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I believe they gave the child a strain of marijuana with a very high concentration of CBD or cannabidiol which prevents the seizures and a very low concentration of THC to keep the kid from getting high.
Of course don't tell sadistic Will Humble who is the head of the
Arizona Department of Health Services or
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer about this child.
Those sadistic b*stards will do everything they can to prevent the kid from taking marijuana to get well.
Source
Mesa family seeks medical marijuana for young son
The Associated Press Wed Aug 28, 2013 4:23 PM
A Mesa family plans to give medical marijuana to their 5-year-old son to treat his seizures caused by a genetic brain defect.
Zander Welton had his first seizure when he was 9 months old and now has them weekly.
His parents say the cortical dysplasia, coupled with autism, keeps Zander from any real form of communication. He squeals and grunts, and on occasion, will bring them a cup to indicate that he’s thirsty, but otherwise doesn’t use hand gestures or form words.
After hearing about some disabled kids thriving thanks to medical marijuana, Jacob and Jennifer Welton have started the process of making Zander a legal cardholder.
The Weltons hope to start giving their son the marijuana oil drops by next week, using a syringe to pinpoint the exact dosage that works.
“If this finally works for Zander and I finally get to meet who he is, that would be amazing. Because I don’t know who he is. He’s just a little boy that’s trapped in this craziness,” Jennifer Welton said.
The Weltons have two other sons and Zander is the second oldest.
He’s undergone two brain surgeries, a third surgery for shock therapy and has been administered a series of trial and error prescription drugs.
His latest prescription made minor improvements with his seizures, but Jennifer Welton said the medication made her son more combative.
Zander’s mobility also is limited and he often reverts back to crawling after a bad seizure.
For medical marijuana treatments, the Weltons need two doctors to sign off on it. The caregiver also needs to be approved for a medical marijuana caregiver’s card and that person has to live with the recipient.
The couple connected with a naturopathic doctor and started the process to administer legal pot, learning Tuesday that their applications have been approved.
Medical marijuana isn’t covered by insurance, however. The state currently picks up the $5,000 a month tab for Zander’s prescriptions.
The CBD oil will cost about $300 a week out-of-pocket. The Weltons have been reaching out to friends and family for donations.
Source
Mesa family seeks medical marijuana for young son
The Associated Press Wed Aug 28, 2013 4:23 PM
A Mesa family plans to give medical marijuana to their 5-year-old son to treat his seizures caused by a genetic brain defect.
Zander Welton had his first seizure when he was 9 months old and now has them weekly.
His parents say the cortical dysplasia, coupled with autism, keeps Zander from any real form of communication. He squeals and grunts, and on occasion, will bring them a cup to indicate that he’s thirsty, but otherwise doesn’t use hand gestures or form words.
After hearing about some disabled kids thriving thanks to medical marijuana, Jacob and Jennifer Welton have started the process of making Zander a legal cardholder.
The Weltons hope to start giving their son the marijuana oil drops by next week, using a syringe to pinpoint the exact dosage that works.
“If this finally works for Zander and I finally get to meet who he is, that would be amazing. Because I don’t know who he is. He’s just a little boy that’s trapped in this craziness,” Jennifer Welton said.
The Weltons have two other sons and Zander is the second oldest.
He’s undergone two brain surgeries, a third surgery for shock therapy and has been administered a series of trial and error prescription drugs.
His latest prescription made minor improvements with his seizures, but Jennifer Welton said the medication made her son more combative.
Zander’s mobility also is limited and he often reverts back to crawling after a bad seizure.
For medical marijuana treatments, the Weltons need two doctors to sign off on it. The caregiver also needs to be approved for a medical marijuana caregiver’s card and that person has to live with the recipient.
The couple connected with a naturopathic doctor and started the process to administer legal pot, learning Tuesday that their applications have been approved.
Medical marijuana isn’t covered by insurance, however. The state currently picks up the $5,000 a month tab for Zander’s prescriptions.
The CBD oil will cost about $300 a week out-of-pocket. The Weltons have been reaching out to friends and family for donations.
Marijuana is the top illegal drug used worldwide
According to this article illegal drugs killed 78,000 people in 2010. They didn't mention marijuana which year in and year out kills ZERO people.
Now compare that to tobacco which yearly kills about 6 million people and liquor or alcohol that kills about 2.5 million people worldwide.
Source
Marijuana is the top illegal drug used worldwide, study says
Published August 28, 2013
Associated Press
Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug used worldwide, but addictions to popular painkillers like Vicodin, Oxycontin and codeine kill the most people, according to the first-ever global survey of illicit drug abuse.
In addition to cannabis and opioid painkillers, scientists analyzed abuse of cocaine and amphetamines in 2010, largely based on previous studies. Ecstasy and hallucinogens weren't included, because there weren't enough data. The researchers found that for all the drugs studied, men in their 20s had the highest rates of abuse. The worst-hit countries were Australia, Britain, Russia and the U.S. The study was published online Thursday in the journal, Lancet.
But there were few concrete numbers to rely on and researchers used modeling techniques to come up with their estimates.
"Even if it is not very solid data, we can say definitely that there are drug problems in most parts of the world," said Theo Vos, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the study's senior author. Vos said people tended to abuse drugs produced close to home: cocaine in North America, amphetamines and opioids in Asia and Australia. The lowest rates of drug abuse were in Asia and Africa. Of the estimated 78,000 deaths in 2010 because of illegal drug use, more than half were because of painkiller addictions.
Vos said countries with harsh laws against drugs had worse death rates for addicts when compared to countries who relied on other policies to wean people off drugs, such as needle exchange programs and methadone clinics.
Other experts warned officials needed to be on their toes to address potential health problems from drug abuse.
"The illicit use of prescribed opiates in the U.S. has only happened in the last 10 years or so," said Michael Lysnkey, of the National Addiction Centre at King's College London, who co-authored an accompanying commentary. "It's possible in another 20 years, patterns will again change in ways we can't predict."
In a related study, scientists found mental health and drug abuse problems including depression, schizophrenia and cocaine addiction kill more people worldwide than AIDS, tuberculosis, diabetes or road accidents.
In some developing countries such as India, attempts to stop AIDS have also slowed drug abuse as they focus on helping people kick their addictions, according to Vikram Patel, of the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Patel recommended an approach to drug use similar to current controls on tobacco.
"A decriminalized drug policy could potentially transform the public health approach to drug use," he wrote in an email. "The enormous savings in the criminal justice system could be used to fund addiction treatment programs."
PhD in Weed: Meet The 82 Year Old Cannabis Scientist
Source
PhD in Weed: Meet The 82 Year Old Cannabis Scientist
By Noga Tarnopolsky | August 27, 2013
JERUSALEM — An award-winning professor of medicinal chemistry and natural products at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Raphael Mechoulam is a trim gentleman who wears tweed jackets and silk scarves.
He is no slacker. At 82, he still works full-time.
Despite Mechoulam’s respectability, his greatest fame stems from two scientific breakthroughs that may earn him a warm welcome among denizens of
/r/trees (sic) .
In 1964, he was the first person to synthesize THC, tetrahydrocannabinol, the principal active ingredient in weed. That leap is what has enabled the scientific study of cannabis.
Before him it was all myths and smoke.
Mechoulam is almost universally referred to as the father of research on cannabinoids. (But no, he has never partaken in the stuff, he says.)
In fact, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta spent a few days in Mechoulam’s lab while researching what became his very public about-face this month on the usefulness of medical marijuana.
In 1992, almost three decades after synthesizing THC, Mechoulam identified anandamide, a naturally occurring human cannabinoid neurotransmitter, (translation: the stuff that makes you feel high when you haven’t ingested anything.)
Given the opportunity to name it, Mechoulam turned to the Sanskrit word ananda, meaning supreme bliss.
Parallel to these achievements, Mechoulam has spent the better part of a lifetime trying to secure approval for scientific experiments — only to crash into the disapproval of officialdom. “An academic lab is an open place,” he says, “and to have young people in the lab working with illegal stuff… How can the head of a lab determine whether the kid who is working on it isn’t taking a bit under the table?”
When just starting his research, in the early 1960s, Mechoulam found some unlikely allies: the narcs. He had a few friends who were cops: “Someone would say ‘hey, could you give him 5 kilos of hash? I know the guy.’”
Et voila: his career was launched.
Mechoulam is still fighting. He recently helped save Israel’s groundbreaking medical cannabis program from yet another assault by Health Ministry bureaucrats, who tried in late June to limit the forms and varieties of medical cannabis available at legal clinics.
Among other things, the ministry threatened (but failed) to ban Avidekel, a locally developed strain of cannabis containing less than 1 percent THC, the element that gets you high, and 16 percent CBD, a palliative cannabinoid that has no side effects. In other words, it doesn’t get you high.
The ministry’s principal concern was that CBD has yet to be isolated and tested in laboratory conditions, in the way that paracetamol, for example, was tested. “Scientists do not like to work with an unidentified mélange when evaluating a compound,” Mechoulam explains.
Dr. Boaz Lev, the ministry’s Associate Director General, says “remember that what we all want is the best for these patients, a medication that we know and understand and can responsibly prescribe them.”
It is easy to giggle about a bum subspecies of weed like the Israeli-developed Avidekel, but for a child undergoing chemotherapy who hopes to keep going to school, non-narcotic cannabis is no laughing matter.
One medical professional said the ministry was thwarted “because Mechoulam stood beside us and never budged, and in the end they couldn’t say no to him.”
By any measure, he is one of Israel’s most renowned scientists.
His groundbreaking article on the synthesis of THC was published almost 50 years ago, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Since then, he has been a recipient of numerous research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health, in Washington, DC.
An experiment he supervised 15 years ago at Jerusalem’s Sha’arey Tzedek Hospital had the remarkable result of diminishing the side effects of chemotherapy on “every single child” who was given TCH in drops, under the tongue. “The nausea and vomiting simply stopped. And when the chemo ended, we stopped the treatment,” he recalls.
Despite this, legal complications stemming from illicit nature of marijuana have almost completely prevented ongoing research on the effects of THC on cancer patients.
Mechoulam says this is “tragic.” Others in Israel are calling it criminal.
The beneficial effects of cannabis for pain relief and in combating chemotherapy’s side effects have long been documented. But now, experiments on cancerous growths themselves, conducted by the Spanish researcher Manuel Guzmán, show outstanding results in reducing the size of tumors in human beings.
Professor Avinoam Reches, a Hadassah Hospital professor of neurology, who as chairperson of the ethics committee of the Israel Medical Association has presided over numerous discussions on the use of medical cannabis, prescribes cannabis to patients with diagnoses known to benefit from its palliative treatments such as Parkinson’s Disease and Tourette’s Syndrome.
Asked to name any colleagues in the world of Israeli medicine who oppose this use of cannabis, Reches replied “no one comes to mind. I can’t think of anyone.”
“I use cannabis in routine ways in my patients, according to the directives that are part of the medical consensus,” he said, underscoring his practice of prescribing cannabis to long-term patients whose case histories he knows well, and mentioning the wariness he feels towards “people who I have never before met, who come in with specific complaints, asking for cannabis. These people do not always tell the truth,” he says, “and have a tendency towards over-use or abuse of the drug.”
Reches said he found it “astonishing” that questions presented to the NIH regarding scientific research on medical marijuana are directed to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Mechoulam is looking ahead. “Governments,” he says, “should set aside the recreational aspects and find a way to allow scientific research to advance.”
This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.
Obama is talking America into a war
Emperor Obama is as bad as Emperor Bush???
Emperor Obama is as bad as Emperor Bush???
Source
Obama is talking America into a war
By George F. Will, Published: August 28 E-mail the writer
Barack Obama’s foreign policy dream — cordial relations with a Middle East tranquilized by “smart diplomacy” — is in a death grapple with reality. His rhetorical writhings illustrate the perils of loquacity. He has a glutton’s, rather than a gourmet’s, appetite for his own rhetorical cuisine, and he has talked America to the precipice of a fourth military intervention in the crescent that extends from Libya to Afghanistan.
Characterizing the 2011 Libyan project with weirdly passive syntax (“It is our military that is being volunteered by others to carry out missions”), he explained his sashay into Libya’s civil war as preemptive: “I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”
With characteristic self-satisfaction, Obama embraced the doctrine “R2P” — responsibility to protect civilians — and Libya looked like an opportunity for an inexpensive morality gesture using high explosives.
Last August, R2P reappeared when he startled his staff by offhandedly saying of Syria’s poison gas: “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” The interesting metric “whole bunch” made his principle mostly a loophole and advertised his reluctance to intervene, a reluctance more sensible than his words last week: Syria’s recidivism regarding gas is “going to require America’s attention and hopefully the entire international community’s attention.” Regarding that entirety: If “community” connotes substantial shared values and objectives, what community would encompass Denmark, Congo, Canada, North Korea, Portugal, Cuba, Norway, Iran, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Poland and Yemen?
Words, however, are so marvelously malleable in the Obama administration that the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “coup” (“a change in the government carried out violently or illegally”) somehow does not denote what happened in Egypt. Last week, an Obama spokesman said: “We have made the determination that making a decision about whether or not a coup occurred is not in the best interests of the United States.” So convinced is this White House of its own majesty and of the consequent magic of its words, it considers this a clever way of saying the law is a nuisance.
Section 508 of the Foreign Assistance Act forbids aid to “any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup” until the president determines that “a democratically elected government” has been restored. Secretary of State John Kerry was perhaps preparing to ignore this when he said something Egypt’s generals have not had the effrontery to claim — that the coup amounted to “restoring democracy.”
Perhaps Section 508 unwisely abridges presidential discretion in foreign policy, where presidents arguably deserve the almost unfettered discretion they, with increasing aggressiveness, assert everywhere. And perhaps if Obama were not compiling such a remarkable record of indifference to law, it would be sensible to ignore his ignoring of this one.
But remember Libya. Since the War Powers Resolution was passed over Richard Nixon’s veto in 1973, presidents have at least taken care to act “consistent with” its limits on unilateral presidential war-making. Regarding Libya, however, Obama was unprecedentedly cavalier, even though he had ample time to act consistent with the Constitution by involving a supportive Congress. As Yale Law School’s Bruce Ackerman then argued:
“Obama has overstepped even the dubious precedent set when President Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo in 1999. Then, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel asserted that Congress had given its consent by appropriating funds for the Kosovo campaign. It was a big stretch, given the actual facts — but Obama can’t even take advantage of this same desperate expedient, since Congress has appropriated no funds for the Libyan war. The president is simply using money appropriated to the Pentagon for general purposes to conduct the current air campaign.”
