own.
Microsoft outlines 66,539 account requests from law enforcement during first half of 2013
By Timothy J. Seppala posted Sep 28th, 2013 at 11:53 AM 18
We've covered various transparency reports before, but now the whole notion takes on a different feel in our post-PRISM world. Microsoft's latest report details that it received 37,196 requests from law enforcement agencies between this January and June, which impacted 66,539 of its accounts. Seventy-seven percent of those requests were for data like a user's name, IP history and billing address, and with 21 percent of requests, no data was disclosed at all. However, in 2.19 percent of queries by law enforcement, Redmond disclosed "at least some" customer content. What does that mean? Well, the company's definition includes the subject or body of an email, photos stored in SkyDrive and address book info. According to the document, the info was all obtained via lawful warrants and court orders.
While National Security Letters also fall under the guise of law enforcement requests -- which primarily come from the FBI in order to obtain records such as phone numbers and email addresses -- Microsoft is only allowed to publish these statistics on an annual basis. Hence, they're absent this time around, and will be published in the company's next Law Enforcement Requests Report. To see just how deep the rabbit hole goes, do check out the source. We suggest putting on a pot of coffee, though -- it's not a quick read.
NSA watchdog: Employees spied on lovers
Associated Press Fri Sep 27, 2013 10:44 AM
WASHINGTON — Some workers at the National Security Agency intentionally misused the government’s secret surveillance systems at least 12 times over the past decade, including instances when they spied on spouses, boyfriends or girlfriends, according to embarrassing new details disclosed by the agency’s inspector general. In nearly every case, the workers were allowed to retire before they could be punished. [While us civilians will get draconian prison sentences for trivial crimes, government employees rarely get more then a slap on the wrist for major crimes]
In addition to the 12 historical cases, authorities are investigating two other suspected violations and reviewing a third allegation for possible investigation, the inspector general, George Ellard, told Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, in a letter released late Thursday.
Senior national security officials and some U.S. lawmakers have said such cases were exceedingly rare considering the breadth of the NSA’s surveillance programs and reflect how seriously the government monitors use of its systems for potential abuses. [Yea, that's what they always say. The f*ck up never happened before and will never happen again!!!]
“Where (a media report) says we’re sweeping up the communications of civilians overseas that aren’t targets of collection systems is wrong,” the NSA’s director, Army Gen. Keith Alexander, told senators Thursday. “If our folks do that, we hold them accountable.”
At least six times the cases were reported to the Justice Department for possible prosecution, Ellard’s letter said. In some cases, U.S. prosecutors declined to take action but in nearly every case the employees were allowed to retire without punishment. [Yea, that's what usually happens - nothing] In one case, a worker was suspended without pay then retired; in another case, a worker’s promotion was cancelled; in two cases, military employees suffered a reduction in rank, extra duty and brief reduction in salary for two months.
Public concerns about how telephone and Internet surveillance data is handled by the NSA have intensified in the wake of leaks about the agency’s programs by former contract employee Edward Snowden. With the Senate readying to consider new limits on the NSA’s spying programs, national security officials have sought to boost confidence in their procedures. Senior officials have said they moved quickly to report and correct internal problems that led to the NSA’s accidental collection of 56,000 emails and other communications by Americans, and they insisted that willful abuse of surveillance data by officials is almost non-existent.
Grassley, who had asked Ellard last month to provide more information about the 12 violations, urged robust oversight of the secret programs. “We shouldn’t tolerate even one misuse of this program,” he said. [But our government masters will pretty much tolerate any all all crimes committed by the goons in the NSA]
Several cases clearly showed government officials using the surveillance system to probe for information about spouses or paramours. During a 2011 polygraph test, an official acknowledged tapping into surveillance data about his foreign girlfriend’s telephone number in 2004. The official also tried to retrieve data about his own phone but was prevented because internal mechanisms prevented queries on domestic phone numbers without authorization. The matter was referred to the Justice Department. The official retired in 2012 before internal disciplinary action could be taken.
In another case, the foreign girlfriend of a U.S official reported her suspicions that the official was listening to her telephone calls. An internal investigation found that the official had made internal surveillance queries on the phones of nine foreign women without authorization and had at times listened in on some phone conversations. The same official also collected data on a U.S. person’s phone.
The case was referred to prosecutors and the official resigned before internal discipline could be imposed.
I suspect that Jan Brewer is tough on crime to get the votes of the huge number of cops. The city of Phoenix alone has 3,000 Phoenix cops. That doesn't include all the other county, city, federal and other cops living in Phoenix.
While cops aren't any more patriotic then the rest of us, they do vote when there is money in it for them. Such as for initiatives that create more jobs for cops. And Initiatives that create higher pay and benefits for government bureaucrats.
Posted on September 27, 2013 4:28 pm by Laurie Roberts
No pardoning Gov. Jan Brewer’s cowardly clemency policy
It was May 2009 and Shannon Connely was asleep in his southwest Valley home when suddenly the sound of squealing tires and barking dogs awakened him.
Worried because of a recent burglary attempt, Connely grabbed his holstered handgun and ran outside to find a police officer.
The officer, who was looking for a missing child, drew his gun and ordered Connely to drop his weapon. Connely cursed, pointed out that his gun was holstered and ordered the officer off of his property. The officer shouted at him to drop it and lie down and Connely complied. He was promptly zapped with a Taser, then arrested.
Connely, a real estate agent who had never before had a run-in with the law, was offered probation if he would plead guilty to a felony. Instead, he opted to take his chances with a jury. Big mistake. He was convicted of aggravated assault and disorderly conduct and because of Arizona’s harsh mandatory sentencing laws, he would pay for his crime. And pay and pay.
The judge, Maricopa County Superior Court Commission Steven Lynch, had no choice but to give him 10½ years in prison. Even Lynch called the sentence “clearly excessive” and issued an order allowing Connely to quickly petition for clemency.
During his clemency hearing, Connely acknowledged his mistake and apologized and in April 2011, the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency recommended that his sentence be commuted to the seven months already served. The vote was unanimous.
Gov. Jan Brewer turned him down flat.
Today, Connely sits in prison in Safford. His record shows one disciplinary infraction – a minor grooming violation two years ago. For his crime, he will remain behind bars until December 2020.
Our tax dollars – and our government — at work.
No mercy, no second chances and for many inmates, not even a fair opportunity to be heard.
This week, we learned that Brewer has been tampering with the supposedly independent clemency board. In a federal lawsuit filed by a death row inmate, five former members of the board say that Brewer Chief of Staff Scott Smith repeatedly pressured them not to send the governor recommendations for clemency. When they did it anyway, three of them were ousted. Two others quit.
One former member, Marilyn Wilkens, says she was called into Smith’s office last year after the board recommended a lesser sentence for Robert Flibotte. Flibotte is a 74-year-old Payson realtor sentenced to 90 years in prison in 2011 after child pornography was found on his computer.
The board in January 2012 unanimously recommended reducing his sentence to five years, letting him out when he is 79, and lifetime probation.
“Mr. Smith was face-to-face with me, with about five inches separating, us,” Wilkens wrote, in a sworn statement accompanying the lawsuit. “He was shaking his finger at me and told me in a raised voice, almost yelling at me, that I voted to let a ‘sex offender’ go. He became very agitated, refusing to accept the tenants of my explanation….”
