American Woman Artist

“Crow Dance”

Laura Pelick

via wood s lot

African American Women

At the Daily Voice, Avis Jones-DeWeever has a great article critiquing the way that CNN covered African American women and families in its documentary on Black American experience.  Here’s some of it:

CNN did all of America a grave disservice with its over-simplistic, decontextualized, and obsessively-hyped documentary on the Black American experience.  Upon the umpteenth showing of the special it finally hit me–the only additional image needed to really bring it home would have been a soft-shoe dancin’, white-glove wearin’, big grin sportin’ minstrel interlude.  At least with such a display, it would have become graphically clear that the Black America emphasized in the series was more caricature than fact-based groundbreaking analysis. 
 
Take for example, the especially disappointing focus on Black women.  To hear CNN tell it, Black women would be fine, if only they would get out of the baby-making business and just get married–preferably, to a white guy.  With those bases covered, all would be right with the world…right?  WRONG!  It’s frankly insulting to insinuate that the range of the Black woman’s experience in America boils down to whether or not she said, “I do.”  Instead, it would have been far more groundbreaking to report that Black women have the highest labor force participation rate of all women in America.  Yet, despite their work effort, Black women earn only 63 cents for every dollar earned by white men, suffering both a gender and race pay gap.  And even worse, they find themselves tied with Native American women as the most likely to be poor.  Even with all of their hard work, Black women’s poverty more than doubles that of white women, notably outpaces that of Latinas, and even exceeds that of Black men.  
 
I have a news flash for CNN.  The biggest problem facing Black women isn’t the lack of a wedding ring, it’s the lack of access to jobs that pay livable wages and that are inclusive of benefits that most middle-class Americans take for granted, such as paid sick days, employer-provided health insurance, and access to retirement plans.
 
It’s important also to note that not all news about Black women is doom and gloom.  We make up the majority of African Americans earning Associates, Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees.  We are entering and excelling in non-traditional fields, earning some 14,800 Doctorates in science and engineering.  And in less than a 10-year span between 1997 and 2006, Black women’s entrepreneurship exploded, growing 147 percent compared to an overall rate of growth among privately-owned businesses of a comparatively paltry 24%.
 
Yet, the powers that be at CNN apparently thought this and other information not important enough for inclusion.  Choosing instead to focus on images that have been around as long as Ronald Reagan’s mythical “welfare queen.”  To CNN, the issue that deserved the primary focus with respect to Black women was the issue of single-parenthood.  And even that issue was given short-shrift, based much more in stereotype and moral proselytizing, than fact-based, contextualized, reality. 
 
It’s no accident that CNN chose to highlight a never-married woman with five kids to drive their point home, when according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the typical Black woman-headed family has only 1.78 kids (well let’s be generous and round it up to two).  It’s no accident that the great solution put forth was Marry Your Baby Daddy Day, complete with dancing grooms, with no mention of the fact that the so-called “marriage solution” is being funded primarily from TANF dollars–money meant to help poor families survive.  And while aid to struggling families have received cut after cut in recent years in a variety of critical areas such as child care assistance, housing assistance, job-training specifically for women, and even child-support enforcement, it’s no accident that marriage promotion dollars have been free-flowing. 
 
So what’s wrong with this reprioritization of funds?  Perhaps what’s most disturbing is that the let them eat wedding cake solution just doesn’t add up.  It’s been estimated that there are three available African American women for every one available African American man who has the means to lift a family out of poverty.  You don’t have to hold a Ph.D. in mathematics to understand what’s wrong with that picture.   There just ain’t enough brothers to go around.  Now CNN would have Black women expand the pool beyond the Black male option.  Problem is, for most, they either lack the desire or the opportunity to do so. 
 
Black women are in fact the demographic group that is the least likely to marry outside of their race.  In contrast, Black men are among the most likely.  In fact, research suggests that as Black men’s income, education, and job prestige increases, so too do their likelihood to marry interracially.  So to suggest to the sistas in the ‘hood that all they need do is wait for their Black Knight to come and rescue them and their children from a life of poverty is disingenuous at best.  Make no mistake about it, those sistas will have a long wait.  And for some, that day will never come, especially since many of the men who are best equipped to “save” them are not looking in the ‘hood when they’re looking for a wife.
 
