Although I am pretty right wing by most people’s standards, there are a few issues upon which my views differ from those of many of my fellow conservatives, and in this instance I think the Supreme Court has given its blessing to the guv’mint to interfere in affairs that should be left to the discretion of individual states.

Court Rules Against Pot for Sick People

Washington (AP) - Federal authorities may prosecute sick people whose doctors prescribe marijuana to ease pain, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, concluding that state laws don’t protect users from a federal ban on the drug.

The decision is a stinging defeat for marijuana advocates who had successfully pushed 10 states to allow the drug’s use to treat various illnesses.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the 6-3 decision, said that Congress could change the law to allow medical use of marijuana.

In a dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that states should be allowed to set their own rules.

Interestingly enough, O’Connor was joined in her dissent by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas. Liberals take note: Medical marijuana is a liberal issue and there’s Clarence Thomas, the accomplished black man whom you demean, for his conservatism, as a traitor to his “people”, coming down on your side of the equation. Try and find some spin to put on that!

I am totally on the dissenters’ side in this.

Living in San Francisco and socializing with a lot of people here, I’ve gotten to know quite a few people who have medical marijuana prescriptions. These are people with severely painful, permanent internal disorders, AIDS and other ailments whose agonies are either relieved or minimized by smoking marijuana. It really, truly helps them and while it is profoundly less expensive than some of the pharmaceuticals they would otherwise have to take, many at the taxpayer’s expense, it also works better than many of those prescription drugs and doesn’t feature the harsh side effects that are associated with most pharmaceuticals.

I truly cannot understand why the folks on my side of the aisle are continuing to be so damned boneheaded about this.  

There is no interstate trafficking in California’s medical marijuana program, all the legal herb sold here is grown in California and it is illegal to transport it out of the state for commercial purposes. People can also grow plants at home for their personal medical use, and a great many do because it’s cheaper than buying by weight. Seeds and young marijuana plants are sold at many of the “weed shops”(my own term).

In short, as long as a state keeps its legal sweet leaf (think Black Sabbath here, with Ozzie on their album Master Of Reality) industry entirely within its borders, the federal government should allow that state to make its own determinations regarding marijuana laws and their enforcement.

That would leave a whole lot more ATF assets free to go after the heroin, crystal & crack cocaine, oxycontin and methamphetamine traffickers who constitute the real threats by purveying addictive products that destroy families, ruin lives and create violent street crime.

In my honest opinion, the government is wasting millions of dollars in man hours(ooops! This is San Francisco, so it’s person hours) and logistics fighting the sale, use and possession of a product that will inevitably be decriminalized, at the very least, within the next few years as members of more recent generations replace the older politicians in the Senate. 

“The states’ core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens,” said O’Connor…. 

Right on!

On June 1st I posted about Amnesty International’s website posting about GITMO and other U.S. military detention centers where they keep captured terrorists and their associates.

Apparently, they were merely indulging in the by the book liberal strategy of hurling accusations in the general direction of G.W. Bush, accuracy not even a factor in their considerations, just another element of the nonstop leftist onslaught of idiocy in the liberals’ War On Bush.

According to an article in today’s Washington Times online by James G. Lakely, Amnesty International admits that they were talking from their touchas.

The head of Amnesty International’s American branch yesterday acknowledged that he “doesn’t know for sure” what is going on at Guantanamo Bay prison, although Amnesty International’s secretary-general has called the terrorist prison run at a U.S. military base in Cuba a “gulag.”

However, William F. Schulz defended the description made last week by Irene Khan, saying on “Fox News Sunday” yesterday that America’s “archipelago of prisons throughout the world” are “similar in character, if not in size” to the Soviet gulags, where millions of political prisoners were killed.

“I don’t believe [the charges] are irresponsible,” said Mr. Schulz, the executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. “I’ve told you the ways in which I think that [there are] analogies between the Soviet prison system and the United States.”

Pressed to cite concrete evidence that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales are the “architects” of “systematic torture” at the prison, Mr. Schulz could produce none.

“We don’t know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo and our whole point is that the United States ought to allow independent human rights organizations to investigate,” Mr. Schulz said, adding that Amnesty International was careful to use the word “alleged” when accusing high level Bush administration officials.    

So, “we don’t know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo,” but we’ll hurl accusations anyway since even though we may be misleading the public, we’ll maybe plant a few anti-Bush seeds in so doing and since the left has been working hard to establish ourselves as noncredible anyway, what could it hurt? We can always stumble foolishly through the heat we’ll have to take when the truth comes out, God knows we’re used to making asses out of ourselves in front of America and the world as it is, so here goes….

