That cops were busted for doing an illegal search. And it doesn't surprise me that the cops were caught by a security camera.
When the world became more surveilled by security cameras and camera phones the initial assumption was that it gave police another tool to find the bad guys, and in some ways it has. But all these cameras are catching cops being cops in the worst ways.
It's becoming more and more difficult to find juries that will produce a guilty verdict in marijuana cases, according to a judge in Missoula County, Montana.
"I think it's going to become increasingly difficult to seat a jury in marijuana cases, at least the ones involving a small amount," District Judge Dusty Deschamps said Friday after potential jurors refused to convict a Montana man for having a 1/16 of an ounce of Marijuana.
An April 23 search of Touray Cornell's home found several used marijuana joints, a pipe, and some residue. He's is also charged with the criminal distribution of dangerous drugs.
Cornell's neighbors had called the police because they thought he was selling drugs. The defendant admitted in an affidavit that he had distributed small amounts of marijuana.
One potential juror after another told the court that they would not convict the man for possessing a 1/16 of an ounce.
Deputy Missoula County Attorney Andrew Paul told the Associated Press that the jurors staged "a mutiny."
"District Judge Dusty Deschamps took a quick poll as to who might agree," the Missoulian reported. "Of the 27 potential jurors before him, maybe five raised their hands. A couple of others had already been excused because of their philosophical objections."
"I thought, 'Geez, I don't know if we can seat a jury," Deschamps said.
Paul and Cornell's attorney, Martin Elison, worked out a plea deal during recess.
Public opinion "is not supportive of the state's marijuana law and appeared to prevent any conviction from being obtained simply because an unbiased jury did not appear available under any circumstances," Elison wrote in the plea agreement.
Cornell entered an Alford plea Friday, not admitting guilt, but acknowledging there was enough evidence to convict him. The judge sentenced Cornell to 20 years with 19 of them suspended, to be served concurrently with his sentence in a theft case. Cornell was given credit for the 200 days already served.
"I think it's going to become increasingly difficult to seat a jury in marijuana cases, at least the ones involving a small amount," the judge said.
"It's kind of a reflection of society as a whole on the issue," he added.
"If more potential jurors start turning down nonviolent drug cases, our drug laws will change," Jason Kuznicki wrote for the blog The League of Ordinary Gentlemen.
Jury nullification often happens when a law is perceived to be unjust. During alcohol prohibition, nearly 60 percent of trials were nullified by jurors. Nullification was also often used in cases involving the Alien and Sedition and Fugitive Slave Acts.
Something weird is happening in San Francisco Giantsland. I don't know how much of this is getting out to the rest of the world.
There is the Giants' overweight third baseman, Pablo Sandoval, nicknamed "The Panda" after the cartoon character The Kung-Fu Panda. He had a great year last year (not so great so far this year) and became a phenomenon. People have taken to wearing Panda hats at the game.
Freaky.
Then there is Tim Lincecum, the Giants' skinny little stoner pitcher who's won the Cy Young award two years in a row. Last year the Major League Baseball video game used him in a hilarious commercial with his video doppelganger, showing him the ropes of major league baseball.
Last winter Lincecum was busted in his home Washington State for possessing a marijuana pipe. The Giants nevertheless resigned him to a nice fat contract.
Another Giants pitcher with a big contract is Barry Zito. He's been a model for a line of jeans and he's dated celebrities too. Zito himself is kind of a freaky guy who talks about unicorns and has a semi-regular pre-game show on weekends called "The Unicorn Hour".
Now a local cartoonist has begun a series on Lincecum called "Timmy & The Bus", a kind of take-off on The Who's Magic Bus. Here's the episode with Zito and his favorite unicorn, Powder.
Here is an interesting article in the LA Times suggesting that some public service announcements do the opposite of what they're intending to do. That is, if the commercial is aimed at making the target audience feel guilty or ashamed, what happens if the target audience is drinking because they feel guilty and/or ashamed?
Let this be a lesson to creators of well-intentioned, if not well-thought-out, public service ads: Messages meant to induce shame and guilt about alcohol abuse might not do what they're supposed to do.
Researchers at Northwestern University and Indiana University found that such ads can trigger some viewers' tendencies to be defensive about their actions, increasing the likelihood they'll behave, shall we say, unwisely.
The "feel guilty" or "feel ashamed" messages don't land in a vacuum, the researchers found. They can interact with existing feelings of guilt and shame. And really, who needs that? Better to shrug off the whole notion. Or so the mental thought process goes.
Remember Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" anti-drug program? That didn't stop drug-taking. And the one that had eggs cracked and sizzling in a skillet ("This is your brain on drugs") just made me want to have an omelet. There goes my cholesterol.
