Originally Posted by Frylok

How high ARE you guys? You think the Republicans (!!!) are going to help you? The GOP might help you send your kid off to some godforsaken desert to get slaughtered, they might take away all of your money and give it to the richest 2% of our population, they might lock you up for being any color but old and white, but the GOP - the REPUBLICANS - will never, EVER EVER !!!EVER!!! allow marijuana to be legally traded and consumed, it is against their conservative ideals and their party policy, and that will never change, just like their party's position on abortion will never change.

So, I'm sorry all you G.O.P. pot smokers, your party will harass you until time ends or you vote them out. Reality sucks, but it is what it is. Yeah, the Democrats suck too, but at least they have the flexibility to CHANGE, albeit slowly and ineptly.

AT LEAST THE DAMNED THING IS TURNING!!!

Originally Posted by Pompo

Obama Loses His "Cool"
On the issue of marijuana legalization, Obama supporters are learning that the president differs little with the past few administrations.
5/28/09|Black and White| by Matt Welch - Opinion



When the generation of Americans under the age of 30 gets around to realizing that our nation's handsome young president might not be nearly as cool as they had hoped, it won't be hard to affix a date on when the milk began to sour. It was March 26, 2009, when Barack Obama conducted a live town hall press conference featuring questions submitted online.

Near the beginning of this hip and mildly groundbreaking interaction, the president said: "We took votes about which questions were gonna be asked. . . . 3.5 million people voted. I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high, uh, and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve, uh, the economy and job creation. And, uh [chuckles], uh, I don't know what this says about the online audience [laughs], but I just want—I don't want people to think that—this was a fairly popular question; we want to make sure that it was answered. Uh, the answer is, no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy."

The live audience laughed and applauded. The kids online? Not so much.

"Way to discredit a lot of the 'online audience' who got you elected, Mr. President," wrote one commenter on the social news aggregating website Digg.com, where Obama's dismissal was heavily criticized. "Enjoy your approval rating now, Mr. President, I think you just lost a bunch of help," wrote another. A third Diggster treated legalization with a seriousness (if not grammaticalness) that Obama failed to muster: "To me this is justa common sense issue, legalize Marijuana, decriminalize drug use, thereby crippling drug lords, creating a safe and in the open means to distribute cannabis, give the economy a shot in the arm, and propel snack food sales through the roof. I know the man has a lot on his plate, but seriously this is not justa pot head issue. and it ain't cute that folks are rotting in prisons for cultivating and smoking a ***** plant."

No, it ain't cute at all.

Scratch a young Obama voter and you won't necessarily find someone who likes bailouts or cares about financial market regulations one way or another. Instead, you're likely to hear about how the awful Republicans wage wars, bait gays and racial minorities, and basically act like a bunch of mean old white men. Party membership and voting are frequently more about group identity than philosophical orientation about the proper role of government. There is little doubt about the broad mores of Generation Obama: pro-choice, pro-gay, and pro-legalization. Obama has the first one covered, but his youngest supporters are finding out quickly that on the latter two the president is not offering substantive "change" from the past few administrations.

Freedom works in chaotic, unpredictable ways. Sometimes you can go for decades without an inch of progress; then, the next thing you know, the whole architecture of oppression gets swept away within a matter of days. At a recent screening in Washington, D.C., for the new documentary about the Velvet Revolution, The Power of the Powerless, an American activist type asked the former Czech student leader Simon Pánek how much behind-the-scenes logistical groundwork and drawn-out planning his fellow revolutionaries engaged in before the 10 days in November of 1989 that overthrew the Communist Party. Pánek laughed. "Oh, no," he said. "It all happened so fast, you cannot plan for such a thing."

Marijuana legalization isn't happening remotely that fast, but there are some preliminary indicators that something new and hopeful is stirring within the populace in 2009. It started in late January, when photos surfaced of record-shattering Olympic gold medal swimmer Michael Phelps smoking a bong at a party. As a nation prepared for the usual round of hypocritical and self-righteous denunciations, something stranger happened: nothing. The country's sports pages, normally not known for their permissive attitudes about what humans put in their bodies, greeted the news of a 23-year-old acting like a 23-year-old with a collective shrug.

Ostensibly conservative corporate America, at least in the form of Phelps' many sponsors, almost unanimously stood by their man. The one company that did not, cereal maker Kellogg, found itself the target of a boycott, and its spokespeople spent February loudly (and not very convincingly) claiming that the two sides' parting of the ways was a simple matter of a contract expiring. "Our marijuana laws have been ludicrous for as long as we've been alive," conservative columnist Kathleen Parker wrote in the Washington Post. "The problem isn't Phelps, who is, in fact, an adult. The problem is our laws—and our lies."