The marriage solution is no solution at all.  Instead, it’s just a diversion from the much more critical task of creating and implementing a truly substantive anti-poverty plan.  When the disproportionate poverty problem is adequately addressed within the Black community, the marriage issue will take care of itself.

Read the rest here, wherein Jones-DeWeever proposes the kinds of changes that might actually make a difference to African American women and children.

It’s also worth nothing that 65% of America’s prison population is comprised of male African Americans.  Most of the convictions are on drug charges that don’t involve violence, so Black America has paid the biggest price for the unsuccessful and cruel US war on drugs.  And the fastest growing population in American prisons is African American women.

Drug possession, trafficking and addiction are most highly correlated with poverty, aside from race, so this makes complete sense.  Investment in America’s black communities would have a high pay-off in terms of dealing with economic inequality, the cost of keeping a high number of people imprisoned and the upward mobility of future generations of African Americans.  Quite apart from the fact that it’s just the right thing to do.

Women & Courage

Part of an interview with Isabelle Allende at the Women’s Media Center:

You are participating in Omega’s upcoming Women & Courage conference. Why to you is cultivating women’s courage so important and timely right now?
Women have always been courageous. They are the bravest of the brave! They are always fearless when protecting their children and in the last century they have been fearless in the fight for their rights. The patriarchy has innumerable ways of confronting women’s courage. A recent example is how effective it has been in depicting feminists as witches and fueling a backlash of the Women’s Lib. Today millions of young women who benefit from the struggles of their mothers and grandmothers and would not give up any of their rights don’t call themselves feminists because it’s not sexy. They believe that feminism is dated. They have not looked around, they are not aware that today, in the 21st century, women still do two thirds of the world labor and own less than 1% of the assets; girls are still sold into premature marriage, prostitutions, and forced labor; women are forced to have children they don’t want or they can’t care for, they are beaten, tortured, raped and assassinated with impunity. In times of conflict, war, poverty or religious fundamentalism, women and children are the first and most numerous victims. Women need all their courage today, as they needed it before.

I belong to the first generation of older women empowered by education and health care. Never before so many older women have had so many resources. Our role as grandmothers is to protect young women and children, to work for peace in every way and at every level, and to improve the quality of life for everybody, not just the privileged. Our role is to dream a better world and to work courageously to make that dream possible.

As a writer and activist, what is your view of how well the media is doing its job? And how you do see the connection between the various kinds of media and the potential for human rights advocacy?
The media could do a much better job, that’s for sure, especially the media that targets women. Women’s glossy magazines, women’s TV series and programs, with few exceptions, are disgusting. Human rights? They couldn’t care less! Their message to women is all about consumerism, looking sexy and pleasing men in bed. And yet they have the potential to make profound changes for the better in women’s lives. In the rest of the media there are some great advocacy journalists and programs, but they are few.

If you could deliver one message to women today, what would it be?
Sisters: talk to each other, be connected and informed, form women’s circles, share your stories, work together, and take risks. Together we are invincible. There is nothing to be afraid of.

More about the “Women and Courage” Conference and an article about participants Isabelle Allende and Loung Ung here

Interview with Loung Ung

WTO Talks

Robert Weissman from Z-Space on the collapse of the trade talks:

Predictably, the cheerleaders for corporate globalization are bemoaning the collapse of World Trade Organization negotiations.

“This is a very painful failure and a real setback for the global economy when we really needed some good news,” said Peter Mandelson, the European Union’s trade commissioner.

Even worse, says the corporate globalization rah-rah crowd, the talks’ failure will hurt the developing world. After all, these negotiations were named the Doha Development Round.

“The breakdown of these talks is bad news for the world’s businesses, workers, farmers and most importantly the poor,” laments U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue.

But don’t shed any tears for the purported beneficiaries of the WTO talks. If truth-in-advertising rules applied, this might have been called the Doha Anti-Development Round.