Obama is as dismissive of “red lines” he draws as he is of laws others enact. Last week, a State Department spokeswoman said his red line regarding chemical weapons was first crossed “a couple of months ago” and “the president took action” — presumably, announcing (non-lethal) aid to Syrian rebels — although “we’re not going to outline the inventory of what we did.”
The administration now would do well to do something that the head of it has an irresistible urge not to do: Stop talking.
If a fourth military intervention is coming, it will not be to decisively alter events, which we cannot do, in a nation vital to U.S. interests, which Syria is not. Rather, its purpose will be to rescue Obama from his words.
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.
Why Syria's chemical weapons stockpile is safe from airstrikes
Sounds like a rerun of the imaginary "weapons of mass destruction" or WMD fiasco in Iraq??? Of course using a slightly different theme this time. Of course this time the show is put on by Emperor Obama, instead of Emperor Bush. Sadly Emperor Obama is just a carbon copy clone of Emperor Bush.
Source
Why Syria's chemical weapons stockpile is safe from airstrikes
By Carol J. Williams
August 29, 2013, 5:00 a.m.
Syrian President Bashar Assad wields command over the world's biggest stockpile of chemical weapons, international security experts say, and he is expected to emerge from any punitive Western airstrikes with his arsenal intact.
With an estimated 50 storage sites, many situated in or near urban centers, any attempt to destroy or degrade the Assad government's supply of poison gases and nerve agents would require a massive invasion of ground forces that no nation considered part of the emerging "coalition of the willing" would be likely to support.
Even if U.S. and allied intelligence have precisely located some of the stores of sarin, mustard or VX gas, analysts say, the likelihood of a successful airstrike is slim because of Assad's powerful air defenses and the risk of bombed chemical stores unleashing their deadly gases.
As the United States and other nations weigh the appropriate response to Assad's suspected use of chemical weapons in an attack last week that killed hundreds of Syrian civilians, Western military strategists have reportedly concluded there is no way to target the weapons of mass destruction with airstrikes. With no appetite in the United States or Europe for the scale of mission necessary to locate, capture and neutralize the Damascus government's chemical weapons, the punitive strikes are expected to be more symbolic than effective in preventing future use of WMD.
"If we were to go after the storage sites, our intel on this stuff, if our track record is any judge, is not perfect, to say the least," said Steven Bucci, a former Army Green Beret officer and senior Pentagon official now directing foreign policy studies at the Heritage Foundation. He alluded to the faulty reconnaissance on Saddam Hussein's purported caches of weapons of mass destruction that prompted the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
A more logical target for airstrikes would be chemical agent production facilities, where bombs or missiles would have a better chance of destroying the substances before they are weaponized, Bucci said.
"That said, what the heck does that do for you, considering that they have a bazillion tons of this stuff already?" he said, branding Syria "the superpower of chemical weapons."
Steven Weber, a UC Berkeley political science professor with expertise in international security and defense issues, describes the objective of taking out Syria's WMD as too daunting and dangerous.
"There is always a risk of unintended dispersal of chemical agents in a missile strike. To do that reasonably safely, you would have to know exactly what is stored at the site, where the people are in the area, what the winds are like. Otherwise you run the risk of creating toxic plumes that would kill people," Weber said. "And you probably can't get to all of them, so it may not make sense to bother taking out only some of them unless you can ensure that any collateral damage is really low."
With so many variables and unknowns, the odds of eliminating Assad's chemical weapons capability are minimal, says Raymond Zilinskas, director of chemical and biological weapons programs at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey.
Factoring the probability of detecting real weapons sites from decoys, acquiring the correct target, successfully launching the munitions and destroying the right contents probably drops the chances for a mission accomplished below 10%, the biotechnology expert estimates.
Charles P. Blair of the Federation of American Scientists this week posted to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists a multimedia report on Syria's chemical weapons, their origins and incidents of suspected use. The Johns Hopkins University and George Mason University biodefense scholar also pointed out that Syria is one of only seven countries that hasn't signed the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention that outlaws production, possession and use of the weapons.
Making a preemptive strike on Assad's chemical arsenal, which Damascus has built up over 40 years, probably would backfire strategically "in this kind of highly propagandized, politicized war," warned Thomas H. Henriksen, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution who studies insurgencies, rogue states and defense affairs. Any civilians killed by the inadvertent release of poison gas from the bombings would be displayed by the Syrian government as evidence of the perfidy of the United States and its allies, he said.
And striking aggressively to eliminate weapons to prevent their future use is a gamble that won't pay off if civilian casualties are inflicted, said Henriksen, a veteran author on U.S. foreign policy who also teaches at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University.
"Even if you think in the long term that it is a good thing to eliminate these weapons, if it blows up and lots of innocent people are killed, no one is going to think about what might have happened later," he said. "All anyone will care about is what has happened in the current time."
Ethics program part of Glendale's post-audit reforms
Translation - our government masters don't obey their own rules. And when they get caught breaking their own rules they pretend that having an "ethics program" is going to change things.
Sorry, but it's already illegal for ANYBODY to steal or commit fraud, and I can't imagine why our government masters need to attend an "ethics program" to figure out that!!!
Source
Ethics program part of Glendale's post-audit reforms
By Paul Giblin The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Aug 28, 2013 10:59 AM
Glendale will re-institute a dormant ethics training program for all municipal employees as part of a sweeping package of reforms being implemented in response to a critical financial audit released last week.
The reforms are largely based on recommendations offered in the audit, which was conducted by a Phoenix-based team of attorneys, forensic analysts and computer experts.
The audit, which took six months to perform, showed that top city administrators mishandled financial accounts, kept information from the City Council and public, and made personnel decisions that were not in the best interests of the city.
The audit was forwarded to the state Attorney General’s Office to review for any legal violations.
“I think we’re a little off-course in how we’ve conducted business,” City Manager Brenda Fischer said. “My desire is to get us back on course and within all policies and procedures.”
Among the other reforms she has instituted:
The city auditor will review all expenditures exceeding $50,000 during the past two years to ensure that they were made in compliance with state laws and city policies.
Fischer will examine all telecommuting agreements with employees to ensure that they too are conducted in compliance with laws and policies.
Administrators will revamp the city’s protocols for projecting tax revenues, perhaps bringing in business leaders or other non-municipal experts to provide broader perspectives in the process.
Human Resources officials will require that boards that oversee certain municipal accounts meet at least quarterly, rather than annually.
The initiatives are in addition to a new policy implemented last week that allows the city auditor to report directly to the City Council rather than to the city manager to provide greater independence.
Mayor Jerry Weiers declined comment on the city manager’s actions. “I’m still trying to sort that out,” he said.
Additional reforms are likely, said acting Assistant City Manager Julie Frisoni. Administrators have reviewed recommendations included in the audit, but she said they consider the set of recommendations as just a starting point for reforming practices.
“This audit has brought up other issues that may not have been recommendations that we are going to undertake and jump on,” Frisoni said.
Glendale already had a policy that required ethics training for every employee every two years, but the training was eliminated a few years ago as city officials sought to cut the budget, Fischer said.
She directed Human Resources Executive Director Jim Brown to re-institute the program this fiscal year and to add an anti-fraud component to the training, she said.
“It’s been dormant, so in light of this, it’s an opportunity to revisit it, re-institute it, as well as strengthen it,” Fischer said.
The new round of internal audits will examine whether proper procedures were used for expenses exceeding $50,000. City policy allows the city manager to authorize spending up to that amount, but bigger-ticket items require council approval.
Fischer’s concern is that high-dollar expenditures have slid past council based on requests that have been presented to her since she became city manager a month ago, Fischer said. “I’ve kicked them back to the departments and said, ‘This is over $50,000; it has to go to council,’” she said.
The review of telecommuting practices is tied to the telecommuting arrangement former City Manager Ed Beasley approved for former Human Resources Executive Director Alma Carmicle, allowing her to work from Mississippi for the better part of a year before she retired in 2012.
The new city manager wants to review the number and circumstances of employees who telecommute, and the methods they use to assure accountability and security of city property and data, she said.
“It’s about internal controls, accountability, doing things the right way with the proper authority,” Fischer said.
She also has been considering new approaches to predicting the city’s income. She wants to better understand employees’ practices, with the idea of perhaps involving community and business leaders in the process.
Considering that Fischer placed four top financial administrators on leave based on the audit’s findings, she may have little choice but to look outside the organization for expertise until matters with those employees are resolved.
Councilman Gary Sherwood, in particular, has been critical of the city’s revenue projections. For months, he has criticized administrators’ fluctuating projections, saying he has little confidence in their numbers. And that was before the audit was released.
Bend over, Jan Brewer wants what is in your wallet!!
Source
Arizona sales tax ranks 9th in nation
By Russ Wiles The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Aug 29, 2013 4:45 PM
When shopping for a car or other big-ticket item, don’t forget to budget for what local governments get out of the deal. Arizonans pay fairly high sales taxes when state rates are included along with those at city and county levels, according to a new report.
Arizona’s average combined sales-tax rate of 8.16 percent — equal to a tax of $8.16 on every $100 spent — ranks ninth-highest in the nation, reported the Tax Foundation in a midyear study.
The report singled out Tuba City in northeastern Arizona, a community on the Navajo Reservation, for charging the stiffest levies in the nation.
Tennessee had the highest combined rate at 9.44 percent, with Arkansas next at 9.18 percent.
Five states do not have a statewide sales tax — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon, the report said. However, Alaska and Montana allow towns, cities or other jurisdictions to charge local sales taxes. Arizona is one of 38 states where local sales taxes are levied.
The report from the Washington, D.C.-based research group cited Tuba City as having the highest combined sales-tax rate in the nation at 12.725 percent. “This rate is composed of a 5.6 percent state tax, a 1.125 percent Coconino County tax and an additional 6 percent tribal tax,” wrote the report’s author, Scott Drenkard.
Tuba City is not included in a separate sales-tax report compiled by the League of Arizona Cities and Towns and the Arizona Department of Revenue. That report shows Fredonia in Coconino County with the state’s highest rate at 10.725 percent, with San Luis in Yuma County close behind at 10.7 percent. Huachuca City in Cochise County charges a state-low 7.6 percent.
Glendale is near the top at 9.2 percent. Phoenix’s combined rate is 8.3 percent. Among other larger Arizona cities, Chandler and Gilbert are at 7.8 percent, Scottsdale has a 7.95 percent rate, Mesa taxes sales at 8.05 percent and Tucson is at 8.1 percent.
These rates are for general retail purposes. Different rates sometimes apply on restaurant meals, hotel stays and other special transactions.
According to the Tax Foundation, California has the highest state-only rate at 7.5 percent. Arizona ranks 27th in state sales taxes alone. It’s also among a few states that have cut their rates recently, to 5.6 percent from 6.6 percent when the temporary sales-tax increase expired around the end of May.
The Tax Foundation report noted that sales-tax rates tell only part of the story, adding that it’s also important to look at bases — the number and types of transactions on which sales taxes apply.
“States can vary greatly in this regard,” Drenkard wrote in the report. “For instance, most states exempt groceries from the sales tax, others tax groceries at a limited rate and still others tax groceries at the same rate as all other products.”
Clothing is another item that sometimes is exempted or taxed at a lower rate.
Hula-seeking tourists should beware: “Experts generally agree that Hawaii has the broadest sales tax in the United States, taxing many products multiple times,” said Drenkard’s report, which also cited New Mexico and South Dakota as having very broad bases.
Reach the reporter at russ.wiles@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8616.
Combined sales-tax rates
Arizona ranks fairly high in state and average local sales taxes, according to a Tax Foundation study. State rankings and the combined rate:
1. Tennessee - 9.44 percent
2. Arkanasas - 9.18 percent
3. Louisiana - 8.89 percent
4. Washington - 8.87 percent
5. Oklahoma - 8.72 percent
9. Arizona - 8.16 percent
North Korea's Kim Jong Un executes ex-girlfriend???
Remember our government leaders always know what's best for us!!!!!
Maybe Kim Jong Un is a mass murderer, but he is a rank amateur compared to American Emperors Bush and Obama who have murdered thousands and possibly millions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When it comes to murders that target specific individuals Kim Jong Un is a again a rank amateur compared the hundreds of people Obama has murdered with drones.
Source
North Korea's Kim reportedly has ex-girlfriend, 11 others executed
By Carol J. Williams
August 29, 2013, 3:09 p.m.
A North Korean firing squad last week executed a former girlfriend of leader Kim Jong Un and 11 other entertainers for allegedly violating laws banning pornography, a South Korean newspaper reported Thursday.
The report by Chosun Ilbo, an English-language newspaper of a Seoul media conglomerate, deemed the reported Aug. 20 executions a death blow to expectations that Kim would oversee a transition of his isolated and tyrannized people into a more open era.
Among the dozen performers shot to death while their families and former band members were forced to watch was Hyon Song Wol, a singer Kim reportedly courted a decade ago but was forced to abandon by his dictatorial father, Kim Jong Il.
Hyon was pictured by North Korean state television performing at a concert Aug. 8 in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, less than two weeks before her execution, Chosun Ilbo reported, posting a picture of the singer juxtaposed against one of Kim applauding at the concert.
The 12 members of the Unhasu Orchestra and the Wangjaesan Light Music Band were accused of violating anti-pornography laws by videotaping themselves having sex and selling copies of the tape to North Korean fans and in China.
The South Korean newspaper, which attributed reports of the executions to sources in China, said one also claimed that some of those arrested in the Aug. 17 crackdown were found to have Bibles in their possession. Like most communist countries, North Korea denounces religion as an undesirable foreign influence.
Hyon married a North Korean military officer after Kim's father forced their breakup, but reportedly continued to see the Pyongyang heir apparent even after her marriage, Chosun Ilbo said.
Kim, 30, is believed to have married Hyon's fellow band member, Ri Sol Ju, in the last year or so. Ri began showing up with Kim at cultural events in the capital a little more than a year ago, including at a female band concert in July 2012 that featured Western music, mini-skirted violinists and a parade of knock-off Disney characters. The gala raised speculation that Kim would relax longstanding constraints on artistic expression and social behavior imposed by his father and grandfather since North Korea's emergence as a separate state after World War II.
