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Protect our national forests

The U.S. House of Representatives will soon have the chance to protect our national forests with two upcoming forests votes.

One vote will protect Alaska's Tongass Rainforest and stop fiscally irresponsible spending by prohibiting taxpayer dollars from being wasted on new logging roads in the Tongass National Forest. For decades, American taxpayers have been forced to subsidize clearcut logging in the Tongass; in a single year, taxpayers spent $36 million on the Tongass logging program and received only about $1 million in revenue.

The second vote, on the Forest Wildlife Conservation amendment, would conserve wildlife and ensure sustainable forest management.

Please take a moment to ask your U.S. Representative to protect our national forests and vote YES on the Tongass amendment and the Forest Wildlife Conservation amendment. Then ask your family and friends to help by forwarding this e-mail to them.

To take action, click on this link: pirg.org/alerts/route.asp?id=695&id4=ES

Background

Ronald Reagan's Hip-Hop Legacy

Many writers mourning the death of our 40th president fail to mention that Ronald Reagan's administration brought on a poverty and despair that inflicted an entire generation of minorities and changed the sound and reality of ghetto life from a pursuit of the dream deferred into a descent into the American nightmare. The children of that era are many of the progenitors and purveyors of modern hip-hop, and Reagan's presidency single-handedly changed that music. Ronald Reagan is hip-hop's first president, and while America mourns, rappers are still rapping about the rusted legacy he left behind.

His turn to the political right and its affects on the inner city are best chronicled in what so many have come to call 'gangsta' rap and not in the history books. While hip-hop culture had been a vibrant thing long before Reagan's administration, his policies coalesced the Jamaicans, Black Americans and Latinos under the same struggle and as their lifestyles changed, so did the music that filled their streets. Whether politically conscious or celebratory, the fact is there is no such thing as 'gangsta'

New documents suggest Enron’s Lay, Skilling, Washington lobbyist knew about company’s trading schemes in California

Federal energy regulators have just released more than 400 pages of documents that suggest former Enron chairman Ken Lay and former chief executive Jeff Skilling were aware that Enron's west coast traders may have broken the law by using manipulative trading tactics in California to boost Enron’s profits during the height of that state's power crisis.

Moreover, one of Enron's most powerful Washington, D.C. lobbyists, who met with several members of the Bush administration in the spring of 2001 about Enron's opposition to price controls on electricity sales in California, was told by Tim Belden, the mastermind behind Enron's notorious trading scams, less than a year earlier that Belden and other traders working at the company's West Coast trading desk in Portland, Ore., spent the better part of 2000 and 2001 breaking the rules governing California's power market "when opportunities presented themselves to make money.”

"There's really two--two things that happened--two areas... in terms of things blowing up," Belden told Rick Shapiro, Enron's vice president of regulatory affairs and one of the company's lobbyists, in August 2000.

Rock and Radiation

Mr. Wasserman: Just read your latest, and I couldn't agree with you more; Reagan was a lot of things, but certainly not one of my "best" Presidents. After the berlin wall-fall, PJ O'Rourke (Rolling Stones token conservative) made essentially the same point that yu are making; R & R, LEVI jeans brought about the fall of communism. He made a point that the Soviet people had only one choice for shoes, those made (poorly)in Bulgaria. Western, moern, youth culture brought doen the evil empire. I think the same argument should applied to Cuba; our culture will bring down Fidel.

Flag Day June 14th

Flag Day is near (June 14), and the Pledge of Allegiance court case is expected to be decided soon. As an attorney, I am asked about the case's historic precedent. The history of the Pledge shocked my libertarian mind.

The Pledge was the origin of the salute of the horrid National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis). The Pledge's original salute was straight-armed. The Pledge's creator was a National Socialist in the U.S. (Francis Bellamy).

It is a myth that the straight-arm salute is an old Roman salute adopted by Mussolini. According to Dr. Martin Winkler in "The Roman Salute on Film" of the American Philological Association, the salute is not in any Roman art or text. The salute occurs in these films: the American "Ben-Hur" (1907), the Italian "Nerone" (1908), "Spartaco" (1914), and "Cabiria" (1914). In imitation of such films, self-styled Italian "Consul" Gabriele D 'Annunzio borrowed the salute as a propaganda tool for his political ambitions upon his occupation of Fiume in 1919. Earlier, D'Annunzio had worked with Giovanni Pastrone in his colossal epic Cabiria (1914). Mussolini

Media: Mourning in America

If journalism is history's first draft, the death of Ronald Reagan has caused a step-up in the mass production of falsified history.

It's mourning in America.

The main technique is omission. People who suffered from the Reagan presidency have no media standing today. It's not cool to mention victims of his policies in, for example, Central America.

President Reagan lauded and subsidized the contra guerrillas -- extolling them as "freedom fighters" while they terrorized the population in Nicaragua, killing thousands of civilians. And he proudly funneled large-scale support to governments aligned with death squads murdering thousands more in Guatemala and El Salvador.

With all the media-fueled mourning in America, there's been none left for the victims of Reaganite policies in Angola, either. His tireless support for the guerrilla forces of Unita "freedom fighter" Jonas Savimbi deserves much of the credit for making Angola the artificial limb capital of the world. Reagan saw to it that Uncle Sam walked in the bloody footsteps of colonial Portugal and apartheid South

Hemp -- it's growing

I appreciated Your series about cannabis / hemp, especially, "Hemp - It's Growing!" (June 1, 2004). It is one reason I support Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich for the Democratic Presidential nominee. Kucinich put in writing on His website, if elected President He will decriminalize cannabis and regulate it similar to alcohol. It stands to reason, if citizens may have and grow cannabis with THC that farmers would be allowed to grow hemp with out THC.

My main concerns on the cannabis / hemp issue are Biblical, where We presently have a powerful nation, caging humans for using what God said was good on literally the very 1st page of the Bible. Cannabis / hemp, a plant, known as kaneh bosm, before the King James version, is good and should not be exterminated.

Truthfully,
Stan White

Supply side

Hempfest photographs



















Rock & radiation, not Ronald Reagan, brought down the Kremlin

No greater nonsense will accompany Ronald Reagan to his grave than the idea that he brought down the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War.

Among the many causes of Soviet collapse two words stand out, and they aren't Ronald Reagan.

They are rock and radiation.

The GOP military's 1980s attempt to "spend the Soviets into oblivion" certainly feathered the nests of the defense contractors who contributed to Reagan's campaigns here, and who still fatten George W. Bush. Lockheed-Martin, Halliburton and an unholy host of GOP insiders have scored billions in profits from Iran-Contra to Star Wars to Desert Storm to Iraq.

But these were not the people who brought down the Kremlin. If anything, they prolonged Soviet rule with the unifying threat of apocalyptic attack.

No, it was rock & roll that wrecked the USSR. From the late 1960s on, the steady beat of the Beatles and Motown, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, shattered Stalinism at its stodgy core.

Precisely the things most hated by the Reagan's rightist culture warriors

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