Brewer denied him clemency and three months after the vote on Flibotte, three members of the five-member board were ousted: Wilkens, who had been appointed by Brewer in 2010; Ellen Stenson, a 2007 Janet Napolitano appointee, and Duane Belcher, who had been the board’s chairman for 20 years.
All three believe they were dumped because of their votes to recommend clemency for Flibotte and certain other inmates. Two other appointees have since resigned, saying they, too, were told how to vote, though one of the two, Jesse Hernandez. quit over allegations of impropriety.
Brewer’s office denied there is any pressure to keep clemency requests from reaching her desk. “The governor’s office does not intervene in cases,” her spokesman wrote in an e-mail to The Republic.
Well, five members of the board – including three Brewer appointees – say differently.
Clearly, Brewer cherishes her reputation as being tough on crime. What elected politician doesn’t?
But you can’t govern by bumper sticker. Or you shouldn’t.
There’s a reason that Arizona has had since 1913 a system that offers a way to cut sentences short in certain exceptional cases.
Few, if any, of us would advocate the wholesale release of ax murderers. But most of us, in our saner moments, recognize that there are times when the system doles out injustice, times when, because of our humanity or simple common sense, a little compassion is called for.
It takes courage for a governor to grant clemency.
But to pressure a board so you’re never put in a position of having to make the call?
That’s the opposite of courage.
What part of the Constitution allows the FBI to investigate crimes in foreign countries like Kenya???
I suspect this is just some empire building by the FBI managers to create a worldwide jobs program for themselves!!!!
U.S. Sees Direct Threat in Attack at Kenya Mall
By NICHOLAS KULISH and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: September 25, 2013
NAIROBI, Kenya — Viewing the deadly siege at a shopping mall in Kenya as a direct threat to its security, the United States is deploying dozens of F.B.I. agents to investigate the wreckage, hoping to glean every piece of information possible to help prevent such a devastating attack from happening again, possibly even on American soil.
For years, the F.B.I. has been closely watching the Shabab, the Somali Islamist group that has claimed responsibility for the Nairobi massacre and recruited numerous Americans to fight and die — sometimes as suicide bombers — for its cause. [Again since when was the FBI given the power to investigate crimes in foreign countries???? Sounds like the FBI is creating a worldwide jobs program for itself]
The Shabab has already attacked most of the major actors trying to end the chaos in Somalia — the United Nations, Uganda, aid groups, the Somali government and now Kenya. The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars bankrolling anti-Shabab operations for years, and there is growing fear that the group could turn its sights on American interests more directly, one of the reasons the Obama administration is committing so many resources to the investigation in Kenya.
“We are in this fight together,” said Robert F. Godec, the American ambassador to Kenya. “The more we know about the planning that went into this, the way it was conducted, what was used, the people involved, the better we can protect America, too.”
Less than a day after the bloody standoff ended, more than 20 F.B.I. agents wearing flak jackets and helmets were combing through the wreckage strewn across the steps of the mall. Dozens more agents will be headed to Nairobi, American officials say. Some of them are members of the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force squad that investigates extremist groups operating in the Horn of Africa, a law enforcement official said.
Over the next few days, agents, including a full Evidence Response Team, will be collecting D.N.A., fingerprints and other biometric information, poring through surveillance footage and examining guns, laptops, cameras and computers — anything to gain insights into how the attack was carried out and the hierarchy, planning and structures behind the group, especially if they have any ties back to the United States.
American officials are mindful that Kenya, one of its closest allies in Africa, has become a precarious buffer zone between the United States and Islamist militants who have declared foreigners legitimate targets in their war.
The American government has learned the hard way what happens if it does not contain groups responsible for faraway attacks. In 1998, the then-relatively unknown group called Al Qaeda simultaneously attacked the United States embassies here and in Tanzania, killing hundreds and following up a few years later with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Shabab militant group, which has pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda and taken responsibility for killing more than 60 civilians at the mall, is considered an especially dangerous threat because more than two dozen young American men are already learning terrorist tactics in Somalia. So far, this has been a one-way pipeline, but the fear is that some battle-hardened militants could come home with their American passports to strike on American soil.
“You never know when a terrorist attack in a faraway place could be a harbinger of something that could strike at the United States,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former Obama administration counterterrorism official. On Kenya, he said, “It’s a country that has a long history of being attacked by terrorists that are of real concern to the United States.”
Compounding matters, relations between the United States and Kenya had grown frosty before the attack because Kenya’s president has been indicted on charges of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. American officials here were trying to keep their distance from him, but now the two sides must work closely together.
As the mall attack showed, militants would not need to reach the United States to strike hard at American interests. Several Americans were injured in the four-day siege, though none were killed. French, British, Canadians, Chinese, Indians and many others died, most of them Kenyan.
The American government is concerned that the Shabab could target the thousands of Americans living in Kenya, working for companies like General Electric, the embassy or the enormous United Nations office here in the cosmopolitan capital. Tens of thousands of other Americans visit the nation’s game parks, beaches and other tourist attractions every year, according to the Kenyan government.
American officials say that several of the attackers may have escaped, posing as civilians and fleeing in the mayhem. The worry is that they may be planning future attacks here in Nairobi.
Wednesday was Day 1 of an investigation that may take weeks, even months, with the first priority establishing the identities of the 10 to 15 attackers who burst into the mall on Saturday with automatic weapons, shooting some people at random, questioning others about their religion and ruthlessly sorting individuals for execution.
Kenyan officials have said that some of the attackers may have been Somali-Americans, but Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Wednesday that there had been no confirmation of that. Another question is whether a British woman, Samantha Lewthwaite, known as the White Widow, was among the assailants.
Part of the mall was destroyed during the three-day effort to dislodge the terrorists, who had holed up in a supermarket with belt-fed machine guns that officials say were sneaked into the mall days before with the help of a colluding employee.
“The next phase really is making sure we know what’s under the rubble,” said a Kenyan government spokesman, Manoah Esipisu. “Forensic people need to be able to clear that rubble and examine the evidence beneath it.”
The massacre plot was hatched weeks or months ago on Somali soil by the Shabab’s “external operations arm,” according to American security officials. A team of English-speaking foreign fighters was carefully chosen for the target: Westgate, a gleaming upscale mall popular with expatriates and Nairobi’s rising middle class.
Kenya is considered one of the most promising countries in Africa and has become a hub for American interests, including the effort to contain Islamist extremism in the region, putting pressure on the United States to repair its strained relations with Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta.
“This incident has literally put Kenyatta and his deputy in the center stage of the war on terror,” said Peter Kagwanja, the chief executive of the Africa Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Nairobi. “America and the world have to contend with the aftermath of Nairobi.”
The United States urgently wants to decode the tactics of the assault. There is growing concern about the ease with which a few determined militants armed with automatic weapons could storm into a crowded area, kill many people very quickly and hold off government forces for so long. After the Mumbai killings in 2008, the F.B.I. sponsored training sessions for the hotel industry and other groups that could be soft targets for such attacks.
“One of the misconceptions is that we can let Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups stay abroad and not fight them there, and that we would be safe at home,” said Katherine Zimmerman, senior analyst at the Critical Threats Project of the American Enterprise Institute. “That’s really proven not to be the case.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and William K. Rashbaum from New York.
N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens
By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS
Published: September 28, 2013 58 Comments
WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.
The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.
The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.
The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.
N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.
