Lawmaker Predicts Marijuana Will Be Legal Within 5 Years

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Photo Credit: Ed Andrieski

Photo Credit: Ed Andrieski

Two states with legal recreational use. Twenty more that allow medical use. Record-high support at the national level for more permissive policies. It seems fair to say that the United States’ official stance on marijuana is shifting quickly. In fact, one congressman is predicting that U.S. pot prohibition will be a thing of the past before the end of the decade.

“I think it’s game over in less than five years,” Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) said Monday during an interview with The Huffington Post.

“There’s no question that we’re likely to see another state or two this year legalizing [recreational] use,” Blumenauer said. “We’re going to see more medical marijuana progress. The crazy prohibitions on bank services and probably the tax disparities — these are all eroding.”

As of now, 20 states have legalized marijuana for medical purposes, and voters in Colorado and Washington have approved marijuana for recreational use. About a dozen more states are expected to legalize marijuana in some form over the next several years. One recent study has projected a $10 billion legal marijuana industry by 2018.

Despite a growing and profitable legal marijuana industry, the federal government continues to ban the plant, classifying it as a Schedule I substance alongside drugs like heroin and LSD, and maintaining that it has “no currently accepted medical use.”


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How To Be A Lesbian In 10 Days. New College Seminar Proudly Offered By A University Of South Carolina Campus (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

According to this, the University of South Carolina Upstate (USCU) is going to host a seminar which will teach students how to be a lesbian in 10 days or less.

Because who doesn’t need to learn that, I ask you?

“Theater artist” Leigh Hendrix will be performing her one-woman show called How To Be A Lesbian in 10 Days Or Less which will apparently focus on LGBTQHIJKLMNOP cultural mores. Part of the show includes Hendrix asking her audience to participate by shouting out, “I’m a big ‘ol dyke!”

Doesn’t that sound awesome?

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Young Christian Woman Brutally Murdered By Egyptian Islamists

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

A young Coptic Christian woman was dragged out of her car, then brutally beaten and stabbed to death by an Egyptian Islamist mob on Friday.

According to a report in CNS News by Patrick Goodenough, eyewitnesses said 25 year-old Mary Sameh George was apparently targeted by the Islamists because of a cross that hung from her car’s rear-view mirror.

The murder occurred in the Cairo suburb of Ain Shams after mosque prayer services on Friday when police fought with Muslim Brotherhood supporters opposed to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s decision to run for president.

An eyewitness reportedly said that George was attacked in her car near a church, where she had planned to deliver medicine to an elderly, infirm woman.

According to the report, the Islamist protestors climbed onto George’s car, collapsing the roof, then dragged her from her car, beating and battering her to such an extent that parts of her scalp were torn off her head. George was then stabbed multiple times and her throat was slit. When she was dead, the Islamist mob set fire to her car.

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Peter King: Homegrown Terrorism a Big Concern on Military Bases

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Photo Credit: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

Photo Credit: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

Although Wednesday’s shooting at Fort Hood is not thought to have been terrorist-related, Rep. Peter King says homegrown terrorism is a major concern among U.S. military personnel.

King, a New York Republican, and former Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, held joint hearings on the previous shooting at the Texas military base, which left 13 people dead in 2009. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was sentenced to death in August 2013 for that attack.

Hasan had been in communication with Muslim extremists leading up to the shootings.

Appearing Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren,” King said the 2010 hearing brought out concerns that there are members of the military who have violent tendencies and terrorist inclinations and are not being removed.

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Missing Alaska Man Found Dead in His Home After a Year

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Photo Credit: Wonderlane

Photo Credit: Wonderlane

An Alaska man missing for more than a year was found dead in his home on Monday, according to Anchorage Police. The home had been occupied by renters for nearly a year, but they apparently had no idea the body was in the home, police said.

Samuel E. McAlpine, 37, was last seen March 17, 2013, when he told his mother he was going on a date.

McAlpine’s sister reported him missing 12 days later, Anchorage Police spokeswoman Dani Myren said.

