3/17/14

GOP to sue administration over legal cannabis; Rand Paul's state cultivation leader



You can't make this shit up.
If you’ve been wondering how Darrell Issa is spending his time since the Benghazi scandal proved to be a non-scandal, he, along with several of his colleagues want to sue President Obama for not arresting people for marijuana in states where it’s legalized. Legislation was actually passed on Thursday to force Obama to crack down on states that have legalized marijuana in any form. [Freak Out Nation]
We Democrats would be foolish not to cheer Sen. Rand Paul (earth hater-KY) as he packs thermite into the basement of his party's world trade center.
Kristin Nevedal chairs the Emerald Growers Association, the triangle's marijuana trade group. The coauthor of an ecofriendly pot-farming guide, she often consults with state and local lawmakers about how to make the industry more responsible. "Prohibition hasn't curbed the desire for cannabis," she says. "So we really need to look at changing our policy and starting to treat it like agriculture, so we can manage it."There will likely still be a niche for the Emerald Triangle growers who started it all, Nevedal believes, just as there has been for craft whiskey distilleries in post-Prohibition Kentucky. Growing really good weed is simply too much work and too much strain on the environment to make sense on an industrial scale. [Mother Jones]
Sen. Paul wants legal GMO hemp: is that want America wants?

Cannabis is already a 35 billion dollar crop in the US.

Most cannactivists see the future of the business as a synthesis of the cannabis equivalents of organic microbreweries, vintners, and greenhouses rolled into (heh heh) cottage industries that can withstand fiduciary and insurance requirements without large corporations running the show.

Recall that California's Prop 19 went down because growers didn't then, and don't now, want to cede control of strains to the state.

Comes this from Doug Fine posted at AlterNet. He talked to a grower named Mark who said:
“It’ll be the end of the small farmer,” he told me. “Foks’ll [sic] be buying packages of joints made by Coors or Marlboro.” Section 40 of Title 27 of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau’s regulations has 534 subsections. If a black-market farmer is simply churning out quick turnaround, pesticide-heavy, indoor-grown popcorn buds to pay the mortgage, that farmer is going to lose out to Coors-style mass-produced cannabis, because he’s essentially growing a Coors-quality product already.
Danger, though, lurks in other places besides Big Tobacco and Alcohol for the small post-drug war cannabis farmer. The first few years of federal drug peace will be the best of times and the worst of times for the independent cannabis farmer. Just as the end of alcohol Prohibition put bootleggers out of business, the question of who will snatch the cannabis market when the cartels are pulled out of the equation is ultimately up to America’s 100 million cannabis consumers.
We are a litigious society: ways to generate revenue for states can be hammered out in committee in each state legislature to head off some of the torts likely following enactment and to guide law enforcement using most of the same language that governs alcohol use.

Patients seeking cannabis as medicine can be seen by a health care provider and be excused from paying the excise taxes.

Anyone who doesn't see the consequences of Citizens United as guaranteed free speech telegraphed into cannabis law is blind.


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3/16/14

GOP's earth hater code decrypted

Listen to part of the basis for what Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crow at WYNC's On the Media:
Lee Atwater became one of the most complicated and successful Republican political operatives in history by employing a triple threat: spin when you can, change the subject when you can’t, and if all else fails, appeal to the voters’ resentment and fear, usually of African-Americans. In this conversation from 2008, Brooke talks to Stefan Forbes, director of "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story", about the dark legacy of Atwater’s Southern strategy.
Just wow.

Newt Gingrich authored the earth haters' handbook and it's still the official little red book of the Republican Party, NPR's Andrea Seabrook says:
New York Rep. Louise Slaughter, a Democrat, was also in Congress with Gingrich. And what she remembers is a memo his staff circulated. It was called "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." "They had a lexicon of words that they could use when they talked about Democrats," she recalls. The memo listed positive words Republicans should use to describe their ideas — like "opportunity," "common sense" and "reform." It also listed negative words the GOP should use to describe Democrats' ideas — like "welfare," "pathetic" and "criminal rights." Today, Slaughter says, "I really do believe that he was responsible for a lot of the absolute vitriol that we have in the House."
Dems, take a lesson from Ron Paul: be consistent and use language wisely... and stand up to the goddamned earth hating bullies!

