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The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment doesn’t have very many words, but if those words are to retain their meaning, the Ninth Circuit will have to put a check on the government’s ability to blacklist its citizens without recourse.

In much the same way as Karl Rove, the campaign is trying to turn Romney’s strength—his private-sector experience—into a weakness. “Yes, Governor Romney was a skilled generator of wealth, but he did so at the cost of families like yours. Just imagine what he’ll do in the White House.” The Romney campaign has been trying to do the same to the president—and may well succeed—but for now, it’s a half-step when compared to this effort.

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Dr. Jody Corey-Bloom, director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at UC San Diego, recently helped run a study that provided multiple sclerosis patients with either a marijuana joint or a placebo that looked, smelled, and tasted like marijuana. After smoking whichever substance they were given, patients were tested to see if it reduced their muscle spasticity — an affliction, common to MS patients, that causes painful, uncontrollable spasms of the extremities. Spasticity was unaffected among the placebo patients but dropped 30 percent on average among the patients given real marijuana. The side effects? “Smoking caused fatigue and dizziness in some users,” says Reuters, “and slowed down people’s mental skills soon after they used marijuana.”

The UC San Diego study is just the latest to suggest that marijuana has some medical benefits. Sixteen states, thousands of doctors, and tens of thousands of sick people concur in that judgment. It is dramatized by the personal testimony of sick people who are offered much more powerful drugs, but nevertheless insistthat consuming marijuana was most effective at helping them. (Don’t miss the video at the top of this post, as powerful a testimonial for medical marijuana as you’ll find.)

Marijuana is nevertheless classified under the Controlled Substances Act as a Schedule One drug. Under the law, drugs placed in that category must meet all of the following criteria (emphasis added):

• The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
• The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
• There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision

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Our plane got delayed 20 minutes so we got out the instruments and played a 4 song impromptu set for the packed plane.

Romania here we come!

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Stung by a UN official’s criticism of the country for allowing some of its people to go hungry, Canada has dismissed him as a “patronizing academic” and said there are more pressing food concerns in other countries.

“Canada has long been seen as a land of plenty. Yet today one in 10 families with a child under six is unable to meet their daily food needs,” Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Conservative government of Canada has reacted like a scalded cat. Uncharacteristically, at least three ministers have been trotted to the microphones to abhor this “ill-informed, patronising academic”. And don’t mention the facts; that obesity and diabetes rates are rocketing especially in remote communities where fresh food is expensive or unobtainable. Canada’s First Nations citizens are often poor; have high levels of violence, substance abuse and crime; have poor diets and poor health.

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The US army has said a combat brigade will be assigned to the Pentagon’s Africa Command next year in a pilot programme that will send small teams of soldiers to countries around the continent to do training and participate in military exercises.

General Ray Odierno, the army’s chief of staff, says the plan is part of a new effort to provide US commanders around the globe with troops on a rotational basis to meet the military needs of their regions.

…

Military advisers are also in Uganda to draw lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan to help train African Union soldiers to fight Somalia’s al-Shabab group.

Lessons like not to fund insurgents on the principle of my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend, perhaps?

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This is what I see when i think about higher education in this country today:Remember the housing meltdown ? Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lot of easy money being lent to buyers who couldn’t afford the money they were borrowing. That money was then spent on homes with the expectation that the price of the home would go up and it could easily be flipped or refinanced at a profit. Who cares if you couldn’t afford the loan. As long as prices kept on going up, everyone was happy. And prices kept on going up. And as long as pricing kept on going up real estate agents kept on selling homes and finding money for buyers.Until the easy money stopped. When easy money stopped, buyers couldn’t sell. They couldn’t refinance. First sales slowed, then prices started falling and then the housing bubble burst. Housing prices crashed. We know the rest of the story. We are still mired in the consequences.Can someone please explain to me how what is happening in higher education is any different ?

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Companies should help reduce income inequality and focus more on long-term goals, a new group of supporters of capitalism said on Monday.

[..]

It also includes Carly Fiorina, former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, and Adam Posen, a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee.

Irony just died, came back to life, died, came back to life, hemorrhaged, shat twice and died.

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Studies show that Massachusetts ranks 12th in the nation in terms of the debt graduating college seniors carry, with an average obligation of $25,541.