The new disclosures add to the growing body of knowledge in recent months about the N.S.A.’s access to and use of private information concerning Americans, prompting lawmakers in Washington to call for reining in the agency and President Obama to order an examination of its surveillance policies. Almost everything about the agency’s operations is hidden, and the decision to revise the limits concerning Americans was made in secret, without review by the nation’s intelligence court or any public debate. As far back as 2006, a Justice Department memo warned of the potential for the “misuse” of such information without adequate safeguards.
An agency spokeswoman, asked about the analyses of Americans’ data, said, “All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.”
“All of N.S.A.’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose,” the spokeswoman added. “Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity.”
The legal underpinning of the policy change, she said, was a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans could have no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called. Based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the Pentagon decided that it was permissible to create contact chains using Americans’ “metadata,” which includes the timing, location and other details of calls and e-mails, but not their content. The agency is not required to seek warrants for the analyses from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
N.S.A. officials declined to identify which phone and e-mail databases are used to create the social network diagrams, and the documents provided by Mr. Snowden do not specify them. The agency did say that the large database of Americans’ domestic phone call records, which was revealed by Mr. Snowden in June and caused bipartisan alarm in Washington, was excluded. (N.S.A. officials have previously acknowledged that the agency has done limited analysis in that database, collected under provisions of the Patriot Act, exclusively for people who might be linked to terrorism suspects.)
But the agency has multiple collection programs and databases, the former officials said, adding that the social networking analyses relied on both domestic and international metadata. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the information was classified.
The concerns in the United States since Mr. Snowden’s revelations have largely focused on the scope of the agency’s collection of the private data of Americans and the potential for abuse. But the new documents provide a rare window into what the N.S.A. actually does with the information it gathers.
A series of agency PowerPoint presentations and memos describe how the N.S.A. has been able to develop software and other tools — one document cited a new generation of programs that “revolutionize” data collection and analysis — to unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible.
The spy agency, led by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, an unabashed advocate for more weapons in the hunt for information about the nation’s adversaries, clearly views its collections of metadata as one of its most powerful resources. N.S.A. analysts can exploit that information to develop a portrait of an individual, one that is perhaps more complete and predictive of behavior than could be obtained by listening to phone conversations or reading e-mails, experts say.
Phone and e-mail logs, for example, allow analysts to identify people’s friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.
“Metadata can be very revealing,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location of the person’s cellphone is going to allow to assemble a picture of what someone is up to. It’s the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”
The N.S.A. had been pushing for more than a decade to obtain the rule change allowing the analysis of Americans’ phone and e-mail data. Intelligence officials had been frustrated that they had to stop when a contact chain hit a telephone number or e-mail address believed to be used by an American, even though it might yield valuable intelligence primarily concerning a foreigner who was overseas, according to documents previously disclosed by Mr. Snowden. N.S.A. officials also wanted to employ the agency’s advanced computer analysis tools to sift through its huge databases with much greater efficiency.
The agency had asked for the new power as early as 1999, the documents show, but had been initially rebuffed because it was not permitted under rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that were intended to protect the privacy of Americans.
A 2009 draft of an N.S.A. inspector general’s report suggests that contact chaining and analysis may have been done on Americans’ communications data under the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, which began after the Sept. 11 attacks to detect terrorist activities and skirted the existing laws governing electronic surveillance.
In 2006, months after the wiretapping program was disclosed by The New York Times, the N.S.A.’s acting general counsel wrote a letter to a senior Justice Department official, which was also leaked by Mr. Snowden, formally asking for permission to perform the analysis on American phone and e-mail data. A Justice Department memo to the attorney general noted that the “misuse” of such information “could raise serious concerns,” and said the N.S.A. promised to impose safeguards, including regular audits, on the metadata program. In 2008, the Bush administration gave its approval.
A new policy that year, detailed in “Defense Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis,” authorized by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, said that since the Supreme Court had ruled that metadata was not constitutionally protected, N.S.A. analysts could use such information “without regard to the nationality or location of the communicants,” according to an internal N.S.A. description of the policy.
After that decision, which was previously reported by The Guardian, the N.S.A. performed the social network graphing in a pilot project for 1 ½ years “to great benefit,” according to the 2011 memo. It was put in place in November 2010 in “Sigint Management Directive 424” (sigint refers to signals intelligence).
In the 2011 memo explaining the shift, N.S.A. analysts were told that they could trace the contacts of Americans as long as they cited a foreign intelligence justification. That could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation, international drug smuggling or espionage to conversations with a foreign diplomat or a political figure.
Analysts were warned to follow existing “minimization rules,” which prohibit the N.S.A. from sharing with other agencies names and other details of Americans whose communications are collected, unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence reports or there is evidence of a crime. The agency is required to obtain a warrant from the intelligence court to target a “U.S. person” — a citizen or legal resident — for actual eavesdropping.
The N.S.A. documents show that one of the main tools used for chaining phone numbers and e-mail addresses has the code name Mainway. It is a repository into which vast amounts of data flow daily from the agency’s fiber-optic cables, corporate partners and foreign computer networks that have been hacked.
The documents show that significant amounts of information from the United States go into Mainway. An internal N.S.A. bulletin, for example, noted that in 2011 Mainway was taking in 700 million phone records per day. In August 2011, it began receiving an additional 1.1 billion cellphone records daily from an unnamed American service provider under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which allows for the collection of the data of Americans if at least one end of the communication is believed to be foreign.
The overall volume of metadata collected by the N.S.A. is reflected in the agency’s secret 2013 budget request to Congress. The budget document, disclosed by Mr. Snowden, shows that the agency is pouring money and manpower into creating a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion “record events” daily and making them available to N.S.A. analysts within 60 minutes.
The spending includes support for the “Enterprise Knowledge System,” which has a $394 million multiyear budget and is designed to “rapidly discover and correlate complex relationships and patterns across diverse data sources on a massive scale,” according to a 2008 document. The data is automatically computed to speed queries and discover new targets for surveillance.
A top-secret document titled “Better Person Centric Analysis” describes how the agency looks for 94 “entity types,” including phone numbers, e-mail addresses and IP addresses. In addition, the N.S.A. correlates 164 “relationship types” to build social networks and what the agency calls “community of interest” profiles, using queries like “travelsWith, hasFather, sentForumMessage, employs.”
A 2009 PowerPoint presentation provided more examples of data sources available in the “enrichment” process, including location-based services like GPS and TomTom, online social networks, billing records and bank codes for transactions in the United States and overseas.
At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, General Alexander was asked if the agency ever collected or planned to collect bulk records about Americans’ locations based on cellphone tower data. He replied that it was not doing so as part of the call log program authorized by the Patriot Act, but said a fuller response would be classified.
If the N.S.A. does not immediately use the phone and e-mail logging data of an American, it can be stored for later use, at least under certain circumstances, according to several documents.
One 2011 memo, for example, said that after a court ruling narrowed the scope of the agency’s collection, the data in question was “being buffered for possible ingest” later. A year earlier, an internal briefing paper from the N.S.A. Office of Legal Counsel showed that the agency was allowed to collect and retain raw traffic, which includes both metadata and content, about “U.S. persons” for up to five years online and for an additional 10 years offline for “historical searches.”
James Risen reported from Washington and New York. Laura Poitras, a freelance journalist, reported from Berlin.
