SF GATE: FRESNO — Two Modesto men are facing mandatory 20-year prison sentences after being convicted of running a medical-marijuana operation that federal prosecutors labeled a criminal enterprise, authorities said today. Luke Anthony Scarmazzo, 28, and Ricardo Ruiz Montes, 28, were convicted by a federal jury Fresno on Thursday of conducting a continuing criminal enterprise, growing marijuana and possessing marijuana with the intent to distribute. The conviction for running a criminal enterprise carries a mandatory sentence of at least 20 years. U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger is to sentence both men Aug. 4. Federal officials said the case sends a […]
HELL NO WE WON’T GO (BACK): Iraq Vets Tell Congress The War Is Immoral, Illegal & Incompetent
AFP: Matthis Chiroux is the kind of young American US military recruiters love. “I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school,” the now 24-year-old told AFP. “I was ‘filet mignon’ for recruiters. They started phoning me when I was in 10th grade,” or around 16 years old, he added. Chiroux joined the US army straight out of high school nearly six years ago, and worked his way up from private to sergeant. He served in Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines and was due to be deployed next month in Iraq. On […]
BILL O’REILLY: The Other Side Of The Story
WARNING: F-bombing cats and dogs in this one. BILL O’REILLY: F*cks Ann Coulter WARNING: F-bomb Alert Defcon 5!
JON STEWART: Why Whitey Can’t Vote 2
PREVIOUSLY: Seriously, West Virginny coal-crackers voting for a Republican is like the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. Letting these people vote is like putting a loaded shotgun in the baby’s crib and hoping for the best. I don’t know about you, but I am against putting a loaded shotgun in the baby’s crib and hoping for the best. RELATED: A Whiter Shade Of Trash Obama Faces Racism in West Virginia – The best video clips are here PREVIOUSLY: I am saying this for the good of the country and, in fact, for the good of white people. Because I fear for […]
Homeland Security Forcibly Injects Deportees With Anti-Psychotic Drugs Before Deportation Flights
WASHINGTON POST: The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged. The government’s forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the “pre-flight cocktail,” as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane. “Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac,” […]
JOHN EDWARDS: ‘Yes We Can’
NEW YORK TIMES: GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina who bowed out of the presidential race in January, is expected to endorse Senator Barack Obama at a rally being held here tonight. Officials announced the news shortly after Mr. Obama landed here late this afternoon. The campaign has timed the announcement to coincide with the start of the major evening newscasts, which would have otherwise focused on Senator Hillary Clinton’s landslide victory in West Virginia, which raised new questions about Mr. Obama’s strength with white working class voters. Mr. Obama’s campaign is hoping it […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Suze Rotolo — she was the woman walking beside Bob Dylan on the album cover for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan — was Bob Dylan’s girlfriend in the early 1960s. She’s an artist, and a teacher at the Parsons School of Design in New York. And she’s written about her relationship with Dylan in a memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. Reviewing the book for Salon, Stephanie Zacharek writes, “This is an honest book about a great love affair, set against the folk-music revival of the early 1960s, but its sense of time […]
MEOW MIX: Don’t Cry For Me West Virginia
“It’s not over until the lady in the pant suit says it is.” Tell it, Angela! Hillary wins big in West Virginia Democrats, while Obama’s peacenik, self-consciously liberal loyalists press “you’re with us, or you’re a racist” case. And because that whole separate-and-unequal superdelegate thing has been such a smashing success, George McGovern has a plan! If it’s going to be about more than race, then stop making it about exposing the racist heart of America and start figuring out how to make that state full of people you just called bigots vote for your guy in November [Sheesh, talk […]
Brainwashing The American Public For Fun & Profit
HUFFINGTON POST: In April, The New York Times published a story exposing the deep ties between numerous media military analysts and the Pentagon and defense industries. The Times noted that “the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform” media military analysts, many of whom have clients or work for companies with an interest in obtaining Pentagon contracts, “into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.” HuffPost’s Jason Linkins noted at the time that neither the Times nor […]
EDITORIAL: Why Whitey Can’t Vote
“You know something people, I’m not black but there’s a whole lotsa times I wish I could say I’m not white.” — Frank Zappa, 1966 BY JONATHAN VALANIA As I write this, Hillary Clinton is exit-polling ahead of Barack Obama in West Virginia by a fairly astonishing margin of 40 points. Which is why I am thinking the time has come to take the right to vote away from white people, at least until they come to their senses. Seriously, I just don’t think they can be trusted to exercise it responsibly anymore. I give you Exhibit A: The last […]
THE DISCONNECT: Philly Wi-Fi Goes No-Fi
PHILADELPHIA – EarthLink Inc. is pulling the plug on its troubled wireless high-speed Internet network in Philadelphia, once touted as a model for how big cities should deploy Wi-Fi. The Atlanta-based Internet service provider said Tuesday that it could not find a buyer for the $17 million network and that talks to give it to either the city or a nonprofit organization had failed. City officials have said it would cost taxpayers millions each year to operate the network. “It’s been an unfortunate situation,” Chief Executive Officer Rolla Huff told The Associated Press. “It was a great idea a few […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Last Good Campaign
[via the current issue of Vanity Fair] In 1968, with the country divided over the war in Vietnam, the Democratic Party struggled to rally behind a candidate. Amid this political turbulence, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, guided by a set of principles and his burning opposition to the war, entered the race. The party establishment reacted with dismay, but his candidacy, coming just five years after the assassination of his brother John F. Kennedy, filled the electorate with hope — a hope that met a violent end just a few months later. By Thurston Clark Two months after John F. Kennedy’s […]
NO JOKE: Let’s Invade Burma And Save A Million Lives!
TIME: The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma’s infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur. So what is the world doing […]