Guy Raz has become one of my favorite NPR hosts. Here he is talking with Sidney Milkis, a political scientist at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, courtesy WBUR:
One late January night in 1966, President Johnson went to the Capitol to deliver the annual State of the Union address. Johnson was at the peak of his power that night, and during the hourlong speech, he talked about his agenda for the year: Vietnam, social programs and expanding the war on poverty. But right in the middle, he offered up an idea that seemed to come out of nowhere when he proposed to change the term for a congressman from two years to four, concurrent with presidential terms.
Milkis goes on to say that Congress spends too much time campaigning and not enough time negotiating.
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3/15/14

Black Hills quick hits

Kris Roberts with the North Dakota Department of Health says no more than 33 barrels were spilled on Friday in the area southwest of Williston and east of the North Dakota-Montana border. Roberts says the well was surrounded by dikes, but some of the oil escaped from a breach in one dike and got into the floodwaters. [AP, Bozeman Daily Chronicle]
It's no secret that South Dakota is a chemical toilet: North Dakota is, too.




Environmental pollutants in the umbilical cord blood of infants? How conservative.
Researchers have found, for example, that the surfactant POEA can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells. But these risks have been conveniently ignored. There is a safer, saner, more earth-friendly way to feed nations. While Monsanto and US regulators are forcing GM crops on American families, Russian families are showing what can be done with permaculture methods on simple garden plots. Bear in mind that Russia only has 110 days of growing season per year – so in the US, for example, gardeners’ output could be substantially greater. Today, however, the area taken up by lawns in the US is two times greater than that of Russia’s gardens – and it produces nothing but a multi-billion-dollar lawn care industry. In the US, only about 0.6 percent of the total agricultural area is devoted to organic farming. This area needs to be vastly expanded if we are to avoid “the sixth mass extinction.” [Ellen Brown, Sky Valley Chronicle]

Connect the dots.


Black Hills historian Charles Rambow presented more than four decades of research into the KKK's presence in the Black Hills to an audience at the Homestake Adams Research and Cultural Center in Deadwood. [KBHB Radio]
Black Hills State University’s week-long celebration of Native culture kicks off Monday, April 7 with this year’s theme “Earth is Sacred; Honor our Mother” focusing on environmental concerns. [BHSU News]
Rick Weiland, the lone Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in South Dakota, came into a Saturday afternoon meeting in Custer “fired up and motivated” in his quest to win the seat being vacated by Democrat Tim Johnson who is retiring this year. [Custer County Chronicle]
How KTEQ managed to get back on the air after 14 years came as a surprise its student managers. The initial estimate to get all the freestanding equipment acquired and land was between $150,000 and $250,000, which was a problem since fundraising was never one of their strong suits, said station manager Brock Benson, a computer science major. The station received the final FCC permission to go back on the air on Feb. 28 with the stipulation they actually needed to be back on the air within 10 days. They made it just in time on Saturday, March 8. [Rapid City Journal]
Reservations contain valuable natural resources worth nearly $1.5 trillion, according to a recent estimate. [Forbes]


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3/14/14

Wismer: South Dakotans Can't Wait!

From my inbox:
Larry --
Last week the governor requested – for a second time – to limit the Medicaid expansion to only cover less than half of those eligible in South Dakota. His request was again denied by the Federal government, just as it was the first time he submitted it a year ago.
South Dakotans, like Ronald Fuchs of Mitchell, can’t wait for health insurance while the governor plays political games. Read more about Robert’s story here.
While the governor sits back and does little to help South Dakotans without health care, I’m working hard in the legislature, fighting for full Medicaid expansion to cover more than 48,000 South Dakotans. Show your support by making a contribution of $250, $100, or $50 today.
I understand that South Dakotans don’t have time to wait for coverage. According to a New England Journal of Medicine study, 94 South Dakotans will die this year while waiting for the governor to expand Medicaid. Give $94 right now to stand up for South Dakotans in need of health care.
Show your support for the 48,000 South Dakotans without access to affordable health care. As governor I will put South Dakota’s needs ahead of politics.
Sincerely,
Susan
P.S. Your support today will send a message to the governor about the priorities of every day South Dakotans.