John McAfee reveals details on gadget to thwart NSA
By Tracey Kaplan
tkaplan@mercurynews.com
Posted: 09/28/2013 07:06:58 PM PDT
SAN JOSE -- John McAfee lived up to his reputation Saturday as tech's most popular wild child, electrifying an audience with new details of his plan to thwart the NSA's surveillance of ordinary Americans with an inexpensive, pocket-size gadget.
Dubbed "Decentral," the as-yet-unbuilt device will cost less than $100, McAfee promised the enthusiastic crowd of about 300 engineers, musicians and artists at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.
"There will be no way (for the government) to tell who you are or where you are," he said in an onstage interview with moderator Dan Holden at the inaugural C2SV Technology Conference + Music Festival.
And if the U.S. government bans its sale, "I'll sell it in England, Japan, the Third World. This is coming and cannot be stopped."
The ambitious -- some would say quixotic -- project is the latest chapter of McAfee's colorful life.
The anti-virus software pioneer's antics have included his widely publicized flight last year from Belize, where he remains wanted as a "person of interest" in the shooting death of his neighbor.
Even so, he remains an icon in the annals of Silicon Valley's history of entrepreneurship. In 1989, he founded the anti-virus software company that still bears his name and once was worth $100 million. In 1994, he ended his relationship with the company and moved to Colorado.
During the interview, the 68-year-old with spiky black hair tipped blond, who wore light blue cargo pants and a black sweatshirt, remarked on a wide range of topics, from how quickly he gets bored once one of his creations comes to fruition (including the software security company he founded) to how yoga helped him 30 years ago to quit using drugs, including his favorite (psychedelic mushrooms).
It was a talk bound to appeal to the young audience, which broke into frequent applause. Among the group was his new 30-year-old wife, Janice Dyson. She said in a brief interview
afterward with this newspaper that she is a former stripper. The couple met in Miami, where McAfee went after being deported from Guatemala.
"I keep him grounded," she said.
McAfee outlined what some might regard as a pie-in-the-sky plan to finish the first prototype of the Decentral in six months. He said the gadget is called Decentral because by communicating with smartphones, tablets and other devices, it will create decentralized, floating and moving local networks that can't be penetrated by government spy agencies.
The design is in place already for a version whose range will be three blocks in the city and a quarter mile in the country, he said. The device will be compatible with both Android and iPhones.
As far as consumers' appetite for such a gizmo, he said, "I cannot imagine one college student in the world who will not stand in line to get one."
Commuters will also find it useful, he said. Neighborhoods will be better able to fight crime because Decentral will include an option that sends an alert if there is a burglary or other crime.
McAfee said the idea for the device came to him well before computer analyst and whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked National Security Agency documents that exposed widespread monitoring of U.S. citizens' phone calls and Internet communications.
But with Snowden's actions, "it became the right time" to make it real, he said.
At the end of the 75-minute discussion, McAfee gamely took questions from the audience about everything from what advice he'd give teens (do what you love) to what he fears (his wife, he joked). In response to a question about marijuana, he made clear he doesn't embrace every aspect of the youth culture.
He said he liked pot users when he sold drugs decades ago because their "lives never go anywhere and they remain customers," adding, "Marijuana is a drug of illusion -- it creates the illusion that you're doing great things when all you're doing is sitting on the sofa growing a beard."
McAfee also reiterated that he never killed anyone in Belize and fled after angering the authorities by refusing to pay a $2 million bribe.
There seemed to be intense interest Saturday in McAfee's
John McAfee, right, speaks with Dan Holden at the "Fireside Chat with John McAfee" during the C2SV Technology Conference + Music Festival at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2013. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group) ( LiPo Ching )
current plans. One man asked whether Decentral essentially creates a "dark Web," or part of the Internet that can no longer be accessed by conventional means.
Yes, he said.
Will the privacy it affords allow criminals and others to evade the authorities, another wanted to know.
"It will of course be used for nefarious purposes," he said, "just like the telephone is."
Contact Tracey Kaplan at 408-278-3482.
Vice Admiral Is Suspended in Gambling Investigation
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ and RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: September 28, 2013
A vice admiral who is second in command at the United States Strategic Command, which oversees nuclear war-fighting forces for the military, has been suspended amid an investigation into his possible involvement in illegal gambling, officials said on Saturday.
The officer, Vice Adm. Timothy M. Giardina, is a highly decorated sailor with more than three decades in the Navy. The suspension occurred on Sept. 3, but was not announced publicly, said Capt. Pamela Kunze, the command’s spokeswoman.
Captain Kunze would not comment further on the circumstances surrounding the suspension, citing a continuing investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
The Strategic Command was first alerted about the issue in mid-July. A month earlier, Admiral Giardina became the target of an inquiry being conducted by the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation into possible use of counterfeit gambling chips at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa, said David Dales, the head of the Southwest division of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.
Mr. Dales said the criminality in question involved poker at the casino, but said he could provide no further information. The agency’s investigation is still open and no state charges have been filed against Admiral Giardina, Mr. Dales said.
It was not clear whether Admiral Giardina’s actions compromised national security or the operations of the Strategic Command.
The commander of the Strategic Command, General C. Robert Kehler, has submitted a recommendation to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Admiral Giardina be reassigned, Captain Kunze said. It has not been determined what, if any, additional actions will be taken. The leadership of the Strategic Command is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
The Strategic Command, based at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, oversees a web of military efforts including the military’s space and cyberwarfare operations. It also controls the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Admiral Giardina, a career submarine officer, assumed his duties at the Strategic Command in December 2011. Before that, he was the deputy commander and chief of staff of the Pacific Fleet. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1979.
He was scheduled to rotate out of his position at Strategic Command later this year. In early July, President Obama appointed an Air Force general to replace Admiral Giardina.
Tim Giardina Suspended: No. 2 U.S. Nuke Commander Under Investigation
By ROBERT BURNS 09/28/13 06:10 PM ET EDT AP
WASHINGTON — The No. 2 officer at the military command in charge of all U.S. nuclear war-fighting forces is suspected in a case involving counterfeit gambling chips at a western Iowa casino and has been suspended from his duties, officials said.
Navy Vice Adm. Tim Giardina has not been arrested or charged, Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation special agent David Dales said Saturday. The state investigation is ongoing.
Giardina, deputy commander at U.S. Strategic Command, was suspended on Sept. 3 and is under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a Strategic Command spokeswoman said.
The highly unusual action against a high-ranking officer at Strategic Command was made more than three weeks ago but not publicly announced at that time. The command is located at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Neb.
Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler, who heads Strategic Command, suspended Giardina, according to the command's top spokeswoman, Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze. Giardina is still assigned to the command but is prohibited from performing duties related to nuclear weapons and other issues requiring a security clearance, she said.
Kehler has recommended to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Giardina be reassigned, Kunze said. Giardina has been the deputy commander of Strategic Command since December 2011. He is a career submarine officer and prior to starting his assignment there was the deputy commander and chief of staff at U.S. Pacific Fleet.
DCI agents stationed at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa, discovered the counterfeit chips, Dales said. He would not say when the discovery was made or how much in counterfeit chips was found, only that "it was a significant monetary amount."
Council Bluffs is located across the Missouri River from Omaha.
"We were able to detect this one pretty quickly and jump on it," Dales said. He declined to give specifics on how authorities determined that casino chips had been counterfeited or how Giardina might have been involved.