To understand what last night's elections mean, you have to recognize what the media wants you to think it means.
The national news seems to have totally missed that Dem John Garamendi has won Ellen Tauscher’s open seat here in California. If reported at all, it's dismissed as, Oh, it's those California left-wing wackos! But California's 10th District historically has been a Republican district. Tauscher won as a fiscally conservative Democrat in the 90s. She often voted to the right of the majority of Dems except on social issues. She'd rather vote for corporations and bankers than for workers. Garamendi is a lot more progressive than Tauscher ever was. He wants us out of Afghanistan now. He wants a single-payer Medicare-like healthcare system (you know, the kind that works better at half the cost around the rest of the world), much farther to the left than is likely to be even considered in Congress.
The lesson in New York’s 23rd District, where the media spent much of its attention, is that there still aren’t enough crazies, even there, to elect a teabagger. The 23rd is a very conservative district. The last time anyone other than a Republican was elected to Congress there Ulysses S. Grant was in the White House. National Republican leaders like Sarah Palin, in undercutting the Republican candidate in favor of a teabagger, managed to do what Democrats hadn't been able to do in 150 years: elect a Democrat. Not that the guy who won is a flaming liberal. He was a Republican before the local Democrats asked him to run this year so I don't expect him to be announcing his solidarity with the proletariat anytime soon.
So, in Congress anyway, it's a plus one for the Democrats. Garamendi is a full Democrat, a half better than Tauscher, and the guy in the 23rd in New York is probably no better than half a Democrat.
On to the two governors' races.
First off, voting for governors is more about state issues than sending a message to Washington. That doesn't mean that national issues don't have an effect on statewide elections. Governors' races have more to do with how well politicians work, as opposed to political philosophies. The lower the office, the more responsibility there is for the potholes and the taxes.
Corzine was really hated in NJ and his car accident really crystalized it. Corzine got injured in an accident while his state SUV was speeding to a photo op. He wasn't wearing a seatbelt. The public probably could have forgiven Corzine being a whore for the camera who felt above the law if he had successfully governed the state. The problem is that New Jersey pays incredibly high taxes and the citizenry think that they're not getting their money's worth. The winner, Chris Christie, the tubby Republican who won the race, is a Rovian hack who’s probably got dirt on him from his prosecutor years. You know, the scandal surrounding the firing of federal prosecutors when Karl Rove was politicizing the federal prosecutors' offices. Christie was never in danger from Rove because he spent most of his time going after corrupt Democratic politicians, with the exception of his big terrorist case nabbing those pizza deliverers with Arab names who were planning on blowing up Fort Dix. For those who don't know New Jersey, corrupt politician is the norm. And since there are plenty of Democratic politicians I'm sure Christie had easy pickings. It's just that corruption in New Jersey knows no political boundaries, meaning that there may be a bag of money in Christie's past, no matter how squeaky clean he presents himself now. And if not in the past, probably in his future. (See "The Sopranos".)
I don't think that this election was so much a referendum on Obama as much as a referendum on Corzine. Jon Corzine is part of a wave of rich men who took their fortunes and bought themselves political offices in a kind of noblesse oblige. He made his billion at Goldman Sachs. The best quip of the day yesterday was from John Cole who noted that finally someone from Goldman Sachs lost his job.
A similar process of noblesse oblige was working across the Hudson. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg changed the term limits rule and then ran and bought his third term as New York City's mayor, although the no-name Democrat who ran against him actually came closer to winning than anyone expected. It should be noted that Bloomberg shed his Republican label for "Independent" for this election.
I know very little about Virginia politics except Richmond once was the capitol of the Confederacy and it has a larger than average African American population. The Dem candidate has been described as “weak”, I don’t know what that means in pundit terminology. The voters in this off-year election were whiter and older than the electorate that showed up at the polls in 2008. Some pundits have claimed that the governor's race in Virginia was a rebuke of Obama's healthcare plans. The problem with that is Deeds, the Democrat in the race, had come out against the Democratic healthcare plan and said he would opt out on the state level. In essence, Deeds proved what right-wing Dems prove time and again: in a race between a Republican and a Republican-lite, the Republican generally wins. The younger voters and African Americans were basically told that no matter who they voted for they weren't getting a real Democrat. So they stayed home.
Bob McDonnell, The Republican winner in Virginia, ran on the red meat issues that attract older, whiter Southern voters. For example, McDonnell was railing against gays and fornicators which almost guarantees he’ll be caught boning someone.
