Mike Pence, the transvaginal rapist governor of Indiana, has decided he doesn't want to encourage new business to locate within the state by continuing a hard right turn. This follows a voucher program in which one Christian school with an "F" ranking for performance is receiving tax payer dollars to continue their program of indoctrination that is, apparently, so bad they cannot even get a mercy "D." This follows Indiana's intention to make abortion unsafe.

Or, maybe he just wants to appease Eli Lily corporation, located in Indianapolis.

Considering all the other crap Pence and other Republicans are bringing up - I think the reality is that they're just too fucking stupid to recognize how out-of-touch with reality they are. Which would lead you to wonder what drugs they're taking - but it's probably abuse of religion, not a pharmaceutical, but maybe it's both.

Indiana residents, from both sides of the political aisle, overwhelmingly support legalization of medical marijuana and 56% support legalization of all marijuana.

Whose interests is Pence representing? Obviously not the voters in his state.

http://indianapublicmedia.org/news/senators-marijuana-penalties-appease-governor-47265/



Stoops is rightly concerned about singling out penalties for marijuana, considering his city is the home to approximately 40,000 students, and those students overwhelmingly support legalization. The parents of those students, or the students themselves, might want to reconsider sending their child to a university in a state that wants to treat the possession of marijuana, a substance less harmful than alcohol, as a criminal offense while the trend, across the nation, is to revise marijuana law to reflect reality, not prejudice.

Students might mistakenly believe that attendance at one of the public ivies would shield them from such laws. They might be right, since Mitch Daniels sold LSD at Princeton and was let go with a slap on the hand. Dan Burton's son, also, was arrested for carrying LSD across state lines, a federal offense, but because his daddy (and another family's daddy at the same time) was Dan Burton, he got off with a slap on the wrist.

Which gets to the real issue: the law is racist in its application and is used as a political tool by right-wing extremists.

Indiana is the only state in the nation that seeks to increase penalties for mere possession of marijuana.

If Indiana wants to know why others think the state is, generally, a backward hell hole, well, here's your answer.

http://hemp.org/news/content/california-lawsuit-alleges-long-beach-police-brutalized-marijuana-dispensary-employee



So much for the claim that California doesn't need legalization.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/daily/the-pot-industry-s-most-politically-important-dispensary-20130321

The first dispensary in D.C. is set to open soon, only blocks away from federal legislators who have been tasked, by a bill from Democrats Polis of Colorado and Blumenauer of Oregon, to overturn decades of poorly thought out and wrongly-enacted prohibition legislation.



Nate Silver, the guy who correctly predicted the Presidential election, in spite of Republican insistence that their views had popular support, suggested Republicans could find some relief among disgustipated voters by returning to their conservative principles and undo prohibition.

I think some of the current crop of Republicans are too stupid to "get it," but, as Polis and others have demonstrated, undoing prohibition laws - by removing cannabis from the drug schedules and moving it to regulation under the Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms bureaucracy - is a winning and correct position. This is the aim of H.R. 499, introduced by the Democratic legislator, Polis.

Who is leading the way to saner and more just law? People like Chellie Pingree, from Maine. A Democrat.



http://bangordailynews.com/2013/03/21/politics/pingree-co-sponsoring-bill-to-legalize-marijuana-nationwide/

THANK YOU to Democrats who are working to create a more egalitarian nation based upon the rational examination of actual evidence.

Even tho the American Revolution had already begun, Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" is considered a pivotal work of the era. It was not universally loved among the American Revolutionaries. Adams hated it because it called for the right to vote even for those who did not own property! How dare Paine extend this right to those who were not rich enough to buy it!

Loyalists hated it because they knew that, without monarchy, government would degenerate into...democracy.

Yet it was a best seller in the colonies. Pamphlets were cheap to produce and easy to disseminate. They were the revolutionary era version of a blog or a discussion board and their intent was to reach people and change their opinions.

