Last week’s contest was won by ‘Siberian dog’. It was College Place, WA, near Walla Walla.

This week’s is related to a news item from December, good luck!

How is this anything other than a complete contradiction?

Frank Abe, spokesman for Constantine, said the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign has many outlets for exercising free speech, including the purchase of ad space elsewhere.

“It’s been claimed the decision to rescind acceptance of the ad is due to public pressure,” he wrote in an e-mail. “It is not.”

Metro’s policies restrict material that can lead to harm or disrupt public transit, Abe said. “This proposed ad did not originally fit that definition, but now falls within it because of the global firestorm over the ad.”

Our freedom of speech should never conditional upon whether it makes people angry or uncomfortable. That’s why capitulations over a cartoonist’s ability to draw Muhammad are cowardly, and why Metro’s decision not to display these ads is just as cowardly.

– Goldy beat me to it on the Pat Robertson news. It’s hard to understand how Robertson could have a more enlightened position on this than our state legislature, who’ve failed for several years in a row to decriminalize marijuana.

– Speaking of state marijuana laws, I was putting together a state-by-state progress report when I noticed that Russ Belville has already put together this handy chart on state medical marijuana laws. More info and charts from Russ here.

– Here in Washington, Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles has released a draft of her medical marijuana bill that would finally legalize dispensaries and provide arrest protection for patients. The bill can be read here.

– The ACLU of Washington continues to fight for a medical marijuana patient who was fired from her job solely for failing a pre-employment screening, even though she didn’t use her medicine at work and was fully able to do her job.

– Dominic Holden writes about the medical marijuana industry in King County that’s now starting to come out of the shadows.

– If any of you have driven on I-5 north of Tacoma, you’ve probably seen this billboard, which Sensible Washington intends to have up all year as they once again push to have an initiative on the November ballot.

– Larry David thanks Congress for the tax cuts.

– Tyler Cowen discusses income inequality.

– Senator Al Franken discusses why net neutrality matters. So does Steve Wozniak.

– Ballard resident Tom Nissley is kicking ass on Jeopardy.

– Here’s the video of the shooting of John T. Williams. After watching that, I have trouble seeing how that could’ve been a justified use of force.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the death of Jeff Roetter, a medical marijuana patient who died of an epileptic seizure the night of June 18, 2010. His death came as Snoqualmie Police were putting pressure on him to assist in their efforts to prosecute Bryan Gabriel, the man who insists he was Roetter’s medical marijuana provider. Even after chatting with a couple of Jeff’s friends and acquaintances, as well as Gabriel, his attorney, and one of the Snoqualmie officers, there’s a lot still unknown about what really happened. Adding to that, several people were simply afraid to talk to me, for fear of retribution from the police. Trying to pin down exactly what happened has been a challenge, and my post ended up not drawing a lot of solid conclusions.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this, I put in a public records request for the police reports on both arrests. This week, I obtained 22 pages of police records from the November 2009 arrests of both Roetter and Gabriel and some additional reports from the week in June when King County Judge Sharon Armstrong ordered that the marijuana taken during the initial arrest should be returned. It was during that week when Roetter died.

Even with this extra documentation, much of the disputed points of the story remain a he said/she said situation between Gabriel and the Snoqualmie Police. In my initial post, I left a number of these conflicts out or only briefly addressed them, partially because I felt I’d be able to get better information later with some additional documentation. Now that I’ve read through the more complete police records (as Sgt. Sylvain of Snoqualmie Police encouraged me to do), I want to elaborate on some of the points of contention.

[Read more…]

Last week’s contest was won by waguy. It was Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, NJ, where the show Cake Boss takes place.

This week’s contest is a random location in Washington state. Good luck!

Via Raw Story:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denounced “business McCarthyism” in the United States after the Bank of America halted all transactions to the website Saturday.

The Australian, who was spending his second full day on bail, vowed the whistle-blowing site would carry on releasing controversial leaked US diplomatic cables as he insisted his life was under threat.

Bank of America, the largest US bank, halted all transactions for WikiLeaks, joining other institutions that have refused to process payments for the website since it started to publish the documents last month.

“Bank of America joins in the actions previously announced by MasterCard, PayPal, Visa Europe and others and will not process transactions of any type that we have reason to believe are intended for WikiLeaks,” it said in a statement.

Commenter ‘Undercover Brother’ made a mention of this in a previous thread, and I think it’s an overlooked point in the battle against Wikileaks. Wikileaks had been considered a serious threat to our government’s secrecy for quite some time already. They released the Apache Helicopter video back in April. They released the Afghanistan War logs in July and the Iraq War logs in October. And even though the release of the diplomatic cables only started recently, our government has known that Wikileaks had them for over six months.

But it wasn’t until the first week in December that major pressure was applied to them from private industry, specifically folks in the financial services world. And it happened shortly after Julian Assange said this in an interview printed in Forbes:

These megaleaks, as you call them, we haven’t seen any of those from the private sector.

No, not at the same scale as for the military.

Will we?

Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.

…

What do you want to be the result of this release?

[Pauses] I’m not sure.

It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume.

Usually when you get leaks at this level, it’s about one particular case or one particular violation. For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails. Why were these so valuable? When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.

When discussing Wikileaks and the intense backlash against them, it’s easy to fall into a conspiratorial mindset. But when dealing with America’s financial sector in a world economy that’s so interconnected, they may indeed have more power to silence people than any single government by itself.

Here’s an interview of Cary Moon by local Grist writer David Roberts.

