Posts by Jan Frel

Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.

The Sad Essence of Drug Prohibition: The War on Fun
Posted by Jan Frel, AlterNet on October 2, 2008 at 5:31 PM.

Don't worry, said the Canadian law enforcer to the Vermont Agricultural Committee about the possible dangers of allowing people have legal access to hemp: "You'd have to smoke 400 pounds of it to even get a smile on your face."

That's the whole concern -- that's why the Ag Committee got together, why the Canadian guy made the trip to talk to the Committee; to say that smoking hemp is not an easy path to fun. Of course it's easy to point out that this concern is a rather scary one for a society to have. But it's true. It's a war on fun -- Mark Ames:

"If everyone would admit that people do drugs because they're fun, then suddenly, the whole 30-year war on drugs thing would seem savage and bizarre: the war on fun. Which is exactly what it is. Drugs are also incredibly practical. They can help you get through rough times. They can numb you to horrible circumstances. They can improve your social skills. Or they can increase your work efficiency."

California Cops: Here's Your Pot Back, 3 Years Later
Posted by Jan Frel on September 18, 2008 at 4:00 PM.

Uhh, here's your weed back:

A medical marijuana user has his pot back, nearly three years after police in Huntington Beach, Calif., seized it. A judge Tuesday ordered police to return about four ounces of marijuana to Jim Spray. Spray says he used the pot to relieve back pain. He was arrested but charges were dropped. Police have been struggling to decide how to deal with California law allowing marijuana use for medical reasons but federal law that prohibits it.

Hopefully, the pot wasn't kept in sunlight ...

Rachel Maddow's TV Ratings Shoot Through the Roof
Posted by Jan Frel, AlterNet on September 18, 2008 at 12:00 PM.

The latest cable news ratings show that Rachel Maddow is already ahead of Keith Olbermann and Larry King. Quite a feat in the ultra-competitive TV news environment.

Cable News Ratings for Tuesday, September 16

8PM - P2+ (25-54) (35-64)

The O'Reilly Factor- 3,060,000 viewers (731,000) (1,253,000)

Election Center-1,166,000 viewers (431,000) (576,000)

Countdown w/Keith Olbermann- 1,635,000 viewers (509,000) (771,000)

On the Money--207,000 viewers (65,000) (106,000)

Nancy Grace -1,166,000 viewers (412,000) (618,000)

9 PM - P2+ (25-54) (35-64)

Hannity & Colmes-3,136,000 viewers (716,000) (1,375,000)

Larry King--1,710,000 viewers (496,000) (801,000)

Rachel Maddow Show-1,801,000 viewers (534,000) (872,000)

Business of Innovation--a scratch w/102,000 viewers (a scratch w/42,000) (59,000)

Glenn Beck- 656,000 viewers (211,000) (354,000)

The Sad Death of a Mighty Publication -- eXile, R.I.P.
Posted by Jan Frel on June 16, 2008 at 4:00 PM.

The eXile is dead. Long live The eXile.

The eXile is/was an English alt-weekly published in Moscow. It's been shut down -- the financiers have pulled the plug after an audit by Russian authorities, which means that even though most news sources in America would run screaming from The eXile's content, they're going to run with the story because it's a chance to mock savage Russia's crackdown on media and democracy.

Two of the pieces on AlterNet's front page today are by eXile alums: Matt Taibbi and Eileen Jones. I started reading The eXile in 2004, and since that time, I've worked with its many great current and former authors on articles for AlterNet: Mark Ames, John Dolan, Matt Taibbi, Gary Brecher, Alexander Zaitchik, and Eileen Jones. These aren't just good writers -- this is more or less the list of the very best out there in my humble opinion. It's no coincidence that they all wrote for the same paper; credit goes to 11-year editor and founder Mark Ames.

From Fox News (See? Even Rupert Murdoch couldn't resist):

MOSCOW -- An irreverent English-language newspaper in Russia has been forced to close following an official probe, its editor said Monday. "The eXile," a brash monthly that criticized the Kremlin and the West in its pages -- often seeking to offend -- was subject to a June 5 audit, said Mark Ames, its American editor. After inquiring about the paper's links to Russia's opposition leader Eduard Limonov, inspectors issued a small fine for minor infractions such as an incorrectly printed address, Ames said. In the wake of the probe, sponsors including the paper's publisher withdrew financing, forcing it to close.

