Suddenly, pursuing a war against our own people when over 20% admit using marijuana regularly, does not seem to be a popular way to spend people’s money during these tough economic times. The drug war has fed the prison industry, the law enforcement industry, and wasted trillions of dollars, thanks in large part to Richard Nixon’s paranoia about blacks, Jews, and hippies.  And we the taxpayer, are paying for it.

The DEA budget for 2009 is $2 billion, and the Federal prison system?  Oh, that’s another $5.5 billion.  On a side note ladies – The Justice Department slashed the Office of Justice Programs, COPS, Office on Violence Against Women budget by 65%, or 1.5 BILLION in 2009).

80% of the DEA’s budget is spent prosecuting the war on marijuana, quite possibly the most useful plant in the history of, well, the world.  All for hemp, a plant that can supply fuel, clothing, food, fabric, as well as cures for countless ailments, including lung cancer.

Prohibition didn’t work for alcohol.  It isn’t working now.

I know that it’s a bit long, but watch the video.  Even if you don’t smoke pot, and according to statistics, most of us don’t, watch just to see how your hard earned tax dollars are being spent, while everything else seems going to hell in a hand basket.

Lawrence Lessig, Joe Trippi, and their Change Congress movement have introduced a new way for small political donors to join forces to put pressure on congress, where it hurts them most – financially.  The Change Congress Donor Strike is underway and they are asking you to withhold financial contributions to any candidates that do not pledge to eliminate special interest money in congress.  In their words…

Right now, special interests have more influence over our political system than regular folks because of our broken campaign finance laws. These special interests pump millions of dollars into congressional campaigns each cycle, and as a result, they block real change on issue after issue.

Here at Change Congress, we believe that politicians should work for the people, not special interests. But it’s not enough to push politicians to stay out of the system of corruption—we have to reform the system itself. That’s why we support a hybrid of small-dollar donations and public financing, to keep big money out of politics.

Lawrence Lessig founded Change Congress to find innovative ways to make government more transparent, and to eliminate special interest money in politics.  Joe Trippi was Howard Dean’s campaign manager and is a pioneer in using the Internet as a tool for political activism and fundraising.  Trippi’s blog looks a lot like mine, demonstrating that we both have a minimal grasp of CSS style content sheets.  Cool.

Occupation 101 is a frighteningly unbiased view of the conflict in the Middle East as seen from the eyes of outside observers from the Red Cross, the U.N. and other groups.

What the Israeli’s have actully been doing to the Palestinians for over a hundred years is far different than what we see on television here in the United States.  What we have been told is a conflict thousands of years old, is actually a brutally violent military occupation. 

Thousands of years?  The conflict started in the early 1900’s when early Zionists laid claim to, bulldozed, and built new towns on Arab land based on centuries old religious based claims.

As one friend pointed out, 90 minutes is a big commitment for a video.  Watch the first 15 or 20 minutes and see if the rest is worth it. I think it is.

“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice . . . you don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying . . . lobbying, to get what they want . . . Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want . . . they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that . . . that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin’ retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it . . . they’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fuckin’ place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in The big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people . . . white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means . . . continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you . . . they don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all . . . at all . . . at all, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. It’s called the American Dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it . . .”

R.I.P. George, we will miss your always truthful words. I leave you all with George Carlin with Keith Olbermann on Countdown last October…

Abraham Lincoln’s guidelines for prisoner treatment during the civil war were the framework for the Geneva Convention’s guidelines. United States army treatment of surrendering German army soldiers at the end of WWII was so humane that it led the quick surrender of millions of German soldiers who knew they would be safer with the allies then fighting a losing cause against them any longer.

This lecture by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tells this tale much better than I can.

One of the key reasons is that the major media corporations have been saving money by drastically reducing, or electing not to cover much more than the United States, a bit of Europe and the Middle East. The rest of the world, over 2 Billion People, gets less than 1% of the news time we see.

Bonus points to you if you knew what the top news story of last year was.

Hint – it wasn’t the war in Iraq.

Most of the suburbs here are 10 or more miles from downtown and many of these large suburbs here are full of empty big box stores, and large vacant parcels of commercial real estate. Western New York has a rich history in failed shopping malls too – The Seneca Mall, The Thruway Mall, McKinley Mall (soon), the list is long.

This great video shows how current suburban landscapes are unsustainable, ugly, and doomed to fail. It also shows a terrific plan for reuse of the land, complete with rebuilt, natural village and city centers.

From their email, which does a better job explaining the campaign than I could:

• The American Freedom Campaign was launched less than eight months ago to build a grassroots movement to help restore the Constitution and reverse the violations of civil liberties and human rights that have occurred over the past seven years.