In better times, that’s a hefty burden with which to start on a career path. In the middle of the worst economic crisis in more than a generation, it is cruel and unusual punishment.

Unless a graduate has a specialized degree (in, say, engineering, computer science, or nursing) the odds of a finding a job are long. Even those lucky enough to get work are often underemployed — pulling espresso or working part-time.

Brown, together with his Republican colleagues, voted to make a bad situation even worse.

Why?

Because the Democrats’ plan to pay for extending the loan subsidies would have closed a tax loophole often exploited by well-off investors.

In other words, Brown sold out the interests of the poor, the working class, and middle-income families in order to lick the boots of Wall Street, which contributes mightily to his re-election campaign.

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A well-known, openly gay supporter of Mitt Romney in New York has decided to withdraw his support for Romney and back President Barack Obama instead.

The clincher: Romney’s stance on same-sex marriage.

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Ah, the MPAA. Hardly a day goes by when someone there doesn’t say something positively ridiculous. The latest is a reaction to the news that a court in the Netherlands has expanded the censorship of The Pirate Bay to a few more ISPs. The MPAA has decided to explain that this kind of censorship is good for consumers:

The UK ruling and indeed other recent ones in Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Finland as well as this one are positive developments that support not only the creative community but also consumers.

It’s not entirely clear why they say “the UK ruling,” since the post only refers to a ruling from The Netherlands, but it’s a strange world when someone is claiming that censoring a website that consumers find useful is “good for consumers.” So how do they defend such a ridiculous claim? Well, by getting the story backwards yet again:

The number of sites that offer legitimate creative content continues to increase dramatically. But to fully enable this growing sector to thrive and provide consumers with content when they want it, where they want it and how they want it, it is imperative that the content not be siphoned off and distributed illegally by those seeking to profit from the work and creativity of others.

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For almost half a century, Don Ritchie would approach people contemplating suicide at the edge of The Gap, just 50 metres from his home in Watsons Bay, his palms facing up.

Mr Ritchie told his daughter Sue Ritchie Bereny he would smile and say: “Is there something I could do to help you?”

“And that was all that was often needed to turn people around, and he would say not to underestimate the power of a kind word and a smile,” said Mrs Ritchie Bereny.

Mr Ritchie, sometimes known as the angel or watchman of The Gap, is acknowledged to have stopped about 160 people from jumping to their deaths.

He died at St Vincent’s Hospital yesterday, surrounded by his wife Moya, 85, daughters Jan, Donna and Sue, and four grandchildren, who travelled from across Australia and from Indonesia to Sydney to see him. He was 86.

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A young Haitian man who accused Uruguayan troops serving as UN peacekeepers in Haiti of sexually assaulting him last year has testified in Montevideo before a judge investigating the case.

The scandal erupted in September 2011 after mobile phone video images circulated on the internet appeared to show soldiers serving with the UN mission sexually assaulting the man, then 18, in the southern Haitian town of Port-Salut.

Six Uruguayan marines were indicted last year on charges of disobeying orders and dereliction of duty. The first charge is punishable by four months to four years of prison, and the second by up to three years in prison.

Why is this young man a ‘rape victim’ in the headline? Isn’t he a rape victim or an alleged rape victim?

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A former Rupert Murdoch aide has told an inquiry that she received commiserations from David Cameron, UK prime minister, after she resigned amid the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

Rebekah Brooks, in her long-awaited testimony before the Leveson inquiry into press ethics on Friday, said she also received messages from the foreign ministry, interior ministry and the offices of George Osborne, finance minister.

…

Cameron has been a friend of Brooks’ husband for 30 years since they studied together at Eton, the elite British boarding school.

The Camerons and the Brookses are also neighbours in the prime minister’s constituency in rural Oxfordshire, forming part of what is dubbed the Chipping Norton Set, a group of the rich and powerful who live near the village of the same name.

The impression that Cameron and Osborne surrounded themselves with a coterie of privileged individuals for cosy dinners and horse riding in the English countryside, has been pounced on by critics.

This is not much of a surprise (politics as usual), but it’s interesting that at last the UK authorities appear to be doing something about this kind of corruption. Of course an inquiry may be used to cover up the facts.

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A review on glyphosate (Monsanto’s invention and key ingredient in their Roundup herbicide formulation) titled, “Developmental and reproductive outcomes in humans and animals after glyphosate exposure: a critical analysis,” was published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health late last year which claimed the following: “[T]he available literature shows no solid evidence linking glyphosate exposure to adverse developmental or reproductive effects at environmentally realistic exposure concentrations.”

