The Demonized Seed : "Among the world's major industrial democracies, only the United States still forbids hemp farming. If an American farmer were to fill a field with this drugless crop, the government would consider him a felon. For selling his harvest he would be guilty of trafficking and would face a fine of as much as $4 million and a prison sentence of 10 years to life. Provided, of course, it is his first offense.
This for a crop as harmless as rutabaga....
The DEA sometimes seems bent on fomenting confusion. Two years ago, during his brief tenure as head of the agency, Asa Hutchinson stated that "many Americans do not know that hemp and marijuana are both parts of the same plant and that hemp cannot be produced without producing marijuana." One reason many Americans do not know this is because it's not true. That's like saying beagles and collies are both parts of the same dog and that beagles cannot be produced without producing collies."

News: "American commanders are seeking to reach out to [Iraqi] tribal leaders by relying on a report devised in 1918 by Britain, the country's then ruler."

Martin Luther King, Jr. Speaks Out on War and Peace

Critics Say the Park Service Is Letting Religion and Politics Affect Its Policies: "The Park Service also approved selling a book at the Grand Canyon that suggests the canyon was created in six days several thousand years ago. And here at the Lincoln Memorial, an eight-minute film that shows historical events at the memorial, including demonstrations for civil rights, abortion rights and gay rights, is being revised by the Park Service to add four minutes of more politically neutral events."

Peace, and Kucinich, Gets a Chance: "'I've never been interested in politics, not since I was 16 years old with Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy,' said Ms. Kaplan, who is in her 50's. Then she saw Mr. Kucinich speak at the Best Western last winter. 'I couldn't leave. The guy moved me deeply. I knew at that moment that hope was reborn in my heart,' she said."

Portsmouth Herald Local News: Poll shows Bush in solid position: "By a whopping ratio of 60 percent to 21 percent, Americans say they would prefer to reduce the deficit by 'canceling some recent tax cuts' - the course advocated to some degree by all the Democratic presidential contenders - rather than by spending less on programs like health and education."

Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | Changes in Budget During the Bush Years

Dave Lindorff: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich

Reporters sans fronti�res - Iraq - United States Two murders and a lie
An investigation of the US Army's firing at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on 8 April 2003

Newsday.com - O'Neill Has Done His Country a Favor

More Firms to End Health Benefits for Retirees (washingtonpost.com): "Twenty percent of large, private-sector U.S. employers will probably terminate health insurance benefits within the next three years for workers when they retire as medical costs continue to increase, a new study reported yesterday. Over the past year, 10 percent of companies with 1,000 or more workers eliminated health benefits for retiring workers."

U.S. Says It Will Contest WHO Plan to Fight Obesity (washingtonpost.com): "The WHO plan, which outlines strategies that nations can use to fight obesity, has been widely applauded by public health advocates but bitterly opposed by some food manufacturers and the sugar industry..."This document is fantastically important," said Philip James, chairman of the International Obesity Task Force, an independent London-based public health think tank. "It should have a big impact, unless it's sabotaged. And we know it's being sabotaged." "

Naples Daily News: Columnists: "We learn that there are no weapons of mass destruction, and the Bushes reply, 'So what?' We learn there never was a connection between Sadism Hussein and Al Qaeda, and the Bushes say, 'So what?' It matters because we need to understand how we got into the mess we're in, so we won't get ourselves into another one. "

AlterNet: The Ultimate Insider: "Now, of course, they're painting him out to be a cross between Jerry Garcia, Karl Marx and the disgruntled former employee who just shot up your local post office. Yeah, what an anti-establishment wackjob: former CEO of Alcoa, and a friend of Don Rumsfeld's since the sixties."

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The Guardian profile: Paul O'Neill: "The archive promises to provide one of the most devastating insiders' accounts of US governmental dysfunction since the Nixon administration "

Bush Plan to Honor Dr. King Stirs Criticism: "'His administration has never supported anything to help the poor, education, or children,' said the Rev. Raphael Allen, vice president of programs at Concerned Black Clergy. 'It's all about isolationism and greed for the upper class. That's not promoting the legacy of Dr. King.'"

The Village Voice: Features: The Essay: The Dennis Kucinich Polka by Stephen Elliott: "What's so funny about peace, love, and the Dems' Great Ignored Candidate?"

