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My fellow Americans. We face extraordinarily difficult times on a number of fronts. My Administration has inherited difficulties unprecedented in the adult lifetime and memory of anyone younger than about 90. Tonight I plan to discuss with you the interrelated challenges facing our economy and our financial system and our plans for dealing with these challenges.

During the campaign, I said that instead of telling you what you wanted to hear, I would tell you what you needed to know. Tonight I plan to tell you what you need to know at some length.

Former Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism Board Chair and community activist Cornell McCleary died February 11 at the age of 55. Cornell recruited me to run for the NAACP Board in the early 1990s. He was one of the few black leaders in Columbus that reached out the white community surrounding the Free Press, as well as to the gay community. When I began co-publishing and editing the Free Press in 1992, my co-publisher and now U.S. Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy suggested we tap McCleary as Chairperson of our Board.

Did George Washington raise hemp? Did he smoke it? Was he gay?

The easy answers are definitely, probably, and maybe.

The questions arise with pre-publication of the shocking satire PASSIONS OF THE PATRIOTS by “Thomas Paine,” which opens with Le General in the hemp-filled embrace of his beloved Marquis de Lafayette.

As Washington’s February 22 birthday approaches, his personal habits say much about today’s America.

Like virtually every Revolutionary farmer, the Father of Our Country grew prodigious quantities of hemp. It was (is) a profitable cash crop, easy to grow, with scant demands for cultivation, watering or fertilizing. As a hardy perennial, it needs no year-after-year replanting, nor pesticides or herbicides.

Early American farmers used cannabis for cloth, rope, sails, paper and much more. At various times its cultivation has been mandatory. Kansas was virtually carpeted with it during World War Two. In today’s conversion to a Solartopian economy, the cellulose of its stems and leaves, and the oil from its seeds, could be essential for green ethanol and bio-diesel fuels.

Hold Bush and His Joint Co-Conspirators Criminally Accountable! You can join the movement to indict Bush Administration officials who committed war crimes, "legalized" torture, and engaged in massive illegal spying and wiretapping against the American people.
Click this link if you support the indictment of George W. Bush and other high officials.
The rule of law, justice, and basic integrity require the indictment for criminal wrongdoing of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and other high officials of the former Bush Administration.

The media establishment is surprised by the ground swell of support from the grassroots for the pursuit of individuals who committed grievous crimes during the Bush era.

We are not surprised that the people are demanding accountability for those who committed wars of aggression, torture, and subverted the Constitution and thus violated not only their oaths of office but domestic and international law.

"I've been through Y2K and I've been through 9/11. I have never seen people so afraid as what we are seeing right now,” said gun shop owner Scott Moss recently. With more guns per capita – easily 250 million privately owned ones – and certainly more people in prisons than any other democracy, the intriguing question in this still worsening economic calamity is: If Americans found the courage for political rebellion now, would it preempt massive criminal violence, social havoc and armed rebellion later?

What we see President Obama and Congress doing and debating seem inadequate to restore financial health and security to the vast majority of Americans before millions more lives are devastated. Billions of tax dollars have gone to banks, corporations and others but have not stopped the hemorrhage of our financial lifeblood. More than half a million jobs continue to be lost a month; 3.5 million in the past year. Millions are losing their homes, health insurance and ability to buy food. Those with jobs are afraid to spend money.

In a tent in front of Shifa hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, a sign on the photo of a young child bleeding from wounds from the Israeli attack on Gaza read “Gaza Will Not Die.”

Shifa hospital received hundreds of bodies of those killed and thousands of those wounded during the December 27, 2008-January 18, 2009 22 day attack, invasion and occupation of Gaza by the Israeli military.

Now in front of Shifa hospital was a tent filled with military armaments-rocket parts, ammunition, etc from Israeli missile and bombs. Several were American made—a 120 mm artillery shell, a TOW missile. During the past eight years under the Bush administration, Israel has received over $21 billion in U.S. security assistance, including $19 billion in direct military aid. The majority of Israel’s military equipment is funded under U.S. assistance programs. The United States has given Israel 226 U.S. F-16 fighter and attack jets, more than 700 M-60 tanks, 6,000 armored personnel carriers, and dozens of transport planes, attack helicopters, utility and training aircraft, bombs, and tactical missiles. The U.S. Arms Export Control Act specifies that US
Can we find ideas — political ideas — big enough to be worthy of this moment?

You know, before the cynicism and the disappointment and the recession and the dumbed-down media and, oh yeah, the regrouping Republicans, conspire to dull Barack Obama’s election into the bitter memory of hope and harass his presidency into something that resembles Clintonism and business slightly to the left of usual (if that).

Right now and perhaps for the fabled “first hundred days,” the sense of possibility is as palpable as it is vague. There’s a yearning in the air, but for what? When I was at the post office the other day, the clerk could scarcely contain her enthusiasm for the Lincoln stamps she was showing me — four views of Honest Abe, see. Here he is as a young man; now he’s practicing law; now he’s in Congress; and, finally, here’s the 16th president, the Great Emancipator, deep and wise, the Lincoln we remember, in the embrace of history and myth.

And we both knew, in some unstated way, that she was really showing me Obama stamps. This is what our expectations are, and they’re impossible. Yes, of course.

For the third straight year, against all odds, a national grassroots No Nukes campaign has stripped out of the federal budget a proposed $50 billion boondoggle for new atomic reactors.

The victory gives a giant boost to solar, wind, efficiency, mass transit and other Solartopian technologies that can solve global warming, sustain real economic growth and bring us a truly green-powered Earth.

This latest victory came Wednesday, February 11, as a top-level Congressional conference committee ironed out the last details of the Obama stimulus package. The loan guarantee scam was slipped into the Senate version by Republican Bob Bennett (R-UT) in cooperation with Democrat Tom Carper (D-DE). The loan guarantees would have backed a Department of Energy program supporting new reactor construction, despite a report from the Government Accountability Office warning that such projects would bankrupt more than half the utilities that might undertake them.

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