The alleged upside of the deal for developing countries — increased access to rich country markets — would have been of tiny benefit, even according to the World Bank. The Research and Information System for Developing Countries points out that Bank analyses showed a successful conclusion of the Doha Round would, by 2015, increase developing country income in total by $16 billion a year — less than a penny a day for every person in the developing world.

The World Bank study, however, includes numerous questionable assumptions, without which developing countries would emerge as net losers. One unrealistic assumption is that governments will make up for lost tariff revenues by other forms of taxes. Another is that countries easily adjust to import surges by depreciating their currencies and increasing exports.

In any case, the important point is that there was very little to gain for developing countries.

By contrast, there was a lot to lose.

The promise to developing countries was that they would benefit from reduced agricultural tariffs and subsidies in the rich countries. Among developing nations, these gains would have been narrowly concentrated among Argentina, Brazil and a few other countries with industrial agriculture.

What the spike in food prices has made clear to developing countries is that their food security depends fundamentally not on cheap imports, but on enhancing their capacity to feed themselves. The Doha rules would have further undermined this capacity.

“Opening of markets, removal of tariffs and withdrawal of state intervention in agriculture has turned developing countries from net food exporters to net food importers and burdened them with huge import bills,” explains food analyst Anuradha Mittal of the Oakland Institute. “This process, which leaves the poor dependent on uncertain and volatile global markets for their food supply, has wiped out millions of livelihoods and placed nearly half of humanity at the brink of hunger and starvation.”

Farmers’ movements around the world delivered this message to government negotiators, and the negotiators refused to cave to the aggressive demands made by rich countries on behalf of agricultural commodity-trading multinationals. Kamal Nath, India’s Minister for Commerce and Industry, pointed out that the Doha Development Round was supposed to give benefits to developing countries — especially in agriculture — not extract new concessions.

The immediately proximate cause of the negotiations’ collapse was a demand by developing countries that they maintain effective tools to protect themselves from agricultural import surges. Rich countries refused the overly modest demand.

And agriculture was the area where developing countries were going to benefit.

The rough trade at the heart of the deal was supposed to be that rich countries reduce market barriers to developing country agricultural exports, and developing countries further open up to rich country manufacturing and service exports and investment.

Such a deal “basically suggests that the poor countries should remain agricultural forever,” says Ha-Joon Chang, an economics professor at the University of Cambridge and author of Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. “In order to receive the agricultural concession, the developing countries basically have to abolish their industrial tariffs and other means to promote industrialization.” In other words, he says, developing countries are supposed to forfeit the tools that almost every industrialized country (and the successful Asian manufacturing exporters) has used to build their industrial capacity.

In sum, says Deborah James, director of international programs for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, this was a lose-lose deal for developing countries. “The tariff cuts demanded of developing countries would have caused massive job loss, and countries would have lost the ability to protect farmers from dumping, further impoverishing millions on the verge of survival,” she says.

By the way, it’s not as if this is a North vs. South, rich country vs. poor country issue. Although there have been multiple lines of fragmentation in the Doha negotiations, the best way to understand what’s going on is that the rich country governments are driving the agenda to advance corporate interests, not those of their populations. That’s why there is so little public support for the Doha trade agenda, in both rich and poor countries.

Says Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch: “Now that WTO expansion has been again rejected at this ‘make or break’ meeting, elected officials and those on the campaign trail in nations around the world — including U.S. presidential candidates — will be asked what they intend to do to replace the failed WTO model and its version of corporate globalization with something that benefits the majority of people worldwide.”

Check It Out!

From Urban Molecule:

Beginning this Monday, July 28 through the month of September, Urban Molecule presents “Rebels, Revolutionaries and Revelations,” a look at how Hip-hop, Punk, Radical Feminism and the Queer Movement have taught us a hell of a lot about art, and ourselves. Join us as we brave the Dog Days of Summer with a look into the world of rebel art.

The editor is Christopher de la Torre, who said, in part, this:

And at age seventeen, my father saw my coming out of the closet as some monumental form of rebellion. To me it felt like liberation. He tore down the posters of The Cure on my wall, forced me to wear “normal” clothes, and said I couldn’t even think about getting an earring until I moved out. At age twenty-three, after finishing two undergraduate degrees, I left home. Six months later I had two diamond studs stapled into my left and right earlobes to celebrate what I thought had been a successful sedition.