Center for American Progress - Progress Through Action - Page: "In all these ways, we are reaping the poison fruit of our misguided and arrogant foreign policy. The Administration capitalized on the fear created by 9/11 and put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth to justify a war that could well become one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries of American foreign policy. We did not have to go to war. Alternatives were working. War must be a last resort. And this war never should have happened. "

ABCNEWS.com : Official Confirms O'Neill's Iraq Claim

Surreal moments serving a mythological president - www.smh.com.au: "Across the room, the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was singing hymns, accompanied on the piano by the Christian fundamentalist Attorney-General, John Ashcroft.
Leafing through the CIA documents, Mr O'Neill was astonished to read plans for covert assassinations around the globe designed to remove opponents of the US Government."

Upstarts Upset the Tobacco Cart (washingtonpost.com): "Numerous states are considering or have adopted legislation aimed at increasing the price of discount cigarettes and protecting the market share of the 'Big Four' tobacco companies -- Philip Morris, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson and R.J. Reynolds. The Big Four are vowing a push this year in the Virginia General Assembly....
[S]tates such as Virginia, which is struggling with a budget deficit, have a powerful reason to go along with the Big Four: money.
In a settlement reached six years ago, major tobacco companies agreed to make annual payments to the states estimated at more than $235 billion over 25 years. Those payments are tied to the sales of the participating companies; if they lose market share, the states lose money.
'We need to guarantee a continuing flow of revenue that we use to help balance Virginia's budget and pay for health care and economic development in the tobacco-dependent regions,' said Sen. Charles R. Hawkins (R-Pittsylvania), who plans to introduce legislation targeting the independents. "

MSNBC - O'Neill denies spilling secrets

The Barreling Bushes

STLtoday.com - Printer friendly - White House seeks control on health, safety: "It goes beyond just having the White House involved in picking industry favorites to evaluate government science.
Under this proposal, the carefully crafted process used by the government to notify the public of an imminent danger is going to first have to be signed off by someone weighing the political hazards."

County balks at voting screens: "But a recent state review of the top four touch-screen companies found security gaps in every system. Burke said he expects it to take at least three months for the companies to plug those holes and for the state to certify the fixes. "

Fairfax Voting Machines A 'Failure' (washingtonpost.com): "New touch-screen voting machines used in Fairfax County's local elections in November were a 'failure,' and county electoral officials were unprepared to deal with the equipment's problems, according to a county GOP committee report released yesterday. "

Open Door Policy: From that bastion of the liberal media, The American Conservative. "There were several shared prerequisites to get on the Neoconservative List of Major Despicable People, and in spite of the rhetoric hurled against these enemies of the state, most really weren't Rodents of Unusual Size. Most, in fact, were retired from a branch of the military with a star or two or four on their shoulders. All could and did rationally argue the many illogical points in the neoconservative strategy of offensive democracy--guys like Brent Scowcroft, Barry McCaffrey, Anthony Zinni, and Colin Powell."

Herald.com - Your Miami Everything Guide: "Speaking on behalf of your devoted radio listeners, most of us never suspected that you were ripped to the gills. You always made perfect sense to us."

Study Published by Army Criticizes War on Terror's Scope (washingtonpost.com): "A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an 'unnecessary' war in Iraq and pursuing an 'unrealistic' quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat."

American Journalism Review News Blackout - The FCC was getting ready to loosen the rules limiting media concentration. A grassroots movement had sprung up to derail the plan. But you wouldn’t have learned much about the controversy from many news outlets owned by the big conglomerates that were eager to cash in.

How to Lose Your Job in Talk Radio: "It seems to me that when there is reason to go to war, it should be self-evident. The Secretary of State should not need to convince a skeptical world with satellite photos of a couple of Toyota pickups and a dumpster."

TIME.com: Confessions of a White House Insider -- Jan. 19, 2004

Cost of War "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." President Dwight D. Eisenhower April 16, 1953

AlterNet: The Killer Among Us: "[T]housands of Americans may already be dying because of Mad Cow disease every year....At Yale, out of a series of 46 patients clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's, six were proven to have CJD at autopsy. In another study of brain biopsies, out of a dozen patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's according to established criteria, three of them were actually dying from CJD. An informal survey of neuropathologists registered a suspicion that CJD accounts for 2-12% of all dementias in general. Two autopsy studies showed a CJD rate among dementia deaths of about 3%. A third study, at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that 5% of patients diagnosed with dementia had CJD. Although only a few hundred cases of sporadic CJD are officially reported in the U.S. annually, hundreds of thousands of Americans die with dementia every year. Thousands of these deaths may actually be from CJD caused by eating infected meat. "

Al-Ahram Weekly | Region | The 40-day prisoner: "'When I get home,' a sergeant [guarding the prison camp] told Mohamed, 'I will never again vote for George Bush.'"