Strategic Command oversees the military's nuclear fighter units, including the Navy's nuclear-armed submarines and the Air Force's nuclear bombers and nuclear land-based missiles.
Kunze said Strategic Command did not announce the suspension because Giardina remains under investigation and action on Kehler's recommendation that Giardina be reassigned is pending. The suspension was first reported by the Omaha World-Herald.
Kunze said a law enforcement investigation of Giardina began June 16. Kehler became aware of this on July 16, and the following day he asked the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to begin a probe.
The suspension is yet another blow to the military's nuclear establishment. Last spring the nuclear missile unit at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., pulled 17 launch control officers off duty after a problematic inspection and later relieved of duty the officer in charge of training and proficiency.
In August a nuclear missile unit at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., failed a nuclear safety and security inspection; nine days later an officer in charge of the unit's security forces was relieved of duty.
___
Associated Press writer Margery A. Beck in Omaha, Neb., contributed to this report.
Rihanna's slow loris photo leads to Thai arrests
Bang Showbiz Mon Sep 23, 2013 11:15 AM
Rihanna may have landed two men in jail thanks to an Instagram picture of an endangered slow loris.
The pop star shared a snapshot of her cuddling the cute creature while partying in Phuket, Thailand, leading local authorities to track down the owners of the south-east Asian animal - listed as a protected species - and arresting them.
Rihanna's picture, which showed the big-eyed loris perching on her shoulder, was accompanied by the caption: ''Look who was talkin dirty to me! #Thailand #nightlife (sic)''
The men, aged 16 and 20, could now face fines of up to £800 and a four-year prison sentence for possession of the mammal.
According to the Metro newspaper, Phuket district police chief, Weera Kerdsirimongkon, said: ''Phuket authorities were alerted to the picture and last night police arrested the two individuals who brought out the loris as a photo opportunity for tourists.
''It's like a cat-and-mouse game. But this time it's bigger because a celebrity like Rihanna posted the picture and there were more than 200,000 'likes' from around the world.''
Rihanna has been getting closely acquainted with the local wildlife in Phuket while she takes time out from her Diamonds World Tour, as the 25-year-old singer also posted another picture of her posing next to a group of elephants.
Chicago gives felon 6-figure grant to open liquor store
Watchdog: Store with ties to felon latest problem for blighted neighborhood
By David Jackson and Gary Marx Chicago Tribune reporters
11:57 a.m. CDT, September 28, 2013
With backing from the local alderwoman and money from City Hall, a new liquor store opened earlier this year in South Austin -- one more purveyor of alcohol, cigarettes and lottery tickets in a neighborhood desperate for something more.
Informing the original backer of the store that he would be getting $105,000 in city funds, a letter from the Department of Community Development exclaimed: "Thank you for reinvesting in the City of Chicago!"
Many residents weren't so enthusiastic. To them, the new business was an insult.
But what even they didn't know was that the store was bankrolled and launched by a convicted drug-dealer who has been tied to a street gang and is facing yet another narcotics charge.
A Tribune investigation unraveled the real origins of the controversial liquor store, pinpointing the lack of oversight that led to the business getting licensed and exposing the years of scattershot planning that undermines hope in one of Chicago's neediest neighborhoods.
"It's disturbing on so many levels," said South Austin resident Serethea Reid, who had implored city officials to reject the store's license application. "The concentration of liquor stores means more violence, more trash, more police activity. ... "Are liquor stores and pawnshops your idea of development?"
The Feds made marijuana illegal with the "1937 Marihuana Tax Act", but during World War II, it was re-legalized. Again, not to give the troops a good buzz, but because marijuana or hemp makes damn good rope and canvas.
New law allows industrial hemp crops in state
Joe Garofoli
Published 4:08 pm, Saturday, September 28, 2013
California farmers could be growing industrial hemp - not marijuana, mind you - by spring after Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation that would permit California farmers to grow the long-banned distant cousin of the trippy herb.
But only if the federal government lifts its hemp cultivation ban.
The new law permits the growing of industrial hemp - which contains trace amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, the active psychoactive component in cannabis - for the sale of seed, oil and fiber. Nine other states have passed similar laws.
There is a potential agricultural windfall in California, where $500 million worth of hemp products were sold in 2012, according to industry figures - but all the raw hemp was imported from China, Canada and eastern Europe.
But that windfall won't be realized unless the federal law is relaxed. Federal law regulates hemp in largely the same way it does its medicinal cousin. There hasn't been a commercial industrial hemp crop grown in the U.S. since 1957, hemp advocates say.
But state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, the law's sponsor, feels that could soon change given recent statements from the federal Department of Justice.
In August, a memo from Deputy Attorney General James Cole clarified that the federal government would de-emphasize marijuana prosecutions in "states and local governments that have enacted laws legalizing marijuana in some form" and have "strong and effective regulatory and enforcement systems."
Oversight structure
Leno believes his legislation sets up just such a structure in California.
It authorizes the California Department of Food and Agriculture and county agriculture commissioners to exercise oversight of hemp production, as they do with other crops.
On Monday, Leno will ask state Attorney Gen. Kamala Harris to seek clarification from the Department of Justice about whether its August memo gives a green light to industrial hemp crops now that the state has approved a regulatory process for them.
"I hope by next spring, this (planting) could be happening," Leno said.
"For (the federal government) to say it's OK for marijuana and not hemp would be ridiculous," Leno said. "It seems a given that hemp would be included in (Cole's) statement."
Leno scoffed at the notion that the new law is a back door to legalizing marijuana for recreational use in the state. Colorado and Washington are the only states that permit adult recreational use of marijuana. Medicinal marijuana is legal in California, 19 other states and the District of Columbia.
"Anyone who says that just shows a lack of knowledge," Leno said. "Unfortunately, hemp got wrapped up in the hysteria around marijuana decades ago."
Federal measures
But John Lovell, a lobbyist for the California Narcotics Officers Association, which opposed the measure, said it "would take more than a letter signed by the Department of Justice to have weight. I'd like to see some legislative action" in Congress.
Two federal measures, one each in the House and Senate, tried to legalize growing industrial hemp this year, but got only a handful of co-sponsors.
Should Californians gain approval to begin planting industrial hemp, the retail market for hemp products could boom. It is used in everything from clothing to soap, and as a substitute for fiberglass in automobile parts.
"I think the market could double to $1 billion within five years," said Tom Murphy, a board member of Vote Hemp, an industry advocate. "It could be hugely influential. California is the largest agricultural state, after all."
Joe Garofoli is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
Court to debate right to grow own medicinal marijuana
Posted: Wednesday, October 2, 2013 5:30 pm
By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services
PHOENIX — Medical marijuana patients could learn later this month if they have a constitutional right to grow their own weed.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper said Wednesday she will consider on Oct. 18 a bid by the Department of Health Services to have the lawsuit thrown out. Assistant Attorney General Gregory Falls hopes to convince her that nothing in the Arizona Constitution about the rights of patients to choose their own health care extends to making their own drugs.
If Cooper doesn't buy that argument, she is ready for the next step: She scheduled an Oct. 21 hearing to allow Michael Walz, the attorney for two medical marijuana patients, to tell her why she should order state Health Director Will Humble to let them have their plants.
If Walz ultimately succeeds, the implications go far beyond these two men. It would pave the way for similar rights for the approximately 40,000 individuals who already have been granted permits to possess the drug but now are required to purchase their supply from one of the state's nearly 100 state-regulated dispensaries.
