Posts by Joe Boden
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It looks more and more like Trump and Putin are going to agree to divide up the "spoils" in Europe. Those "unswayable" Sanders supporters should perhaps re-assess their priorities.
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Hard News: Obama's Mana, in reply to bob daktari,
could it be that lefties aren’t all that pro clinton because she like Obama (democrats) are not really of the left?
Possibly. It’s hard to know what the political left in the US actually is, to be honest, because it’s not terribly well organized and lacks much of a national presence. The Green Party, for example, a well-known and high profile group here in NZ, barely exists in the US outside of a few states (they will appear on only some state ballots in November as they do not qualify for Federal matching funds). Bernie Sanders was clearly a member of the old (60’s) left, an actual socialist if not a full-on communist, and his message seemed to have a lot of resonance this year (especially among young people), but it hasn’t yet coalesced into anything like an organized political movement.
What is clear is that the Democratic Party is “relatively” left as compared with the republicans. In all other universes they are squarely at the center, if not slightly rightward.
Disclaimer: I’m an American who has lived here in NZ for 14 years.
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Hard News: Obama's Mana, in reply to Russell Brown,
True, but it's interesting the way it's jumped the tracks so that a lot of lefties believe it – even to the extent that some of them are calling Sanders a traitor for negotiating a notably progressive platform as a quid pro quo for his backing of Clinton. I would note that a lot of those people don't seem to have a deep grasp of history ...
The genius of the right wing and their complicit media in the US is that they recognize that what they are saying doesn't need to be true... simply repeating it will cause people to believe it. They don't quite know why they don't trust her, but they don't.
I think the recent primary has shown also that there were a lot of people becoming politically aware who were too young to remember what the Clintons were subjected to in the 90s (a person aged 18 this year and voting in their first election would have been born in 1998, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal - the one thing they did "get" Bill Clinton for). They have no memory of Whitewater, Vince Foster, or any of the other material that was fodder for the republican-controlled Congress from 1994 in their attempt to take down Bill and Hillary.
Having said that, there are things that people may legitimately object to. Her vote on the Iraq War Resolution (in support of... but note also that to understand her vote it helps to hear her speech concerning her reasoning, in which she states that force should be used only after definite proof of WMDs were obtained, and delivered on the Senate floor in 2003), her prior support of free trade deals (she is now opposed to the TPP), and some of the policy choices concerning regime change in the Middle East during her tenure as Secretary of State. But to take these things and conflate them into a situation in which she is "just as bad as Trump" is just ludicrous.
There's a segment of the voting population who appears to believe that the only way to change the system in the US is a disaster on a Trump-ian scale. They are forgetting that we had such a disaster from January 2001 to January 2009. The world definitely does not need another one.
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The anti-Clinton hysteria is a fully and intentionally manufactured product of the republican witch hunts against the Clintons which have been doing on for 25 or more years. And for anyone who wants to make claims that Hillary is corrupt, please provide proof. If the republicans in Congress had any proof they would have done something about it (other than hold "show hearings").
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Hard News: Things that do us good and ill, in reply to ,
The same problem happened to Massachusetts. It’s not just ordinary pain killers, its modified codeine advertised as pain killers that gave the American middle class an addiction epidemic. We used to call that stuff home bake heroin.
Indeed. My hometown (Pittsfield MA) was recently named the fifth worst location in the USA in terms of prescription opiate abuse. Some distinction.
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There must be some good agribusiness brains out there who could put together a workable proposal for a legal trade in cannabis. In addition to benefits to users and taxpayers, we'd also get the benefit of taking away one of the major sources of income for gangs in NZ.
Our interdiction procedures are so good that most drugs that New Zealanders consume are those grown or manufactured here. There's no reason to expect that there will be anything to replace the vacuum caused by cannabis legalisation.
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I thought I would repost something here that I posted in the first article about Helen Kelly, and my own take on the Government's behaviour in this area.
"It’s Big Pharma.
As part of my research work in cannabis, a few months ago I was asked to review a white paper by a group opposing cannabis legalization in the US state of Vermont. The white paper was a response to a RAND Corporation study examining the likely impacts of legalization on the health of Vermont residents, as well as economic impacts for the state. The RAND study presented several compelling arguments for legalization that I won’t repeat here, but the white paper did little to rebut those arguments.
Out of curiosity I looked into the organizations that had provided the funding for the group opposing cannabis legalization. There are in fact two major lobbying organizations in the US (one of them was behind the white paper in question), and both are funded in large part by the pharmaceutical industry.
I would think this sheds all the light needed on the reasons for this government’s total opposition to decriminalization."
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Hard News: Kia kaha, Helen Kelly, in reply to Kumara Republic,
If it’s not Judge Laura Norder (who counts McCoskrie among her supporters) who’s holding back reform, then it’s quite possibly Big Pharma, Big Booze, or Big Chemicals. Or a combination of both.
It's Big Pharma.
As part of my research work in cannabis, a few months ago I was asked to review a white paper by a group opposing cannabis legalization in the US state of Vermont. The white paper was a response to a RAND Corporation study examining the likely impacts of legalization on the health of Vermont residents, as well as economic impacts for the state. The RAND study presented several compelling arguments for legalization that I won't repeat here, but the white paper did little to rebut those arguments.
Out of curiosity I looked into the organizations that had provided the funding for the group opposing cannabis legalization. There are in fact two major lobbying organizations in the US (one of them was behind the white paper in question), and both are funded in large part by the pharmaceutical industry.
I would think this sheds all the light needed on the reasons for this government's total opposition to decriminalization.
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This is a trend I am also growing to dislike intensely (and would dislike even if their politics matched mine). Members of any national team should be keeping their politics to themselves. They are supposed to be representing the whole nation, not just part of it.
I reckon National is trial-ballooning Richie for PM, actually, since nobody in their caucus is at all likable (apart from Key, and that's debatable).
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Polity: Too much to swallow on the TPP, in reply to bob daktari,
numbers don’t matter
Excellent, government by fiat. :(