Legalize it

&feature=kp

Legalize it.

they all migrated from country - where indigenous music, blues, rock and roll, negro spirituals and country all influenced the music.

Artists and musicians across all genres know this.

without the ego trip.

Peace to you, malaise.

and hear some crucial pop influences (can't link).

(critic, magazine writer, author, and biographer of Willie Nelson) and he said this on the origins of reggae, to paraphrase: They listened to radio stations from Miami, to New Orleans, to the Border, re-arranged it, and sold it back to us.

Twyla Herbert, some 20 yrs. Christie's senior, was his life-long collaborator in writing & arranging his biggest hits. She is playing the piano under the organ in their Three Faces. If that isn't a blue printed sound, I don't know what is.

In reality you have to go back to Ska and Rock Steady both of which preceded Reggae in Jamaica from the 60s.

But it's stuff like Two Faces which remind everyone that much of reggae comes from a synthesis of American pop sounds as well.

Thanks for the thread, Uncle Joe!

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/24318-a-bitter-harvest-california-marijuana-and-the-new-jim-crow
<snip>
Marijuana is the single largest agricultural commodity in California, and it is the primary vehicle for the war on drugs' racialized arrest and incarceration system, which has our prisons bursting at the seams nationwide. Great numbers of predominantly white men and women grow, harvest and process marijuana in California for distribution throughout the United States. Local law enforcement and the communities they represent - communities whose economies are marijuana-dependent - benefit from letting this part of the illegal process go mostly undetected, while the crackdown happens almost exclusively in poor inner-city neighborhoods of color.

"A Bitter Harvest" follows the eyewitness narrative of Monica Bell, a young farmer in Nevada County, California, who read The New Jim Crow while witnessing the influx of white marijuana workers into her area during the fall harvest season. Bell's candid and perceptive account is complemented by interviews with Michelle Alexander, Stephen Gutwillig (Drug Policy Alliance), and the late Vincent Harding (renowned veteran of the African-American Freedom Movement). Each of these voices help crack open the question of why and how California's marijuana industry is directly tied to the racial injustices of the system of mass incarceration. The result is a radio documentary that grapples head on with the reality of white privilege in the United States.

The so called War on Drugs is corrupt, immoral, racist, stupid and is rotting our nation from the inside out.

If anything should be illegal it's prisons that profit for incarcerating the American People!

Thanks for the link, malaise.

Congress rarely tries to interfere - though they did with medical marijuana for a decade, by also refusing to fund that legislation.

What I want to know is, since Congress will have allowed D.C. to decriminalize marijuana, does this reality constitute unequal protection under the law.... i.e. Federal legislators are responsible for D.C. law by the way the Constitution works out D.C. non-statehood, so any law is approved by Congress.

They are subjecting the rest of the nation to federal law that criminalizes marijuana, however, so this is a violation of the 14th amendment's equal protection clause.

Or so one lawyer has claimed.

I'm looking forward to a lawsuit if Congress doesn't act on its own to address federal level criminalization.

But the current legislative examination of the scheduling of marijuana may be part of this, as a longer term issue.

The SCOTUS held D.C.'s gun ban laws were unconstitutional as to the Second, but could not or did not incorporate the Fourteenth as D.C. was not a state. The subsequent McDonald decision did incorporate the 14th with the 2nd as Illinois was and is a state.

The 14th has been given a bad rap due to the Citizens United ruling, but it served as the bulwark for civil rights and legal procedure court cases from the 1950s through the 1970s.

privileges & immunities of a U.S. citizen. It does not prevent a state's exercise of power as long as it doesn't abridge those privileges & immunities as described in the BOR. This dynamic has been seen before. Exp: Gideon said essentially that the state of FL could not (14A) pass laws abridging Gideon's right to "assistance of counsel" (6A). Any abridgement of any right by a state runs afoul of the 14th, as well as the enumerated BOR right. The McDonald ruling is one of several such.

I'm not sure what Congress will do if D.C. has constructed a cantilevered bridge with no gusset plates. But in lieu of action, the question becomes whether or not D.C.'s laws represent the privileges & immunities of all U.S. citizens, esp. With regards equal protection of the law.

Home rule (or not, in D.C.'s case) is a bitch.

This might be a question to throw out at Volokh Conspiracy's site. (It is now with WAPO.) Yeah, it's libertarian, but Heller & McDonald were brought by Cato Institute lawyers; you find your friends where you find them.

On edit: Crudely put, a law regarding pot use & its penalties in D.C. is de facto making some U.S. citizens "more equal than others," and may be a violation of equal protection rights. Ve-l-l-ly intelesting.

If you think the for profit prison industry is only interested in incarcerating the "others;" black, brown or whatever, you will have another think coming, ultimately just as is the case with their bought and paid for politicians, the only color they care about is green.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Now, we wouldn't want the fuzz to find the Congressman's stash, would we?

no water to mix it with either, just a straw.