Family members weren’t initially concerned, because he “frequently disappears for weeks at a time” said an e-mail sent by police in August asking for the public’s help in finding McAlpine.

McAlpine was going through a divorce at the time and had moved out of the home he shared with his now ex-wife, Myren said. “They were unable to sell the home, so she rented it out to tenants.”

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Keep Calm and Refuse the NYS Tests

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

While her son’s fourth-grade classmates were taking the nation’s first round of tests under the controversial Common Core program, Heidi Indelecato decided to teach her son a lesson in civil disobedience.

“We respectfully refuse to participate in the test,” said Indelecato, whose son Benjamin attends school in Lancaster, N.Y., which on Tuesday became the first state to administer testing under the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

So while other kids sat poised with their No. 2 pencils above Scantron sheets, Benjamin studied with his mother, who documented the occasion with a picture of the pair wearing T-shirts that read: “Keep calm and and refuse the NYS tests.”

Common Core was adopted by 45 states, although Indiana withdrew last month. The set of standards, devised by the nation’s school superintendents at the behest of the National Governors Association, seeks to set a uniform standard for grades K-12, to ensure kids all over the nation reach the same minimum level of learning.

The program involves testing of students in grades 3-8 and high school testing is scheduled to begin next year.New York implemented the standards a year early.

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Just When You Thought Obama Had Damaged The Economy Enough…

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Photo Credit: Western Journalism

Photo Credit: Western Journalism

In an op-ed for the Las Vegas Sun, President Obama gave his argument for supporting the proposed minimum wage increase, which would increase the federal minimum wage rate by nearly 40% from the current rate of $7.25/hr to $10.10/hr.

In the article, the President made claims that are false. According to him, a full-time employee making $7.25/hr would be living in poverty. By the federal government’s own poverty threshold, a single person household working 40 hours a week at minimum wage is making nearly 20% more than the poverty threshold.

Second is the effects that this would have on education. A teacher in Mississippi who graduated with a bachelor’s degree will be earning an insignificant 15% more than an unskilled employee working as a drive-thru clerk or Quik Stop cashier. With this law, there will be convicted rapists and even murderers (there are thousands of convicted rapists and murderers released from prison each year), many of whom have no skill at all, earning nearly as much as the people who educate our children. While it is true that most minimum-wage workers are not convicted felons, it is a fact, however unpleasant it may be, that a vast majority of them are unskilled workers.

What incentive is there for someone to go to college? The average bachelor’s degree costs a student over $30,000 and four years of their lives. The only way people are going to get out of poverty is to become a skilled worker rather than an unskilled one, and that is done through education, not minimum wage increases. This legislation removes the incentive to go to college. If all someone had to do to raise a family is flip burgers or wash dishes, those jobs would be in much higher demand. But there’s a reason employers don’t want to pay unskilled workers wages as high as skilled workers.

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Feds Curtail Major Counterterror Exercise in Washington

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Photo Credit: Free Beacon

Photo Credit: Free Beacon

The White House sharply curbed a major counterterrorism drill scheduled for Tuesday in Washington that was designed to test the federal government response to threats of car bombs attacks and a chemical weapons strike on the Metro subway system.

The exercise, code named Eagle Horizon 2014, was cut back instead to small-scale communications checks within federal agencies.

The transfer of government functions through groups of emergency personnel located at remote secure locations as part of so-called “continuity of government” operations was scrapped, according to Obama administration security officials.

Disclosure of the curtailed exercise comes as al Qaeda recently issued new threats to conduct car bomb attacks in Washington. Details of the car bombing campaign were contained in the latest issue of the English-language magazine “Inspire,” published by the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The magazine urged Muslim youth to attack Americans with car bombs and provided detailed instructions for making the devices from easily available components, such as groups of small propane tanks used in cooking grills.

