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Efforts to legalize marijuana for recreational use are gaining momentum in Washington state and Colorado, despite fierce opposition from the federal government and a decades-long cultural battle over America’s most commonly used illicit drug.
Officials in Washington state on Friday said an initiative to legalize pot has enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in November. In Colorado, officials are likely this week to make a similar determination about an initiative there.
Supporters are prepared to possibly spend millions of dollars ahead of the November ballot, when they hope a strong voter turnout, particularly among youth, for the U.S. presidential election will aid their cause.
“Whether it’s make or break depends on what public opinion does after 2012, but in terms of voter turnout this is the best year to do it,” said Alison Holcomb, director of New Approach Washington, the initiative’s sponsor.
While 16 states, including Washington and Colorado, along with the nation’s capital, now allow marijuana use for medical purposes, cannabis remains an illegal narcotic under U.S. law – and public opinion is sharply divided on the merits of full legalization.
California voters turned back a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational use in 2010, in part because of concerns about how production and sale of the drug would be regulated.
Undeterred, supporters of the Washington state initiative say it represents the “grown-up” approach to legalization.
Sales would only be allowed to adults 21 and older through marijuana-only stores licensed by the state Liquor Control Board, which would also oversee production and processing of the drug. Laws on drunken driving would be amended to include maximum blood content thresholds for THC, the main psychoactive element in pot plants.
Colorado already has a robust regulatory system for medical marijuana that includes a registry of over 80,000 card-carrying patients and rules governing how physicians and distributors operate. Here, too, legalization advocates are stressing a rational regulatory approach.
“Voters aren’t being asked to imagine as much as they are in other states, they have seen that marijuana can be regulated and it doesn’t result in significant problems,” said Mason Tvert, co-director of the Colorado-based Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol.
Organizers of the Washington effort have collected over $1.1 million in campaign funds, with $250,000 of that coming from Progressive Insurance chairman Peter Lewis, public disclosure records show.
Loren Collingwood, senior researcher for the nonpartisan Washington Poll run by the University of Washington, said the initiative could pass, but that backers must spend between $2 million and $4 million to run a competitive campaign.
A poll done by the university in October found 48 percent of Washington residents support the idea of pot legalization, but that was not tied to any particular initiative.
“If young voters turn out in droves like they did in 2008 or even start to approach those numbers … then I think this will pass, but they very well may not,” Collingwood said.
Pot legalization supporters have argued for decades that prohibition has failed to curb pot use, and that the policy enriches drug cartels, hurts casual users and deprives governments of a potentially lucrative source of tax revenue.
No one has been able to explain to me why young men…… and women serve in the U.S. Military for 20 years, risking their lives protecting freedom, and only get 50% of their pay. While Politicians hold their political positions in the safe confines of the capital, protected by these same men and women, and receive full pay retirement after serving one term. It just does not make any sense.
On Fox news they learned that the staffers of Congress family members are exempt from having to pay back student loans. This will get national attention if other news networks will broadcast it. When you add this to the below, just where will all of it stop?
35 States file lawsuit against the Federal Government
Governors of 35 states have filed suit against the Federal Government for imposing unlawful burdens upon them. It only takes 38 (of the 50) States to convene a Constitutional Convention.
This will take less than thirty seconds to read. If you agree, please pass it on.
This is an idea that we should address.
For too long we have been too complacent about the workings of Congress. Many citizens had no idea that members of Congress could retire with the same pay after only one term, that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed (such as being exempt from any fear of prosecution for sexual harassment) while ordinary citizens must live under those laws. The latest is to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform… in all of its forms. Somehow, that doesn’t seem logical. We do not have an elite that is above the law. I truly don’t care if they are Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever. The self-serving must stop.
If each person that receives this will post it on their wall, in three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message.. This is one proposal that really should be passed around.
Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution: “Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States ..”
Now, what are you going to do about it? Read and delete, or work for reform? Share on the wall of EVERY congressman, representative, governor, the white house!!!!! Pass it around!!! Make calls, send fax’s and email’s……………
Almost daily we see-read, and watch insulting false-incorrect spermicidal information flowing out of mouths of Republicans and the Fox News types. We send that info to each other and post the shocking lies in disbelief them – Republicans and the Fox News types that blatantly say what they say.