The review authors included a thank you to Monsanto for funding their work: “The authors acknowledge the Monsanto company for funding and for providing its unpublished glyphosate and surfactant toxicity study reports.”

Their report aimed to discredit the work of a French research group at the Institut Jaques Monod who published five articles indicating glyphosate’s wide-ranging potential for environmental and human harm.[1]  [2] [3] [4] [5]

In their newly published rebuttal titled, “LETTER TO THE EDITOR: TOXICITY OF ROUNDUP AND GLYPHOSATE,” the French research team pointed out several serious flaws in the Monsanto-friendly scientist’s criticism of their work.

The first major flaw was their total disregard for the scientific context within which their glyphosate research was performed, namely, the DNA-damaging and carcinogenic potential of the chemical.

The second flaw was the claim that their results were “not environmentally relevant” (repeated 5 times in the article), despite the fact that the French researchers were able to demonstrate toxicity in 100% of the individual cells at short exposure time below the usage concentration (20 mM) of the herbicide in present agricultural applications. They elaborated on this point further:

“Therefore, regarding the considerable amount of glyphosate-based product sprayed worldwide, the concentration of Roundup in every single micro droplet is far above the threshold concentration that would activate the cell cycle checkpoint. (2) The effects we demonstrate were obtained by a short exposure time (minutes) of the cells to glyphosate-based products, and nothing excludes that prolonged exposure to lower doses may also have effects. Since glyphosate is commonly found present in drinking water in many countries, low doses with long exposure by ingestion are a fact. The consequences of this permanent long term exposure remain to be further investigated but cannot just be ignored.”

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CIA Officials Defy Obama Directive on FOIA which states that “the Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.”

Washington, DC, May 10, 2012 – More than year after the National Security Archive sued the CIA to declassify the full “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation,” a U.S. District Court judge today sided with the Agency’s efforts to keep the last volume of the report secret in perpetuity. In her ruling, Judge Gladys Kessler accepted the CIA’s legal arguments that, because Volume V was a “draft” and never officially approved for inclusion in the Agency’s official history, it was exempt from declassification under the “deliberative process privilege” despite having been written over 30 years ago.

The National Security Archive called the decision “a regrettable blow to the right-to-know” and vowed to press the Obama administration to force the CIA to adhere to the President’s Executive Order 13526 that “no information shall remain classified indefinitely.”

The volume, titled “CIA’s Internal Investigations of the Bay of Pigs Operations,” was written by CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer in 1981. It forcefully critiqued the scathing investigative report written in the immediate aftermath of the paramilitary attack – by the CIA’s own Inspector General, Lyman Kirkpatrick – which held CIA planners fully responsible for the worst debacle in the Agency’s covert history. In court papers, CIA officials described Pfeiffer’s critique as “a polemic of recriminations against CIA officers who later criticized the operation.”

“When it comes to protecting its own, the CIA appears to have a double-standard on history,” said Peter Kornbluh who directs the National Security Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project which brought the FOIA lawsuit. Kornbluh noted that the CIA had no problem declassifying Volume IV of the official history–also a draft– in which Pfeiffer attacked both President Kennedy for his role in setting restrictions on the overt elements of what was supposed to be a covert, and “plausibly deniable,” operation, as well as Attorney General Robert Kennedy for his role in the Presidential commission, led by Gen. Maxwell Taylor, that investigated the failed invasion.

“Apparently, the CIA sees no problem in the American public reading a ‘polemic of recriminations’ against the White House,” according to Kornbluh. “But the CIA claims ‘historical accuracy’ as a reason to withhold documents critical of its own officials.”

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A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the National Security Agency’s decision to withhold from the public documents confirming or denying any relationship it has with Google concerning encryption and cybersecurity.

That’s despite the fact that Google itself admitted it turned to “U.S. authorities,” which obviously includes the NSA, after the search giant’s Chinese operation was deeply hacked. Former NSA chief Mike McConnell told the Washington Post that collaboration between the NSA and private companies like Google was “inevitable.”

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, invoking the Freedom of Information Act, had sought such documents following the January 2010 cyberattack on Google that targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack was among the considerations that prompted Google toconsider abandoning China, and Google announced that it was “working with the relevant U.S. authorities.”

