The Prop 19 campaign is looking to make a statement (and raise some money) with a money bomb today, Monday, September 13.
Norm Stamper has asked us all to help out with $5 (or more, if you wish). Seemed like a good idea, so I did.
…
This is an open thread.
I donated. Good luck to us! The mainstream media and all the usual suspects and villains are pulling out the stops to defeat 19. Sticking it to the Man only costs 5 bucks–tell your friends!
:-0 <——– $
As in "Put your money where your mouth is." I just did, and I hope that many, many more follow suit.
Cannabists all over the country should send what they can; our opponents are few in number and have deep pockets, but we have vastly greater numbers, and truth and conviction on our side.
A win in November is the death-knell for this odious oppression. We can win this, people! Let’s give the prohibs a serious run for their money!
“Bomb” away!
And I’ll keep donating every week, too. They’re asking for so little to free us from so much. And with so many us, we can pull this off with ease. Easier than donating blood (I do that, too) and it will be a Hell of a lot more satisfying to see the looks on the prohibs faces and hear their shrieking when 19 passes.
20 years ago, when Ken Burn’s seminal work on the Civil War was broadcast, I recalled an instance in the first episode where a story was told in which a Black freedman (a former slave who’d purchased his freedom), when he saw his first Union soldier, said that if he’d know the ‘gun men’ were coming he’d have saved his money. In other words, he was willing to let somebody else do the fighting and dying to free him…because he didn’t really value his freedom at all.
Fellow cannabists…do you value your freedom? More correctly, the freedom you could have? Care to put it to the test? Here’s your chance.
I don’t have a credit card so I had to purchase a gift card from the bank. Since after bills for food,shelter
and car payment I only have 150 left,I could only send
$25,but will send it next month also.
So much for the extra worm poop.
I posted a thought in the DEA sue America thread and wanted to spread it here for Pete’s response.
What happens if the government sues CA over Prop 19.
Wouldn’t they have to prove that all their propaganda
is true and the ignoring of marijuana’s medical efficacy is justified?
It would be in an open courtroom where all their bullshit could be debunked in public and their outstanding record of failure would be held up like a banner.
I would think every attorney at NORML and LEAP would welcome that trial.
I just hope they webcast it.
@claygooding… I really don’t know how the federal government can sue California. I’ve been searching the law blogs since this letter came out, and nobody has put forth any grounds on which they can sue.
The supremacy clause? California isn’t attempting to overturn federal law and the feds can still enforce it. Courts have already determined that California is not required to enforce federal laws for the DEA.
Something to do with taxing an illegal product? Not sure what the grounds are there, but even then, the feds are in a difficult position since Prop19 puts the decisions in local governments, not the state.
I’d really be interested in anyone finding legitimate grounds for suing. I believe that this is just bluff on the part of the DEA heads to try to scare folks.
http://www.november.org/thewall/men/male07.html found this searching for something completely unrelated
Well I could only justify $4.20, but I talked the wife into a matching contribution. I hope it helps.
I can’t recall ever looking forward to election day as much as I am this year.
I don’t think that the Feds can sue and that shows the severe lack of knowledge on the part of the current and former ONDCP Directors. Here is a good article for background:
On the Limits of Supremacy: Medical Marijuana and the States’ Overlooked Power to Legalize Federal Crime
Robert A. Mikos
Vanderbilt Law School
March 9, 2009
Vanderbilt Public Law Research Paper No. 09-05
http://ssrn.com/abstract_id=1356093
Clay, I’m not flush either. Some months its’ beans and rice after paying the bills. But this has real promise. I’ll risk reducing the bank account for a shot at real freedom. It’s why I buy canned food 😉
Seriously, folks, in the past couple hours since I made my donation the coffer received 5K. There’s a hell of a lot of us, and we can pull this off.
Clay and Duncan, I got you covered. I sent a little more than they was askin for, since I have been mercifully un affected by the financial meltdown.
Money bombs do more than raise money. When our opponents start in with the “all their money comes from a few rich contributors” line and they mention George Soros (and they will), we can point to this one day total and give ’em real, nutshell numbers of contributors and average dollar ammounts. Smothers that baby in the crib.
I’m gonna go back and contribute again today as well. BTW $30,000 of the way to their $50,000 goal at 7:17 am Left-coast time! Looks like a nuclear moneybomb.
Donated over the weekend to prime the money bomb.
P.S. Clay, it’s a little late in the year but outdoors, you can work a little lawn mulch into the first couple of inches of soil, then let the worms that are already there do the pooping. Get yorself a worm box and feed ’em your old kitchen scraps. Free worm poop is the best, and poop should be free, after all, it’s …well…
I too donated. Looking forward to actually voting on the measure in November. Cautiously optimistic about the outcome, but all they anti-drug hype is just now starting up.