Many years and relationships later, I still find myself rebelling. Not because of teenage angst or the need to find who I am. This sort of rebellion is against a mainstream that’s gotten wickedly out of control. Normative to the point of persecuting those who are different, simply because they are.

To put it frankly, I’m bored. And I’m tired off all the bullshit. I’m tired of the societal need to “belong.” I’m tired of Reality-TV. I’m tired of bullshit art. I’m tired of straights telling gays what they can and cannot do. I’m tired of men telling women what they can and cannot do. I’m tired of mainstream hip-hop. I’m tired of voting for the Presidential candidate I dislike the least. I’m tired of people trying to tell me what is and isn’t normal. I’m tired of exploitation. I’m tired of infomercials. I’m tired of useless death and poverty. Johnny Depp and Will Smith made $75M and $80M in 2007, respectively. I’m tired of apathy. I’m tired of celebrity. I’m tired of “style.”

I still clash with my father. I don’t think that silent battle will ever end. And neither will the bullshit. Sometimes to be a rebel is glorious. To stand up for something and make a difference is pure aphrodisia.

And I really like that.  Via Outside the Lines

A Poem for My Grandchild

With crude oil gushing into slave ships

refurbished into free-market super-tankers

 

Government assures its people of development

with proceeds from export and spot market deals.

 

My children have had no scholarships,

they can’t fish or tap rubber as I once did

 

the river transformed into a snake of a tomb

and the forest fraught with flares and seepage.

 

No jobs for them graduates in the oil sector

even as wells litter our family’s farmland!

 

Mobile policemen brandish guns in the dearth of prospects

and from above American Marines keep the pipelines safe.

 

Villages of imploring eyes marching, their hands up-

raised with green-leafed branches, are mowed down.

 

CNN & BBC Inc. embedded with Chevron reports the women

stripping to save their children and men from death are barbaric.

 

With my grandchild born, the new Stone Age

of a nation very black in the books has begun

 

with refilled slave ships refurbished into super-tankers

anchored at Escravos and poaching inland as centuries ago.

 

Tanure Ojaide

American Woman Artist

Moving Rock, Racetrack, 1999

Death Valley National Park, California

Lynn Radecka

Working Women Should Get in Touch With Their “Feminine Side”

Oh dear, Anna Pasternak’s gotta problem:

My friend Sophie, 46, who runs her own design company and is a single mother to two boys aged nine and 11, agrees. She has been single for six years, since her husband left her for another woman. Blonde, attractive and kind, she hasn’t been on a date since he walked out. ‘I have absolutely no idea how to be a woman any more,’ she says. ‘Because I run my business, my home and make all the decisions about the boys, I feel totally unfeminine. ‘I’m terrified of dating as I have no idea how to behave. ‘I would love a partner but I feel unattractive, untrusting, unsexy and completely alone.’”

Anna wants to help “us” because ”competing with men has left women out of touch with their femininity”.  See a great exegesis of Pasternak’s whole article at Cruella-Blog.

Inciting Hatred

Jim David Adkisson, the alleged shooter at the TVUUC on Sunday, left a letter providing very specific evidence as to how he’d been affected by violent right-wing rhetoric and has made clear statements in that regard, as you can see from the following article:

Police found right-wing political books, brass knuckles, empty shotgun shell boxes and a handgun in the Powell home of a man who said he attacked a church in order to kill liberals “who are ruining the country,” court records show.

Knoxville police Sunday evening searched the Levy Drive home of Jim David Adkisson after he allegedly entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and killed two people and wounded six others during the presentation of a children’s musical.

Knoxville Police Department Officer Steve Still requested the search warrant after interviewing Adkisson. who was subdued by several church members after firing three rounds from a 12-gauge shotgun into the congregation.

Adkisson targeted the church, Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, “because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.”

Adkisson told Still that “he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office.”

Adkisson told officers he left the house unlocked for them because “he expected to be killed during the assault.”

Inside the house, officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.