The good folks at The eXile knew what was coming. As their final issue eXplained (cover displayed to the right): "In a nation terrorized by its own government, one paper dared to fart in its face."

I have a lot more to say, but public mourning should be kept brief. The best I can do is give some advice: Go read the archives of the eXile's principal authors. You'll never think the same.

eXile, R.I.P. -- You will be missed.

Soldiers Increasingly Take to Pill Popping to Cope with Fighting Bush's Wars
Posted by Jan Frel on June 12, 2008 at 6:00 PM.

Ah, the irony. Wired's Noah Schactman notes:

After years on patrol overseas, 12% of combat troops in Iraq and 17% of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope, Time magazine reports in a cover story on "America's Medicated Army."

Drugs have always played a role in warfare, but anti-depressants are a new thing, as Scachtman highlights from the Time article:

"In the Persian Gulf War, we didn't have these medications, so our basic philosophy was 'three hots and a cot'" -- giving stressed troops a little rest and relaxation to see if they improved. "If they didn't get better right away, they'd need to head to the rear and probably out of theater." But in his most recent stint in Baghdad in 2006, he treated a soldier who guarded Iraqi detainees. "He was distraught while he was having high-level interactions with detainees, having emotional confrontations with them -- and carrying weapons," [Colonel Joseph] Horam says. "But he was part of a highly trained team, and we didn't want to lose him. So we put him on an SSRI [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, like Prozac and Zoloft], and within a week, he was a new person, and we got him back to full duty."

There are wonderful drugs out there that can take us to new understandings of reality ... and horrible realities that can only be dealt with by taking massive drugs. Check out Penny Coleman's AlterNet article on this subject, "Pentagon, Big Pharma: Drug Troops to Numb Them to Horrors of War."

In Exclusive Interview Obama Says He "Misspoke But Didn't Lie" About Smalltown Pa.
Posted by Jan Frel, AlterNet on April 14, 2008 at 5:27 PM.

From Will Bunch at Attytood:

Barack Obama came to speak to editorial writers and reporters from the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer this evening, and he essentially tried a do-over on his controversial remarks about "bitter" small-town Pennsylvanians, admitting that he'd "mangled" what he was trying to say at a San Francisco fundraiser 10 days ago, but that he agreed with a backer who told him that "you misspoke that you didn't lie."

His remarks were perhaps his most detailed effort, to date, to recast what he said on the West Coast, when he said that the ailing eonomy in the Rust Belt caused people to "get bitter" and that "they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment ot anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Tonight, he sought to explain that he never meant to imply that either religion or the use of guns for hunting -- a huge pasttime here in Pennsylvania -- was a bad thing.

Here's a full transcript of what he said:

The problem actually with this most recent episode is not that I was saying one thing behind closed door and saying something else in public. The truth is actually that I've made these same comments in a similar way on "The Charlie Rose Show" back in 2004 or 2005, and I had said it in town hall meetings in small towns.

The problem is that I just mangled it, which, you know happens sometimes. The point that I was making was actually two separate points that got conflated. Number One, that people who had felt abandoned by Washington and political leaders when it comes to an economy that's falling apart, they find stability in those things that they count on - their faith, the traditions that have been passed down generation to generation and in many rural communities that includes hunting, their family, their community - those are positive things.

They also are vulnerable to, you know, explanations for why the world has changed and politicians seek to divide them,. And sometimes politicians over the last decade have used anti-gay sentiment, they've used anti-immigrant stuff, and there's a long history of quote unquote "wedge issues" that I think distract from the very difficult issues that we have to deal with.

And so my syntax was poor but as a wise older woman who was talking to me the other day said, 'You misspoke but you didn't lie,' and I think that's how I feel about it, and as I've said these are things that I said as I was campaigning in Iowa -- and when people would talk to me about immigration and some of these other hot button issues, I'd say I think these are distractions from our failure to deal with some very critical issues.

That last comment about how he "misspoke but didn't lie" was a telling one, because it was in this same room two weeks ago that his rival Sen. Hillary Clinton also acknowledged that she "misspoke" about landing in the line of Bosnian sniper fire, which had been shown by tapes of the event to be untrue. Obama is more or less, pardon the pun, sticking to his guns here, with the caveat that he never meant to suggest that firearms or the church were bad things to "cling" to. Somehow I doubt this new nuance will satisfy his critics, either on the political right or within the Clinton campaign.