The performance that dispensed with the usual dour dress and state-mandated repertoire gave rise to "hopes that the young leader is more open to ideas from overseas, but that was apparently misreading," Chosun Ilbo concluded.
"Kim Jong Un has been viciously eliminating anyone who he deems a challenge to his authority," the newspaper said, quoting an unnamed source. The executions "show that he is fixated on consolidating his leadership."
Kim and his military and political hierarchies provoked new strain in relations with South Korea and the West this year by conducting a prohibited nuclear bomb test and proclaiming as invalid the 1953 armistice that halted fighting in the Korean War. The two sides never signed a peace treaty to formally end the conflict.
Is Obama lying about his "new" marijuana position???
When you read this article you will see that I am not the only one who thinks Emperor Obama may be lying about his new position on marijuana.
Obama lied before when he said he wouldn't shake down people for medical marijuana, but he continue to send his DEA thugs to shake down medical marijuana users in California.
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Marijuana advocates cheer Obama administration stand
By Ari Bloomekatz
August 29, 2013, 1:30 p.m.
Marijuana advocates in California and elsewhere cheered the Obama administration's announcement Thursday that it would not interfere with new laws in Colorado and Washington state permitting recreational use of cannabis.
But the advocates cautioned there is still a ways to go before legalization.
Dale Gieringer, a leading marijuana advocate in California, said he is encouraged by the new U.S. Justice Department memo, but he notes he has been encouraged by past memos only to see federal enforcement increase.
“There are some weasel words in this,” he said. "They’re not going to make a priority to do something, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do it.”
The memo written by Deputy Atty. Gen. James M. Cole is a sharp turn from the last memo he wrote in 2011, in which he emphasized that commercial marijuana operations were not protected by their states’ laws.
The document released Thursday said prosecutors “should not consider the size or commercial nature of a marijuana operation alone” as a factor for enforcement.
“I hope the attorney general follows through with the spirit of their memo, but we’ll have to see,” Gieringer said.
But at least in writing, the Justice Department has now decided against seeking to block new state laws in Colorado and Washington that legalize the recreational use of marijuana.
They also said they will not bring federal prosecutions against dispensaries or businesses that sell small amounts of marijuana to adults.
A department official stressed, however, that marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and that U.S. prosecutors will continue to aggressively enforce the law against those who sell marijuana to minors or to criminal gangs that are involved in drug trafficking.
Atty. Gen. Eric Holder described the Obama administration’s middle-ground approach to marijuana enforcement in a call to the governors of the two states.
Under the new guidance, a marijuana dispensary will not be targeted by federal prosecutors based on its size or its volume alone, an official said.
This change could have an immediate effect in states where medical marijuana is legal under state law.
Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said Thursday's announcement will reverberate not only in Washington and Colorado, but also in California and New York, and in other countries as well.
In a phone interview from Jamaica, Nadelmann said that country is moving to legalize marijuana and that some officials had been expecting opposition from the U.S. But Nadelmann said he told them there was now a lot less to fear.
"With today's announcement, it reinforces what I was saying in a huge way," Nadelmann said. "I was expecting a yellow light, but this light looks a lot more greenish than I had expected."
"The White House is essentially saying proceed with caution," he said.
Nadelmann said the announcement is "significant for the growing number of the other states where the majority of the electorate favor legalizing marijuana and it has international implications" for countries like Jamaica and Uruguay.
As for California, Nadelmann said "there's more or less a consensus among key allies to try and put this on the ballot in 2016."
Missouri poised to enact measure nullifying federal gun laws
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Gun Bill in Missouri Would Test Limits in Nullifying U.S. Law
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: August 28, 2013 738 Comments
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Unless a handful of wavering Democrats change their minds, the Republican-controlled Missouri legislature is expected to enact a statute next month nullifying all federal gun laws in the state and making it a crime for federal agents to enforce them here. A Missourian arrested under federal firearm statutes would even be able to sue the arresting officer.
Lawmakers are considering whether to override a veto of a gun bill by Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri, who considered the bill unconstitutional.
The law amounts to the most far-reaching states’ rights endeavor in the country, the far edge of a growing movement known as “nullification” in which a state defies federal power.
The Missouri Republican Party thinks linking guns to nullification works well, said Matt Wills, the party’s director of communications, thanks in part to the push by President Obama for tougher gun laws. “It’s probably one of the best states’ rights issues that the country’s got going right now,” he said.
The measure was vetoed last month by Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, as unconstitutional. But when the legislature gathers again on Sept. 11, it will seek to override his veto, even though most experts say the courts will strike down the measure. Nearly every Republican and a dozen Democrats appear likely to vote for the override.
Richard G. Callahan, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, is concerned. He cited a recent joint operation of federal, state and local law enforcement officials that led to 159 arrests and the seizing of 267 weapons, and noted that the measure “would have outlawed such operations, and would have made criminals out of the law enforcement officers.”
In a letter explaining his veto, Mr. Nixon said the federal government’s supremacy over the states’ “is as logically sound as it is legally well established.” He said that another provision of the measure, which makes it a crime to publish the name of any gun owner, violates the First Amendment and could make a crime out of local newspapers’ traditional publication of “photos of proud young Missourians who harvest their first turkey or deer.”
But the votes for the measure were overwhelming. In the House, all but one of the 109 Republicans voted for the bill, joined by 11 Democrats. In the Senate, all 24 Republicans supported it, along with 2 Democrats. Overriding the governor’s veto would require 23 votes in the Senate and 109 in the House, where at least one Democrat would have to come on board.
The National Rifle Association, which has praised Mr. Nixon in the past for signing pro-gun legislation, has been silent about the new bill. Repeated calls to the organization were not returned.
Historically used by civil rights opponents, nullification has bloomed in recent years around a host of other issues, broadly including medical marijuana by liberals and the new health care law by conservatives.
State Representative T. J. McKenna, a Democrat from Festus, voted for the bill despite saying it was unconstitutional and raised a firestorm of protest against himself. “If you just Google my name, it’s all over the place about what a big coward I am,” he said with consternation, and “how big of a ‘craven’ I was. I had to look that up.”
The voters in his largely rural district have voiced overwhelming support for the bill, he said. “I can’t be Mr. Liberal, St. Louis wannabe,” he said. “What am I supposed to do? Just go against all my constituents?”
As for the veto override vote, he said, “I don’t know how I’m going to vote yet.”
State Representative Doug Funderburk, a Republican from St. Peters and the author of the bill, said he expected to have more than enough votes when the veto override came up for consideration.
Adam Winkler, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, who follows nullification efforts nationally, said that nearly two dozen states had passed medical marijuana laws in defiance of federal restrictions. Richard Cauchi, who tracks such health legislation for the National Conference of State Legislatures, said: “Since January 2011, at least 23 states have considered bills seeking to nullify the health care law; as of mid-2013 only one state, North Dakota, had a signed law. Its language states, however, that the nullification provisions ‘likely are not authorized by the United States Constitution.’ ”
What distinguishes the Missouri gun measure from the marijuana initiatives is its attempt to actually block federal enforcement by setting criminal penalties for federal agents, and prohibiting state officials from cooperating with federal efforts. That crosses the constitutional line, said Robert A. Levy, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute’s board of directors — a state cannot frustrate the federal government’s attempts to enforce its laws.
Mr. Levy, whose organization has taken a leading role in fighting for gun rights, said, “With the exception of a few really radical self-proclaimed constitutional authorities, state nullification of federal law is not on the radar scope.”
Still, other states have passed gun laws that challenge federal power; a recent wave began with a Firearms Freedom Act in Montana that exempts from federal regulations guns manufactured there that have not left the state.
Gary Marbut, a gun rights advocate in Montana who wrote the Firearms Freedom Act, said that such laws were “a vehicle to challenge commerce clause power,” the constitutional provision that has historically granted broad authority to Washington to regulate activities that have an impact on interstate commerce. His measure has served as a model that is spreading to other states. Recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down Montana’s law, calling it “pre-empted and invalid.”
A law passed this year in Kansas has also been compared to the Missouri law. But Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, disagreed, saying it had been drafted “very carefully to ensure that there would be no situation where a state official would be trying to arrest a federal official.”
In Missouri, State Representative Jacob Hummel, a St. Louis Democrat and the minority floor leader, said that he was working to get Democrats who voted for the bill to vote against overriding the veto. “I think some cooler heads will prevail in the end,” he said, “but we will see.”
Taking up legislative time to vote for unconstitutional bills that are destined to end up failing in the courts is “a waste of taxpayers’ money,” Mr. Hummel said, adding that more and more, the legislature passes largely symbolic resolutions directed at Congress.
“We’re elected to serve the citizens of the state of Missouri, at the state level,” he said. “We were not elected to tell the federal government what to do — that’s why we have Congressional elections.”
The lone Republican opponent of the bill in the House, State Representative Jay Barnes, said, “Our Constitution is not some cheap Chinese buffet where we get to pick the parts we like and ignore the rest.” He added, “Two centuries of constitutional jurisprudence shows that this bill is plainly unconstitutional, and I’m not going to violate my oath of office.”
Mr. Funderburk, the bill’s author, clearly disagrees. And, he said, Missouri is only the beginning. “I’ve got five different states that want a copy” of the bill, he said.
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Missouri poised to enact measure nullifying federal gun laws
Published August 29, 2013
FoxNews.com
The Republican-led Missouri Legislature is expected to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of a bill that would expand gun rights and make federal gun regulations unenforceable -- even as similar laws adopted in other states to buck federal gun rules face legal challenges.
Several of Nixon’s fellow Democrats told The Associated Press that they would vote to override his veto when lawmakers convene in September, even while agreeing with the governor that the bill couldn’t survive a court challenge. Many of them noted that in some parts of Missouri, a “no” vote on gun legislation could be career ending.
The legislation would make it a misdemeanor for federal agents to attempt to enforce any federal gun regulations that “infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms.” The same criminal charges would apply to journalists who publish any identifying information about gun owners. The charge would be punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Nixon said the bill infringes on the U.S. Constitution by giving precedence to state law over federal laws and by limiting the First Amendment rights of media.
The legislation is one of the boldest measures yet in a recent national trend in which states are attempting to nullify federal laws. A recent Associated Press analysis found that about four-fifths of the states have enacted local laws that directly reject or ignore federal laws on gun control, marijuana use, health insurance requirements and identification standards for driver’s licenses. Relatively few of those go so far as to threaten criminal charges against federal authorities.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week ruled against a series of laws enacted in Montana that attempt to declare that federal firearms regulations don't apply to guns made and kept in that state. Similar laws have been adopted in other states.
In the Montana case, the Justice Department successfully argued that the courts have already decided Congress can use its power to regulate interstate commerce to set standards on such items as guns.
The ruling has the potential to affect similar laws in several other states and leaves open the possibility of an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The state of Montana has intervened in support of its law. The case also attracted the support of Utah, Alaska, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
In Missouri, gun rights legislation typically has received bipartisan support. In 2003, the Republican-led Legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Bob Holden’s veto of legislation legalizing concealed guns with the help of more than two dozen Democrats. That same year, Democrats helped Republicans to override another Holden veto of a bill limiting lawsuits against gun manufacturers.
“We love our guns and we love hunting. It’s not worth the fight for me to vote against it,” said Rep. T.J. McKenna, D-Festus. But, he added, “the bill is completely unconstitutional, so the courts are going to have to throw it out.”
McKenna was among 11 House Democrats who joined Republicans to pass the Missouri gun legislation in May, by a 116-38 vote. The bill cleared the Senate 26-6, with two Democrats supporting it. A veto override needs a two-thirds majority in both chambers, or 109 votes in the House and 23 in the Senate.
Republicans hold 24 Senate seats. Although Republicans currently hold 109 House seats, they’re down at least one of their own. Rep. Jay Barnes was the only Republican to vote against the original bill and said he opposes a veto override.
“Our Constitution is not a Chinese buffet, which we like and do not like,” the Jefferson City attorney told the AP. “The First Amendment is part of the Constitution that we must uphold. … (And) the supremacy clause means that states cannot criminalize the activities of agents of the federal government.”
If the rest of the Republicans stick together, and none are absent, that means they will need at least one Democratic vote to override the veto.
But so far, at least three House Democrats McKenna, Keith English of Florissant and Ben Harris of Hillsboro said they would support a veto override, and Democratic Rep. Jeff Roorda of Barnhart said he was leaning toward it.
“Being a rural-area Democrat, if you don’t vote for any gun bill, it will kill you,” Harris said. “That’s what the Republicans want you to do is vote against it, because if you vote against it, they’ll send one mailer every week just blasting you about guns, and you’ll lose” re-election.
Four other Democrats who voted for the bill told the AP they were now undecided. At least one of the original Democratic “yes” votes Rep. Steve Hodges, of East Prairie said he would switch to a “no.”
This year’s vetoed gun bill is entitled the “Second Amendment Preservation Act” a label that some Democrats said makes it politically risky to oppose.
Democratic Rep. Ed Schieffer, who proclaims himself “100 percent pro-gun,” said he voted for the bill in May with an eye toward a potential 2014 state Senate campaign against Republican Rep. Jeanie Riddle, of Mokane, who also supported the bill. Schieffer, of Troy, said he is undecided whether to support a veto override.
“I personally believe that any higher court will probably rule this particular gun law unconstitutional on that, I probably agree that the governor’s right,” Schieffer said. “But I may end up still voting for the gun bill, because I don’t want to be on record for not supporting guns.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Missouri to nullify federal firearm laws while Obama offers new gun control measures
Published time: August 29, 2013 21:49
As the White House rolls out new plans meant to curb violent gun crime in America, residents in the state of Missouri may soon be able to bypass federal firearm laws.
United States Vice President Joe Biden announced additional steps on Thursday that the Obama administration will move forward with as part of a gun-control initiative ramped-up following last year’s mass shooting at a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school. At the same time, however, the Republican-controlled state legislature in Missouri is on the verge of defying both the governor and the US Constitution by pushing forward a bill that will prohibit local authorities from enacting federal gun laws.
Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, vetoed Republican-authored legislation last month that would make it a misdemeanor for the feds to attempt to enforce any federal gun regulations that “infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms.” Despite shutting down the bill, however, lawmakers are expected to override his veto in the coming days and let the measure go on the books.