Aside from the shattered lives of those caught either in the drug war or in the dangerous black market that prohibition produces, the lies are what make marijuana criminalization so infuriating. For decades we have allowed billions of our tax dollars to be spent on propaganda telling us, falsely, that pot is "dangerous," that winners don't do drugs, and that recreational drug users finance terrorism. Barack Obama is the living refutation of all of that: Not only did he inhale, he freely admitted that "that was the point." Yet countless federal agencies still require either marijuana-free pasts or (more likely) skilled lying about it. This at a time when more than half of Americans born after World War II have tried pot at least once.

Forcing people to lie, even a little bit, is one of the single most corrosive things a government can do. That's the bad news. The good news is that this model is ultimately unsustainable, for the simple reason that people would rather tell the truth. At Andrew Sullivan's blog in March and April, readers sent in dozens of testimonials explaining that they are perfectly upstanding members of society yet have broken the nation's marijuana laws multiple times in the past and are now tentatively "coming out of the closet" about it. Though it's another sign that the architecture of lies is finally showing the first signs of collapse, the act is nonetheless kind of pathetic. What kind of fearful, groveling supplicants have we become after four decades of abuse?

That's why Obama's pot answer, and the immediately hostile reaction to it by his core fan base, was so interesting. The president has done some good things in office, most notably giving word to the Drug Enforcement Administration that it is no longer to conduct raids on medical marijuana clubs in states where they are legal. Though there still have been a couple of raids during the transition period, the new policy presents a marked change from the past. But considering that this is about as far as Obama appears willing to go, events and public sentiment may soon overtake him.

In moments of liberation, leaders who seemed so progressive during times of stagnation suddenly appear archaic, even obstructionist. Mikhail Gorbachev was far more liberal than the communist leaders of East Germany and several other Soviet satellites, yet the revolutionaries there who rammed through the opening he helped create nonetheless tended to hate his guts. He was, after all, still an authoritarian communist. By demonstrating that some winners do use drugs, and by allowing cannabis clubs to show the world that pot buyers and sellers are as American as apple pie, Obama is perhaps unwittingly helping to unleash a long-overdue correction in the way America lies to itself. Taking advantage of that window of opportunity might not be a good strategy for growing the economy, but it's an excellent way to begin regrowing our spines. &

Matt Welch, an assistant editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial page, is the author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.

Originally Posted by funkifize

You are absolutely kidding, right? This dolt has done nothing but embrace all the same sad-ass statist prgrams that both Bush and Clinton did.

Originally Posted by jmhereiam

The way I see it is unfortunately with how things are most of America chooses a side (democrat or republican), which IMO is one of the main problems this country has. People Don't even look at policies anymore, they just blindly vote for either a democrat or a republican.

Then there are people like me who are straight down the middle, who if I had a say in it I would have elected neither Obama or Mccain, unfortunately when it comes down to it it's either going to be a dem or a repub who gets elected.

So I looked at it as this... Which of those two would have given us the best chance to move forward with marijuana reform? Definitely not Mccain... Our only "hope" if you want to call it that was with Obama. Just look at the outrage with the right wing supporters when the Obama administration came out and said that they will stop raiding medical dispensaries... the right was PISSED... and the sad thing is they are so uneducated about it I don't think they even know what they were pissed about, just that "Obama is trying to help out his terrorist drug using buddies by wasting tax money by stoping raids on dispensaries". Does it make sense? No.. but unfortunately that is the stance for the majority of them.

You would think the more and more our economy goes into the dirt, and once the people realize that not even Obama can save it with his "stimulus", then maybe we will open our eyes, unfortunately it's for all the wrong reasons, but hey if it's legalized just for money then that's still good news for those of us who need it. I am thinking that if California eventually does legalize it (which i think it is a pretty big possibility, they are in desperate need of money, we all are lol), but if California legalizes it, then I think once the rest of America see's how much that helps them it will begin to spread. In my eyes thats our only hope since there are still to many ignorant douche bags living in this world who refuse to open there eyes and see the benefits of marijuana medically.


/end rant... I hope I made sense

Originally Posted by annabanana

aren't dispensaries still being raided and people in States that have legalized medical marijuana still being sent to jail and the only difference is a name change?

I don't really follow you here..

Originally Posted by Buzzby

Unless dispensaries or medical marijuana patients are also in violation of state laws, the DEA has been directed by the Attorney General of the United States to leave them alone. There are older cases still being prosecuted - this applies only to new cases.