At issue is what Walz said is a conflict between the Medical Marijuana Act that voters enacted in 2010 and a separate constitutional amendment, also approved by voters, two years later.
The 2010 law allows those with a doctor's recommendation to obtain up to 2 1/2 ounces of marijuana every two weeks. It also envisioned dispensaries around the state.
That law also allows anyone not within 25 miles of a dispensary to grow up to 12 plants at any one time. And since no dispensaries were operating, every cardholder initially got that right.
But Humble said that now virtually all Arizonans are within that 25-mile radius. So he is denying grow rights to individuals as they renew their annual permits.
Walz, however, points to a 2012 constitutional amendment which overrules any law that requires anyone to “participate in any health care system.” And that, he argued, means individuals can't be forced to give up the cheaper option of growing their own plants.
“People are legally entitled, if their doctor gives them certification, to obtain and use marijuana for medical purposes,” Walz said Wednesday.
“Many people cannot afford the prices that are charged by dispensaries,” he continued.”Therefore, they need to be able to grow their marijuana for themselves.”
And Walz said that, for some patients, the strain of marijuana is crucial.
“A particular strain may be effective to treat their specific condition and they need that strain,” Walz argued. “They can't depend on a dispensary to make the effort of providing a specific strain for any particular person.”
Humble isn't buying the argument — and not only because he rejects the idea that the Arizona Constitution guarantees individuals the right to make their own regulated medicine. He pointed out that voters themselves approved the provision in the 2010 law, which says the right to grow disappears once there is an available dispensary.
Walz dismissed that as irrelevant.
“I don't know that the voters were aware of that specific provision,” he said.
“They clearly were aware that some patients would be able to grow,” Walz said. “As far as when and how many of those rights would be extinguished, I don't think the voters had a clue.”
I saw the following ad in the Arizona Republic
the week of October 20 to 26, 2013.
DEA has lots of our tax dollars to waste on silly ads
In this weeks Arizona Republic the DEA or
Drug Enforcement Administration ran what looks
like a quarter page newspaper ad which I have
attached to this email.
The ad says:
Turn in your unused or expired medication for safe
disposal Saturday, October 26th 10 a.m. - 2 p.m.
Visit
www.dea.gov
or call 800-882-9539 for
a collection site near you.
I guess the DEA doesn't any any REAL criminals
to arrest, other then people for victimless drug war
crimes so they are trying to figure out ways to justify
their existence by running this ad which is attached to
this email.
1) link to main page
Thomas Jefferson and George Washington used to grow lots of hemp. In those days it was used to make rope and cloth. Of course if Thomas Jefferson and George Washington did that today they would have been arrested by jackbooted DEA thugs and sentenced to live in prison for growing marijuana.
Marijuana was made illegal in 1937, but when World War II started it was re-legalized. Not to get troops high with a safe alternative to liquor, but because it makes good rope and cloth which was used in WWII.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/free/20131012colorado-hemp-crops-industrial-federal-drug-law-farmer-loflin.html
Legal or not, industrial hemp harvested in Colorado
By Kristen Wyatt Associated Press Sat Oct 12, 2013 8:15 AM
SPRINGFIELD, Colo. — Southeast Colorado farmer Ryan Loflin tried an illegal crop this year. He didn’t hide it from neighbors, and he never feared law enforcement would come asking about it.
Loflin is among about two dozen Colorado farmers who raised industrial hemp, marijuana’s non-intoxicating cousin that can’t be grown under federal drug law, and bringing in the nation’s first acknowledged crop in more than five decades.
Emboldened by voters in Colorado and Washington last year giving the green light to both marijuana and industrial hemp production, Loflin planted 55 acres of several varieties of hemp alongside his typical alfalfa and wheat crops. The hemp came in sparse and scraggly this month, but Loflin said but he’s still turning away buyers.
“Phone’s been ringing off the hook,” said Loflin, who plans to press the seeds into oil and sell the fibrous remainder to buyers who’ll use it in building materials, fabric and rope. “People want to buy more than I can grow.”
But hemp’s economic prospects are far from certain. Finished hemp is legal in the U.S., but growing it remains off-limits under federal law. The Congressional Research Service recently noted wildly differing projections about hemp’s economic potential.
However, America is one of hemp’s fastest-growing markets, with imports largely coming from China and Canada. In 2011, the U.S. imported $11.5 million worth of hemp products, up from $1.4 million in 2000. Most of that is hemp seed and hemp oil, which finds its way into granola bars, soaps, lotions and even cooking oil. Whole Foods Market now sells hemp milk, hemp tortilla chips and hemp seeds coated in dark chocolate.
Colorado won’t start granting hemp-cultivation licenses until 2014, but Loflin didn’t wait.
His confidence got a boost in August when the U.S. Department of Justice said the federal government would generally defer to state marijuana laws as long as states keep marijuana away from children and drug cartels. The memo didn’t even mention hemp as an enforcement priority for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“I figured they have more important things to worry about than, you know, rope,” a smiling Loflin said as he hand-harvested 4-foot-tall plants on his Baca County land.
Colorado’s hemp experiment may not be unique for long. Ten states now have industrial hemp laws that conflict with federal drug policy, including one signed by California Gov. Jerry Brown last month. And it’s not just the typical marijuana-friendly suspects: Kentucky, North Dakota and West Virginia have industrial hemp laws on the books.
Hemp production was never banned outright, but it dropped to zero in the late 1950s because of competition from synthetic fibers and increasing anti-drug sentiment.
Hemp and marijuana are the same species, Cannabis sativa, just cultivated differently to enhance or reduce marijuana’s psychoactive chemical, THC. The 1970 Controlled Substances Act required hemp growers to get a permit from the DEA, the last of which was issued in 1999 for a quarter-acre experimental plot in Hawaii. That permit expired in 2003.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture last recorded an industrial hemp crop in the late 1950s, down from a 1943 peak of more than 150 million pounds on 146,200 harvested acres.
But Loflin and other legalization advocates say hemp is back in style and that federal obstacles need to go.
Loflin didn’t even have to hire help to bring in his crop, instead posting on Facebook that he needed volunteer harvesters. More than two dozen people showed up — from as far as Texas and Idaho.
Volunteers pulled the plants up from the root and piled them whole on two flatbed trucks. The mood was celebratory, people whooping at the sight of it and joking they thought they’d never see the day.
But there are reasons to doubt hemp’s viability. Even if law enforcement doesn’t interfere, the market might.
“It is not possible,” Congressional Research Service researchers wrote in a July report, “to predict the potential market and employment effects of relaxing current restrictions on U.S. hemp production.”
The most recent federal study came 13 years ago, when the USDA concluded the nation’s hemp markets “are, and will likely remain, small” and “thin.” And a 2004 study by the University of Wisconsin warned hemp “is not likely to generate sizeable profits” and highlighted “uncertainty about long-run demand for hemp products.”
Still, there are seeds of hope. Global hemp production has increased from 250 million pounds in 1999 to more than 380 million pounds in 2011, according to United Nations agricultural surveys, which attributed the boost to increased demand for hemp seeds and hemp oil.
Congress is paying attention to the country’s increasing acceptance of hemp. The House version of the stalled farm bill includes an amendment, sponsored by lawmakers in Colorado, Oregon and Kentucky, allowing industrial hemp cultivation nationwide. The amendment’s prospects, like the farm bill’s timely passage, are far from certain.
