Historic

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

leahypot

Patrick Leahy holding hearings today on legalizing marijuana:

The Senate Judiciary Committee will open landmark hearings Tuesday in the nation’s capital that could ultimately lead to the legalization of marijuana or at least resolve the deep divide between a federal government that has sent mixed messages on prosecuting users and the growing number of Americans who want the drug to be legal for medicinal or recreational use.

Requested by its committee chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, the timing was triggered by the announcement last month by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that federal authorities no longer will interfere as states increasingly adopt laws to either allow medical marijuana or legalize the drug entirely.

In calling for the hearing, Leahy himself questioned whether, at a time of severe budget cutting, federal prosecutions of marijuana users are the best use of taxpayer dollars.

“Leahy favors legalization,” said Dan Riffle, director of federal policies for the nonprofit lobby group Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C.

Riffle said he hopes for a breakthrough in the hearing that would lead to changes in federal banking laws, allowing marijuana sellers to accept credit cards and checks, not just cash.

The shell game

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

So even if Syria gives up their chemical weapons, we have to bomb them anyway because Iran!

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States needs to strike Syria in part to send a message to its ally Iran over its nuclear program, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser said Monday.

Susan Rice, joining a major public effort by Obama to persuade a skeptical Congress, said the United States was morally bound to respond to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons.

Rice said that US action on Syria was also critical for the broader influence of the United States, which has joined Israel and European nations in warning Iran against developing nuclear weapons.

“We will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” Rice said at the New America Foundation, a think tank.

Religious tradition

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

It always seems to involve hurting females, for some reason. h/t Shadgirl:

HARDH, Yemen, Sept. 8 (UPI) — An 8-year-old Yemeni girl died from internal injuries on the first night of her marriage to a man more than five times her age, Kuwaiti daily Al Watan reported.

The girl, identified only by the name Rawan, died in Hardh in the governorate of Hajjah in northwestern Yemen, the newspaper reported Sunday.

She died after suffering a tear to her genitals and severe bleeding, Gulf News reported.

Yemeni and Kuwaiti activists have called for police to arrest the girl’s husband and family and to put an end to the practice of marrying young girls, Gulf News said.

The ghost rapes of Bolivia

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Here’s a story with more details. As I suspected, patriarchial religion had a lot to do with it. Forced incest is common, as it is in most repressed and isolated religions.

For a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other explanation. No way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night. No way of explaining how another went to sleep clothed, only to wake up naked and covered by dirty fingerprints all over her body. No way to understand how another could dream of a man forcing himself onto her in a field—and then wake up the next morning with grass in her hair.

For Sara Guenter, the mystery was the rope. She would sometimes wake up in her bed with small pieces of it tied tightly to her wrists or ankles, the skin beneath an aching blue. Earlier this year, I visited Sara at her home, simple concrete painted to look like brick, in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia. Mennonites are similar to the Amish in their rejection of modernity and technology, and Manitoba Colony, like all ultraconservative Mennonite communities, is a collective attempt to retreat as far as possible from the nonbelieving world. A slight breeze of soy and sorghum came off the nearby fields as Sara told me how, in addition to the eerie rope, on those mornings after she’d been raped she would also wake to stained sheets, thunderous headaches, and paralyzing lethargy.

Her two daughters, 17 and 18 years old, squatted silently along a wall behind her and shot me fierce blue-eyed stares. The evil had penetrated the household, Sara said. Five years ago, her daughters also began waking up with dirty sheets and complaints of pain “down below.”

The family tried locking the door; some nights, Sara did everything she could to keep herself awake. On a few occasions, a loyal Bolivian worker from the neighboring city of Santa Cruz would stay the night to stand guard. But inevitably, when their one-story home—set back and isolated from the dirt road—was not being watched, the rapes continued. (Manitobans aren’t connected to the power grid, so at night the community is submerged in total darkness.) “It happened so many times, I lost count,” Sara said in her native Low German, the only language she speaks, like most women in the community.

Australian Federal Elections…

~ Boohunney ~ 2 Comments

Compulsory voting in the Australian Federal Elections was completed this weekend. In the House of Representative the Coalition Party defeated the Labour Party for the first time in six years. The 81 seat win puts Tony Abbott in the Prime Minister’s office, solidly defeating Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of the Labour Party.

Even though Australia has somehow avoided a lot of the World’s economic woes, the country is facing an expected economic slow down and the Coalition is hoping to avert that…

The ALP (Labour) points to continued growth, low inflation, low unemployment and low interest rates as well as comparisons with other OECD economies, particularly those in the US and Europe, as a sign of Australia’s continued economic strength in the wake of the global financial crisis. Labor argues that its strategy of stimulating the economy during the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) saved Australia from the worst of the crisis…

The Coalition’s main line of attack on the economy is based on the mantra of “debt and deficit”.

It says the rise in debt over this government’s first four budgets has been bigger as a share of GDP than over any other four year period since at least 1970, when the historical records in modern budget papers began.

It blames the Labor government’s stimulus packages, and a continuing high spend, for pushing Australia’s debt to unsustainable levels. It also contrasts Labor’s repeated deficit budgets with the former Coalition government’s run of surplus budgets.

Australia has a very low percentage of debt as part of GDP at 3.2%.

The Senate race has nearly been decided and it may have a makeup that will put a thorn in the Coalition’s side. Of 76 seats the Coalition has 32 seats, Labour has 25 seats. The Greens have 9 seats and generally will vote along with Labour. There are 8 seats from minority parties that are going to cause some uncertainty in the Senate…

Instead of Labor and the Greens being able to form a blocking majority, the Abbott government must deal with the uncertainty of minor party senators, including one or perhaps two from the insurgent Palmer United Party, South Australian Nick Xenophon and an allied candidate, and potentially a Motoring Enthusiast Party senator from Victoria.

Results are highly provisional, with less than half the upper house vote counted and counting at an early stage in Western Australia, but the new Parliament would seem unlikely to be entirely free of the uncertainty that dogged the minority Labor government in the last.

Australia isn’t without its media issues in elections, too….

Australia’s commercial TV networks have banned an advertisement that criticises the anti-Labor coverage of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers.

Channels Seven and Ten refused to air the ad commissioned by GetUp, while Nine screened it over four days in Brisbane – then cancelled it after blaming a “coding error”.

GetUp (a progressive action group) says it will report all three networks to the competition watchdog for alleged “misuse of market power”…

The group has accused the broadcasters of censorship to avoid displeasing Murdoch and his company, News Corp. It intends to lodge a complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, claiming the networks have breached rules by refusing to supply their services.

In the banned advertisement, a man is seen scooping up dog feces with a copy of News Corp’s Courier Mail.

The man tells viewers: “It was great when you could pick up a paper and get, well, news. Recently, the Courier Mail and the Daily Tele have been using their front pages to run a political campaign instead.”

The man says it is “fair enough” for Murdoch to hold a personal opinion about Prime Minister Kevin Rudd but adds: “Political bias presented as news is misleading crap”

Oh, REALLY? I am shocked! Here is the ad…

http://youtu.be/grqp-JQMFuM