If passed, the law will also force journalists who publish identifying information about gun owners to pay a $1,000 fine and spend a year in jail. Gov. Nixon said it could start a precedent that would erode some First Amendment rights for the media if his veto is rejected.
In a letter to the New York Times, Nixon said the bill would make it a crime for a local newspaper to publish “photos of proud young Missourians who harvest their first turkey or deer.” According to some estimates, however, local lawmakers will likely make it impossible for the law to be vetoed anytime soon.
When the bill was originally passed in the State House, 108 of the 109 Republicans voted in favor of it, as did 11 Democrats. In the Senate, the Times reported, two-dozen Republicans and 2 Democrats signed on in support. In order for the veto to be rejected, the legislature will need 109 votes from the House and 23 from the Senate.
State Representative T. J. McKenna (D-Festus) told the Times he voted for the bill even though he doesn’t favor it because the repercussions could have been dastardly.
“If you just Google my name, it’s all over the place about what a big coward I am,” he told the paper. “I can’t be Mr. Liberal, St. Louis wannabe,” he said. “What am I supposed to do? Just go against all my constituents?”
Speaking to Fox News, McKenna added that the bill would violate constitutional law and will likely be thrown out, even if the veto override receives enough votes.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is hoping he can advance reformed gun rules on a federal level that, if the Missouri legislature has its way, will be null and void in The Show-Me State—until, of course, a court intervenes and opines otherwise.
Months after the White House announced plans to reform laws in the wake of the Newtown shooting, Biden on Thursday said the administration is looking to tackle firearm crime by launching two new front lines in their war against guns. The vice president proposed a White House plan to stop letting military weapons be re-sold to people in the US or allied countries, as well as another that would close down a loophole that currently lets Americans who are ineligible to own a firearm bypass restrictions by registering weapons in the name of a corporation or trust.
"It's simple, it's straightforward, it's common sense," Biden said.
Obama unveils modest new restrictions on some guns
“Banning these rifles because of their use in quote-unquote crimes is like banning Model Ts because so many of them are being used as getaway cars in bank robberies,” said Ed Woods, a 47-year-old from the Chico area of Northern California.
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Obama unveils modest new restrictions on some guns
By Josh Lederman Associated Press Thu Aug 29, 2013 10:41 PM
WASHINGTON — Months after gun control efforts crumbled in Congress, Vice President Joe Biden stood shoulder-to-shoulder Thursday with the attorney general and the top U.S. firearms official and declared the Obama administration would take two new steps to curb American gun violence.
But the narrow, modest scope of those steps served as pointed reminders that without congressional backing, President Barack Obama’s capacity to make a difference is severely inhibited.
Still, Biden renewed a pledge from him and the president to seek legislative fixes to keep guns from those who shouldn’t have them — a pledge with grim prospects for fulfillment amid the current climate on Capitol Hill.
“If Congress won’t act, we’ll fight for a new Congress,” Biden said in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. “It’s that simple. But we’re going to get this done.”
One new policy will bar military-grade weapons that the U.S. sells or donates to allies from being imported back into the U.S. by private entities. In the last eight years, the U.S. has approved 250,000 of those guns to come back to the U.S., the White House said, arguing that some end up on the streets. From now on, only museums and a few other entities like the government will be eligible to reimport military-grade firearms.
The ban will largely affect antiquated, World War II-era weapons that, while still deadly, rarely turn up at crime scenes, leaving some to question whether the new policy is much ado about nothing.
“Banning these rifles because of their use in quote-unquote crimes is like banning Model Ts because so many of them are being used as getaway cars in bank robberies,” said Ed Woods, a 47-year-old from the Chico area of Northern California.
Woods said he collects such guns because of their unique place in American history. He now wonders whether he’ll be prohibited from purchasing the type of M1 Garand rifle his father used during World War II. The U.S. later sold thousands of the vintage rifles to South Korea.
“Someday my kids will have something that possibly their grandfather, who they never had a chance to meet, is connected to,” Woods said in an interview.
Charles Heller, who lobbies for gun rights in Arizona on behalf of the Arizona Citizens Defense League, called the new regulation “another tempest in a teapot.”
“These (guns) are relics,” Heller said. “They are used in service-rifle competitions and kept in collections. They are bought by the exact people who aren’t going to do something wrong.”
The Obama administration is also proposing to close a loophole that it says allows felons and other ineligible gun purchasers to skirt the law by registering certain guns to a corporation or trust. The new rule would require people associated with those entities, like beneficiaries and trustees, to undergo the same type of fingerprint-based background checks before the corporation can register those guns.
Using the rule-making powers at his disposal, Obama can place that restriction only on guns regulated under the National Firearm Act, a 1934 law that only deals with the deadliest weapons, like machine guns and short-barreled shotguns. For the majority of weapons, there is no federal gun registration.
“It’s simple, it’s straightforward, it’s common sense,” Biden said of the measures he unveiled Thursday as he swore in Obama’s new director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Todd Jones.
But Heller said gun buyers typically don’t set up trusts or corporations to avoid background checks. He said they are established to allow multiple people, often family members, to use or inherit a weapon legally.
ATF already conducts thorough checks on anyone purchasing that class of weapon, he said.
“This means absolutely nothing,” he said. “It’s a red herring meant to make people think they are doing something.”
The quick reproach from gun-control opponents, however, underscored that the same forces that thwarted gun control efforts in Congress have far from mellowed on the notion of stricter gun laws in the future.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., accused the president of governing only by executive action while failing to sufficiently enforce gun laws already on the books. And the National Rifle Association called on Obama to stop focusing his efforts on inhibiting the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
“The Obama administration has once again completely missed the mark when it comes to stopping violent crime,” said NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam.
But proponents of gun control called them important steps to keep military-grade weapons out of American communities and plug a deadly hole in the background check system.
“It’s time for Congress to stop dragging its feet and pass common-sense reforms that keep criminals and the dangerously mentally ill from illegally buying guns,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino in a joint statement.
There are few signs the calculus in Congress has changed dramatically since April, when a package of measures including expanded background checks and an assault weapons ban flopped in the Senate despite intense advocacy by families of the 20 children and six adults gunned down in December in Newtown, Conn.
Republic reporter Alia Beard Rau contributed to this article.
Military has deep doubts about wisdom of striking Syria
Military has deep doubts about wisdom of striking Syria
U.S. military officers have deep doubts about impact, wisdom of a U.S. strike on Syria
Hey it's not about protecting American from bad guys, it's about Emperor Obama proving he is a real Emperor. Just like Emperor Bush!!!!
Remember wanna be Emperor John McCain singing "Bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boy's song "Barbara Ann". In addition to being a clone of Emperor Bush, President Obama is also a clone of John McCain
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U.S. military officers have deep doubts about impact, wisdom of a U.S. strike on Syria
By Ernesto Londoño, Published: August 29
The Obama administration’s plan to launch a military strike against Syria is being received with serious reservations by many in the U.S. military, which is coping with the scars of two lengthy wars and a rapidly contracting budget, according to current and former officers.
Having assumed for months that the United States was unlikely to intervene militarily in Syria, the Defense Department has been thrust onto a war footing that has made many in the armed services uneasy, according to interviews with more than a dozen military officers ranging from captains to a four-star general.
Former and current officers, many with the painful lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan on their minds, said the main reservations concern the potential unintended consequences of launching cruise missiles against Syria.
Some questioned the use of military force as a punitive measure and suggested that the White House lacks a coherent strategy. If the administration is ambivalent about the wisdom of defeating or crippling the Syrian leader, possibly setting the stage for Damascus to fall to fundamentalist rebels, they said, the military objective of strikes on Assad’s military targets is at best ambiguous.
“There’s a broad naivete in the political class about America’s obligations in foreign policy issues, and scary simplicity about the effects that employing American military power can achieve,” said retired Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold, who served as director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the run-up to the Iraq war, noting that many of his contemporaries are alarmed by the plan.
New cycle of attacks?
Marine Lt. Col. Gordon Miller, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, warned this week of “potentially devastating consequences, including a fresh round of chemical weapons attacks and a military response by Israel.”
“If President [Bashar al-Assad] were to absorb the strikes and use chemical weapons again, this would be a significant blow to the United States’ credibility and it would be compelled to escalate the assault on Syria to achieve the original objectives,” Miller wrote in a commentary for the think tank.
A National Security Council spokeswoman said Thursday she would not discuss “internal deliberations.” White House officials reiterated Thursday that the administration is not contemplating a protracted military engagement.
Still, many in the military are skeptical. Getting drawn into the Syrian war, they fear, could distract the Pentagon in the midst of a vexing mission: its exit from Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are still being killed regularly. A young Army officer who is wrapping up a year-long tour there said soldiers were surprised to learn about the looming strike, calling the prospect “very dangerous.”
“I can’t believe the president is even considering it,” said the officer, who like most officers interviewed for this story agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because military personnel are reluctant to criticize policymakers while military campaigns are being planned. “We have been fighting the last 10 years a counterinsurgency war. Syria has modern weaponry. We would have to retrain for a conventional war.”
Dempsey’s warning
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned in great detail about the risks and pitfalls of U.S. military intervention in Syria.
“As we weigh our options, we should be able to conclude with some confidence that use of force will move us toward the intended outcome,” Dempsey wrote last month in a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.”
Dempsey has not spoken publicly about the administration’s planned strike on Syria, and it is unclear to what extent his position shifted after last week’s alleged chemical weapons attack. Dempsey said this month in an interview with ABC News that the lessons of Iraq weigh heavily on his calculations regarding Syria.
“It has branded in me the idea that the use of military power must be part of an overall strategic solution that includes international partners and a whole of government,” he said in the Aug. 4 interview. “The application of force rarely produces and, in fact, maybe never produces the outcome we seek.”
The recently retired head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. James Mattis, said last month at a security conference that the United States has “no moral obligation to do the impossible” in Syria. “If Americans take ownership of this, this is going to be a full-throated, very, very serious war,” said Mattis, who as Centcom chief oversaw planning for a range of U.S. military responses in Syria.
The potential consequences of a U.S. strike include a retaliatory attack by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah — which supports Assad — on Israel, as well as cyberattacks on U.S. targets and infrastructure, U.S. military officials said.
“What is the political end state we’re trying to achieve?” said a retired senior officer involved in Middle East operational planning who said his concerns are widely shared by active-duty military leaders. “I don’t know what it is. We say it’s not regime change. If it’s punishment, there are other ways to punish.” The former senior officer said that those who are expressing alarm at the risks inherent in the plan “are not being heard other than in a pro-forma manner.”
President Obama said in a PBS interview on Wednesday that he is not contemplating a lengthy engagement, but instead “limited, tailored approaches.”
A retired Central Command officer said the administration’s plan would “gravely disappoint our allies and accomplish little other than to be seen as doing something.”
“It will be seen as a half measure by our allies in the Middle East,” the officer said. “Iran and Syria will portray it as proof that the U.S. is unwilling to defend its interests in the region.”
Still, some within the military, while apprehensive, support striking Syria. W. Andrew Terrill, a Middle East expert at the U.S. Army War College, said the limited history of the use of chemical weapons in the region suggests that a muted response from the West can be dangerous.
“There is a feeling as you look back that if you don’t stand up to chemical weapons, they’re going to take it as a green light and use them on a recurring basis,” he said.
An Army lieutenant colonel said the White House has only bad options but should resist the urge to abort the plan now.
“When a president draws a red line, for better or worse, it’s policy,” he said, referring to Obama’s declaration last year about Syria’s potential use of chemical weapons. “It cannot appear to be scared or tepid. Remember, with respect to policy choices concerning Syria, we are discussing degrees of bad and worse.”
Hearing today in Sheriff Arpaio racial-profile ruling
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Hearing today in Sheriff Arpaio racial-profile ruling
By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Aug 30, 2013 6:12 AM
The specific steps Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio will have to take to resolve a racial-profiling ruling should become clearer after a hearing in federal court scheduled for Friday morning.
Attorneys for Arpaio and the American Civil Liberties Union have spent months negotiating a resolution to U.S. District Judge Murray Snow’s ruling that the Sheriff’s Office engaged in widespread discrimination against Latino residents through the agency’s patrol operations.
Lengthy and detailed court documents filed during the last month have offered a glimpse into the progress of those negotiations and the disputed areas where Snow will have to weigh in with his opinion.
“The MCSO maintains its stance of denying there is a problem,” attorneys for the ACLU wrote in the opening of its 30-page brief filed last week that went on to detail Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s opposition to a court-appointed monitor, increased training, the creation of a community-advisory board and collecting the data on drivers stopped by deputies that the plaintiffs desire.
The two parties agreed to increase the racial-profiling training that deputies will receive each year and to implement more systems to collect data on the nature and length of deputies’ traffic stops, according to a joint statement filed in U.S. District Court earlier this month.
Whether the Sheriff’s Office agrees to a monitor or not, Snow left little doubt at a hearing in June that one would be in place to oversee the agreement.
With that in mind, ACLU attorney Dan Pochoda said it was the sheriff’s resistance to court-ordered community input and an overhaul of the sheriff’s disciplinary system that were among the most disturbing points of contention.
“We feel is very problematic and does not indicate a desire to reverse the widespread harms done to this community,” Pochoda said.
The sheriff’s attorney, Tim Casey, said some of the ACLU’s proposals were beyond the scope of the racial profiling lawsuit, which began after sheriff’s deputies stopped a Mexican man who was legally in the United States near Cave Creek in 2007 and detained the immigrant for nine hours.
The suit was later certified as a class-action suit to include every Latino driver sheriff’s deputies have stopped since 2007.
Dozens of demonstrators are expected to gather outside the courthouse Friday morning to protest Arpaio’s resistance to a court-appointed monitor and some of the other changes proposed in the ACLU’s court filings.
If Snow issues an order from the bench on Friday it will be a break from his deliberate approach to the case so far- he took nine months to craft his opinion that the Sheriff’s Office had engaged in discrimination.
Snow oversaw a tightly managed trial in downtown Phoenix and issued his landmark ruling in May that found the sheriff’s immigration-enforcement tactics, which had brought Arpaio worldwide acclaim and criticism, amounted to constitutional violations.
