Eideard

Medical marijuana advocates are hoping state governments can succeed where their efforts have failed by asking federal authorities to reclassify pot as a drug with medical use.

Shortly before Christmas, Colorado became the fourth state to ask the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to reclassify marijuana as a narcotic in the same league as heavyweight painkillers including oxycodone. The governors of Washington and Rhode Island filed a formal petition with the agency in November, and Vermont signed onto that request shortly afterward.

All four are among the sixteen states and the District of Columbia that have laws on the books that allow the medical use of marijuana, even though the drug remains illegal under federal law. Meanwhile, federal authorities have asserted their power by raiding dispensaries in states including California and Washington.

Supporters say the public is on their side, and the state requests show the feds are increasingly isolated on the issue. But they acknowledge it’s still an uphill battle…

Insert appropriate smartass remark about “Change” here.

In their November petition, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire and Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee argued that “the vast majority of modern research” has found marijuana useful for treating patients with glaucoma, for relieving the nausea suffered by cancer patients in chemotherapy and for relieving symptoms of degenerative nerve diseases…

Critics call medical marijuana a “Trojan horse” for legalizing the drug entirely, and federal authorities mounted a string of high-profile raids in California, Washington and Montana in 2011…

Which further convinces social conservatives that their backwardness has at least an opportunist ally in the White House.

Morgan Fox of the Marijuana Policy Project said the states’ requests to reclassify the drug “could and certainly should” give the states some breathing room, “but I really don’t think it will…I think that it’s not going to provide any real tangible benefits immediately,” he said. But it if succeeds, “It will definitely bring the federal government more in line with currently accepted science.”

In the meantime, “There’s no reason for the federal government to be wasting resources going after medical marijuana providers,” he said.

Yup.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A Roman Catholic priest in Missouri has been indicted on federal child pornography charges.

The indictment…charges the Rev. Shawn Francis Ratigan still took sexually suggestive photographs months after church officials removed him from a parish position and ordered him to stay away from children, The Kansas City Star reported. At the time, Easter Sunday this year, officials had not yet reported Ratigan to police.

Ratigan also faces state charges.

“When a person who has been placed in a position of trust exploits and victimizes children, he victimizes the entire community,” U.S. Attorney Beth Phillips said. “The indictment today sends a strong message that this type of behavior will not be tolerated.”

Ratigan was ordained in 2004. The indictment charges that a year later he took lewd photographs of a 6-year-old girl at St. Joseph Church in Easton, Mo.

Late last year, Ratigan was removed from parish work and transferred to the Vincentian Mission House in Independence, Mo. but his alleged activities were not reported to police until May. The official in the Kansas City diocese in charge of dealing with allegations of clerical abuse was removed in June largely because of his [non] handling of the case.

Time and again the Catholic Church figures they know better than the law of the land. In any case they think they need not answer to secular civil law.

Wrong! Again.

Microsoft has filed a patent that describes a “legal intercept” of VoIP communications.

Filed in December 2009, the document was created when Microsoft may have had no intentions of acquiring Skype, but the company makes clear statements that it applies to Skype and similar services.

According to the patent – and it is just an application at this point – Microsoft envisions a variety of possibilities to use “recording agents” as a way to intercept, monitor, record and store recorded calls. The agent could be placed in a router, call server, or within the network of an organization.

The agent can also be a software module that is placed between the call server or the network. Microsoft does not mention the recording agent to be hidden part of the client software. However, since Microsoft now owns the Skype infrastructure, that may not be a problem anymore.

The good news, depending on your view, is that the technology is only targeted to become a tool that can be requested by law enforcement. The downside, also depending on your view, is that those Skype calls may not be as anonymous as you think and your private information may actually be easily accessible by government organizations.

Microsoft did not say if it already uses eavesdropping technology in Skype or other VoIP applications.

Our government, the government of sleazy Berlusconi, many self-righteous nanny states have resented the encryption built into Skype that defeats official snooping. Essentially, this is why Skype is the VOIP of choice for dissent and revolution – as well as Mafias – throughout the world.

Are we supposed to trust Microsoft to confront government snoops and the several flavors of Patriot Act enacted in the fearfilled West and come down on the side of privacy, liberty?

Refrigerator magnets
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Anticipating California voters will back a November ballot measure to legalize casual marijuana use, officials in Oakland have approved two tax rates on pot sales in their city, already a hub of the state’s medicinal marijuana scene.

Oakland’s city council…approved the rates — a 5 percent gross receipts tax on licensed marijuana growers and on businesses selling marijuana for medical purposes, and a 10 percent rate on sales of marijuana used for recreational purposes.

