Citizens must demand that their respective Congressmen review the delegation of authority to the Judicial Branch under the U.S. Judicial Conference Act to not only conduct secret meetings with the Executive Branch, as in an upcoming Judicial Boondoggle, but more importantly to use court rules to deprive citizens of substantive rights.  This is because, "[t}here is no crueler tyranny than that which is exerc ...

By Dirk Beittel, a.k.a. Buddy Greene The Mendocino Marijuana Museum is dead. It would have probably died of neglect and lack of funding sooner or later, but its bank preemptively killed it off.   It was supposed to be a place where the stories of the participants of the modern war on drugs were turned from folklore to history, but people mostly remained in their foxholes, and the war continues… What happene ...

Thursday May 24, 2012 at 11:15 AM there will be a General Assembly for the League of Student Workers at Santa Monica College.  I’ve been told the meeting is going to be pretty informal; the group is meeting to create a contact point for the Student Workers, introduce the committee members and present the annual report.  Student-workers are going to vote on whether or not they want to submit the report to th ...

Published on May 15, 2012 by     iamcompucomp In order to stay competitive with the Chinese, who are now using I.V. drips of amino acids to raise test scores, Arnie Duncan has launched the "Drip to the Top" for junior I.V. Leaguers. It's a wild ride in America on "goof balls" but with the population under the screws of the pharmaceutical industry and drugs, both legal and illegal, being doled out and taken ...

By Elaine Leeder   For the last fifteen years, I have been running self-help groups and education programs in some of the most notorious prisons in the United States. At both Elmira Correctional Facility in New York and San Quentin State Prison in California, I have met men who would be considered the “worst of the worst.” And yet when I get to know them, I find that they are human beings like you or m ...

Rick Hess's Straight Up blog at Education Week proves often to be valuable not for his intended messages, but for what he reveals about education reformers committed to choice and competition as paradigms for that reform. In his "Sanctimonious Scolding Isn't a Great Strategy for Promoting School Choice" posting, Hess makes an important statement at the end: "Rather than obey the moral instruction of do-good ...

By Michael Collins Rebekah Brooks is a witness for her own prosecution and that of Jeremy Hunt  based on her testimony last Friday before the Leveson Inquiry on the relationship between press and politicians.  Criminal charges against the Rupert Murdoch insider and favorite may be a prelude to looming charges arising out of Brooks' testimony before the Leveson Inquiry last week. Crown Prosecution Services c ...

By Saul Landau I sit on a gray plastic chair, facing a tiny, gray, plastic table and another empty, gray, plastic chair, waiting for Gerardo Hernandez in the visiting room of the maximum-security federal pen in Victorville, California. Next to me, in similar seating arrangements, a middle-aged black man speaks to a woman, presumably his wife; other black men talk to their spouses. Two kids run from the “chi ...

Just days ago, I completed my twenty-eighth year as a teacher—eighteen as a high school teacher of English followed by ten years as a professor of education. And I am excited about the coming semesters because, as I have felt every year of my teaching life, I know I failed in some ways this past academic year and I am confident I will be better in my next opportunities to teach. As a teacher, I am far from ...

By Saul Landau You can disagree with violent anti-Castro dogma, but such dissent could also get you killed – or your business torched as happened on April 25 to Airline Brokers Co. Some Cuban exiles apparently take free speech so seriously that they punish those who use it in “inappropriate” ways. Miami has witnessed countless incidents for five plus decades where those who consider their own views on how t ...