Arpaio’s attorneys and the ACLU have been working since May to come to a joint resolution on the changes that need to be made in the agency in order to correct the practices that led deputies to discriminate against Latinos and to ensure they won’t occur again in the future.
Has Arpaio gone ‘Back to the Future?’
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Has Arpaio gone ‘Back to the Future?’
It’s déjà Joe all over again.
There is no other explanation for the recent behavior of the local county sheriff.
Out of nowhere Joe Arpaio has expressed sympathy — not disdain — for the plight of illegal border crossers. Out of nowhere he has expressed disdain — not sympathy — for the self-proclaimed militia members who patrol the border.
It’s as if Arpaio climbed into a 1981 DeLorean time machine, hit the gas pedal and … BOOM! … it’s 2003.
Has the Toughest Sheriff in America has gone “Back to the Future?”
Ten years ago, before Arpaio went on his anti-immigrant rampage, I had several conversations with him about bodies his deputies had discovered dumped in a remote area near the I-10 and Buckeye.
“It’s like I told you,” Arpaio said at the time, “if I had nine dead bodies in Scottsdale, people would be a lot more interested. Am I right?”
Another time, a running gun battle between rival gangs of human smugglers left shot-up vehicles and dead bodies over a wide stretch of freeway.
The sheriff said, “It’s like the old Mafia wars where you try to get rid of the competition… And it’s going to get worse.”
That combination of empathy and concern continued for Arpaio until April, 2005.
It ended abruptly when an Army reservist from Michigan named Patrick Haab held a group of suspected illegal immigrants at gunpoint at a freeway rest stop.
At first, Arpaio was appalled. He said of Haab, “You don’t go around pulling guns on people. Being illegal is not a serious crime.”
It turned out, however, that the general public as well as recently-elected County Attorney Andrew Thomas were solidly behind Haab. They supported him completely.
So Arpaio reversed his position.
He joined the rapidly growing anti-immigrant army and rose in the ranks to what appeared to be Commander in Chief. (At least if you count appearances on Fox News.)
But that was then.
In the past year or so the public’s attitude has changed. Softened.
Arpaio’s office was sued by the Justice Department. And a federal judge ruled that his policing practices were discriminatory and violated the Constitution. A federal monitor might be appointed to oversee his department. On top of that Arpaio’s reelection was closer than ever.
So the sheriff has taken a step back — perhaps even a leap.
Last weekend a member of the Arizona Minuteman (border patrol wannabes) was arrested for pointing a rifle at a sheriff’s deputy he mistook for a drug smuggler.
“If they continue this, there could be some dead militia out there,” an angry Arpaio said.
He warned about the “chaos” that would be caused by private citizens acting like law enforcement, adding, “I have to commend my deputy for not killing this person, which easily could have happened. He’s lucky he didn’t see 30 rounds fired into him.”
In addition, Arpaio has instituted a program in which his deputies erect white crosses to mark the spots they find the bodies of immigrants who died crossing into the U.S.
“The crosses symbolize death,” Arpaio said, adding, “This is just one way to try and save some lives.”
It’s a nice sentiment, a caring sentiment.
Of course, a skeptical person might question the sheriff’s sudden decision to humanize individuals he’s spent years dehumanizing. A suspicious individual might wonder if this is calculated public relations scheme to convince federal Judge G. Murray Snow, who ruled against Arpaio, that the sheriff would never again allow his deputies to racially profile people.
Personally, I hope Judge Snow is not so cynical.
I hope he is willing to give Arpaio the benefit of the doubt. I hope the judge is open-minded enough to believe the sheriff is being sincere … and wise enough to appoint a monitor to watch over Arpaio’s department. Just in case.
This is Arizona, after all, where politicians like Arpaio leap back and forth on issues the way Marty McFly and the “Back to the Future” cast leapt back and forth in time.
And just like the movie, there are lots of sequels.
NSA paying U.S. companies for access to communications networks
Cold hard cash is an easy way go get around the 4th Amendment????
NSA didn't hack into your personal ATT phone account, ATT voluntarily gave NSA all the data they have on you!!! Well after NSA gave them some cold hard cash!!!
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NSA paying U.S. companies for access to communications networks
By Craig Timberg and Barton Gellman, Published: August 29
The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.
The bulk of the spending, detailed in a multi-volume intelligence budget obtained by The Washington Post, goes to participants in a Corporate Partner Access Project for major U.S. telecommunications providers. The documents open an important window into surveillance operations on U.S. territory that have been the subject of debate since they were revealed by The Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in June.
New details of the corporate-partner project, which falls under the NSA’s Special Source Operations, confirm that the agency taps into “high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,” according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013. The program was expected to cost $278 million in the current fiscal year, down nearly one-third from its peak of $394 million in 2011.
Voluntary cooperation from the “backbone” providers of global communications dates to the 1970s under the cover name BLARNEY, according to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. These relationships long predate the PRISM program disclosed in June, under which American technology companies hand over customer data after receiving orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
In briefing slides, the NSA described BLARNEY and three other corporate projects — OAKSTAR, FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW — under the heading of “passive” or “upstream” collection. They capture data as they move across fiber-optic cables and the gateways that direct global communications traffic.
The documents offer a rare view of a secret surveillance economy in which government officials set financial terms for programs capable of peering into the lives of almost anyone who uses a phone, computer or other device connected to the Internet.
Although the companies are required to comply with lawful surveillance orders, privacy advocates say the multimillion-dollar payments could create a profit motive to offer more than the required assistance.
“It turns surveillance into a revenue stream, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “The fact that the government is paying money to telephone companies to turn over information that they are compelled to turn over is very troubling.”
Verizon, AT&T and other major telecommunications companies declined to comment for this article, although several industry officials noted that government surveillance laws explicitly call for companies to receive reasonable reimbursement for their costs.
Previous news reports have made clear that companies frequently seek such payments, but never before has their overall scale been disclosed.
The budget documents do not list individual companies, although they do break down spending among several NSA programs, listed by their code names.
There is no record in the documents obtained by The Post of money set aside to pay technology companies that provide information to the NSA’s PRISM program. That program is the source of 91 percent of the 250 million Internet communications collected through Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which authorizes PRISM and the upstream programs, according to an 2011 opinion and order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Several of the companies that provide information to PRISM, including Apple, Facebook and Google, say they take no payments from the government when they comply with national security requests. Others say they do take payments in some circumstances. The Guardian reported last week that the NSA had covered “millions of dollars” in costs that some technology companies incurred to comply with government demands for information.
Telecommunications companies generally do charge to comply with surveillance requests, which come from state, local and federal law enforcement officials as well as intelligence agencies.
Former telecommunications executive Paul Kouroupas, a security officer who worked at Global Crossing for 12 years, said that some companies welcome the revenue and enter into contracts in which the government makes higher payments than otherwise available to firms receiving reimbursement for complying with surveillance orders.
These contractual payments, he said, could cover the cost of buying and installing new equipment, along with a reasonable profit. These voluntary agreements simplify the government’s access to surveillance, he said.
“It certainly lubricates the [surveillance] infrastructure,” Kouroupas said. He declined to say whether Global Crossing, which operated a fiber-optic network spanning several continents and was bought by Level 3 Communications in 2011, had such a contract. A spokesman for Level 3 Communications declined to comment.
In response to questions in 2012 from then-Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who was elected to the Senate in June, several telecommunications companies detailed their prices for surveillance services to law enforcement agencies under individual warrants and subpoenas. AT&T, for example, reported that it charges $325 to activate surveillance of an account and also a daily rate of $5 or $10, depending on the information gathered. For providing the numbers that have accessed cell towers, meanwhile, AT&T charged $75 per tower, the company said in a letter.
No payments have been previously disclosed for mass surveillance access to traffic flowing across a company’s infrastructure.
Lawyer Albert Gidari Jr., a partner at Perkins Coie who represents technology and telecommunications companies, said that surveillance efforts are expensive, requiring teams of attorneys to sift through requests and execute the ones deemed reasonable. Government agencies, meanwhile, sometimes balk at paying the full costs incurred by companies
“They lose a ton of money,” Gidari said. “And yet the government is still unsatisfied with it.”
The budget documents obtained by The Post list $65.96 million for BLARNEY, $94.74 million for FAIRVIEW, $46.04 million for STORMBREW and $9.41 million for OAKSTAR. It is unclear why the total of these four programs amounts to less than the overall budget of $278 million.
Among the possible costs covered by these amounts are “network and circuit leases, equipment hardware and software maintenance, secure network connectivity, and covert site leases,” the documents say. They also list in a separate line item $56.6 million in payments for “Foreign Partner Access,” although it is not clear whether these are for foreign companies, foreign governments or other foreign entities.
Some privacy advocates favor payments to companies when they comply with surveillance efforts because the costs can be a brake on overly broad requests by government officials. Invoices also can provide a paper trail to help expose the extent of spying.
But if the payments are too high, they may persuade companies to go beyond legal requirements in providing information, said Chris Soghoian, a technology expert with the American Civil Liberties Union who has studied government payments related to surveillance requests.
“I’m worried that the checks might grease the wheels a little bit,” he said.
Shamed into war?
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Shamed into war?
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: August 29
Having leaked to the world, and thus to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a detailed briefing of the coming U.S. air attack on Syria — (1) the source (offshore warships and perhaps a bomber or two), (2) the weapon (cruise missiles), (3) the duration (two or three days), (4) the purpose (punishment, not “regime change”) — perhaps we should be publishing the exact time the bombs will fall, lest we disrupt dinner in Damascus.
So much for the element of surprise. Into his third year of dithering, two years after declaring Assad had to go, one year after drawing — then erasing — his own red line on chemical weapons, Barack Obama has been stirred to action.
Or more accurately, shamed into action. Which is the worst possible reason. A president doesn’t commit soldiers to a war for which he has zero enthusiasm. Nor does one go to war for demonstration purposes.
Want to send a message? Call Western Union. A Tomahawk missile is for killing. A serious instrument of war demands a serious purpose.
The purpose can be either punitive or strategic: either a spasm of conscience that will inflame our opponents yet leave not a trace, or a considered application of abundant American power to alter the strategic equation that is now heavily favoring our worst enemies in the heart of the Middle East.
There are risks to any attack. Blowback terror from Syria and its terrorist allies. Threatened retaliation by Iran or Hezbollah on Israel — that could lead to a guns-of-August regional conflagration. Moreover, a mere punitive pinprick after which Assad emerges from the smoke intact and emboldened would demonstrate nothing but U.S. weakness and ineffectiveness.
In 1998, after al-Qaeda blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa, Bill Clinton lobbed a few cruise missiles into empty tents in Afghanistan. That showed ’em.
It did. It showed terminal unseriousness. Al-Qaeda got the message. Two years later, the USS Cole. A year after that, 9/11.
Yet even Clinton gathered the wherewithal to launch a sustained air campaign against Serbia. That wasn’t a mere message. That was a military strategy designed to stop the Serbs from ravaging Kosovo. It succeeded.
If Obama is planning a message-sending three-day attack, preceded by leaks telling the Syrians to move their important military assets to safety, better that he do nothing. Why run the considerable risk if nothing important is changed?
The only defensible action would be an attack with a strategic purpose, a sustained campaign aimed at changing the balance of forces by removing the Syrian regime’s decisive military advantage — air power.
Of Assad’s 20 air bases, notes retired Gen. Jack Keane, six are primary. Attack them: the runways, the fighters, the helicopters, the fuel depots, the nearby command structures. Render them inoperable.
We don’t need to take down Syria’s air defense system, as we did in Libya. To disable air power, we can use standoff systems — cruise missiles fired from ships offshore and from aircraft loaded with long-range, smart munitions that need not overfly Syrian territory.
Depriving Assad of his total control of the air and making resupply from Iran and Russia far more difficult would alter the course of the war. That is a serious purpose.
Would the American people support it? They are justifiably war-weary and want no part of this conflict. And why should they? In three years, Obama has done nothing to prepare the country for such a serious engagement. Not one speech. No explanation of what’s at stake.
On the contrary. Last year Obama told us repeatedly that the tide of war is receding. This year, he grandly declared that the entire war on terror “must end.” If he wants Tomahawks to fly, he’d better have a good reason, tell it to the American people and get the support of their representatives in Congress, the way George W. Bush did for both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
It’s rather shameful that while the British prime minister recalled Parliament to debate possible airstrikes — late Thursday, Parliament actually voted down British participation — Obama has made not a gesture in that direction.
If you are going to do this, Mr. President, do it constitutionally. And seriously. This is not about you and your conscience. It’s about applying American power to do precisely what you now deny this is about — helping Assad go, as you told the world he must.
Otherwise, just send Assad a text message. You might incur a roaming charge, but it’s still cheaper than a three-day, highly telegraphed, perfectly useless demonstration strike.
Glendale paid $1M to ex-CFO as consultant
Glendale paid $1M to ex-CFO as consultant
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Lax oversight of consultant costs Glendale
Audit shows ex-CFO made almost $1M after leaving city job
By Caitlin McGlade The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Aug 30, 2013 9:15 AM
The contract that a recent audit says paid a retired Glendale employee nearly $1 million over three years skated past the City Council three years ago with no cap on spending.
The external audit of city finances released last week targets the deal as one example of costly mismanagement. The agreement kept the city’s longtime chief financial officer, Art Lynch, on board as a private consultant, earning $930,410 from 2009 to early 2013.
After the audit’s release, past and present council members expressed surprise that Lynch raked in so much money, but the terms that council members approved without public question set no cap on pay.
The agreement promised to pay Lynch $8,000 for 50 hours of work a month, plus from $250 to $300 for each additional hour, travel reimbursements and bond-issuance fees. The contract allowed the city manager to renew the contract for two more years.
Council members swiftly approved the deal Jan. 26, 2010, lumping three other unrelated items into the same vote, and then moved on to talk about the Glendale Chocolate Affaire festival.
Then-Mayor Elaine Scruggs and Councilwoman Yvonne Knaack were absent.
Lynch had taken the city’s early-buyout offer in October 2009, but he returned the next day as a private contractor, primarily to assist in negotiations to keep the Phoenix Coyotes at the city-owned arena.
Former City Manager Ed Beasley did not seek council approval for three months despite a city policy that requires any contract over $50,000 to go before council. Information the city provided The Republic showed that Lynch had made $75,000 through January 2010.
Other Valley cities have similar thresholds for taking contracts to council, but several city officials also said they set caps, or at least estimates, on such agreements.