I must say I’m very puzzled by all this talk of the Feds filing suit against Prop 19 if it wins. There’s no grounds whatever for the Feds to overturn Prop 19. Why would anyone think it possible when Prop 215 has been to the SCOTUS 3 times and still stands as the law of the land in California? The SCOTUS didn’t even bother to hear the case on the last trip when the idiot local authorities of San Diego and San Bernardino counties chased their incredibly lame theory that Federal law prevented implementation of SB420. No issuance of certiorari, they just said, ‘fuck it, we’re not hearing that shit again.’ So we have OCBC vs the United States (2001), Raich v Gonzales (2005), and San Diego/San Bernardino v State of California (2009, not granted certiorari), all demonstrating that the Feds have no ability whatever to overturn Prop 215, and Prop 19 is identical to Prop 215 with regard to Federal law. There just isn’t a law requiring the States to have a duplicate of every Federal law. There wouldn’t even be a reason to have dual sovereignty if the States enforced duplicate Federal laws. I wonder if there are really people who think it wouldn’t be absurd to try to make New Hampshire enforce the Federal income tax law.
Taxing illegal products? The Feds do that already. People seem to think drug dealing money is tax free. It is only if you commit income tax evasion. There isn’t a State in the Union that has a sales & use tax that excludes illegal products. Yes, your drug dealer is legally required to charge sales tax when he sells you a fix. Just because they don’t do it doesn’t mean that it isn’t legally required. Aside from that there are some 20 States give or take a State that have ‘drug tax stamps’ and if you get busted without those tax stamps you get a bill from the State authorities. You can see these State drug tax stamps traded on Ebay as novelties.
Aside from all that, can anyone really see a majority vote from the most populous State in the Union being challenged by elected officials? I can see it if the legislature passes a law that specifically intrudes on something specifically reserved to the Federal Government, let’s say immigration for example. But do you really think that Mr. Obama can win in 2012 without all those electoral votes from California? Do you think he’d even care to try? Christ, I’d say it’s only 50/50 that the Feds would sue California if they reinstated involuntary servitude by popular vote, and the Feds were the only ones with standing to challenge such a law.
No fucking way do the Feds file any kind of suit over cannabis re-legalization, even if they had some remote fantasy that they could win such a baseless suit. The idiotic chickenshit thinking of San Diego and San Bernardino counties just isn’t represented at the Federal level. The idiotic chickenshit reasoning that does exist at the Federal level will realize they don’t have a prayer of winning, and even if they did win they would ostracize a hell of a large number of voters. Just take a look at the push back in CA from overturning the blatantly unconstitutional Prop 8. We’ve already seen gay marriage ballot initiatives going side by side with expanding medical cannabis rights (Maine in 2009) and medical cannabis won while the bigots managed to defeat the gay marriage referendum.
I admit I’m mystified why people are so all fired against gay marriage. It sure doesn’t intrude on my relationship with my wife if a couple of guys prefer packing the fudge in the privacy of their home. Frankly, I’d rather not even think about it because it’s so irrelevant to my life. Well, except for the fact that one of my dearest friends is gay and lives in California with her SO and it pisses me off to no end that her life is shit on by these religious perverts. But it does seem there are a lot of religious perverts that can’t quit thinking about what gay people do in private. It simply fills me with an urge to defecate.
@claygooding
Did the prepaid credit card work without any problems? I’ve had some issues using those online. The billing address doesn’t exist on a card like that and I don’t have a visa or master card either. Why do they not take paypal (other than it’s evil?)
I could spare a twenty since I’d only spend it on coffee anyways. Yep, I budget my coffee intake… So I’ll take a literal coffee break for a few days.
Nice points Duncan. I’ve said before that the Fed’s only option if this passes is to enforce the laws themselves. The Federal Government just is not able to virtually duplicate every local police force in the State. So it ain’t gonna happen.
It went through just now and I have never felt better about giving money to something without receiving anything back in my life.
I have another 25 on the card and am cruising between NORML and LEAP as to the next recipient,or I may just let it ride till after the 10th of OCT and boot another $25
to Prop 19 support. Thanx for the link Pete.
The only other charity I donate to is the Salvation Army
because when I was in the hospital in Nam,the Red Cross came thru the wards everyday,selling writing paper and envelopes,donuts and coffee and following them was the Salvation Army,giving them away. It just always stuck in my mind. So every year if I have it,I drop change in every bell ringers bucket for the SA,even if someone could be stealing it.
I have hopes that CA will pass this initiative but even if they don’t,they have already made a huge difference in the playing field and opened America’s eyes to an alternative to spending billions of dollars and accomplishing nothing but locking up non-violent non-criminals.
I’m in.
And where the hell is Soros? C’mon George!
Goes to show how experiences can shape one’s path. Clay, a Salvation Army donation truck ran over my dog when I was seven. No Shit. Anyway, I give to non-religious charities.