When also see the posted fact checks, such as who is really on welfare and who really the welfare president, Mr. George Bush was.
We know who really increased the debt, and increased taxes, three times more than any other president that would be Mr. Ronald Reagan. For the record Obama has raised it the least.
We know eight years of Bush policies all the way up to him leaving office in January of 2009 caused the loss of two million jobs. Please somebody tell Newt to stop saying Obama lost two millions jobs. Fact under Obama in 2009- 2010 only 300,000 jobs were lost, but it open to debate did Obama or did Bush residue cause those jobs to go away. Fact unemployment is back at 8% and going under from a high of 10% This is coming from a man who lost his job too, and still looking …hey in-box me if you need me…
Not many News service will call-out the lies the Republican machine will roll out, and they will say when caught in a lie … “Oh that’s not what I meant.”, but wait here is what we need to do … send facts to those conservative Republicans and Fox News types, on the fence swing voters and so called independents friends you might happen to have.
I know there is the worry you’ll end up debating someone who would rather eat his or her own boggers than submit to the facts. Well no you don’t have to, just send them the facts and then act like they do, ignore them. You can lead an elephant-ass to water but you can’t make-em drink.
I always send them correct information to them, even when I know they most likely will reject the truth because the truth was not they wanted. We, our, people of conciseness of any color or race, and religion know the facts, we know where we are in life, but they- Republicans and the Fox News TYPES DON’T KNOW THEIR ASS IS IN THE POOR HOUSE AND WHO PUT THEM THERE, but hey…by chance if you keep sending them the facts it’s the same liars who they voted for, you might get one to pull the head out of a hole.
Even though Fox News screams loud they are only talking to the same people who choose to be ignorant of facts and fall easy to being led by a corporation of elitist. Most Americans have figured out that is a circus show of easily proven lies.
What we have to be so-much more careful of and aware is WE CAN JADE OURSELVES WHEN WE PREACH TO THE CHOIR. The message we know need to get into the ears of the on fence swing voters and so called independents friends you might happen to have. Why, here is a lie easy to believe in for them. Black voters are the only reason Obama is the President….WRONG…. if not one Black person voted he still would have won…Fact
SEND THEM THE FACTS OFTEN:
Fact:
36 million Americans relied on food stamps. More than 24 million of them were white, 8 million were African American and 6 million were Hispanic of any race. Of the 46 million people living in poverty in America in 2010, the U.S. census revealed that 31 million were white.
Fact: there are only 35 million Black people and of the 8 million living in poverty 6 million are children.
Fact: That state Iowa is 96% white…let me repeat 96% white and has the one of the highest crimes rate percentage in America… will Fox News ever tell you that, I think not!
Fact:
Of the 49 million people without health insurance coverage, 37 million were white; 8 million were African American. Latinos of every race and Asian Americans represented the remaining largest ethnic groups.
Fact:
White Americans, poor and middle-class alike receive the vast majority of tax-funded government assistance programs, from monthly assistance to Social Security to food stamps.
Fact:
TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), the program that provides aid to single mothers, is the most well-known welfare program, but the truth is that Social Security and Medicare are also social welfare services, funded by tax dollars. To that end, nearly 70 percent of all benefits of these programs go to white people. In fact, since African Americans have lower life expectancy, many work and pay into the Social Security and Medicare programs through their tax dollars, only to have white Americans, who have a longer life expectancy, benefit from the income they’ve left behind.
Fact:
Child Poverty in Rural America,” reveals that 57 percent of rural poor children were white and 44 percent of all urban poor children were white.
And for the person who will doubt these facts out of denial of going to look them up themselves. These figures were taking under George Bush and Obama
Kind of funny when you think of it, the poor whites that hate Obama will follow Fox News and never hear this. Yet the same people they vote for are the one keeping them down…
Kind of funny, Black people are stereotyped for saying “The Man Is Keeping Me Down”, and several of the Repubs running for office has said Blacks are the Welfare users, and we look for a hand outs, but the truth is it the other way around.
Kind of Funny, those poor white folk lost many of their blue collar jobs because people like Mitt sold their companies and shut the door on them.