Beasley and Lynch did not return The Republic’s calls this week for comment, nor would they speak to auditors.
The council commissioned the audit, which was completed by a Phoenix firm for a projected $500,000.
The audit estimates the city could have saved a half-million dollars if Lynch had remained a city employee. He earned $174,930 a year as a city employee at the time of his retirement.
Joyce Clark, then on the council, said she and other council members probably saw the $8,000 a month figure and didn’t realize how high the other fees would climb.
Then-Councilman Phil Lieberman said Beasley told him before the deal came to the council that he needed Lynch to fill a gap left as top administrators had taken early retirement.
Then-Councilman David Goulet said he recalls thinking that losing Lynch through retirement would mean losing a lot of experience. Bringing him back, he said, was a way to capitalize on his expertise.
None could recall how much they expected the deal to cost the city at the time they approved it.
“He had so much institutional knowledge and we didn’t question the fact that he would come back and help us,” said Knaack, one of two council members from that time who remains in office.
Lynch had become Glendale’s dealmaker, debt adviser and investment manager since joining the city in 1985. He helped craft agreements that brought four professional sports teams to Glendale and helped spark Arrowhead Towne Center and Westgate City Center.
In 2011, Lieberman said he asked questions when he heard the city was paying Lynch more as a consultant than he earned as an employee. Beasley insisted he was short staffed and needed Lynch, Lieberman said.
“Nobody else seemed concerned about it and I wasn’t getting anywhere bringing it up,” Lieberman said.
Beasley soon after announced his own retirement, he added.
“I’m sure I got assurances that it was the best thing to do,” Goulet said. “I had to rely on these other experts; I had to have some faith in their work.”
Clark said that management never presented the council with enough information to spark a reason for questioning. Most work Lynch completed was for Beasley and Beasley “didn’t share,” she said.
Not sharing and even hiding information from the council was a recurring concern in the audit.
Goulet, who remains in Glendale as a business owner, said he now wonders whether he should have supported the contract. At the least, he said perhaps the council should have been given options to ensure the best deal.
The contract with Lynch was inked during the recession, as the city faced budget deficits.
The audit quotes an unnamed employee saying that Lynch’s salary came at a time when many employees’ pay was being frozen or cut.
In neighboring Peoria, City Attorney Steve Kemp said such services require competition.
“What happened in Glendale is not a process that we would use in Peoria,” Kemp said.
Peoria keeps a list of vetted professionals that management uses each time it needs to choose a contractor, he said. Each consultant, for example, is selected by a committee after a competitive process, he said.
Kemp called Lynch’s contract “direct selection.”
“I think it poses an issue from a standpoint that when we select consultants, lawyers, anyone else, we have a duty to our public and citizens to make the best use of their resources,” he said.
The audit pointed out that Lynch’s contract never went to public bid. Glendale’s policy typically calls for a bidding process for professional services such as consultants, but the city manager or designee may skip it if they deem that would be “in the best interest of the city.”
Practices compared
Valley cities have differing policies on council involvement in contract approval. A Chandler spokeswoman said the city requires all consultant agreements, other than construction work, exceeding $30,000 to be voted on by council. A Mesa spokeswoman said the city requires that consultant contracts exceeding $25,000 be reported to the council quarterly.
Peoria and Glendale requires council approval for all contracts exceeding $50,000.
That did not happen in the case of Lynch. City Manager Brenda Fischer, who started in mid-July, has called for an internal audit to find out how many times city administrators failed to do this.
In addition, the policy in Mesa and the practices in Chandler and Peoria are to require almost all contracts to include an attachment that provides the maximum price, or at least a cost estimate.
Fischer said she plans to require that the council attach a spending limit before approving a contract.
“It’s all about controls and ensuring that this doesn’t happen again,” Fischer said. “Council should know, the public should know when council approves something how much it is going to cost.”
RELATED INFO
Telecommuting concerns
Glendale’s external audit raised concerns about a telecommuting department head.
Alma Carmicle retired as human resources director in 2012 after more than 20 years with the city. Despite wage freezes among most Glendale employees, she received a $14,000 bonus in 2010 and earned an 8.6 percent raise that bumped her salary to $151,111 in 2011, according to a past Arizona Republic story. A month after her raise, she moved to Mississippi, where she telecommuted for the better part of a year.
She mostly negotiated union contracts ,
but now-Human Resources Director Jim Brown told auditors that
he often had to talk to union representatives
to find out where negotiations stood.
Communications with her staff became sparse, he told auditors.
The city does not have a formalized telecommuting policy,
and the decision to allow employees to telecommute is at the discretion of department heads.
City Manager Brenda Fischer plans to review all telecommuting activity
and plans to establish policies.
The Republic recently requested a list of all city employees who telecommute.
Glendale admin fired, another resigns amid audit fallout
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Glendale admin fired, another resigns amid audit fallout
By Paul Giblin Fri Aug 30, 2013 10:34 AM
Glendale fired one of the top administrators embroiled in the city’s financial controversies on Thursday. A second resigned.
Two others remain on paid leave.
All four feature prominently in an audit of the city’s finances that was performed by a Phoenix-based team led by attorneys with the firm Haralson, Miller, Pitt, Feldman & McAnally and released on Aug. 21.
The audit revealed that city employees mishandled millions of dollars and kept those dealings from the City Council and public.
The audit showed that administrators transferred millions of dollars among several municipal accounts in an attempt to cover unanticipated expenses associated with an early retirement program.
It also showed that former City Manager Ed Beasley made two high-level personnel decisions that were not in the best interests of the city. Beasley and the two administrators involved in those matters retired long before council commissioned the audit in February.
New City Manager Brenda Fischer fired Assistant City Manager Horatio Skeete on Thursday.
Financial Services Executive Director Sherry Schurhammer resigned Wednesday. City officials accepted it effective Thursday.
Chief Budget Officer Don Bolton and Chief Financial Officer Diane Goke remain on paid leave.
Skeete had been with the city more than nine years and had been paid $189,500 a year, according to records obtained by The Arizona Republic through a public records request.
“This action is based on your violation of city of Glendale policies and procedures,” Fischer wrote to Skeete in the termination letter. “Specifically, the results of an external audit indicate that you were dishonest and misleading to the Glendale City Council on numerous occasions.”
Fischer also notes that the city will not pursue an investigation that it had launched around Aug. 2 regarding possible policy violations outside the the scope of the audit. Further information about that investigation was not immediately available to the Republic.
Skeete did not return messages seeking comment Friday.
He was served with a notice of intent to terminate employment on Aug. 21, according to Fischer’s letter, which the Republic also obtained through a public records request. An attorney representing Skeete responded that he intended to challenge the action and that the attorney would follow up regarding “certain other matters,” according to the letter.
However, Skeete and his attorney failed to follow through within seven calendar days, according to the letter.
Skeete served as acting city manager for months after Beasley retired from the city in June 2012. He served in that role until a majority of the council sought his ouster in the spring. At that time, he returned to his position as assistant city manager while the search for a permanent city manager continued.
Schurhammer was employed by the city for more than 15 years, leaving with a salary of nearly $143,600.
She was place placed on administrative leave on Aug. 21. An acceptance letter from Human Resources Director Jim Brown notes that it was a voluntary resignation.
A person who answered the telephone at her home Thursday told the Republic that she declined comment.
Reporter Caitlin McGlade contributed to this article.
Dick Foreman wants a TAX INCREASE for the Tempe Schools????
If it's not a tax increase where is all the money going to come from???? Will Jesus wearing a white robe walking on clouds come out of nowhere and magically make a pile of money for the schools???
In this editorial DICK FOREMAN seems like a double talking politician who is trying to convince us that a TAX INCREASE isn't a TAX INCREASE!!!!
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Continuation of override does NOT mean tax increase
My Turn by DICK FOREMAN
If I had a nickel for every vote that ultimately defeated last November’s maintenance and operation budget override request for the Tempe Union High School District, I still wouldn’t have enough money to buy my wife and daughter a ticket to the movies, popcorn and drinks.
That campaign lost in 2012 by 811 votes. Other Southeast Valley school districts had similar fates. Chandler Unified lost; Higley lost. And Gilbert didn’t just lose, its override was crushed.
In fact, half of all schools throughout Arizona lost in their request to budget the legislatively approved, authorized rate. But in the Southeast Valley, we outdid the state average. We managed a 100 percent failure rate.
Couple these losses with multiple years of state budget cuts to school funding, and the reality is stark, humbling and demoralizing for most educators.
So, where are we now? Many taxpayers believe we need a plan for our schools that doesn’t raise taxes. Many education advocates are now simply seeking to maintain current spending without any increases in tax rates, too. And here’s the good news for both sides: IT CAN BE DONE!
Recently, I joined a representative group of Tempe Union parents, civic leaders and concerned taxpayers to review the M&O Override, the 10 or 15 percent options, and what we would recommend to the governing board. For the typical taxpayer, the difference is only about a buck and a half a month between the two options; a couple nickels a day.
The same is true, more or less, throughout the Southeast Valley.
In Tempe, community leaders such as Angie Taylor Thornton supported a 15 percent override. So did Mel Hannah from Tempe Union’s Desert Vista High School site council.
But Rosalie Hirano, whose passion for education takes second place to nobody, joined me in urging a Tempe Union Citizen Finance Committee recommendation of 10 percent.
While our citizens committee was about equally split between a 10 percent and 15 percent override recommendation, the governing board chose the lower amount.
Message to taxpayers: “We heard you and we’re holding the line on spending. Will you support us now?”
In Tempe, failure to support a continuation of the current 10 percent override would cut nearly $6.5 million per year from existing budgets.
About 85 percent of that money will come out of the classroom.
I do believe taxpayers want schools to tighten their belts and not ask for an increase. I do not believe Tempe, Gilbert, Chandler or Higley taxpayers wish to lay off teachers, increase class sizes or put our children literally in the streets as we scale back or eliminate many after-school programs to enable further, massive cuts.
My message today is simple. Your yes vote will NOT increase your current tax rate on any proposed Maintenance and Operation Override if the school district is asking for a “continuation.” It will simply maintain it exactly where it is. Not one penny more.
So, if your local school governing board, such as Tempe Union, asks your permission to continue an existing override, they are respecting the taxpayers’ wish to hold the line on spending. They are NOT proposing an increase in taxes.
Let’s keep that in mind. And if we’re still short a few nickels a day, may I suggest checking the creases in the couch before we cut classroom spending again?
Dick Foreman is an education advocate and community volunteer who lives in Tempe.
What the heck is wrong with the city of Glendale?
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Posted on August 30, 2013 10:32 am by Laurie Roberts
What the heck is wrong with the city of Glendale?
So, a longtime city employee takes a buyout then comes back the next day as a consultant and proceeds to suck nearly $1 million from the city treasury over three years.
You don’t even have to ask what city I’m talking about, do you?
You know it’s Glendale.
The mismanagement in that place apparently knows no bounds, whether it be in its dealings with the Phoenix Coyotes or its own employees.
Consider the city’s shrewd negotiations with the Phoenix Coyotes over the last decade – something residents will be paying for for many years to come.
Or Camelback Ranch, the city’s $200 million spring training baseball complex. (See above).
Or that curious business of then-City Manager Ed Beasley allowing the city’s human services director to telecommute for the better part of a year – from Mississippi.
Consider the recent audit that showed top city administrators moved millions of dollars around to cover the cost of a 2009 early-retirement program – hiding it from the City Council and the public. The buyout was pitched to the council as a way to save the city $2.2 million. Instead, it apparently cost $6 million. That little maneuver has left an assistant city manager, the city’s financial services executive director, the chief budget officer and the chief financial officer on leave. This, thanks to a new city manager, Brenda Fischer, who appears ready, willing and able to tackle the long-needed job of cleaning house.
Last week, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded several of Glendale‘s credit ratings, citing its weak general fund, outsized debt burden and declines in the city’s tax base.That’ll likely cost the city’s taxpayers yet again, when Glendale tries to borrow money.
This week, we learned that the now-former city attorney, who for years was a key player in negotiating all those swell Coyotes deals, has joined the Coyotes’ payroll, as the team’s general counsel.
Then, there is today’s revelation. The city’s longtime chief financial officer, Art Lynch, was allowed to take early buyout even though the deadline had passed. Then he returned to work then next day as a private contractor and proceeded to earn nearly $1 million over three years – about double what he would have gotten had he remained a city employee.
The City Council, as always, was asleep at the wheel.
It’s a costly lesson to Glendale voters, but then I suppose it’s true. You really do get the government you deserve.
More on that outrageously overpriced Gilbert Park
Source
Plans for Gilbert park put on hold
By Parker Leavitt The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Aug 26, 2013 11:19 AM
South Gilbert residents clamoring for more public recreation opportunities will have to wait nine years for a new regional park on land the town acquired in a controversial 2009 deal.
For now, the vacant 80 acres will once again be used for farming, as the Gilbert Town Council this month agreed to lease it to local grower Jason Perry for $70,000 over five years.
Gilbert bought the plot for $24 million from dairy farmer Bernard Zinke as part of a larger $50.2 million transaction that raised eyebrows among land brokers for its premium price during a time of free-falling property values.
The land was purchased without an appraisal, and criticism over how the deal was negotiated prompted officials to strengthen land-buying protocols.
Gilbert financed the deal with bonds that did not require voter approval, but the town does not have enough money to build the activity center and sport fields planned at the southwestern corner of Greenfield and Chandler Heights roads.
Long-term plans call for $17 million in developer impact fees and $8 million in future bonds to build the park, according to Gilbert’s Capital Improvement Plan.
While south Gilbert residents have called on town officials to build more parks in an area that has only a few, officials say the Southwest Activity Center is not scheduled for completion until fiscal 2022. The town is nearing completion of a parks master plan that could impact the potential use and timing of the land, officials said.
‘Heritage’ farmland
Some residents may take solace in the preservation of the area’s long-standing agricultural heritage, as weeds and dust are replaced by corn stalks or alfalfa.
“People are wanting to see farmland stay for heritage reasons, for the aesthetic beauty of it and for the open space,” Perry said. “I was born and raised here and watched farmland turn into houses. It’s hard to see it go.”
Perry, who also leases farmland in Chandler, Mesa and Queen Creek, said he plans to grow “forage crop,” used to feed cattle at local dairies. That could include corn for silage or sorghum, which are summer crops, or alfalfa hay, if the town gives permission.