The passing of medical marijuana in Maine suggests that perhaps federal prosecutors should be elected. See this. Joseph Russionello, the Bush-appointed federal prosecutor for Northern California, says he's going to continue to bust medical marijuana clinics no matter that the voters in California voted for medical marijuana and the Attorney General directed federal prosecutors to lay off marijuana prosecutions in favor of more important crimes. Alas, the drug war continues.
Same-sex marriage? Sigh. The new law in Maine was voted down by the voters by a slim margin while the medical marijuana initiative passed. On one hand, a few years ago the idea that almost half of the voters would support gay marriages would be hard to believe. On the other hand, it's discouraging. Think of all the rights we could take away from each other if only we voted on it. This makes the current lawsuit in federal court over Prop 8 all the more important because it seems like the same dynamics (and people) were behind it. And until gay marriage is recognized on the federal level gay rights will always be unequal to heterosexuals. However, all was not lost:
Two-term councilman Mark Kleinschmidt, a death-penalty defense lawyer and gay rights activist, narrowly defeated colleague Matt Czajkowski to take the reins as mayor. Kleinschmidt had just 49 percent of the vote in the four-person mayoral race.
+++
The most important thing about these elections is how the media interprets them. Watch the spin. Measure the spin. That’s the game today. How the media interprets these elections says more about the media and what it wants you to believe than the reality of the elections.
Here's my spin:
The Dems gained a seat in the House although two Dems were elected. They lost two governorships, one because their candidate was hated and ineffective, one because the candidate was so much a Republican-lite that a lot of Dems stayed home. The road to equality for gays is long and hard. Maybe when enough people are stoned.
What should this say for the next election? If Democrats want to be elected they should run candidates that aren't hated and are different enough from Republicans to make a difference. The Republicans might want to reconsider their drift farther to the Right. They are alienating themselves from the middle and there aren't enough voters to buy into the tea-bag mythology.
I written often on this, but it's nice to see someone else say it.
Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose, just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: “Your Federal Tax Dollars at Work.”
Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article Wednesday reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the CIA payroll.
Okay, the article was lacking much historical perspective (more on that later), and the dead hand of top editors was evident in the overly cautious tone (I loved the third paragraph, which stated that “The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raises significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.”
Well, duh! It should be raising questions about why we are even in Afghanistan, about who should be going to jail at the CIA, and about how can the government explain this to the over 1000 soldiers and Marines who have died supposedly helping to build a new Afghanistan).
But that said, the newspaper that helped cheerlead us into the pointless and criminal Iraq invasion in 2003, and that prevented journalist Risen from running his exposé of the Bush/Cheney administration’s massive warrantless National Security Agency electronic spying operation until after the 2004 presidential election, this time gave a critically important story full play, and even, appropriately, included a teaser in the same front-page story about October being the most deadly month yet for the US in Afghanistan.
What the article didn’t mention at all is that there is a clear historical pattern here. During the Vietnam War, the CIA, and its Air America airline front-company, were neck deep in the Southeast Asian heroin trade. At the time, it was Southeast Asia, not Afghanistan, that was the leading producer and exporter of opium, mostly to the US, where there was a heroin epidemic.
A decade later, in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, as the late investigative journalist Gary Webb so brilliantly documented first in a series titled “Dark Alliance” in the San Jose Mercury News, and later in a book by that same name, the CIA was deeply involved in the development of and smuggling of cocaine into the US, which was soon engulfed in a crack cocaine epidemic—one that continues to destroy African American and other poor communities across the country. (The Times role here was sordid—it and other leading papers, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times—did despicable hit pieces on Webb shamelessly trashing his work and his career, and ultimately driving him to suicide, though his facts have held up. For the whole sordid tale, read Alex Cockburn’s and Jeffrey St. Clair’s White Out).
In this case, Webb showed that the Agency was actually using the drugs as a way to fund arms, which it could use its own planes to ferry down to the Contra forces it was backing to subvert the Sandinista government in Nicaragua at a time Congress had barred the US from supporting the Contras.
Read it all. Read it and weep.
The other day I posted about a British scientist who called bullshit on a government official who was exaggerating the dangers of marijuana and reclassified grass into a more dangerous category.
Then the scientist was fired.
Now other scientists are resigning and calling bullshit on the government.
Colleagues of the government drugs adviser sacked by Alan Johnson say they have "serious concerns" about his decision and whether they can continue.
Two drugs advisory panel members quit in protest when Prof David Nutt was fired for comments on cannabis policy.
Others have questioned whether they can continue in "good conscience".
The home secretary denied reports that there will be a review of the council's role and told MPs he would meet members to discuss the situation "shortly".