Ron Carleton, a Colorado deputy agricultural commissioner who is heading up the state’s looming hemp licensure, said he has no idea what hemp’s commercial potential is. He’s not even sure how many farmers will sign up for Colorado’s licensure program next year, though he’s fielded a “fair number of inquiries.”
“What’s going to happen, we’ll just have to see,” Carleton said.
1) link to main page
2) put in government and cops
I wonder if "drug war tyrant" Will Humble will try to block this???
In his mind people eating poop to make themselves healthy is probably just as silly as people smoking marijuana to get healthy.
http://www.azcentral.com/business/consumer/free/20131003pills-made-from-poop-cure-serious-gut-infections.html
Pills made from poop cure serious gut infections
By Marilynn Marchione Associated Press Thu Oct 3, 2013 1:55 PM
Hold your nose and don’t spit out your coffee: Doctors have found a way to put healthy people’s poop into pills that can cure serious gut infections — a less yucky way to do “fecal transplants.” Canadian researchers tried this on 27 patients and cured them all after strong antibiotics failed to help.
It’s a gross topic but a serious problem. Half a million Americans get Clostridium difficile, or C-diff, infections each year, and about 14,000 die. The germ causes nausea, cramping and diarrhea so bad it is often disabling. A very potent and pricey antibiotic can kill C-diff but also destroys good bacteria that live in the gut, leaving it more susceptible to future infections.
Recently, studies have shown that fecal transplants — giving infected people stool from a healthy donor — can restore that balance. But they’re given through expensive, invasive procedures like colonoscopies or throat tubes. Doctors also have tried giving the stool through enemas but the treatment doesn’t always take hold.
There even are YouTube videos on how to do a similar treatment at home via an enema. A study in a medical journal of a small number of these “do-it-yourself” cases suggests the approach is safe and effective.
Dr. Thomas Louie, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Calgary, devised a better way — a one-time treatment custom-made for each patient.
Donor stool, usually from a relative, is processed in the lab to take out food and extract the bacteria and clean it. It is packed into triple-coated gel capsules so they won’t dissolve until they reach the intestines.
“There’s no stool left — just stool bugs. These people are not eating poop,” and there are no smelly burps because the contents aren’t released until they’re well past the stomach, Louie said.
Days before starting the treatment, patients are given an antibiotic to kill the C-diff. On the morning of the treatment, they have an enema so “the new bacteria coming in have a clean slate,” Louie said.
It takes 24 to 34 capsules to fit the bacteria needed for a treatment, and patients down them in one sitting. The pills make their way to the colon and seed it with the normal variety of bacteria.
Louie described 27 patients treated this way on Thursday at IDWeek, an infectious diseases conference in San Francisco. All had suffered at least four C-diff infections and relapses, but none had a recurrence after taking the poop pills.
Margaret Corbin, 69, a retired nurse’s aide from Calgary, told of the misery of C-diff.
“It lasted for two years. It was horrible. I thought I was dying. I couldn’t eat. Every time I ate anything or drank water I was into the bathroom,” she said. “I never went anywhere, I stayed home all the time.”
With her daughter as the donor, she took pills made by Louie two years ago, and “I’ve been perfectly fine since,” Corbin said.
Dr. Curtis Donskey of the Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center, who has done fecal transplants through colonoscopies, praised the work.
“The approach that Dr. Louie has is completely novel — no one else has done this,” he said. “I am optimistic that this type of preparation will make these procedures much easier for patients and for physicians.”
The treatment now must be made fresh for each patient so the pills don’t start to dissolve at room temperature, because their water content would break down the gel coating. Minnesota doctors are testing freezing stool, which doesn’t kill the bacteria, so it could be stored and shipped anywhere a patient needed it.
“You could have a universal donor in Minnesota provide a transplant for someone in Florida. That’s where we’re heading,” Donskey said.
Other researchers are trying to find which bacteria most help fight off C-diff. Those might be grown in a lab dish and given to patients rather than the whole spectrum of bacteria in stool.
The hope is “we could administer that as a probiotic in a pill form,” Donskey said.
Louie sees potential for the poop pills for other people with out-of-whack gut bacteria, such as hospitalized patients vulnerable to antibiotic-resistant germs.
“This approach, to me, has wide application in medicine,” he said. “So it’s not just about C-diff.”
———
Online:
CDC on C-diff: http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/organisms/cdiff/Cdiff—infect.html
http://www.azcentral.com/news/free/20131003poop-pills-gut-infections.html
Cure for gut infections: Pills made from poop
Thu Oct 3, 2013 8:08 AM
Hold your nose and don’t spit out your coffee: Doctors have found a way to put healthy people’s poop into pills that can cure serious gut infections — a less yucky way to do “fecal transplants.” Canadian researchers tried this on 27 patients and cured them all after strong antibiotics failed to help.
It’s a gross topic but a serious problem. Half a million Americans get Clostridium difficile, or C-diff, infections each year, and about 14,000 die. The germ causes nausea, cramping and diarrhea so bad it is often disabling. A very potent and pricey antibiotic can kill C-diff but also destroys good bacteria that live in the gut, leaving it more susceptible to future infections.
Recently, studies have shown that fecal transplants — giving infected people stool from a healthy donor — can restore that balance. But they’re given through expensive, invasive procedures like colonoscopies or throat tubes. Doctors also have tried giving the stool through enemas but the treatment doesn’t always take hold.
There even are YouTube videos on how to do a similar treatment at home via an enema. A study in a medical journal of a small number of these “do-it-yourself” cases suggests the approach is safe and effective.
Dr. Thomas Louie, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Calgary, devised a better way — a one-time treatment custom-made for each patient.
Donor stool, usually from a relative, is processed in the lab to take out food and extract the bacteria and clean it. It is packed into triple-coated gel capsules so they won’t dissolve until they reach the intestines.
“There’s no stool left — just stool bugs. These people are not eating poop,” and there are no smelly burps because the contents aren’t released until they’re well past the stomach, Louie said.
Days before starting the treatment, patients are given an antibiotic to kill the C-diff. On the morning of the treatment, they have an enema so “the new bacteria coming in have a clean slate,” Louie said.
It takes 24 to 34 capsules to fit the bacteria needed for a treatment, and patients down them in one sitting. The pills make their way to the colon and seed it with the normal variety of bacteria.
Louie described 27 patients treated this way on Thursday at IDWeek, an infectious diseases conference in San Francisco. All had suffered at least four C-diff infections and relapses, but none had a recurrence after taking the poop pills.
Margaret Corbin, 69, a retired nurse’s aide from Calgary, told of the misery of C-diff.
“It lasted for two years. It was horrible. I thought I was dying. I couldn’t eat. Every time I ate anything or drank water I was into the bathroom,” she said. “I never went anywhere, I stayed home all the time.”
With her daughter as the donor, she took pills made by Louie two years ago, and “I’ve been perfectly fine since,” Corbin said.
Dr. Curtis Donskey of the Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center, who has done fecal transplants through colonoscopies, praised the work.
“The approach that Dr. Louie has is completely novel — no one else has done this,” he said. “I am optimistic that this type of preparation will make these procedures much easier for patients and for physicians.”