The shotgun-wielding suspect in Sunday’s mass shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church was motivated by a hatred of “the liberal movement,” and he planned to shoot until police shot him, Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV said this morning.

Adkisson, 58, of Powell wrote a four-page letter in which he stated his “hatred of the liberal movement,” Owen said. “Liberals in general, as well as gays.”

Adkisson said he also was frustrated about not being able to obtain a job, Owen said.

The letter, recovered from Adkisson’s black 2004 Ford Escape, which was parked in the church’s parking lot at 2931 Kingston Pike, indicates he had been planning the shooting for about a week.

“He fully expected to be killed by the responding police,” the police chief said.

Owen said Adkisson specifically targeted the church for its beliefs, rather than a particular member of the congregation.

“It appears that church had received some publicity regarding its liberal stance,” the chief said. The church has a “gays welcome” sign and regularly runs announcements in the News Sentinel about meetings of the Parents, Friends and Family of Lesbians and Gays meetings at the church.

Owen said Adkisson’s stated hatred of the liberal movement was not necessarily connected to any hostility toward Christianity or religion per say, but rather the political advocacy of the church.

The church’s Web site states that it has worked for “desegregation, racial harmony, fair wages, women’s rights and gay rights” since the 1950s. Current ministries involve emergency aid for the needy, school tutoring and support for the homeless, as well as a cafe that provides a gathering place for gay and lesbian high-schoolers.

Adkisson does not appear to be a member of any church himself, Owen said.

“In his written statement, he does not ascribe to any affiliation,” the chief said. “It does not appear he’s a member of any organized group.”

read the rest here

Since the alleged shooter has done all the work for us by being so clear about his motives, it’s difficult to see on what grounds anyone could argue that he was unaffected such comments as these:

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”
-Ann Coulter, August 26, 2002

“I’d hang every lawyer that went down to Guantanamo”
-Michael Savage, June 19, 2008

“In this recurring nightmare of a presidency, we have a national debate about whether he “did it,” even though all sentient people know he did. Otherwise there would be debates only about whether to impeach or assassinate. “
-Ann Coulter, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, 1998

The definitive list is here (Special thanks to David Neiwert, who has been shining a light on this kind of rhetoric for years) 

 

That from The Galloping Beaver

More of Ann Coulter’s pithy comments:

Phil Donahue: “I just want to make sure we got this right. Liberals hate America. They hate all religions except Islam. Liberals love Islam, hate all other religions.”
Ann Coulter: “Post 9/11.”
Donahue: “Well, good for you.”
–Donahue, MSNBC, July 19, 2002

From “Cam Kate”:
On [Fox News Channel's February 7th] Hannity and Colmes, Alan Colmes confronted Ann Coulter with the following statement she made at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference:“We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too.”
Coulter whined to Colmes, “I didn’t know we were talking about this tonight, but now that you’ve sprungit on me…” but confirmed she made the comment and boasted it was a “huge hit with the audience.“
Colmes: “You hate liberals. You despise liberals. This is unbelievable.We should execute them to make liberals scared?“
Coulter: “Right. Right!“
– Feb. 10, 2002

“When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty.We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors.”
– Ann Coulter, CPAC convention, February 2002

“God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it! It’s yours.’”
– Ann Coulter, Hannity & Colmes,June 20, 2001

“The thing I like about Bush is I think he hates liberals.”
– Ann Coulter, Washington Post, August 1, 2000

“If you don’t hate Clinton and the people who labored to keep him in office, you don’t love your country.”
– Ann Coulter, George, July 1999 (and you wonder why the magazine folded)

On Rep. Christopher Shays (D-CT) in deciding whether to run against him as a Libertarian candidate: “I really want to hurt him. I want him to feel pain.”
– Ann Coulter, Hartford Courant, June 25, 1999

“I have to say I’m all for public flogging. One type of criminal that a public humiliation might work particularly well with are the juvenile delinquents, a lot of whom consider it a badge of honor to be sent to juvenile detention. And it might not be such a cool thing in the ‘hood to be flogged publicly.”
– Ann Coulter, MSNBC, March 22, 1997  

 

And, finally, this one seems horribly á propos:

“If those kids had been carrying guns they would have gunned down this one [child] gunman. … Don’t pray. Learn to use guns.”
– Ann Coulter, Politically Incorrect, December 18, 1997

See American Politics Journal for more

If these comments don’t constitute incitement to violence, I just don’t know what would.  In Canada, it would appear that the Criminal Code allows for prosecution in such cases:

Publicly inciting hatred, wilfully promoting hatred or advocating genocide are criminal offences under the Criminal Code section 318 — regardless of how those messages are communicated.