It will be more of the same race baiting this time around of stupid ignorance that will keep the liars out of office with simple minded … “I don’t know what Obama is and where he was born, and he has ties to terrorist, and he not American enough type of crap and that train of thought will keep him office because there is enough intelligent people of all races, and religions who will reject it as they did in 2008
Family Values Obama or Newt
For the people because I come from the people Obama or Mitt
Has Obama made some mistakes yes, but he has not started two wars and then didn’t pay for them and left America broke and Fox blames him for it. No need to answer unless you got the facts
Alvin L.A. Horn an independent minded voter not owned by anyone but by the truth.
FactCheck.org : Newt’s Faulty Food-Stamp Claim
factcheck.org
Newt Gingrich claims that “more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.” He’s wrong. More were added under Bush than under Obama, according to the most recent figures.
Here is more info for you
Catholic leaders tell Gingrich, Santorum ‘to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes’
floridaindependent.com
Catholic leaders issued a letter Friday1/20/2012 to GOP presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, themselves Catholics, urging them to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes on the campaign trail.
Thank you, Mr. Alvin L.A. Horn for this article
Very simple to prepare, and afterwards will make you slap yo Mama, lol lol
Vodka Caramel Fried Chicken
ingredients: 1. Cut up chicken, 2. 1 1/2 cups of Milk, 3. 1 2/3 cups of Vodka Caramel, 4. 1 tsp of Sea Salt, 5. 1 tsp of sugar, 6. 2 eggs beaten, 7. 1 tsp of Black Pepper.
Ok here we go, such fun
Place cut up chicken is a plastic container that we will cover later. Mix all the rest of the ingredients together in a bowl. Pour liquid over chicken in plastic container and cover. Put in fridge for 3 hrs.
Ok, now we are ready to cook this fantastic chicken.
Make sure each piece of chicken is covered in flour, place in a skillet of 2 cups of Olive Oil and 1 stick of butter. Cook over a med-high temperature until golden brown. Now don’t start snacking until all is done, you won’t want to eat the rest of your meal. Feeds 4 folks.
Added attraction – Add spinach, carrots, or corn, or a fresh salad to compliment your meal.
(recipe by Lennis)
So that leaves us with Romney and Gingrich. That’s not exactly a snoozefest, but it isn’t a barn burner either. The issue here is not so much who will win the republican ticket. Its about who blows it first! Who will say something that can be seen as ignorant, racist or homophobic? They are both driving their campaigns like freight trains, headed straight into one another. Its like political chicken. Who do you think will move out of the way first?
That depends. Newt Gingrich is the Tupac Shakur of the Republican Party. He is smart, fearless, dedicated to his cause, has more friends than you think and will go out of his way to hurt your feelings to win. He can also be reckless in his speech which gives Romney a shot.
Gingrich has recently been quoted saying things that seem to criminalize the poor:
“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich claimed.“They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal,” he added.
Newt Gingrich has a long history of saying things that anger and rile up all kinds of people. He speaks in ways that compels everybody to take notice. Today on CNN former President Bill Clinton said that he predicted Newt’s comeback in the polls and added how “resilient” he is.
Mitt Romney always looks like he should be doing better than he is doing. He is dangerous mainly because he got a long history in politics. He knows the terrain well. Romney is well connected. But he talks like your old uncle at the Christmas dinner who has never seen an ipad.
He’s got the entire package of the standard republican: Old, rich, White male.
The truth is, once you scratch beyond that he’s simply not that interesting. Its hard to find a statement from Romney that makes you upset. Even things that might easily rile you up if other people were saying them, just make you shrug your shoulders when Romney is on the mic. If you sprinkle his shameless flip-flops on positions from abortion to healthcare, you can see why the Romney camp is worried about Newt.
In 2006, Romney signed a Massachusetts healthcare law that looked a lot like Obama’s federal plan in 2010. When asked what he thought about Obama’s healthcare plan he said “Obamacare is bad news.” This hurt Romney immensely. It was clear he was hating on the person (Obama) and not the plan.
I believe Romney much less likely to say something wrong though. Romney is much more likely to get busted doing something wrong. Recently the Daily Beast said that Nancy Pelosi is investigating reports of Romney improperly dumping records of his Governorship in 2008.
The only thing worse than his flip-flops are his faith. It’s that he’s Mormon and nobody likes that idea inside the party. No matter how we might talk about freedom of religion in this country, serious Christian conservatives have deep reservations about electing Romney because he is a Mormon. That’s an unfortunate American reality.