Read the entire article.

In September, I am moving from San Francisco to New York, from which I hail.

The thing I will miss most about today’s California is….

THIS!

I’m sure finding a lot of stuff to comment about from the “all the left that fits to print” newspaper these days. In todays New York Times there’s an article by Andrea Elliott entitled You Can’t Talk to an F.B.I. Agent that Way, or Can You?

Dressed in a navy suit and red tie, his hair parted neatly on the side, Special Agent Charles E. Frahm sat with practiced calm as Muslims rose, one after another, to hurl raw complaints at him. Mr. Frahm, who heads the counterterrorism division of the F.B.I. in New York, was at a banquet hall in the Midwood section of Brooklyn on Thursday night to listen, he had told hundreds of residents gathered there.

And they responded. They were tired of being held for hours at airports when their names resembled those of suspected terrorists, they said. They were tired of seeing Muslims arrested on immigration charges. They were tired of having their mosques watched, their businesses scrutinized.

….Since Mr. Frahm took over New York’s counterterrorism division in July 2004, he has impressed some skeptical Muslim leaders with his eagerness to make public appearances. “I think it helps the community to air their feelings,” he said during a break on Thursday night. “”This provides folks a forum for pent-up frustration. The emotion is real.”

….”I hear you, and I will continue to hear you,” he said. “I can also say we make no apologies for actions we must take to protect Americans.” 

And that last quote sums things up pretty well. “…. we make no apologies for actions we must take to protect Americans.”

What do these people expect? The overwhelming majority of today’s terrorists look just like them, have names like theirs and to go further, several mosques and places of business have been caught out as places for storing weapons and explosives, harboring wanted terrorists, indoctrinating and training terrorists and also in the case of the mosques, many are places where “holy men” preach hate against Jews and Christians with the intention of inciting lethal violence against innocent people in the name of Islam.

So we’re supposed to assume that all of these people are clean until something blows up and a lot of people are killed or maimed? Is that it? 

I have a much better idea: Stop whining, and police your own damn community! Your inaction sends out a message of approval to these murderous fanatics, and coupled with the adulation they receive from Arab media and millions of fellow Muslims this accellerates terrorism. If a Muslim community, here or elsewhere does not openly oppose terrorists and actively help local and federal law enforcement in taking them down(that includes fingering relatives who are involved in terrorism) then as far as I’m concerned that community is proterror and undeserving of U.S. citizenship or even a green card.

Terrorism travels with Islam; Wherever the Religion of Peace goes, so does violence. It’s your baggage, Muslims, so you need to deal with it. Until you do, don’t bitch about your “rights.” My right to live is more important to me than your right not to be inconvenienced.

So, in the article.…

In today’s N.Y. Times, the paper known 99% of the time or thereabouts for butt munching Old Europe while extolling their superiority to the U.S. under a GOP administration, there is a column by David Brooks titled Fear and Rejection that expresses the opinion that American liberals are, once again, being proved wrong. How? By failing to perceive that their goals for the United States have already been tested over time in Western Europe and found to be seriously lacking in favorable results.

Read the column here.

“The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it’s sliding. European output per capita is less than 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas. There is little prospect of robust growth returning any time soon.”

“Once it was plausible to argue that the European quality of life made up for the economic underperformance, but those arguments look more and more strained, in part because demographic trends make even the current conditions unsustainable. Europe’s population is aging and shrinking. By 2040, the European median age will be around 50. Nearly a third of the population will be over 65. Public spending on retirees will have to grow by a third, sending Europe into a spiral of higher taxes and less growth.”

And the above is what the liberals want for the rest of us? Our so-called ”cultural elite”, with all their self proclaimed intellectual superiority, are as dumb as the proverbial box of rocks. Even confronted with the truth glaring out of the reality that is the example set by today’s Western Europe, they are determined to lead us down their Utopian trail to economic and cultural disaster.

The references made by the columnist to the Western European median age, by 2040, of 50 with one third of the population being 65, while not cited in the piece, are a result of a severe decrease in child births in the last couple of decades. Younger generations are having less babies, and less babies means less future taxpayers to support them when they retire, and it stands to reason that this, in turn, means that in order to take care of the old folks a few short decades from now, the thinned down working generation of that time will have to be taxed almost to starvation.

Do we really need to be there tomorrow, just so a few “cultural elite” jackasses can score some political victories today?   