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Judicial Watch Warns Iowa, Colorado, DC of Potential Election Integrity Lawsuits

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

Judicial Watch announced today that on March 24, 2014, it sent letters to top election officials in Iowa, Colorado, and the District of Columbia warning that it will file federal lawsuits against each state within 90 days if they fail to take immediate actions to comply with Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) requiring them to maintain accurate lists of eligible voters. The organization also sent inquiries on March 6 to officials in California, New Mexico, Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois notifying them of potential “apparent problems” and asking these states to provide records of steps taken to assure the accuracy of voter lists.

The letters to the Secretaries of State in Iowa and Colorado and the Board of Elections Supervisors in the District of Columbia specifically warn:

We write to bring your attention to violations of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (“NVRA”) … This letter serves as statutory notice that Judicial Watch will bring a lawsuit against your office if you do not take specific actions to correct these violations of Section 8 within 90 days. In addition, by this letter we are asking you to produce certain records to us which you are required to make available under Section 8(i) of the NVRA. We hope that litigation will not be necessary to enforce either of these claims.

In each state and the District of Columbia, the letters advise the election officials of specific evidence gathered by the organization indicating that the jurisdiction is “failing to comply with the voter registration list requirements of Section 8 of the NVRA”:

• In Iowa:

[A] comparison of 2012 Census data and 2012 EAC data shows there were more people registered to vote than there were adults over the age of 18 living in each of the following 24 counties: Fremont, Johnson, Madison, Adams, Scott, Pocahontas, Kossuth, Poweshiek, Lyon, Cass, Dickinson, Clay, Chickasaw, Shelby, Boone, Worth, Hancock, Ida, Dallas, Audubon, Sac and Greene. A comparison with 2010 Census population estimates and 2010 EAC data shows that this trend has only worsened.

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NSA Performed Warrantless Searches on Americans’ Calls and Emails

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Photo Credit: Shawn Thew/EPA

Photo Credit: Shawn Thew/EPA

Spencer Ackerman and James Ball.

US intelligence chiefs have confirmed that the National Security Agency has used a “back door” in surveillance law to perform warrantless searches on Americans’ communications.

The NSA’s collection programs are ostensibly targeted at foreigners, but in August the Guardian revealed a secret rule change allowing NSA analysts to search for Americans’ details within the databases.

Now, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the intelligence committee, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has confirmed for the first time the use of this legal authority to search for data related to “US persons”.

“There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” Clapper wrote in the letter, which has been obtained by the Guardian.

“These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the Fisa court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.”

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Photo Credit: fedsocblog

Photo Credit: fedsocblog

Tools for Lawyers Worried That NSA Is Eavesdropping On Their Confidential Conversations

The ABA Journal reports:

Are you concerned that Big Brother (including the National Security Agency) is not only watching, but listening, recording and even transcribing your confidential client conversations?

The good news for lawyers worried about maintaining their duty of confidentiality is that there are tools and safeguards to help them. In a session entitled “N.S.A.y What? Firm and Client Data Security & Encryption in the Age of Monitoring” held at ABA Techshow on Friday, Sensei Enterprises vice president John Simek and Oracle Corporation’s Chris Ries provided tips on gadgets and best practices for lawyers to use if they wish to avoid the NSA’s massive net.

“Lawyers need to be very cognizant of their communications being intercepted by NSA,” said Simek. Even worse for lawyers is that they can’t even be certain what the law is, since the status of the NSA’s various programs and the data they collect seems to change every day. Plus, given the secretive nature of the NSA, as well as the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that oversees its surveillance warrants, lawyers can’t even be sure of what is and what is not legal.

As such, Ries and Simek said lawyers should assume all of their conversations are subject to NSA surveillance and take steps to protect confidential information. To begin with, they recommended that all emails, electronic messages and communications be encrypted. There’s no shortage of available encryption hardware and software, and they recommended lawyers use an encryption service such as Zix Corporation’s ZixCorp or the open-sourced TrueCrypt. Platform-specific devices are also available, such as Microsoft’s BitLocker to Go and Apple’s FileVault. Lawyers can also purchase encrypted hard drives, including Symantec Corporation’s PGP Whole Disk Encryption and Sophos Ltd.’s Safeguard, as well as encrypted flash drives such as IronKey from Imation Corp.

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