I'm doing this to find where my logical blind spots are.

We all have them. And they can, despite sometimes being very small, hide deadly dangers behind them. Hence my seeming infatuation with providing links, statistics, details, etc.

I WANT people to tell me where I am wrong...but most importantly, tell me *why*. It truly is how we learn and grow. Antis are cocksure of themselves, and that's why they are continually failing in their endeavors, year after year, decade after decade. They are mentally STAGNANT. Cerebrally moribund. They haven't come up with an original argument against cannabis in 6 decades. All they do is rehash, over and over and over, the same tired, worn out old tripe.

Because they simply will not allow theselves to for a mcrosecond doubt their premises. They are like mental athletes grown fat on the rich diet of funding they've gotten for so long. They couldn't hold a mental race with us ( a la a debate) and they KNOW it. Hence their proven abject cowardice in refusing to debate us; they know they'd lose ignominiously.

Whereas I, like many if us, have had to grow 'lean and mean' mentally, from always being on the defensive. Let us take the offense, and it' all over.

Part of that strategy requires, no, DEMANDS(!) that we at least have the mental wherewithal to know that we *could very well be wrong*. And the intellectual honesty to admit when we've jammed feet in our mouths.

So, I welcome criticism. I don't like it, but I welcome it because I am only too well aware of how a small blind spot can conceal a pitfall. And, because we ARE always on the defensive, always being marginalized by the big fat antis, we can't afford to get sloppy in our thinking.

Show me my blind spots; I might growl, but not at you.

I am a Libertarian. Have been since I saw my first local rigged 'town meeting' for Reagan in 1976, where important questions by citizens were dismissively, contemptuously ignored by Republican Party hacks eager to press their own agendas. I became a *registered* Libertarian, voting for Mr. Clark, in 1980. And haven't voted for anyone but Libbers since then, out of sheer disgust with the Duopoly.

I don't fit in a nice, neat little pidgeonhole...neither do you. But Libbers are perhaps the most radical organized Party there is. That's the key to understanding them. 'Radical' and 'organized'. Attempting to fit Libbers onto the political scale of Left/Right just won't work. Check out the Website of the Libbers at http://www.lp.org/ and see if your concept of us might be changed.

The reason why I, a Libber, would vote for Kucinich, is based more on principle than any adherence to Party dogma.

Namely, on the fact that Kucinich has amply demonstrated time after time that he HAS principles. He also has a shot, albeit a long one, at making it. If (God forbid) he doesn't meet the same kind of Carnahan/Wellstone type of 'convenient acccident'.

I am one pissed off American, and not just because my medicine/sacrament is illegal. I hope that I am not perceived as being so shallow. I am heartily sick to death of how these slimey s***s of pols make such loud noises about matters of national concern and then as soon as elected, begin sucking off the special interest teat, and the Devil take the hindmost, guaranteeing the status quo remains untouched...while the country slides into what I truly, deeply fear may be the eventual dissolution of the Republic. I mean it. I am damned scared.

Like you, I have had the benefit of a better than average education...though no thanks to the public school system for it. I look at John Taylor Gatto's work on the origin of the present form of public education and wonder how we've survived so far. Because I've been, however briefly, in the belly of that beast and can tell you almost everything he wrote is true - horrifyingly true.

Like you, I have a better than average grasp of history...and know what happens to nations that listen to the Siren Song of Empire. None of them, not even the mighty Sov Empire is around anymore. Are we to follow it into History's dumpster? We are teetering on the knife's edge of its' maw, swaying in the wind. One more 'convenient' terrorist act and in we go. We are that close. That's why I am willing to vote for someone who many would call a Leftist.

It's been three years now. It's getting old, really.

The poor and working class left is what made Arnold into Governor-elect Schwarznegger.

If you want to gush bile at the people responsible for Arnold winning the recall, then start to work on the poor and the working class Democrats who decided to vote for him.

What do the Democrats stand FOR?

One could easily get the impression that the American left stands FOR nothing, there are only positions AGAINST Bush.

This is the effect of Noam Chomsky -- he only teaches people how to be as negative as humanly possible, he doesn't give anyone information or tools on which they can build anything positive.

Why has it sprung up in such a short time? What could have nurtured this, in a time of relative economic prosperity and peace? Why have *Gastarbeiters* been attacked with such increasing ferocity? Their homes burned? Their children subjected to taunts and worse?

No nation is safe from it's own version of barbarians within the city walls; we have our own, right here. Sadly, some are wearing cop's badges.

But, why is it that a geneartion, twice removed from the horrible contagion, willing to risk infection, again?

Because many of them still haven't learned, that's why.