California voters in 1996 approved a measure allowing marijuana use for medical purposes and would legalize its recreational use if they approve Proposition 19 in November.

The measure would allow marijuana possession for personal use and would authorize local governments to issue permits for pot production and sales and to tax it under state law. Selling marijuana would remain illegal under federal law…

Federal authorities have not aggressively interfered with sales of medicinal marijuana sales in California.

Cripes. I’ll bet that even bible-thumper/stoners living in Oakland will vote for Prop 19. Sooner or later, enlightened self-interest has to overcome hypocrisy.

Only the “saved” who want to stick with alcohol for their highs and resent anyone having alternatives will fight to jail people for possession.

Georgia’s mental health system is in trouble again with federal authorities, who say seven state psychiatric centers, including Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, remain unsafe and the state must do more to move the mentally ill into outpatient care.

The U.S. Department of Justice has slapped Georgia with a federal discrimination lawsuit accusing the state of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by improperly segregating hundreds of Georgians with mental illness and developmental disabilities in institutions. The department’s civil rights division also filed a motion seeking the appointment of a federal monitor to protect patients “from harm to their lives, health and safety.”

Federal prosecutors listed several violent incidents — a killing, a rape and several suicides — at state mental hospitals in 2009 and 2010. They said patients confined in Georgia’s mental hospitals are still exposed to “egregious harm.”

The state’s new mental health chief disputed that, arguing the state has made huge strides in improving care at its psychiatric facilities…

The state said it would stop offering care for adult mental health patients at Central State Hospital, where some of the worst cases of abuse had been reported. In November, federal officials found so many shortcomings at Central State, with patients attacking one another and receiving poor treatment, that state officials announced the facility would no longer accept new patients.

RTFA to identify the hospitals in question. I hope you haven’t any friends or kin under treatment in one of these snake pits.

Sounds about right for a state run by a “compassionate conservative”.

As Congress debates the government’s role in health care, a new report finds that state and federal officials failed to detect millions of dollars in Medicaid prescription drug abuse.

An audit of the government program in five large states found about 65,000 instances of beneficiaries improperly obtaining potentially addictive drugs at a cost of about $65 million during 2006 and 2007 — including thousands of prescriptions written for dead patients or by people posing as doctors…

The states targeted by the GAO — California, Illinois, New York, North Carolina and Texas — accounted for 40% of Medicaid’s prescription drug payments in fiscal years 2006 and 2007. They are not fully taking advantage of federal databases or technology that could spot fraud, the report said.

The GAO found:

• About 65,000 cases where Medicaid beneficiaries visited six or more doctors and up to 46 different pharmacies to acquire prescriptions — a practice known as “doctor-shopping” that allows purchasers to exceed the legal limit of drugs.

• Sixty-five doctors or pharmacists writing or filling prescriptions after being banned from Medicaid, some for illegally selling such drugs.

• About 1,800 prescriptions written for dead patients and 1,200 prescriptions “written” by dead physicians.

Obama’s proposals on digitizing medical records could bring a crushing decline in this kind of fraud. As the Feds roll it out the biggest problem will be dragging some states into the 21st Century. And this kind of spot-check can and should be routine throughout the system.

Here in New Mexico – now that we’ve brought the state’s unemployment/employment departments back from outsourcing in India – they still managed to buy a software management package that has missed peoples’ unemployment checks several times. IT is still ruled by political hacks.

www.makinghomeaffordable.gov
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

A multiagency federal-state effort will crack down on scam artists targeting people seeking help to avoid foreclosure, three U.S. departments said Monday.

The new effort will match up responses from federal law enforcement agencies, state investigators and prosecutors, civil enforcement entities and the private sector to protect homeowners seeking help under the Obama’s administration’s Making Home Affordable program from predators, the Justice Department said in a news release filed jointly with the Treasury Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Trade Commission…

Exploitative behavior by lenders has jeopardized homeownership for millions of Americans, Attorney General Eric Holder said.

“The Department of Justice’s message is simple: If you discriminate against borrowers or prey on vulnerable homeowners with fraudulent mortgage schemes, we will find you and we will punish you,” Holder said.

“We’re enforcing the law against these scam artists who are deceiving consumers while they’re down,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, “and we’re working with other government agencies, non-profits and mortgage servicers to reach out to our neighbors in distress with the details of how and where to get help.”

There’s a link under that photo of Leibowitz, Geithner and Holder. It takes you the government website designed first-of-all to help you qualify yourself for assistance in sorting mortgage loan problems. Within that site is a special link to help you fight against scam artists trying to rip you off.