– Former UK Defence Minister and Drugs Minister Bob Ainsworth is speaking out in favor of legalizing and regulating all drugs (not just marijuana, all drugs). No doubt that his experience staring into the abyss in Afghanistan over the past two years helped lead him to this conclusion. It’s hard to imagine anyone who’s recently held either equivalent position in our own government doing the same. Pete Guither discusses the impact this could have in the UK, which has historically been just as averse to science and reason as our own.

– Earlier this month, Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin placed a hold on the nomination of Michele Leonhart to head up the DEA. His specific problem with her nomination was over the DEA’s overly strict rules governing how pain medications are dispensed in nursing homes. Kohl’s objection is just one of many reasons to oppose Leonhart.

– Now that medical marijuana is becoming a legal and mainstream part of America’s economy, a national trade group called the National Cannabis Industry Association has been formed to lobby for more liberal marijuana laws in Washington DC. Locally, a group called the Washington Cannabis Association has now come together and intends to share some ideas with our legislators in Olympia on how they can lessen the impact of our budget problems while also making our communities safer.

– Paul Armentano ridicules Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske’s attempt to blame medical marijuana laws for the increase in teen drug use. It’s really not much of a fair fight as Armentano – unlike our former Police Chief – actually uses evidence to back up his assertions. And as we found out this year, even polling on whether or not someone will vote for marijuana-related bills is often skewed by a reluctance to admit support for a more liberal position. With that in mind, it’s reasonable to suspect that polling over the years might not be solely an indication of how many teens are using marijuana from year to year, but also a measure of how comfortable a teenager is to admit their use in a survey.

Here’s a bit of interesting news from last week that I missed. Roy Alloway, the Bremerton police officer who gained notoriety within the WestNET drug task force as one of the most zealous marijuana law enforcers in the state (and who retired this past spring) is suspected of involvement in an illegal gun-dealing operation.

The state appears to have a very different view of dispensaries than it did only a few years ago:

The state has begun an effort to collect sales tax from medical marijuana dispensaries, The Associated Press reports.

State officials, facing a $4.7 billion deficit for 2011-13 and needing about a half-billion dollars in extra cuts to the current budget, are looking for money any place they can find it.

The Washington Department of Revenue launched the statewide medical marijuana effort. Spokesman Mike Gowrylow told The AP the department mailed letters to 90 dispensaries and related organizations on Friday, saying medical marijuana is not exempt from state sales tax and dispensaries must collect that money and turn it over to the state. The letter also warned them that dispensaries must also pay the state business and occupation tax.

While some dispensary owners around the state actually boast about their willingness to pay taxes (to show that they can be just as responsible a corporate citizen as any other business owner), they’re still taking a legal risk that other business owners don’t by opening up their operations to government scrutiny. Dispensaries still operate in a very gray area of Washington’s medical marijuana law. This move could lead to greater visibility in the community and higher risks with local officials.

It’s about time we finally fix the law and let these businesses operate in the open. Then tax away.

Fareed Zakaria points out how Glenn Beck’s producer’s attempts to justify Beck’s fuzzy math on Islamic terrorism ends up defining Beck himself as a terrorist.

Jeremy Scahill of The Nation just returned from an unembedded trip to Afghanistan and here was part of his prepared testimony before Congress:

Despite the perception that we know what is happening in Afghanistan, what is rarely discussed in any depth in Congress or the media is the vast number of innocent Afghan civilians that are being killed on a regular basis in US night raids and the heavy bombing that has been reinstated by General David Petraeus. I saw the impact of these civilian deaths first-hand and I can say that in some cases our own actions are helping to increase the strength and expand the size of the Taliban and the broader insurgency in Afghanistan.

There’s no question that our overall military strategy (along with our counter-narcotics strategy) is leading to a larger and stronger Taliban. One can simply look at the trend of coalition military casualties in the graph below:

Scahill also goes on to point out that despite what many expected of Obama, his Administration hasn’t just expanded the war in Afghanistan, but has also overseen an increase in the number of countries where American military assets operate – often secretly.

This trend towards American imperialism, militarism, and secrecy was what initially inspired me to begin blogging way back in 2004. The parallels between the war on drugs and the war on terror have long been obvious to anyone who could approach the subject with a willingness to look past longstanding taboos. And the current war on Wikileaks demonstrates the same dynamic. As Scahill implores Congress to provide oversight over a military-industrial complex run amok, Congress remains far more concerned with those who aim to reveal the truth about what that apparatus is doing.

UPDATE: For some great commentary on this subject, listen to Glenn Greenwald’s interview with Nir Rosen, whose new book covers this topic to much acclaim.

UPDATE 2: Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, passed away today. Holbrooke was someone who seemed to understand the situation in Afghanistan at a level that others within our government could not. His final words were “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”

Last week’s contest was a particularly tough one, but wes.in.wa got it for his third win in a row. It was Genk, Belgium.

This week’s is related to a TV show or a movie, good luck!

Gov.-elect Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Gov.-elect John Kasich in Ohio campaigned on pledges to stop passenger-rail projects in their states. On Thursday, they got their wish.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood rescinded nearly $1.2 billion that had been allocated to Wisconsin and Ohio for new train lines. Wisconsin, which received $810 million for a passenger train between Madison and Milwaukee, will have to forfeit the entire amount. Ohio must give up $385 million of the $400 million allocated for a train connecting Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland.

The funds will be redirected to train projects in 14 states. California and Florida will receive the largest portions, up to $624 million and $342.3 million, respectively.

After that, Washington is third, getting $161 million. And as unemployment continues to rise in Ohio and Wisconsin, I’m sure they’ll nod dutifully at Glenn Beck as he blames us “coastal elites” for electing “socialists” to office rather than make the connection between stimulus spending and jobs. Meanwhile, we’ll be too busy getting to work on building 21st century infrastructure to care.