It is up to $33 to $34 and climbing rapidly,apparently I was not the only one waiting till the last day to kick in.
I wish George or one of the obscene rich contributors would come onboard and make this a much easier win.
I’m in. And will be in every week until the election!
They’ve tried cutting off our lines of communications. They’ve tried to cut our supply lines. They’ve even tried “strategic bombing” to no avail.
I’m just now finishing up a great book, “I Could Never Be So Lucky Again,” the autobiography of James H. Doolittle, Tokyo Raider #1. If he were alive today, he’d love this sort of battle.
I’m finding I’m learning a lot from the past that can be applied to the present.
Glad to hear it went through, I’ll swing by the store and pick up a card on my lunch break.
I usually have enough cash left over to occasionally donate a few bucks to a local no kill animal shelters/rehab facilities and MSF International.
Wait, isn’t Soros already funding all these vile, leftist, legalization plots to destroy the nation and then, the world? All whilst cackling evilly over mountains of money and the tiny charred bones of children? Geeze. What a tightwad.
$5 for me. I also donated $4.20 to norml on $4.20 this year. I’m pretending I’m not about to zero out my bank account next month when I pay for school 🙁
er that was on 4/20, but you probably could have guessed that
$41,800 at central time 🙂 I hope all cannabis consumers and non-consumers alike Spill into the polls like a biblical flood !! Come on …put the cannabis down..go vote…..free your self from thier tyranny !!
Just sent my donation by way of AL. What a beautiful day it will be when this wonderful plant is legalized!
dropped $125 🙂
Donated $25 and will continue to do so weekly for remainder of campaign. PETE, thanks for posting the link as it spurred me from my procrastination in getting YesTo19 into my donation pool.
Sent ’em $5.
Think of it this way: Every donation is a bitch-slap to every authoritarian badged thug, every overly-ambitious prosecutor and judge, every snot-nosed faux-moralist, every parole officer who thought they could lord it over you, every conniving and self-serving DrugWarrior bureaucrat, every prison guard union member in CA, every control-freak busybody who thinks they can run your life better than you can.
Slap!
Slap!
Slap!
And keep on slapping until their faces look like they they’ve made far too many of ours look and feel like. Keep slapping until we effin’ WIN.
And you don’t even have to break a sweat doing it.
@ ez… a commenter over at the Hive just posted this about the Jim Gray – John Redmon debate:
well I don’t have $5 to send but I do appreciate the money the folks here on Pete’s couch have sent – Thanks Y’all!
http://thehive.modbee.com/node/21238
at $50,098 and still climbing… very nice!
8:20 pm CDT we made the 50 grand. Thanks to all. Waiting to hear the statistics of how many out of stater’s kicked in,because inquisitive minds want to know.
Day ain’t over yet, folks…at least not here. To my best recollection, it ends at midnight. ‘course they say pot affects your short term memory and your sense of time…but I also seem to recall reading somewhere that “they” are full of shit. Here’s another twenty says it goes to 65 thou by the end of the night!
Time for California to End The Unwinnable Marijuana War
Can More Arrests Ever Stop Marijuana?
Source/Links:http://www.globalresearch.ca/
Since the founding of the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973, 15 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana.
That is more people than live in California’s 25 largest cities – millions more than live in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Illinois.
The DEA has led an aggressive national law enforcement effort that results in a marijuana arrest every 38 seconds, propelling the U.S. to become the biggest incarcerator on the planet, housing one out of four of the world’s prisoners. Despite mass arrests, incarceration and the tearing apart of millions of families, the war rages on with no end in sight.
Since the DEA’s founding, approximately 90% of youth have described marijuana as easy to get in annual federal surveys. It is easier for young Americans to buy marijuana than it is to buy alcohol or prescription drugs which are legally regulated and controlled.
Is there any reason to think that millions more arrests – with costs running into the billions – will win the marijuana war?
Last week every former U.S. DEA head came out against Proposition 19 which would end possession arrests and allow local jurisdictions in California to make marijuana legal. No surprise that drug enforcement bureaucrats want to defend their marijuana enforcement budgets. They even oppose medical marijuana for people suffering and dying. But, more important for the voter, this is an opportunity to look at the big picture. Voters should ask themselves:
Has the marijuana war, with more than 800,000 arrests each year, worked?
Will more arrests stop marijuana?
If not, isn’t it time to consider alternatives that could better control marijuana?
Thankfully, the DEA is not the only law enforcement voice. Recently the National Black Police Association came out in support of Prop. 19, following a slew of endorsements from unions, faith leaders and the NAACP. On Monday, simultaneous press conferences will be held at Oakland City Hall and in West Hollywood Park to announce a letter of endorsement signed by dozens of law enforcers across California.