• Over the past few months, the American Freedom Campaign has filled an important role in Washington by leading the fight to restore our system of checks and balances. While there are many organizations fighting specific policies considered unconstitutional, few, if any, are focused almost exclusively on restraining executive overreach.

• Consistent with its mission to restore checks and balances, AFC aggressively – and successfully – pushed the U.S. House to pass a contempt resolution against Bush administration officials who refused to comply with congressional subpoenas. The Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, in an article about the contempt vote in the House, cited AFC as an example – in fact, the only example – of an advocacy group generating grassroots pressure on House members.

• AFC has also helped inject constitutional balance of powers issues into the debate over the nation’s Iraq policy. As the Bush administration negotiates an agreement with the Iraqi government to establish the parameters of the two nations’ bilateral relationship beyond 2008, AFC is working with members of Congress to ensure that no significant commitment is made without the approval of Congress. Toward this end, AFC hosted a conference call on which Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), joined by two constitutional scholars from Yale Law School, introduced a resolution expressing the sense of the House that any major agreement reached without congressional approval will be invalid.

• As the 2008 campaign moves forward, AFC will play a critically important educational role. We will aggressively push the message that the Bush administration’s dramatic expansion of executive power makes the selection of the next president one of the most important decisions the citizens of this nation will ever make.

The changes to our constitution need to be reversed, and our freedoms returned to us.

My local incumbent republican congressman, Tom Reynolds, best known in recent years for publicly supporting congressman/pedophile Mark Foley during a bitter scandal a few years ago, has decided to retire! As the house Republican responsible for getting party congressmen re-elected, Reynolds convinced Foley to rerun for office, even after evidence of his despicable behavior was known.

So now that Reynolds has seen the writing on the wall, and has decided to step down, that leaves an interesting puzzle here in Western New York. Democratic newcomer Jon Powers has started a grass roots campaign, and has garnered some local support and a few endorsements. Unfortunately, he hasn’t gotten the Erie County nod, as millionaire businessman Jack Davis has yet to announce his intentions. Remember Davis, a local millionaire who ran and lost a very close race to Reynolds just two years ago, mostly with his own money.

Davis was a Republican until just prior to that election however, and only switched parties after a personal insult from Dick Cheney. Reynolds is considered by most to be a loose cannon and is really party independent. The Albany Report notes:

” Mr. Davis is prone to overstatement. He has warned about “Red China,” for example, and suggested he would take a bat to anyone who sent his sons sexually explicit e-mail messages like those a congressman sent to young male pages.”

I have been following Jon Powers’ campaign for weeks now. Powers is running on a change platform, however the only change he seems to advocate is away from Tom Reynolds. What will his position be now? If you visit the Powers’ web site, you can see that his campaign may be in a strange spot now though, since all of his campaign rhetoric is directed at unseating Reynolds, and does not really make any case for what Powers wants to do.

As for change, Powers has also already taken special interest money and his campaign has told me that he will continue to do so. Real change would be to run free of soft money contributions, and with real plans for change. So far I have nothing to indicate that Powers has any plan other than not being Tom Reynolds. Grabbing Obama’s message of Change is certainly popular this year, but I hope he’s got a real plan somewhere.

Is it possible that the Bush administration used terror threats, many of which were later proven to be totally false and misleading, to divert attention away from their own misdeeds and screw ups elsewhere? We could just consider it part of an ongoing pattern of propaganda by the administration. Remember, using messages designed to change people’s opinions or more importantly, BEHAVIOR is a fundamental part of the definition of propaganda.

def. – Propaganda is a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people. Instead of impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience. The most effective propaganda is often completely truthful, but some propaganda presents facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis, or gives loaded messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the cognitive narrative of the subject in the target audience.

I remember being told told to go buy duct tape and plastic drop cloths to protect my family from an impending chemical or nuclear attack, which turned out later to be verified as false. Yes, that whole week of water cooler discussion and hardware store excitement was the direct result of one of these announcements. Home Depot stock probably went through the roof.

I also remember as a child, being taught to hide under my school desk, to protect myself against a nuclear bomb attack. Living near one of the world’s largest hydroelectric plants made us a huge target we were told. Niagara Falls was a vital target for the commies, it was REALLY IMPORTANT, and we were going to be targets our whole lives – just for living here!

Use common sense, and filter things you see on TV with natural skepticism. If it sounds like a bunch of hype, it very well could be. Your natural instincts are not fooling you.

There are a lot of things in the world to be afraid of – skyrocketing prices on food and everything else, the faltering economy, the death toll in Iraq, and people who would scare you into doing their will. You are far more likely to die in a car accident, fire, or murder, than by a terrorist attack according to statistics.

Watch the video.