The treatment now must be made fresh for each patient so the pills don’t start to dissolve at room temperature, because their water content would break down the gel coating. Minnesota doctors are testing freezing stool, which doesn’t kill the bacteria, so it could be stored and shipped anywhere a patient needed it.
“You could have a universal donor in Minnesota provide a transplant for someone in Florida. That’s where we’re heading,” Donskey said.
Other researchers are trying to find which bacteria most help fight off C-diff. Those might be grown in a lab dish and given to patients rather than the whole spectrum of bacteria in stool.
The hope is “we could administer that as a probiotic in a pill form,” Donskey said.
Louie sees potential for the poop pills for other people with out-of-whack gut bacteria, such as hospitalized patients vulnerable to antibiotic-resistant germs.
“This approach, to me, has wide application in medicine,” he said. “So it’s not just about C-diff.”
———
Online:
CDC on C-diff: http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/organisms/cdiff/Cdiff—infect.html
———
Follow Marilynn Marchione on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
1) link to main page
2) putin police
http://www.azcentral.com/news/politics/free/20131019maine-marijuana-legalization-vote.html
Pot legalization effort moves eastward to Maine
Associated Press Sat Oct 19, 2013 10:00 AM
PORTLAND, Maine — Advocates of recreational marijuana use are looking to an upcoming vote in Maine as an indicator of whether the East Coast is ready to follow in the footsteps of Colorado and Washington by legalizing cannabis.
Voters in Portland are being asked whether they want to make it legal for adults 21 and over to possess — but not purchase or sell — up to 2.5 ounces of pot. The Nov. 5 vote is being eyed nationally as momentum grows in favor of legalizing marijuana use.
The Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that supports legalization, says it targeted Portland because it’s Maine’s largest city and because, unlike many other states and cities, it has an initiative process to get the referendum on the ballot. Organizers hope passage of the Portland initiative could spur similar results in other liberal Northeast cities.
“I think there’s national implications, keeping the momentum that Washington and Colorado started last November in ending marijuana prohibition,” said David Boyer, the organization’s political director in Maine. “This is just the next domino.”
There’s no organized opposition to the referendum, but law enforcement and substance abuse groups are speaking out against it.
In reality, the vote in Portland won’t change anything because people aren’t being targeted by police for possession, said Kevin Sabet, director of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a national alliance that opposes legalization and imprisoning people for marijuana possession.
Legalizing pot sends a message to youths that using marijuana is no big deal, when really it carries health risks including an increased heart rate, respiratory problems and memory problems, Sabet said. The Portland referendum is simply a first step toward establishing a marijuana industry, he said.
“People with small amounts of marijuana are not being locked up in jail,” he said. “This is really about a much bigger issue, which is moving toward the retail sales model where we really would be introducing our new version of Big Tobacco in Maine.”
If the ballot measure passes, it will be largely symbolic because it won’t override state and federal laws. Pot possession is a low priority for Portland police, but they’ll continue enforcing state law, Police Chief Michael Sauschuk said. Besides, possessing 2.5 ounces or less of marijuana is already a civil offense under state law, where violators are issued a ticket and fined, he said.
A majority of Americans now think marijuana possession should be legal, according to a Pew Research Center poll in March. In the national survey, 52 percent of respondents said marijuana should be legal, while 45 percent said it should not, marking the first time in more than 40 years of polling that a majority favored legalization.
Washington and Colorado last year legalized the possession of up to an ounce of pot by adults 21 and over, with voters deciding to set up systems of state-licensed growers, processors and sellers. In August, the Department of Justice said federal authorities wouldn’t pre-empt state law as long as the states developed a sound regulatory structure.
There hasn’t been any public polling on the Portland ballot question, but marijuana-legalization supporters in the liberal city are confident it will pass.
Peter Johnson, a 28-year-old artist, is among those who favor the initiative. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing, as long as people use it in moderation, just like anything.”
But George South, 59, thinks legalization would send a message to children that it’s OK to do drugs.
Marijuana “affects your brain and slows your brain down,” he said. “It’s a drug that shouldn’t be legalized.”
Twenty states and Washington, D.C., have legalized marijuana for medical use, and it’s time to do the same for recreational use, said Mason Tvert, national communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project.
His group has identified 10 states where it intends to support legalization efforts in the next few years. A signature-collecting drive is now underway in Alaska to force a vote in 2014, with Arizona, California, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont targeted for legalization in 2016 and 2017.
“I think more people than ever before recognize the fact that marijuana is actually less harmful than alcohol, and they’re questioning their beliefs about why it should be illegal,” he said. “I think there are a lot of younger people, who, like with marriage equality, are simply growing up with a different mindset with this type of social issue.
“But I also think there a lot of people in their 40s and 50s who have come to recognize that what they’ve been told about marijuana their whole lives simply isn’t true,” Tvert said.
Previous
articles
on
Medical Marijuana & Drug War News.
More
articles
on
Medical Marijuana & Drug War News.
Mexican President Fox wants to legalize pot in Latin America
Propone Vicente Fox legalizar la mariguana en Latinoamérica
Mexican President Fox wants to legalize pot in Latin America
Blaring block party raises noise concerns in Scottsdale
Don't waste your time complaining about those loud bar parties in Scottsdale
Don't count on calling the cops to stop the local bars from disturbing your peace with loud parties!!!!!
Editorial: Ex-Chicago alderman scores corruption three-peat
Source
Put NSA in a narrower box
Robb should be writing that the criminals in the NSA who violated our 4th Amendment rights should be put in prison. Same goes for the members of the US Senate and US House who supported the unconstitutional Patriot Act which is just an end run around the 4th Amendment.
Microsoft outlines 66,539 account requests from law enforcement
No, I am not paranoid - the government IS SPYING ON YOU!!!!!
NSA watchdog: Employees spied on lovers
Source
Draconian prison sentences for trivial crimes???
Governor Jan Brewer doesn't pardon anybody!!!!!
Draconian prison sentences for trivial crimes???
FBI investigating shoot out at mall in Kenya
FBI investigating shoot out at mall in Kenya
N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens
I drive a foreign made Volkswagen and eat lots of Mexican food. I suspect that is justification for the goons at the NSA to spy on me. At least with the convoluted, cockamamie logic the NSA uses to justify flushing the 4th Amendment down the toilet and spying on Americans.
John McAfee reveals details on gadget to thwart NSA
John McAfee seems to be able to shovel the BS as well as any professional politician does so I am not sure if this is something that is real or if
John McAfee just wants to remove some money from your wallet.
No. 2 U.S. Nuke Commander Under Investigation
Admiral Giardina is being investigated for using counterfeit gambling chips at the Horseshoe Casino
Rihanna's slow loris photo leads to Thai arrests
Don't these pigs have any REAL criminals to hunt down????
Chicago gives felon 6-figure grant to open liquor store
Hmmm ... at the same time the government is locking people in prison for using the harmless drug marijuana, they are encouraging people to use liquor which worldwide kills about 2.5 million people. The yearly death toll cause by marijuana overdoses and other health problems worldwide is a big ZERO. On the other hand tobacco yearly kills about 6 million people
New law allows industrial hemp crops in California
I believe that many of the Founding Fathers grew hemp, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Not to help people get high, but because hemp makes damn good rope and canvas.
Court to debate right to grow own medicinal marijuana
They want to remove the 25 mile limit for growing medical marijuana!!!
Source
DEA has lots of our tax dollars to waste on silly ads
Source
Got Drugs?