I'd travelled widely through Germany in the 1980's. Unlike many of my comrades, I wasn't a 'barracks rat', who, fearing to interact would stay on post all weekend, swill beer, and count the days 'til they went back to 'The World', as the US was refered to by many grunts.

I went out and about, and rarely let on that I could understand more than a smattering of Deutsche. Most of those I met were simply wonderful people trying to get along stuck between two colossi that had not one care about turning Germany into green glowing glass. every war game I was ever on ended when the nuke cork was popped...and it always WAS. Every time. it was expecetd as part ofthe 'play book'. The Germans new this, and had no illusions.

But many of them resented my presence. Quite a few times I heard "Verdammt Amerikaner!" muttered under the breath as I passed. I ignored it. But I tried to understand why...and learned that there was a smoldering resentment, not at being garrisoned as Germany was and still is (and shouldn't be).

Nope, that resentment ran much deeper. A sense of destiny denied was the undercurrent I sensed.

Destiny denied. What kind of destiny?

We have the past to guide us for the answer...for the past is indeed the prologue. The young people who join these fascist movements have had the benefit of both educaton and tolerance...and deride both. Why?

Nations all have a character of sorts, upon which stereotypes are mutated from...but the core values are there. Yes, they are a very hard working, industrious, mostly decent people. But they have also had the not that distant past to guide them. And many choose to ignore that past.

Ah-nuld is one such. One wonders just how far he would have taken his public admiration of Hitler if he had been in private, amongst fellow countrymen. Given his behavior and other statements he's made in the past, it's a fair question.

What you are doing here without realizing it is casting Nazi guilt on Arnold's entire generation in Germany and Austria, and they weren't even born when Hitler was alive.

Arnold only first learned about Nazi atrocities when he was 16 working for a trainer who had personally witnessed Nazis murdering Jews.

Arnold was reportedly enraged by this knowledge that was kept from his generation of youth by their guilty parents. He participated in organized disruptions of neo-Nazi meetings in his town. His trainer was an anti-neo-Nazi activist.

Watch the film Nasty Girl, about a German girl of Arnold's generation who incites the anger of her town by trying to find out what happened during the war.

Arnold's generation of Austrians was not guilty for the crimes of the Nazis, and it is horrific to put this guilt on them in the name of California partisan politics.

You're slandering a whole generation by implication here because that whole generation is the offspring of Nazis, just like Arnold. They have suffered quite a bit already from the emotional agony of what happened before they were born by the people who bore them.

They are not guilty of what their parents did, so give them a break.

If the left is losing the poor and working class, you need more than cynicism. You need something more than clever cutting comments and phony accents on your side.

You need a plan that revolves around something more substantive than insults.

Do you think the Taliban were gouging those herdsmen?

He could have been a Democrat, but chose instead, calculatedly, deliberately, to ingratiate himself with the "Party of the Rich", and made no bones about it. He's an opportunist. If the Prison Guard Association calls him on the phone and he suddenly decides to stop support of MMJ, don't be surprised.

The real test will come when he has to decide if he's going to continue the 9 Billion dollar lawsuit began by Davis and Bustamente to get Californians their money back...from the very rate gougers he was in a hotel room with back in 2001 when all the rate gouging began. what was being said and done in that hotel room, he refuses to say...just as Georgie Deux wouldn't 'fess up about his nose candy days.

If he tries to kill that lawsuit, you'll know the fix is in. He's not the power, but a 'vessel of power'. Like a 'Good German' (I know, he's Austrian-born, but the cultural behavior patterns run deep) he'll do what he's told to. I predict here that he will go back on his word, and he will allow the Feds to continue their predations on the sick.

Tommy Chong has begun his prison sentence. He does not deserve this and neither does anyone else.

More on the death of our right to vote...

IRREGULARITIES IN CALIFORNIA RACE!! Long-shot candidates do startlingly well in Tulare County - DIEBOLD MACHINES YIELD FISHY RESULTS!!! http://www.markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/

Computer Scientists Fear Voter Fraud: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,99241,00.html

Election-Fraud Website Removed Before Tuesday Recall Vote: http://www.tomflocco.com/

Time to Recall E-Vote Machines? http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60713,00.html

Black Box Voting - Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century: http://whitestarwebsitedesign.com/bbvreport/modules.php?name=Forums&file=index&c=5

YOUR STOLEN VOTE - THE MISSING PIECE OF THE PUZZLE: http://www.skullandcrossbones.org/news/voting.htm

DIEBOLD VOTING MACHINE TALLIES A NEGATIVE 16,022: http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=37706

It won't be nearly enough to hope that he sees it that way, it's up to us to MAKE him see it that way, and I suggest we start immediately.