Prof Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, was sacked on Friday after using a lecture to say that cannabis was less harmful than alcohol and tobacco.
And here's how the bureaucrat tried to play off firing the professor:
In a statement to MPs, Mr Johnson said the reason for sacking Prof Nutt was not "the work of the council but because of his failure to recognise that... his role is to advise rather than criticise".
He added that he had "lost confidence in the professor's ability to be my principal adviser on drugs".
Mr Johnson said Prof Nutt had "acted in a way that undermined the government rather than supporting its work".
But he added that the advisory council, set up in 1971, had been "invaluable to the successive governments it has served".
The letter sent by the council to the home secretary says that, while not all remaining 28 members have been reached, "it is clear that a majority of the council have serious concerns" about Prof Nutt's dismissal and the body's future.
It also says: "For some members these matters are of such seriousness as to raise the question whether they can, in good conscience, continue on the council.
"In this situation members wish for clarity and assurances about how the ministers view the council's advice and will view the council's advice in the future."
One member, Dr Les King, resigned on Sunday in protest at Prof Nutt's sacking. Another, pharmacist Marion Walker, has also resigned.
Dr King told the BBC he did not think the panel could continue. He said ministers had used the council as "a rubber stamp, as a poodle, by coming to the advisory council with a pre-determined agenda about drug classification".
Why Britain and not the U.S.? In America the government has a better screening plan. They hire scientists who will lie for them.
Here is a story from Great Britain about marijuana use.
The row over the reclassification of cannabis has been reignited after the government's chief drug adviser accused ministers of "devaluing" the evidence.
Professor David Nutt, of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, says it does not cause major health issues.
He accused ex-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith of "devaluing" scientific research. The Home Office said his view did not reflect that of the government.
In 2004 cannabis went from class B to C. In 2008, Ms Smith returned it to B.
A Home Office spokesman said: "Prof Nutt's views are his own."
He added: "The government is clear: we are determined to crack down on all illegal substances and minimise their harm to health and society as a whole."
It comes after Prof Nutt used a lecture at King's College in London and briefing paper to attack what he called the "artificial" separation of alcohol and tobacco from illegal drugs.
What is the motive for the government to lie about the relative dangers of drug usage? Alcohol and tobacco certainly are deadlier than marijuana. And Ecstacy?
In his lecture and briefing paper, entitled Estimating Drug Harms: A Risky Business?, he repeated his claim that the risks of taking ecstasy are no worse than riding a horse.
Prof Nutt also warned that the reclassification decision may lead to more people taking the drug.
"It may be that if you move a drug up a class it has a greater cachet," he said, adding the government's approach "starts to distort the value of evidence".
So if the purpose of government is to protect us from danger, why not protect us from the danger of alcohol and tobacco? Scientists have said that tobacco is more addictive than heroin. And tobacco kills millions of people worldwide every year.
But tobacco is an established business. It's taxed, it brings in lots of revenue around the country and exported around the world. Companies that make tobacco products donate to political campaigns. The same is to be said for alcohol. It's the accepted social lubricant, although it's negative effects cannot be denied.
Marijuana? It's relatively harmless, except that when it's illegal police with guns try to break up the trade, and people with guns fight the cops and others who try to move in on their business. In fact, that's the way all illegal drug trade works. People are sent to prison where they provide more work for prison guards. It's a growth industry.
Unless you are in denial you know that the trade in illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine (and even marijuana) provides huge profits for the underworld, and that underworld involves corrupt governments and corrupt government officials. And that web of corrupt governments includes shady government agencies. When Japan moved into China not only were there Japanese imposing government structures on the Chinese, there were also groups of secret police and Japanese gangsters who took over the drug trade, importing heroin into China. Our conquering armies aren't all that much different from the Japanese, at least as far as the web of gangsters and secret police and the drug trade.
One difference, though, is that Japan did not encourage the spread of drugs back to Japan. Heroin and opium were a means to control and weaken the will of the Chinese as well as make lots of money. America's secret police loosely oversee the flood of drugs into the U.S. where it goes into poor neighborhoods. What happens to the people in those neighborhoods? They are made poorer, they become devalued. They are essentially a devalued pool of workers, like slaves. They keep the cost of labor down. If they are unemployed they can still undercut the value of those who are employed. By creating a division between those who work and those who have no jobs, the oligarchy keeps the underclasses divided. Racism helps here.
This is how the game is played. And it all starts with making drugs as illegal as possible. It's a value-added tax, so to speak.
Is now as it ever has been, same as it ever was...
The brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been getting regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, The New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing current and former U.S. officials.