If that amounts to censorship, that’s fine by me.  It’s a reasonable restraint on freedom of expression.

Thanks to Dr. Dawg and The Galloping Beaver

UPDATE:  Ya gotta see driftglass

Pot Kills Rachel Hoffman

This outrageous story from AlterNet via The Wild Wild Left:

Rachel Hoffman is dead. Rachel Hoffman, like many young adults, occasionally smoked marijuana.

But Rachel Hoffman is not dead as a result of smoking marijuana; she is dead as a result of marijuana prohibition.

Under prohibition, Rachel faced up to five years in a Florida prison for possessing a small amount of marijuana. (Under state law, violators face up to a $5,000 fine and five years in prison for possession of more than 20 grams of pot.)

Under prohibition, the police in Rachel’s community viewed the 23-year-old recent college graduate as nothing more than a criminal and threatened her with jail time unless she cooperated with them as an untrained, unsupervised confidential informant. Her assignment: Meet with two men she’d never met and purchase a large quantity of cocaine, ecstasy and a handgun. Rachel rendezvoused with the two men; they shot and killed her.

Under prohibition, the law enforcement officers responsible for brazenly and arrogantly placing Rachel in harm’s way have failed to publicly express any remorse — because, after all, under prohibition Rachel Hoffman was no longer a human being deserving of such sympathies.

Speaking on camera to ABC News’ “20/20″ last week, Tallahassee Police Chief Dennis Jones attempted to justify his department’s callous and irresponsible behavior, stating, “My job as a police chief is to find these criminals in our community and to take them off the streets (and) to make the proper arrest.”

But in Rachel Hoffman’s case, she was not taken “off the streets,” and police made no such arrest — probably because, deep down, even they know that people like Rachel pose no imminent threat to the public. Instead, the officers on the scene secretly cut a deal with Rachel: They told her that they would not file charges if she agreed to go undercover.

Rachel became the bait; the Tallahassee police force went trolling for sharks.

In the weeks preceding Rachel’s murder, police told her to remain tight-lipped about their backroom agreement — and with good reason. The cops’ on-the-spot deal with Rachel flagrantly violated Tallahassee Police Department protocol, which mandated that such an arrangement must first gain formal approval from the state prosecutor’s office. Knowing that the office would likely not sign off on their deal — Rachel was already enrolled in a drug court program from a prior pot possession charge, and cooperating with the TPD as a drug informant would be in violation of her probation — the police simply decided to move forward with their informal arrangement and not tell anybody.

“(In) hindsight, would it have been a good idea to let the state attorney know? Yes,” Jones feebly told “20/20.” Damn right it would have been; Rachel Hoffman would still be alive.

But don’t expect Jones or any of the other officers who violated the department’s code of conduct — violations that resulted in the death of another human being — to face repercussions for their actions. Obeying the rules is merely “a good idea” for those assigned with enforcing them. On the other hand, for people like Rachel, violating those rules can be a death sentence.

Of course, to those of us who work in marijuana law reform, we witness firsthand every day the adverse consequences wrought by marijuana prohibition — a policy that has led to the arrest of nearly 10 million young people since 1990. To us, the sad tale of Rachel Hoffman marks neither the beginning nor the end of our ongoing efforts to bring needed “reefer sanity” to America’s criminal justice system. It is simply another chapter in the ongoing and tragic saga that is marijuana prohibition.

Maybe we can get some of this kind of action going in Canada too, if the Liberals let the Harper Conservatives pass Bill C-26.

See also this ignorant op-ed by National Post’s Barbara Kay, via Tousaw