The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post followed up, saying Google had contacted the NSA following the attack.

EPIC sought documents seeking to know what type of collaboration there was between Google and the NSA and, among other things, records of communication between the NSA and Google concerning Google’s e-mail service Gmail.

In response, the NSA invoked a so-called “Glomar” response, in which the agency neither confirmed nor denied the existence of records on the topic at all. EPIC sued and lost in the lower courts.

On appeal, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the NSA’s conclusion that admitting the existence of relevant documents would harm national security (.pdf).

Judge Janice Rogers Brown, in a 3-0 opinion, sided with the government’s contention that acknowledging any records “might reveal whether the NSA investigated the threat,” or “deemed the threat a concern to the security of the U.S. government.”

If we removed all the legalese, the appellate court upheld the government’s often-said contention that, “if we told you, we’d have to kill you.”

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What an extraordinary year this has been for Net activism. After the great SOPA blackout led to SOPA and PIPA being withdrawn, and the anti-ACTA street demonstrations triggered a complete rethink by the European Parliament that may well result in a rejection of the treaty, now it seems that the Trans Pacific Partnership is falling to pieces.

Foreign Policy magazine, for example, has a feature entitled Is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Foundering?, where its author explains that a number of the smaller countries participating in the negotiations are starting to ask themselves whether there are any advantages in joining at all:

Of even more concern, however , is the sudden questioning by the Chileans of the value of the deal as presently being constituted. Chile had been considered a slam dunk supporter. So its raising of questions is a red flag danger signal. Beyond that it seems that the Malaysians are also questioning whether any benefits they may be getting are worth the trouble of further liberalization of their domestic economy. And just to put the icing on the cake, it is becoming ever clearer that the Vietnamese, whose economy resembles that of China with large segments controlled by state owned companies, are going to have great difficulty in actually meeting the high standards being proposed.

As Techdirt has reported, TPP has been negotiated in the utmost secrecy, but now that word is finally leaking out about its provisions, there is resistance building in the US:

Although the deal, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, has received relatively little media attention in the United States, it has sparked international friction among consumer groups and environmental activists who worry that terms demanded by the Obama administration will eliminate important public protections. Domestically, however, the deal’s primary source of political tension is from a portion that could ban “Buy American” provisions — a restriction that opponents emphasize would crimp U.S. jobs.

That seems like a pretty significant issue. After all, one of the supposed aims of the trade agreement is to remove such internal barriers to trade for all signatories. But in an election year, President Obama will hardly want to be painted as someone who is sacrificing American jobs.

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Millions may know him best from one of the only lines he delivered in the Blues Brothers movie: “We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline“. Others who notice these things will remember him as the guy who also played the bass in the Blues Brothers band. And those for whom Stax records and the Memphis sound are important will know him as the four-string foundation of the great Booker T and the MGs, and the man who lent his solid, no-frills bass lines to many a tune by soul luminaries Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and lots of other greats. Memphis-born bassman Donald “Duck” Dunn has died while on tour (along with fellow legend and bandmate Steve Cropper) in Tokyo. RIP, Duck Dunn, and if there’s any goat piss in heaven, I know you’re gonna turn it into gasoline up there, too.

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Reality sometimes does exceed fiction. Three days ahead of the elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, the Piratenpartei‘s website has been discovered to be censored in schools. These state-run institutions do not allow people – voters – to read what policies the challenger party stands for.

Specifically, it is the election program of the German Pirate Party that is being actively censored in schools, under the category “illegal drugs”. It is no secret that the German Pirate Party wants to change the law to regulate, rather than prohibit, cannabis. Apparently, expressing a desire to change the law is seen as just as dangerous as breaking the law – just questioning the current policy: enough to suppress freedom of speech in the state-run schools.

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The Verge’s Joseph L. Flatley delves into the world of Internet marketing scams (those stupid spam pitches you get for “lead generation” and such) in eye-watering detail. Fundamentally, these things are exactly what they appear to be: con artists who suck money out of desperate people by lying to them about the money they can make with “work from home” businesses. They’re pyramid schemes. But Flatley lingers on the personalities, the histories, the motivations and the unique innovations that the Internet has given rise to, providing insight into the feel of being inside one of these desperate, sweaty scams.