Yesterday I received my copy of Herb Meyer’s DVD, The Siege Of Western Civilization, and I just finished watching it.

It’s a 42 minute monologue that very reasonably defines the entire conservative point of view, and I can’t imagine a liberal watching more than the first fifteen minutes, since as we know, liberals are almost exclusively closed minded to the point that they’ll rarely even socialize with anyone whose political views are different.

The intro begins thusly:

“We all want to live in a healthy environment. So when our environment is threatened, we need to know about it so we can take steps to make things better. But in the last few years, we have become so obsessed by our physical environment that we have ignored threats to our cultural environment. And the truth is, in the long run the health of our cultural environment is just as important to us as the health of our physical environment- maybe even more important…

Our cultural environment is Western Civilization. This is who we are. And today, Western Civilization is under siege……..”

Herb Meyer really does cover all the bases in the conservative argument.

You can order it here.

I have added Amnesty International to my site links and aptly described them as an international version of the ACLU, whose site I won’t link to here because it is probably the most miserably bigoted, hate filled and hypocritical organization in America.

While Amnesty International is another org along the same lines, their site keeps us up with some of the rhetoric these asshats are spreading to a vast global audience.

Ever since its inception, Amnesty International has put a great deal of effort into anti-U.S. propaganda. Basically, they have taken the side of our enemies at any given time, whenever an opportunity has arisen to do so.

Currently on their website is yet another of their attacks on Guantanamo Bay and “other” prisoner of war camps. Read The Article.

These people we have in detention are not there for shop lifting, though some of them are associated with others who steal airplanes, then crash them into busy office buildings, murdering thousands of innocent human beings they don’t even know. They are not prisoners because they committed DUI, uttered forged instruments nor perpetrated insider trading.

These people are terrorists, or they are the former thugs of a fallen, oppressive, murderous theocratic regime that supported and harbored those terrorists, a Muslim Ton Ton Macoutre. They are POWs in the Global War On Terror, which is an ongoing military conflict and as such different(military) rules apply. These prisoners’ crimes, other than by association, were not committed on United States soil, and they are not being held on sovereign U.S. soil. Hell, the GITMO bunch are in Cuba! Rest assured, therefore, that considering how prisoners of the same status would be treated in Fidel Castro’s captivity they are living in the lap of luxury.  

The rejection of the proposed EU constitution is now official, the link in the preceding post now reaches the updated Wall Street Journal article, Here…

Today’s Wall Street Journal Online features a story titled France Rejects EU Constitution.

Paris– The French decisively rejected the European Union’s proposed new constitution, plunging the bloc into polical paralysis and putting at least a temporary break on five decades of movement toward an ever-stronger pan-European government.

President Jacques Chirac said in a televised address late Sunday that he would decide later this week whether to shuffle his cabinet in response to the vote, which amounted to a bitter personal defeat for the French leader. A staunch supporter of the constitution, he conceded that his countrymen had spurned the charter, after partial official results indicated that the “no” vote was carrying the day by a margin of 57% to 43%.

Read the rest….

This veering off from voting with Chirac could signal the beginnings of a lack of confidence among the rank and file Frenchman for Jock–sorry, I meant Jacques, which could be good news for that weasel country. Maybe the next president over there will be a little bit honest and also be endowed with a spine. Wait, we’re talking France here, what am I saying!?  

As far as the EU is concerned, I’ve never thought the concept was a very good idea. I would hate to see the United States surrender some of our sovereignty by joining a bloc of countries like that. Imagine having a lot of our policies decided during a vote by Bolivia, Costa Rica and Canada.

Over at FOXNews Online, there’s a link from the home page to a video report on the Iraq Stock Exchange(ISX). To summarize the report,

The exchange has been open for eleven months, and in that time their sales volume has fully tripled. There are more than 100 companies currently listed.

In the first seven months, fourteen billion shares were traded and the increase since has been “exponential”. The thing that really makes this newsworthy is that the ISX is only open five hours a week, yet Iraqi citizens are turning out in droves to invest in their country’s future.

To date, they have been employing a marker and wallboard system, like Nevada race and sports books did before they went electronic, to keep track of trades, but a modern high tech exchange is being built and will soon be ready for the ISX to relocate there.

Watch the video. You’ll be on Fox’s home page, go to the right sidebar and click on Business, then on Iraq Stock Exchange.

Thank God for FOX News,  they’re one of very few media outlets without a tenacious liberal agenda, rather an eye toward the conservative point of view, without whom we would never read any news that might hint that something positive actually happened as a result of something George W. Bush set in motion.