Paine claimed that monarchies and aristocracies were ancient tyrannies and that revolutionaries should oppose these tyrannies. He used the rhetoric of religion to tell the revolutionaries they were "twice born" - once in their religious convictions and a second time in their political ones.

He opposed all European aristocratic institutions, most especially monarchies, yet he also met with the French King to gain financial support for the revolution in the states (and this support a huge factor in the French financial crisis that led to the French Revolution because aristocrats did not want to pay taxes to support their govt's actions, while they continued to receive their benefits because they were born into wealth.)

Yet he was not revolutionary enough for the leaders of one faction that held power (many did, for a time, until they were executed) and was jailed in France and came close to execution himself. He was one of the most important English-language voices in support of the French Revolution until he was imprisoned. While in England, he had written "Rights of Man" in support of France, and in opposition to liberals (classic liberals, not the current American usage) like Edmund Burke, who recoiled at the excesses of the French when they deposed their king. He faced arrest in Britain for this pamplet. The poet, William Blake, encouraged him to go to France. The anarchist William Godwin and others faced trial in Britain for publication of Paine's work.

When he was imprisoned in France, he published the first part of Age of Reason. He critiqued revealed religion (that same religion he appealed to in his "twice born" rhetoric.) He attacked organized religion and presented questions about the validity of the bible.

He was writing about ideas that had long been part of the conversation about religion among the educated British, French and American populations. But his pamphlet brought those ideas into a form that was accessible, and, as was his style, it was written without jargon. He argued that reason, rather than revelation, was the real work of god, because he, like many of the founders, was a deist who thought that god was just as subject to the working of the natural world as any other process found within it.

Deists argued that superstition was harmful and ritual and claims of miracles and the ornamentation that was part of religion was a seduction away from the use of reason and rational thought which the founders used as the basis for their claim to independence, and which the French Revolutionaries used to depose a king and the aristocrats and the religious leaders who upheld that system of spoils to the rich.

Paine claimed that original sin was the worst of the teachings of religion because such a claim was meant to hold people in psychological bondage by telling them they were not capable or worthy before they even had an opportunity to prove their ethical actions. This claim was akin to abuse - to hear from birth that you are somehow unworthy simply by the existence of your being.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

Paine claims all have the right to their belief, yet he attacks beliefs such as divine revelation. He attacks the history of the church - both its historical validity and its actions. He attacks the very foundations of Christianity - no matter the variation.

This is part of the history of democracy and the history of religious/political thought in the U.S. and it continues today.

I am posting this in GD b/c the discussion of Bergoglio's role related to the Argentinian military junta was mentioned in GD several times in the past few days. Both those of us who accused him of actions and those who defended him have the story wrong, it seems.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/14/pope_francis_junta_past_argentine_journalist

From Horacio Verbitsky (an investigative journalist and head of the Center for Legal and Social Studies, an Argentine human rights organization and the author of The Silence: From Paul VI to Bergoglio: The Secret Relations Between the Church and the ESMA.

(ESMA was the naval military group that was implicated in stealing the children of women dissidents, giving those children to military and other fascist friendly families and then throwing those mothers to their deaths in the Atlantic Ocean. The leader of the military junta admitted, in 2011 that the junta had given the children of dissidents to "good families" but denied, in opposition to Truth Commission testimony, that the Navy had murdered the mothers... tho they are still "disappeared" - which was the fascist's term for political murder.)

Verbitsky:
(Regarding Bergoglio) (regarding those two priests.)

Verbitsky also talks about Bergoglio as the leader of the opposition to the Argentinian govt. that sought to liberalize laws.

Regarding hiding prisoners from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights -



There has been back and forth here about the two priests and the hiding of political prisoners. They are two separate incidents, and in the second one, Bergoglio was not the archbishop who colluded with the fascists to hide political prisoners from the Human Rights organization.

He helped the investigative reporter identify the church property that was used to hide the prisoners.