Joseph McNamara, former police chief in San Jose, CA and Kansas City, MO, an active member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, describes the marijuana laws as much worse than ineffective: “they waste valuable police resources and also create a lucrative black market that funds cartels and criminal gangs with billions of tax-free dollars.” Federal researchers find marijuana to be safer than many legal drugs, so why waste precious law enforcement resources on it?
These officers, judges and prosecutors support Proposition 19 because it:
*
Stops wasting police on non-violent marijuana offenders and enables them to focus on preventing violent crime,
*
Cuts off funding to violent gangs and drug cartels,
*
Reduces marijuana access to children by instituting strict age-limits and public safety controls,
*
Protects the lives of police officers now at risk in the “drug war,” and
*
Restores mutual respect and good relations between law enforcement and communities bearing the brunt of the current marijuana laws.
These police views are shared by the California Legislative Analyst which says Prop 19 would enable California to put our police priorities where they belong saying it “could result in savings to the state and local governments by reducing the number of marijuana offenders incarcerated in state prisons and county jails, as well as the number placed under county probation or state parole supervision. These savings could reach several tens of millions of dollars annually. The county jail savings would be offset to the extent that jail beds no longer needed for marijuana offenders were used for other criminals who are now being released early because of a lack of jail space.”
Proposition 19 is a cautious reform that keeps in mind public safety. It empowers local jurisdictions to decide whether to bring adult use of marijuana within the law and how to regulate it. It maintains strict criminal penalties for driving under the influence, increases the penalty for providing marijuana to a minor, expressly prohibits consumption in public, forbids smoking while minors are present, and bans possession on school grounds.
In addition to being good policy that sets common sense police priorities and regulates marijuana so it is more difficult for children to get, it will generate $1.4 billion in tax revenue each year according to California’s tax collector, the Board of Equalization.
California voters should thank the federal drug enforcement bureaucrats for showing that – despite their best efforts over nearly four decades – the marijuana war cannot be won and it is time for voters to do what politicians refuse to do: tax and control marijuana.
Kevin Zeese is president of Common Sense for Drug Policy and executive director of Prosperity Agenda.
Although I’ve bookmarked the donation link, I’d like to propose that a hypertext link be maintained for the donation page until the election. It would help those who’ve only discovered this place to participate…perhaps with a WAV file so that when you click on it, you’d hear the sound of an officious blowhard prohib being slapped.
People, you’ve been witnessing a tiny, tiny fraction of the power that we have always possessed.
Within 24 hours, with hardly any advertisement, the ‘lazy, shiftless stoners’ have marshaled resources to pull off what our detractors always thought we couldn’t accomplish. Their smug assurance was already starting to slip; now they begin to understand fully the import of this, as the smarter of them realize that this…is…just…the…beginning.
The time has come. Our time. A storm is approaching. It is our storm. Let the latest generation be the absolute last to endure second-class citizenship in their own country; the last to be stolen from with their taxes, and those taxes spent in promulgating intelligence-insulting lies about drugs in general and cannabis in particular; the last to be piss-tested without good reason, only as social control; the last to endure fear, pain and death because they choose an intoxicant that never killed anyone…unlike their self-appointed saviors, who’ve killed plenty of us.
I said it last year, and I repeat it again: NOW IS THE TIME.
Long ago, the Diaspora Jews used to say, “Next year, in Jerusalem”. Meaning, someday they’d have their own homeland. And then it happened.
In the same vein, and with the same intensity, I say to you, my friends: “THIS YEAR, IN CALIFORNIA!”
Tomorrow the world!
The war on drugs is over. Drugs won.
It’s almost as funny as getting the California AG publicly debating medical cannabis with a cartoon character (Lungren v Harris 1996).
Clay, if we manage it here, then, yes, that will truly be the case.
The US is Drug Prohib Number One on this planet. Knock out the cornerstone of US drug prohibition by eliminating cannabis prohibition, the rest of the planet will quickly jettison their own US ‘suggested’ laws, in favor of harm reduction strategies.
We truly are at the cusp of a monumental point in history. And every person who has and will continue to contribute to that money bomb is just like the people who gathered at the Berlin Wall with hand tools. They were just the beginning. It ended with construction equipment being used to bring down the rest of it. But it all started with a few people tapping away at it. Every contribution is a hammer strike against the ‘wall’ of oppression. A wall that cannot stand in the face of that ‘storm’ I mentioned. A ‘storm’ whose effects will be felt around the world.
@Allan,
Thanks for the head’s up. I’ve been keeping “Little Lindy” on her toes lately. I told her I’d fixed cooked crow for her on November 3rd. LOL Plus, I’ve been keeping her topics in the “truthful” column, although we both know it’s eating a hold through her. LOL
Salutare imi place siteul tau vrei sa facem linkexchange cu blogul meu?