Ahmed Wali Karzai is a suspected player in Afghanistan's opium trade and has been paid by the CIA over the past eight years for services that included helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the CIA's direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, the newspaper reported.Ahmed Wali Karzai said in an interview that he cooperates with U.S. civilian and military officials but does not engage in the drug trade and does not receive payments from the CIA, the Times said.
The CIA neither confirmed nor denied the reported payments.
"No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kinds of allegations," a CIA spokesman told Reuters.
According to the Times, the agency's financial ties to Ahmed Wali Karzai and its working relations with him have created deep divisions within the Obama administration.
Critics see the relationship as complicating Washington's increasingly tense relationship with President Karzai, it said.
As I was sang once: "They ship it in. We shoot it up. They shoot us down. We die. But they ain't catchin' me 'long as I can fly."
I was called up for jury duty. Like most times I've been called initially I didn't particularly want to be selected. Who wants to go to a temporary job (juror) where you have to empty your pockets and take off your belt every time you go into the building. But after you turn your papers into the clerk they show you a short video about serving on a jury and scenes from "Twelve Angry Men" flash through your head. This time I made it past the big jury pool and was sent up to a courtroom with probably fifty other people.
A lot of people didn't want to be on the jury. There were self-employed people who were going to make any money if they miss a few days work. There was an unemployed person who had a job interview she'd miss. She'd been unemployed for six months. She needed a job. She started crying. Me, I'm retired. I've got all the time in the world. There was one guy who was working on a ranch who didn't want to serve because it was hay harvesting season.
The other thing that seemed more prevalent than the last time I made it as far as a courtroom were the number of people who said they didn't understand English. There were people who'd lived in the county for over twenty years (and were citizens) who claimed not to understand enough English to be jurors. I suspect that some of them were playing dumb to get off the jury, but one woman who claimed not to understand much English stayed in her seat next to me and grinned at the judge after he dismissed her. The rest of the panel had to gesture shooing her away before she got the clue.
I won't say much about the case, and, quite honestly, since I wasn't seated and didn't hear any evidence I don't know anything the case. What I will say is that the only black face in the room was the defendant and among the charges was one about drugs.
With all the people who had been dismissed I think the judge was happy to see me when I was called up. I was retired so I wasn't going to plead having to be at a job. And I said and did believe that I could be a fair judge of the facts of the case. And, hey, I was an English major way back when I was in college.
But then the judge asked me if I'd had any family members who'd been involved with the law regarding drugs.
Forty years ago I was arrested for possessing a drug I didn't have a prescription for. I hadn't thought about it for awhile. I told the judge this, that I'd been arrested on a drug charge forty years ago and that there were drugs around back then too, and I told him the charges were dismissed. He asked me if I felt I'd been treated fairly. I said I was treated fairly by the court. Then he asked me if I'd been treated fairly by "the arresting agency".
A friend and I had gone to pick up her elderly parents who were at the little boardwalk in this small town on the New Jersey shore. While she was gathering up her parents I was yanked out of her car by cops who apparently mistook me for someone else. I was taken down to the police station where cops circled around me and punched and kicked me. They never gave me my Miranda Rights, even after I requested a lawyer. I was charged and showed up to court three weeks in a row. No cop or DA ever showed up to present a case against me and on the third appearance the case was dismissed. All of this flashed through my mind as the judge asked me if I'd been treated fairly by "the arresting agency".
No, I told the judge.
The first challenge the prosecutor had I was gone. I left the court building with my stomach churning. I wasn't fit to be a juror because I'd seen the drug war in action forty years ago.
And maybe the prosecutor was right. As I drove home I actually began feeling sympathy for the defendant. Here he was, an addict, presumably a thief who'd been robbing to pay for his habit.
Over forty years ago I was with a friend of mine in Tompkins Square Park in New York City. A little kid, maybe ten years old, came up to us and asked us if we wanted some "hair-ur-ron." What? I asked. "You want some hair-ur-ron?" The little kid was selling heroin. Why was a ten year-old selling heroin? Because New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had pushed through a law making it a life sentence to sell heroin. So the unintended consequence was that drug pushers got minors to run the drugs.
Guess what? You can still buy heroin on the streets of America. Billions spent fighting drugs, probably a half million Americans in jail on drug charges.
I am so sick of people's lives being ruined by the drug war.
Maybe the prosecutor was right. Maybe I'd be the wrong guy on the jury. Maybe I'd feel sorry because of the machine this guy is being ground up in. Because I'm angry. I'm tired of wars. We haven't won a war since World War II. And I'm really tired of the drug war. We will never win the drug war.
At a certain point in your life you stop thinking about what you want to do and start thinking about what you should have done.
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