Follow the money.
Gov. Dennis Daugaard has received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from affiliates of companies that have been recipients of grants overseen by the governor’s office, an investigation by the Capital Journal has found. An analysis of Daugaard’s campaign contributions and corporate filings found on the Secretary of State’s website reveals several officers of companies that received Future Fund awards also gave the governor money. [Joel Ebert, Daugaard receives donations from Future Fund recipients]
Where will it end?
Every year in South Dakota the state department of social services removes over 740 American Indian children from their homes, tearing them away from their families, their tribes and their traditions. Since 2006 the Lakota People's Law Project has been waging a comprehensive campaign to stop the state's actions and win the return of these children.
South Dakota's earth hater governor is slipping Ft. Pierre some Community Development Block Grant dough:
Gov. Dennis Daugaard already has signed the two offers of CDBG assistance to the city of Fort Pierre on April 10. The city council also set a public hearing date of May 6 for Ordinance No. 962, amending some passages of city ordinance having to do with conditional uses and conditional use permits; and it set May 20 as the date for a public hearing on a petition by Dakota Mill & Grain Inc. to vacate a 20-foot alley that isn’t used. No other property owners are affected.--staff, Pierre Capital Journal.
You have to admit Hani Shafai has balls. Of course he was invited to Governor Daugaard's pheasant killing contest. Shafai, a Rapid City Muslim, criticized Walid Shoebat, a converted christian, after Shafai learned of a speech at a Rapid City terrorism conference:
I don’t think it is right for anyone in any organization to generalize about these types of issues,” Shafai said. “Every group of society, regardless of its religious or cultural backgrounds, has good and bad.” [David Montgomery, Al-Qaida not a fringe opinion among Muslims, speaker claims, Rapid City Journal]
Recall the slush fund called the Governors Club: Shafai appears with Doyle Estes, who donated polluted swamp land for a soccer complex. Also appearing on that list is Roger Tellinghuisen, now managing cash resources for the complex. He enjoyed a $75,000 legal services contract after being attorney general for the state.

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3/13/14

Noem wants to end air and water protections

The US Environmental Protection Agency contributed over $47 million in funding programs for South Dakota in 2012 through the GOP-owned Department of Ecocide and Natural Ruination (DENR). EPA has posted funding opportunities for 2014. Here is the page for EPA's Office of Brownfields & Land Revitalization.

Last year EPA imposed fines for violations by ethanol facilities in Aberdeen and Huron:
EPA inspections conducted in January, 2012 found that Advanced BioEnergy’s ethanol plants had deficiencies in their Risk Management Plans associated with the use and storage of hazardous chemicals. Advanced BioEnergy also failed to accurately file TRI forms detailing the chemicals processed, manufactured or used at its facilities.
South Dakota's K Street-owned christofascist junior senator Thune was a lobbyist for industrial chemical companies before his handlers bought him a blogger and a Senate seat.

South Dakota's embattled Rep. Kristi Noem has opened a can of worms by bringing sunlight to the dust generated by agriculture in a state where the levels of toxicity in soils is off the charts in most watersheds.
Thanks to disingenuous catchphrases and a cleverly selected bill name, the pesticide manufacturers were able to convince many in the House of Representatives to vote for H.R. 872, and now the Senate is all that stands between this bill and the President’s desk. Unfortunately, the true effect of the so-called “Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act of 2011,” which should more appropriately be called the “Reducing Environmental Protections Act of 2011,” can’t be wrapped into quick sound bites. These special interests used the complexity of this issue to turn Congressmen who typically work to protect the public health into conspirators in exposing our waterways and our bodies to more pesticides. [Pesticide industry bill would axe Clean Water Act protections]

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