Gilbert has “some of the best soil in the world,” along with available water — conditions that helped it become the “hay capital of the world” in the 1950s and ’60s, Perry said.
While alfalfa growers in other parts of the globe might get to harvest three or four times in a year, the Valley’s climate allows fields to be cut eight or nine times, Perry said.
Town paid top dollar for land
Jason Perry Farms Partnership was the highest bidder for the land lease, beating out D Lamoreaux Farms II and Bond Crop, town spokeswoman Dana Berchman said.
If the town signs off on Perry’s plan to grow alfalfa, the farmer will look to plant in October, while corn or sorghum would be planted next spring, Perry said.
In addition to 80 acres at Greenfield and Chandler Heights, Gilbert also purchased about 63 acres from Zinke at Greenfield and Germann roads, along with the farmer’s home and dairy equipment.
Despite having no overall appraisal for the properties the town purchased, officials did have recent appraisals on hand that showed much of the property the town acquired for $300,000 an acre may have actually been worth $67,000 per acre.
In the months after Gilbert’s deal with Zinke, a 318-acre parcel near Higley and Queen Creek roads sold for about $35,000 an acre, and a 549-acre parcel near Val Vista Drive and Riggs Road went for about $40,000 an acre.
Mass. court hears Pledge of Allegiance challenge
Source
Mass. court hears Pledge of Allegiance challenge
Wed Sep 4, 2013 7:52 AM
BOSTON — A lawyer for an atheist family has asked Massachusetts’ highest court to ban the practice of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in state public schools.
In arguments before the Supreme Judicial Court on Wednesday, a lawyer for the Acton family argued that the words “under God” in the pledge discriminate against atheist students.
The lawyer argues that the reference defines patriotism as someone who believes in God.
Lawyers for the school district and another family who want to keep the Pledge of Allegiance in schools say reciting it is voluntary and students can leave out the reference to God or choose not to participate.
Last year, a state judge found that the rights of the atheists were not violated by the words “under God.”
The family appealed the ruling.
Tempe dispensary reaches out to disabled Mesa boy seeking medical marijuana
Will Humble, the Director of the Arizona Health Services and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer want you to think that medical marijuana patients and medical marijuana dispensaries are just a bunch of criminals that want to use marijuana to get high.
That is a bunch of rubbish. Read this article!!!
Source
Tempe dispensary reaches out to disabled Mesa boy seeking medical marijuana
Posted: Friday, August 30, 2013 1:32 pm
By Nohelani Graf, ABC15.com
It's been a busy 48 hours for Jennifer, Jacob and Zander Welton.
"It's kind of crazy how many people wanted to get ahold of Zander's story," said Jennifer.
ABC15 first reported the story on the 5-year-old with cortical dysplasia on Tuesday.
The genetic brain defect causes Zander to have seizures. Some are so severe, he forgets to breathe. Each one takes a severe toll.
"He'll go from walking around okay to crawling and we have to build him back up,' said Jennifer.
Brain surgeries and meds haven't worked. Desperate for a cure, or at least some relief, the Weltons are turning to cannabis.
Dr. Elaine Burns of Southwest Medical Marijuana Evaluation center is one of two doctors who have signed off on Zander's treatment and will also be monitoring his progress and helping guide his dosages.
"Mom and dad will get to know who Zander is. And if that's what this medication can do for them, I’m all for giving it a try," says Burns.
The biggest hurdle now is money.
Jacob is a stay-at-home dad for their three sons. Jennifer is the breadwinner. The cost of Zander's medication, an expected $300 a week, will all be out-of-pocket.
After seeing Zander's story, Harvest of Tempe offered to provide all the cannabis oil Zander will need to ease his suffering.
It will supply Zander's dad Jacob who is now a legal medical marijuana caregiver and Jacob will then administer the CBD oil drops to his son twice a day.
"We exist in order to try and help people. To the extent we're able to do that, we're honored," said Steven White, with Harvest of Tempe.
"It’s so nice to see how many people are willing to step out and help, all you need to do is ask for it," says Jennifer.
The family has set up a Facebook page called Zander Welton's Journey. People can go there to donate.
Even though the dispensary offered to supply the CBD oil free of charge, the Weltons still want to help cover the production costs.
Money raised will also help pay for Zander's visits to Dr. Burns which aren't covered by insurance either.
Government welfare for agribusinesses
Source
Letter: Welfare for agribusinesses
Posted: Sunday, September 1, 2013 9:22 am
Letter to the Editor
Over the last decade, the farm bill has cost more than $168 billion. This program uses loans, price support and payments to protect family farmers. The program is to maintain a stable price and food supply.
In practice, the program keeps food prices high, costing consumers billions, while funneling most of its aid to giant agribusinesses and wealthy farmers. About 75 percent of total subsidies go to the biggest 10 percent farming companies, including Riceland Foods Inc., Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., and Archer Daniels Midland. Among the “farmers” who gets federal subsidies are Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi and President Jimmy Carter and billionaire media mogul Ted Turner. The typical farmer has literally millions of dollars.
The farm lobby has immense power in Washington, thanks to its contribution to congressional campaigns and political parties, and a large number of legislators from farm states, most of them Republicans from ‘Red’ states, number one being the great conservative State of Texas. The Democrats have also supported the farm bill because of food stamps. In ending direct payment, the legislation channels $8.9 billion into an a expanded crop insurance, which already ballooned from $1.5 billion in 2002 to $7.4 billion in 2011, it’s hard to understand how anyone in the House who called himself a conservative could support this. They’re locking in a historically high commodity prices at taxpayers expense.
Barbara Anderson
Mesa
Napolitano wants to create jobs program for cyber cops????
As H. L. Mencken said:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
If you ask me the best way to prevent a cyber attack is to disconnect your computers or your computer network from the internet. Something that isn't very hard to do.
Source
Napolitano urges successor to prepare for cyber attack
By Erin Kelly Gannett Washington Bureau Tue Aug 27, 2013 11:22 AM
WASHINGTON - Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Tuesday that her successor must act quickly to prepare for a major cyber attack.
"Our country will, at some point, face a major cyber event that will have a serious effect on our lives, our economy, and the everyday functioning of our society," Napolitano warned during her farewell address at the National Press Club.
"While we have built systems, protections and a framework to identify attacks and intrusions, share information with the private sector and across government, and develop plans and capabilities to mitigate the damage, more must be done, and quickly," she said.
Napolitano, who was Arizona's governor before serving as homeland security secretary for the last four and a half years, is leaving to become head of the University of California system.
She said her successor, who has not yet been chosen, also may face more natural disasters. The Department of Homeland Security includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which brings aid to communities when there are hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other major disasters.
"You also will have to prepare for the increasing likelihood of more weather-related events of a more severe nature as a result of climate change, and continue to build the capacity to respond to potential disasters in far flung regions of the country occurring at the same time," Napolitano said in what she called "an open letter" to the next secretary.
She said her replacement will have to continue to lead the massive department through tough fiscal times, including the impact of the automatic budget cuts imposed on federal agencies by Congress.
The department, created a decade ago in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, includes FEMA, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Office of Cybersecurity and Communications.
Napolitano said the job is stressful and she advised the next secretary that, "You will need a large bottle of Advil." But she also said the job is one of the most rewarding in Washington.
"What you do here matters to the lives of people all across our great nation, and your decisions affect them in direct, tangible ways," she said. "You make sure their families are safe from terrorist threats, that their local first responders have equipment and training and funding, and that when disaster strikes, people who have lost everything are given food, shelter, and hope."
She credited the department's 240,000 employees with helping her lead the agency through the swine flu pandemic, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, drug cartel violence along the Southwest border, and numerous terrorist plots and threats including the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon in April.
During Napolitano's tenure, the agency managed 325 federally declared disasters, including Hurricance Sandy, the second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history.
"Looking back over the past four and a half years, I can say that if there is one take-away, one object lesson and core operating principle that I've learned and embraced as secretary, it is this: in a world of evolving threats, the key to our success is the ability to be flexible and agile, and adapt to changing circumstances on the ground -- whether that is across the globe, or here at home," Napolitano said.
Among her unfinished business is immigration reform.
Napolitano touted her department's efforts to strengthen border security and her policy to focus efforts on catching and deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records. She also defended a controversial program that stopped the deportation of undocumented immigrants brought here as children. That program, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, gives young immigrants who meet certain criteria a two-year provisional legal status to remain in the United States.
"In just its first year, over half-a-million individuals have requested deferred action, and after a thorough review of each of those cases, including a background check, 430,000 requests have already been approved, allowing these young people to continue to contribute to the country they call home," Napolitano said.
But she said a more permanent solution is needed for them and for all of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
"DACA, of course, is no substitute for comprehensive immigration reform, which is the only way to face the longstanding problems with our immigration system," she said.
Contact Erin Kelly at ekelly@gannett.com
Appeals court: No immunity for Thomas, Aubuchon
Source
Appeals court: No immunity for Thomas, Aubuchon
By Michelle Ye Hee Lee The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Aug 16, 2013 12:42 PM
Former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas and his then-deputy, Lisa Aubuchon, do not have absolute prosecutorial immunity against lawsuits for actions they took while in office, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held Friday.
The appellate court affirmed a previous ruling on the issue by the U.S. District Court.
Thomas and Aubuchon have argued that they cannot be sued over legal actions they took against other county officials and retired judges in late 2009. The pair at that time filed a federal civil racketeering lawsuit against 10 county officials. The racketeering case was subsequently dismissed, and the prosecutors were sued by some of their intended targets. Thomas and Aubuchon argue that their actions were protected because they were taken in the course of their duties as prosecutors.
Thomas and Aubuchon had brought charges against Maricopa County officials and Superior Court judges in so-called corruption cases investigated by Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office and prosecuted by Thomas’ office. The federal racketeering lawsuit was filed during years of political fighting between the Board of Supervisors, Arpaio and Thomas.
Thomas and Aubuchon were disbarred last year for ethical violations stemming from those prosecutions and investigations.
The appeals court panel “held that, under the circumstances, Thomas and Aubuchon were not entitled to absolute immunity because their actions were not sufficiently analogous to those of a prosecutor,” according to the ruling published Friday.
“A number of people advised them not to file the suit,” but despite warnings, Thomas and Aubuchon “actively participated in drafting the complaint” and filing it, the panel wrote. The panel ruled Thomas and Aubuchon were politically motivated in filing the racketeering lawsuit.
Obama should get Congress’ OK
Source
Obama should get Congress’ OK
The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Aug 29, 2013 7:56 PM
Even before the start of his second term, President Barack Obama made clear that he and Congress essentially had parted ways.
On virtually every significant domestic policy, be it health care, environmental enforcement, energy or social welfare, Obama is pursuing initiatives through the bureaucracy he controls rather than the balky, uncooperative legislative branch he does not.
An attack on Syria is not a matter of domestic policy.
And, like it or not, Obama owes it to the American people to make his case publicly before Congress as to why this nation’s best interests lie in going to war with Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime, however limited and temporary that war may be.
Consulting with Congress and securing a vote of affirmation from lawmakers may not be an experience at the top of Obama’s to-do list.
But George H.W. Bush likely did not relish the experience in 1991 prior to gaining congressional approval of the invasion of Kuwait.
And, likewise, George W. Bush in 2003 prior to his invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Obama can and should do as much.
Yes, history is full of examples of presidents acting unilaterally as commander in chief. But in virtually all latter-day cases — including President Bill Clinton’s bombing campaign to save Muslim refugees from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo — the chief executives made their choices based on an urgent need to act and with a reasonable expectation that the action could achieve its intended goal.
Obama needs to explain to Congress — and, in the process, the country — why committing U.S. troops and materiel to the Syrian civil war is in the nation’s best interest.
The administration’s rough outline of engagement — cruise missiles delivered over two or three days — does not inspire much confidence that the mission is intended to achieve anything other than fulfilling Obama’s Dec. 2, 2012, declaration that if Assad began exterminating his people with chemical weapons, “there will be consequences, and you will be held accountable.”
Even that declaration is rife with ambiguity. Also last year, Obama said Assad chemically mass-murdering his own people “would change my calculus.” He did not say to what.
The president needs to explain why a 2-year-old butchery that has claimed perhaps 100,000 Syrian lives now is different because the butcher is wielding a more menacing cleaver.
Further, he needs to explain what difference launching those cruise missiles will make, both in terms of American interests and Syrian lives.
Obama is frustrated with a Congress that he sees as paralyzed with partisan intransigence. In many respects, that frustration is understandable. Regarding the approaching Syrian conflict, much less so.
On Wednesday, 116 House members, including 18 Democrats, signed a letter “strongly” urging the president “to consult and receive authorization from Congress before ordering the use of U.S. military force in Syria.”
Obama, of all people, should not need to be reminded of the folly of ignoring contrarian voices before marching off headlong into foreign conflicts.
White House releases report on Syria chemical attack
So will Emperor Obama be launching a cruise missile attack on the FBI and BATF for their use of chemical weapons when they burned 100+ Christians to death in the Waco, Texas massacre???
I believe that attack was on the Branch Davidians who lived in the Mount Carmel Center which was burnt to the ground by the FBI and BATF attack in attempt to arrest their leader David Koresh on some trivial weapons charges.
Source
White House releases report on Syria chemical attack
By Aamer Madhani USA Today Fri Aug 30, 2013 11:49 AM
WASHINGTON--Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that the U.S. has evidence the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people, as the White House released a four-page report summarizing their case against the Bashar Assad regime.
Kerry said the administration is releasing an intelligence report today laying out their evidence. Proving this allegation is considered a threshold that the U.S. would use to justify a potential military strike on that country.
"I'm not asking you to take my word for it," Kerry said. "Read for yourselves the verdict reached by our intelligence community" that the government of Syria was responsible for the attack.
The intelligence community believes with "high confidence" that Assad government used chemical weapons in Damascus suburbs based on human sources as well as intercepts of conversations by senior Syrian officials, according to the report and Kerry.
With the release of the unclassified intelligence report and a telephone briefing for lawmakers on Thursday evening, the White House looked to bolster the case for taking action against Assad even as objections to a military strike continue to mount in the U.S. and with the nation's closest ally, Britain, to taking military action.