If I were a betting man, I’d bet Gingrich is more likely to say something that ruins his own election. Romney on the other hand as ripe as he may be for the republican ticket is not memorable enough to matter. There is just not enough fire in his belly. This could force him to go on the offensive to get Newt. Without the charisma and ability to be spontaneous, he could blow it overextending himself in a public forum.
Newt’s fearlessness in speech could easily wilt Romney in the spotlight. He could also make Obama look soft and unprepared. Gingrich has to play hard enough to attract the Tea Party, but not cross the line and alienate the real Republican base. If he does that, he can be a big problem for Romney and eventually Obama. Gingrich’s weakness in public speaking that he is more convincing as a one liner guy. In an open debate, he could embarrass himself to irrevocable levels. Not because he’s not unintelligent. Simply the more you listen to Newt, the harder he is to like- let alone believe.
In this game of political chicken, I’m betting Romney fails first. Either by blundering with an overextended attack, or putting the masses to sleep with boredom. Which of these candidates do you think will win and why? Can either of them beat Obama? Post your thoughts below.
With GOP presidential contender Herman Cain’s presidential candidacy effectively dead, now’s a good time to turn a hard glare on the suddenly surging GOP Presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s racial skeletons. His closet is stuffed with them. The first reminder of that was his off the cuff crack at Harvard that ghetto children are lazy and chronic thieves and should be dumped into menial jobs early on to break their alleged ghetto slothful habits. This racially loaded slur was vintage Gingrich. More than any other major party office contender he has never shied away from spewing some of the most bigoted, racially charged, digs on and off the campaign trail. The crack about ghetto kids having “no habits of working” was a near verbatim repeat of Gingrich’s jab at poor blacks nearly two decades ago.
Then he chided a group of black journalists that blacks were poor because of their “habits.” Gingrich didn’t stop there. The habits that he said held blacks back were that they were too religious, and too law suit happy (meaning mounting legal challenges to discrimination), rather than acquiring the good old habits of business and professional skills to lift them out of poverty. In his ill famed Contract with America he touted as Congressional House Speaker in the 1990s, he moved to encode his obsession with the presumed “habits” of social and personal dysfunctionality that supposedly pervades all black communities when he proposed lopping off all welfare benefits for poor teen mothers and taking some of that money saved and dumping their kids into orphanages.
This harsh throwback to 19th century poor houses and workhouses was mocked, laughed at and sneered at the time by critics but a part of the proposal wove its way into law when then President Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act. The law contained rigid time frame limits and top heavy work requirement provisions for welfare recipients.
In a Meet the Press interview last May he did double duty on racial bigotry. He slammed Obama with racist code name calling, branding him the “food stamp president.” He double downed on racist coding by huffing that Obama’s policies would turn the country into Detroit. Gingrich may have preferred to lambaste blacks again for the alleged “bad habits” of the ghetto—sloth, poverty, and dependence on government handouts—but Detroit is universally recognized as the poster city for urban decay, the mere mention of the city was enough to make the point about alleged black dysfunctionality.
While blacks are a favorite target of his, Gingrich has spread his bigotry around. He’s gone after Muslims, railing at the notion of putting a mosque near the twin towers, and endorsed racially profiling them under the guise of fighting terrorism, and likened gay activists to fascists. Gingrich gets an occasional mild rebuke in the press, and quiet cheers from his supporters, whose numbers have climbed with the crash and burn of Bachman, Perry, and Cain, and the fear and loathing of Romney by ultra conservatives. This insures that Gingrich’s blatant bigotry will continue to get headline coverage. If Gingrich forbid should make it to or near the White House race baiting would be back on the nation’s table. Before that happens turn the glare on Gingrich’s bigotry.
by Earl Hutchinson
Another reality show in the works is the Real Preachers’ Wives of Atlanta. The show will air on TLC. Meanwhile, changes are coming to the real housewives of Atlanta. Khandi Burress and Kim Zolciak are leaving the show to star in their own spinoffs. I hear Keshia Knight Pulliam (“Rudy” from The Cosby Show) may be joining the cast when the new season starts. In other reality show news, don’t look for Vanessa Bryant to star in any. The ex-Mrs. Kobe Bryant was offered a lot of money by VH1 to star in a show, but she turned them down saying shows about players wives are not her style.