Latest Montana Ruling Continues Assault Against Medical Marijuana

[+EdwardGlen]

With the criminally influenced tea party usurpers of our democracy and constitution gaining control in many states. The existence of MM is threatened in Michigan and throughout America.

 

http://www.theweedblog.com/latest-montana-ruling-continues-assault-against-medical-marijuana-industry/#utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheWeedBlogcom+%28THE+Weed+Blog%29&utm_content=Twitter

 

A second state judge has ruled Montana’s medical marijuana law does not allow caregivers to transfer marijuana among themselves.

 

District Judge Stewart Stadler ruled of the Montana Medical Marijuana Act doesn’t allow caregivers to provide marijuana to just any qualifying patients, only the patients for whom they are the registerd caregiver.

 

The ruling came Thursday in a lawsuit filed against Flathead County Attorney Ed Corrigan by the Medical Marijuana Growers Association.

 

The ruling could determine the fate of two men facing felony drug charges after a traffic stop by law enforcement agents revealed several pounds of pot in their possession.

 

One of the men is a registered caregiver while the other is a card holder, according their attorney. The men were driving the pot from Kalispell to Cascade County for delivery to another caregiver, he said.

 

Wheelchair Police BrutalityAn attorney for the Medical Marijuana Growers Association argued on July 6 that medical marijuana providers have a duty to provide for their patients, and that practically requires them to deliver, transport or transfer marijuana to another caregiver.

 

In making his ruling, Stadler granted Corrigan’s request for summary judgment.

 

“All of plaintiffs’ arguments are predicated on the assumption that the Act is ambiguous with respect to whom caregivers may and may not supply with marijuana,” Stadler wrote. “No such ambiguity exists; rather, the clear and unambiguous language of the Act permits caregivers ‘to provide marijuana only to qualifying patients who have named the applicant as caregiver.’”

 

In April, District Judge John Larson ruled in a Missoula County case, saying the marijuana law prohibits a caregiver from providing marijuana to anyone other than a qualifying patient who is registered with that caregiver. That case is being appealed to the Montana Supreme Court.

 

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Rupert Murdock financed Tea Party makes run for control of Montana Republican Party

 

Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/article_8eb5cf97-f375-582b-86bc-23e3422519a2.html#ixzz1T9hALcX2

 

HELENA — A Tea Party advocate is making a run for chairman of the Montana Republican Party as the GOP faithful gather later this week in Butte to pick leadership in advance of the critical 2012 election cycle.

 

Republicans are gearing up to back undisputed GOP leader U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg in his challenge to U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, and Rehberg's speech on Saturday will highlight the event.

 

But first Republicans will have to sort out a challenge to the current Montana Republican Party chairman, Will Deschamps. Tea Party advocate Mark French of Paradise says the GOP has not done enough to protect individual liberties.

 

French unsuccessfully challenged Rehberg in a primary battle last year and made some waves by tying himself to the fledgling Tea Party movement.

 

"The Republican Party must move from a course of degrading as slow as possible in trade for short-term power, to a winning strategy even if it is costly, in regard to our rights as a people," French said in an email. "Losing rights at a slow pace is not acceptable. Gaining rights back is my focus."

 

Deschamps is completing his first two-year stint at the helm and says he hopes to build on successes Republicans had sweeping up legislative seats around the state — including a few seats in places like Butte, Great Falls and Helena that normally favor Democrats.

 

"There is a new enthusiasm out there that I sense in the party," Deschamps said. "I don't think it's a dream, we are seeing people involved, and who want to be involved, because they don't like what is going on in the national scene."

 

There have been growing pains. Some of the more moderate Republicans elected from those Democratic strongholds led to complaints from ardent conservatives that the newcomers were RINOs, or "Republican in name only."

 

Deschamps said he has even heard the complaint leveled at him, but he said the party is best served by getting as many Republicans elected as possible, even if they don't toe the most conservative line all the time.

 

"I would rather have somebody sitting at a seat at the Legislature who is a Republican that votes with me 70 percent of the time rather than a Democrat that votes zero percent of the time with me," Deschamps said. "Sometimes you have to take the lesser of two evils. It is not always palatable. But, by gosh, I would rather have someone that votes with us than votes against us."

 

French said support from those who favor the Tea Party movement will be critical in his run, but he recognized he needs more than that to win. GOP officeholders, such as state legislators, along with local Republican central committee officers and others get to vote.

 

"Personal responsibility needs to increase while government intervention decreases," French said. "We need to back up and embrace the limited powers of our Constitution, which all elected officials swear to uphold but frankly, most ignore."

 

The 2012 election cycle is a big one. Both parties are putting a great deal of effort into the Rehberg-Tester matchup. Rehberg will rally the GOP faithful to his campaign to help volunteer, such as by taking a role on a phone bank fundraising initiative the campaign is launching.

 

"In order to be successful in a state as large as Montana you just have to have people that are willing to represent you and go out there and spread your message," said Rehberg campaign spokesman Brian Barrett.

 

Other races loom large as well. Republicans are gathering behind Bozeman businessman Steve Daines, who will also have a big presence at the convention, to replace Rehberg in the state's lone House seat.

 

Five GOP gubernatorial candidates will be at the convention shaking hands and gathering support for the crowded primary battle.

 

Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/article_8eb5cf97-f375-582b-86bc-23e3422519a2.html#ixzz1T9hdOdgr

 

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The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html

 

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

 

Vive la révolution!

 

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

 

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

 

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics.

 

Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

 

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.”

 

To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

 

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions.

 

That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

 

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

 

This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed.

 

As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

 

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.

 

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller.

 

Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

 

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center.

 

But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.

 

No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance.

 

Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

 

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

 

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

[Kingdiamond]

Its going to take a entire breakdown of society to get our country back from these paid lackeys we have a long battle ahead to regain what this great country once stood for equality And the American way of life not living in fear of not getting your social security check because of political showboating and old grudges.