Obama was also given a bolt of international backing on Friday, when President François Hollande of France on Friday announced his support for international military action against the Syrian government.
On Thursday, the British parliament voted to reject taking military action in Syria, even the government published an intelligence document that detailed how it concluded the Syrian government was responsible for the chemical attacks on the outskirts of Damascus last week.
Obama still has not on announced whether he will take action for the Aug. 21 attack, which the U.S. government says killed 1,429, including more than 400 children.
"The primary question is no longer what do we know," Kerry said. "It is what are we in the world going to do about it?"
A war with Syria to save face
Didn't Clinton bomb some a pharmaceutical aspirin factory in Sudan in 1998 to save face when he got caught having sex with Monica??? OK, maybe it wasn't sex, because after all Clinton said he doesn't consider a BJ sex!
Source
A war with Syria to save face
Apparently the United States is going to go to war, at least sort of, with Syria.
That’s not because Syria has attacked the United States, because it hasn’t.
It’s not because the United States believes that it has strategic interests at stake in Syria’s civil war that warrant military intervention. If that were the case, we would have already taken action.
And it’s not really out of humanitarian concern with what’s going on in Syria’s civil war, although that will be the rhetorical cloak with which we don our military action. If we were truly acting out of humanitarian concern, we would have intervened tens of thousands of civilian deaths ago.
Instead, we are going to war with Syria because the President of the United States said that the use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that would change his “calculus” regarding involvement and Syrian strongman Bashar Assad has apparently made such egregious use of them that it can no longer be ignored.
In other words, we are going to war with Syria to save face.
Supposedly, the United States now has to take action because if we don’t, our subsequent threats won’t be taken seriously by other powers.
It’s already too late for that. The reluctance of the Obama administration to take action even after the president’s red line was crossed is transparent and obvious to all. Unless the military action is large enough to result in Assad’s ouster, which doesn’t appear to be in the offing, the rest of the world will continue to significantly discount the Obama administration’s bluster.
The Middle East is on fire. The Syrian civil war is lapping over into Lebanon and Jordan. Egypt is wretched politically and economically.
The places where the United States has previously intervened militarily are hardly oases of stability. Afghanistan appears likely to revert to rule by local warlords. Renewed sectarian violence is breaking out in Iraq. Libya is a place where a U.S. ambassador was killed by jihadists and has become an arms depot for jihadists throughout the region.
The argument is made that the Arab Spring went bad and the Middle East is on fire because the Obama administration retreated from involvement in the multitude of conflicts going on there. Think through the implications of that claim.
According to this line of thinking, the United States should have sufficient troops stationed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya to ensure relative peace and security in each country.
We should have picked which Syrian rebels to back and given them the firepower to knock off Assad. Although whether we should have supported the factions backed by Saudi Arabia or those supported by Turkey and Qatar, which are different, isn’t clear.
And the United States should have somehow bullied the Muslim Brotherhood to govern more inclusively in Egypt or the military not to engage in a coup.
A more grounded understanding of U.S. interests in the Middle East begins with accepting that we have no true allies in the region except for Israel.
Is the House of Saud our ally? Saudi Arabia promotes a radical strand of Islam, Wahhabism, throughout the world. Wahhabism often spawns jihadist movements. Jihadi terrorism gets important financial support from Saudi sources.
Saudi Arabia is one of the most despotic regimes in the world, including religious intolerance and persecution. The principal difference between the House of Saud and the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t really religious and certainty isn’t relative commitment to democratic capitalism. It’s that the Brotherhood doesn’t believe in hereditary monarchies. And that’s a fight the United States should get in the middle of?
We have no true allies. There is not even a semi-clear path to peace and stability in the region. And even if there were, there’s not much the United States could do to steer regional powers toward it.
It’s hard to see how a war to save face is a meaningful step in any right direction.
Affordable Care Act needs fixes to address costs
Kyrsten Sinema shovels the BS on affordable health care
Vote for me and I will give you free stuff - Kyrsten Sinema
OK Kyrsten Sinema didn't say it exactly that way, but that's how congressmen or congresswoman in her case get reelected.
Last but not least Kyrsten Sinema is being a real hypocrite in this editorial she or her staff wrote.
Kristen Sinema didn't say a word about how she attempted to make it outrageously expensive
for medical marijuana patients to get their drugs when she attempted to slap a 300 percent tax
on medical marijuana.
If Kyrsten Sinema has been successful in passing her outrageously high
300 percent tax on medical marijuana it would certainly bankrupt the family
of Zander Welton who in this
article
needs to spend $300 a week on medical marijuana to prevent
Zander from having seizures.
If Kyrsten Sinema's tax had become law the family of
Zander Welton would have been facing a weekly bill of
$1,200 for medical marijuana with $900 of that going to
pay for taxes which would go to the state of Arizona,
while the medical marijuana would only have cost $300.
Source
Affordable Care Act needs fixes to address costs
By Kyrsten Sinema My Turn Sun Sep 1, 2013 7:31 PM
Three years ago, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act
to ensure better access to quality care for all Americans. The law is by no means perfect, but now that it is in place, it’s Congress’ duty to improve it for the benefit of hard-working Americans.
Every sound legislative solution requires dialogue from both parties in order for the law to stand the test of time.
The fixes we make to the Affordable Care Act cannot be simply Republican or Democratic ideas.
The ACA addressed access to health care, but it did not effectively contain the rising costs of health care.
I am working with Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House to make important fixes. I have co-sponsored bipartisan legislation to help control costs and improve transparency, including:
House Resolution 763 to repeal an annual tax on insurance providers. I do not believe that we should let insurance companies off the hook, but the reality is this tax will simply be passed on to individuals and employers, increasing their health-care costs. Repealing the tax will help keep down the cost of insurance.
The Protecting Seniors’ Access to Medicare Act to ensure that Medicare benefits are not arbitrarily cut.
The Protect Medical Innovation Act to repeal the tax on medical devices. Arizona’s Congressional District 9 is home to some of America’s most innovative companies within the medical-device industry. The repeal of this tax will help companies like Tempe’s Medtronic create jobs and develop new technologies that improve the quality of health care while driving down the cost.
It is my job to listen to the families and businesses in Congressional District 9 and ensure the law works for them.
Families and businesses are making serious health-care-related decisions in the coming months, and it is important they have all the information they need and the law is implemented as smoothly as possible.
I’ve heard from families and businesses concerned about the lack of specific information regarding implementation of the ACA, what the law means for them and and what the marketplace costs and options will be. This frustrating lack of information from the federal government is hampering their ability to plan for the future.
My staff and I are working to help businesses and families navigate the current law.
That’s why I supported a one-year delay of the health-insurance mandate for employers and families. This delay will give Congress time to make fixes to the law, and provide businesses time to understand and prepare for the law.
We’ll be holding a series of workshops this fall to help businesses understand the law and make it work for them, and we’ve invited the Small Business Administration in Arizona to present at these workshops.
As our community prepares for the ACA’s implementation, I appreciate the parts of the law that give us security and certainty. Because of this law, children cannot be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions and students can continue receiving care under their parents’ existing plans. In Arizona, the Medicaid provisions of the ACA will help disabled veterans, seniors and those who previously lost access to critical health programs get the care they need.
Beginning in January, adults will no longer be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions.
I think we can all agree that these improvements are critical for thousands in Arizona and millions across the country.
I look forward to continuing our work both here and in Washington to strengthen the ACA and ensure the provision of quality and affordable care for Arizona’s hard-working families.
Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, represents Arizona’s Congressional District 9 in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Arizona: Medical pot excludes resin-based products
DHS Director Will Humble makes up some imaginary laws
More imaginary laws on medical marijuana from Will Humble and Jan Brewer????
Cops love to make up imaginary laws so they can arrest people and shake them down for money.
In Arizona, Tucson cops out of thin air redefined Arizona's traffic law requiring people to stop their motor vehicles at stop signs to mean a person riding a bicycle had to touch both feet on the ground for them to make a legal stop at a stop sign.
And the Tucson cops used this for years to stop people riding bicycles who stopped at a stop sign, but didn't touch both feet to the ground to write them tickets. Well until the courts said this arbitrary made up rule was a bunch of bullshit and could not be used.
When you are drunks it's legal to sleep it off in your car??? Well again Arizona cops made up an arbitrary rule that said if you are drunk and sleeping it off in your car that is the same as drunk driving. Their cockamamie logic was that if you had the keys to the car in your pocket that meant the car was under your control and therefor legally you were driving the car and thus the cops could write you a ticket for DWI.
Recently the Arizona Supreme Court said that was a bunch of bullshit and rules the practice unconstitutional.
Now Arizona Department of Health Services Director Will Humble and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer seem to be making up some imaginary laws which say it is is illegal for medical marijuana patients to have concentrated marijuana resin, which I believe is a big word for hashish or hash oil.
Arizona's medical marijuana law which is Prop 203 and is ARS 36-2801 says in ARS 36-2801.8 and in
ARS 36-2801.15 that marijuana is
”MARIJUANA” MEANS ALL PARTS OF ANY
PLANT OF THE GENUS CANNABIS WHETHER
GROWING OR NOT, AND THE SEEDS OF SUCH
PLANT.
and
”USABLE MARIJUANA” MEANS THE DRIED
FLOWERS OF THE MARIJUANA PLANT, AND
ANY MIXTURE OR PREPARATION THEREOF, BUT
DOES NOT INCLUDE THE SEEDS, STALKS AND
ROOTS OF THE PLANT AND DOES NOT INCLUDE
THE WEIGHT OF ANY NON-MARIJUANA
INGREDIENTS COMBINED WITH MARIJUANA
AND PREPARED FOR CONSUMPTION AS FOOD
OR DRINK.
If you ask me marijuana resin, hashish and hash oil are all "usable marijuana", "flowers of the marijuana plant" which per Prop 203 are legal for medical marijuana patients.
But in the following article Will Humble says medical marijuana patients who have "resin" can be put in jail.
Source
Arizona: Medical pot excludes resin-based products
By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Aug 30, 2013 9:59 PM
The Arizona Department of Health Services is kicking off a campaign to educate cardholders and dispensaries about which forms of marijuana are OK under the voter-approved Medical Marijuana Act and which are a felony to possess.
Director Will Humble said the act’s definitions differ from the state’s criminal code. So, while cardholders can legally buy what is defined as “usable marijuana” or any food product made from “usable marijuana,” they can be prosecuted for possessing products made by extracting resin from the plant.
Humble said he doesn’t know of any dispensaries selling products made by extracting resin.
“It’s kind of a subtle thing, but it could be really, really important to somebody’s liberty,” he said.
Changing the act to allow resins would require going back to the voters or persuading a majority of legislators to make the change.
9 million in U.S. use sleeping pills before bed
I suspect that medical marijuana is a lot safer and more effective then many of these prescription drugs or over the counter drugs used to help people sleep.
Of course don't tell that to Arizona Drug Czar Will Humble, or is that Arizona Department of Health Services Will Humble. He will say it is BS unless you have a study from the DEA, FDA and a note from your mom!!!
Source
9 million in U.S. use sleeping pills before bed
By Mike Stobbe Associated Press Fri Aug 30, 2013 7:12 PM
Can’t get enough shuteye? Nearly 9 million U.S. adults resort to prescription sleeping pills — and most are white, female, educated and 50 or older, according to the first government study of its kind.
But that’s only part of the picture. Experts believe there are millions more who try options like over-the-counter medicines or chamomile tea, or simply suffer through sleepless nights.
“Not everyone is running out to get a prescription drug,” said Russell Rosenberg, an Atlanta-based sleep researcher.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study was based on interviews with 17,000 adults from 2005 through 2010. Study participants were even asked to bring in any medicines they were taking.
Overall, 4 percent of adults said they’d taken a prescription sleeping pill or sedative in the previous month.
The study did not say whether use is increasing. But a CDC researcher calculated that use rose from 3.3 percent in 2003-2006 to 4.3 percent in 2007-2010.
That echoes U.S. market research that indicate an increase in insomnia in recent decades.
For adults, the recommended amount of sleep is 7 to 9 hours each night.
Doctors offer tips for good sleeping that include sticking to a regular bedtime schedule, getting exercise each day and avoiding caffeine and nicotine at night.
Phoenix Council aided Cavazos in taking city to the cleaners
Source
Posted on September 4, 2013 1:33 pm by Laurie Roberts
Phoenix Council aided Cavazos in taking city to the cleaners
It is, of course, easy to be nauseated at the sight of Phoenix City Manager David Cavazos, taking the city’s taxpayers to the cleaners.
I know I certainly want to heave every time I think about the quarter of a million dollars in parting gifts about to be bestowed on the guy, as he departs for greener pastures.
But remember two things:
1. He’s only doing what the Phoenix City Council allowed him to do, given the contract city leaders gave the guy — a contract that allows him to consider even his $600-a-month car allowance and his $100 a month cell phone allowance as pensionable income.
And 2. He’s able to stick it to taxpayers even more painfully than he otherwise would have, thanks to a 33 percent retroactive pay raise the City Council voted 8-1 to quietly gave him last fall. Now all that year’s worth of sick leave thathe accrued early in his career at a lower pay grade is about to be paid out (and much of it applied to his pension) at his new pay rate of $151 an hour.
Nice deal, if you can get it. And in Phoenix, you apparently can if you’re the top guy.
Be angry at Cavazos, but don’t forget the enablers who offered up all this largess, courtesy of taxpayers: Mayor Greg Stanton and the Phoenix City Council – everyone, that is, but Councilman Jim Waring, who at least voted no on the ridiculous 33 percent pay raise.
Mum’s still the word over at city hall on why the City Council suddenlyoffered Cavazos that ridiculous raise, which allowed him not only to boost his pension but leverage a better deal in his new job in Santa Ana. This, though rank-and-file city employees still haven’t had their pay and benefits restored given the city’s budget woes.
Perhaps someday, the truth will come out about what happened here. Of course, by then Cavazos will be gone, having lined his pockets and laughed all the way to the bank.
Praise MLK, then bomb Syria
|
I have posted a number of articles on the city of Chandler, Arizona mixing government and religion. In this article it seems we have the answer why!!!
One question for you Dick. You sound like a big fan of this tax increase, or as you call it a non-tax increase.
Will you some of this cash being going to you??? Will you be working as a school cop, or a school resource officer getting paid $50 an hour to baby sit the kiddies???]