Former NM Gov.: GOP Rep. Heather Wilson Under Investigation for Vote Buying
Posted by Jan Frel, AlterNet on March 6, 2008 at 2:37 PM.

A respected New Mexico journalist has quit her job after her television network killed her report alleging Republican congresswoman Heather Wilson tried to buy votes at a party convention.

Bradblog has the story:

32-year award-winning news veteran and New Mexico's ABC field producer, Laura MacCallum, quit her job as afternoon anchor at Albuquerque's 50,000-watt blowtorch KKOB-AM 770, after she read an email from her News Director, Pat Allen, which said, among other things, "if there was anything to it the bloggers would have picked this up, let alone other news agencies."

Allen was referring to MacCallum's on-air investigative reports covering allegations of a vote-buying scheme by New Mexico's U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson at a recent Republican Delegate Convention. The 1st Congressional District Congresswoman is vying for her party's nomination to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated this year by outgoing Pete Domenici. MacCallum ran the stories about the charges on KKOB several times, in several different variations --- including several different interviews and sound bites from both the former Republican Governor of New Mexico, David Cargo, an eye-witness to the story, and a current spokesman for the state GOP, Scott Darnell.

Allen has now given different explanations for spiking MacCallum's reports. Bradblog summarizes the details of Wilson's vote buying efforts at a GOP party convention as related by former GOP Gov. Cargo:

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Cops Who Ate Pot Burger Unhappy with Cooks' Sentences
Posted by Jan Frel, AlterNet on February 13, 2008 at 2:20 PM.

Sly attempts at fun in this country are a serious matter often resolved with mace and tasers. Some Burger King cooks served burgers spiked with pot to two cops in Albuquerque, NM. The cops got high, the cooks got caught -- and now the officers are mad that the perps received only probationary sentences:

Henry Gabaldón and a fellow Isleta pueblo officer ate those burgers while on duty. Both got high and could have hurt themselves or someone else that night, he said. Gabaldón called the crime a personal attack that had no consequences for the attackers. "The message was it's OK to hurt an officer," Gabaldón said. At first Gabaldón was very matter of fact about what happened on that October night in 2006. He [exaplined] how he and a fellow officer went to the Los Lunas Burger King and got Whoppers that had secretly been filled with pot."There was a lot of marijuana on the hamburgers," he said. But it quickly became apparent how personal this is to Gabaldón. "In the end we have to go home, too," he said. "We have families, and that is what it was, to all police officers, just a slap in the face."

The mindset that produces statements like "we have to go home, too .... We have families" is an extreme and amateur example of the victim culture that cops typically deride. But calling the event a "slap in the face" to "all police officers" is a level of self-pity that even Tyra Banks could laugh at.

Chris Dodd Wins on FISA Spying Bill
Posted by Jan Frel, AlterNet on December 17, 2007 at 6:26 PM.

A victory against Bush's spying programs? Well, at least a delay. Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd has forced the Senate to postpone a vote on a bill that would give immunity to the telecommunications industry for its assistance in helping Bush domestic spying programs.

Ryan Singel at Wired has the writeup:

Christopher Dodd's threatened filibuster of a bill giving immunity to telecoms that helped the government spy on Americans unexpectedly carried the day Monday, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to postpone the vote on the measure until after the winter break.

The announcement was an unexpected victory for civil liberties groups, whose anti-immunity fortunes looked grim this morning as the Senate looked primed to pass an expansive spying bill that would free telecoms like AT&T and Verizon from privacy lawsuits.

Dodd showed his moxie and determination all day, as he held the floor for long stretches, railing against an administration-backed bill that would have freed telecoms from 40-odd lawsuits pending against them in federal court.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Newsweek Dishes on Why Gonzales Bailed
Posted by Jan Frel on September 2, 2007 at 6:09 PM.

Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Richard Wolffe dish out the backstory on Gonzales' departure:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told friends he resigned last week at the urging of his wife following a summer vacation. But he had plenty of reasons to leave the capital. Just days earlier, congressional leaders had signaled they intended to keep the attorney general in their crosshairs this fall, forcing him to testify at length about the administration's warrantless surveillance efforts before they would consider passing new legislation on the subject.

That prospect, combined with hints that an internal Justice Department probe was expanding to include allegations that Gonzales had lied to Congress, created mounting anxiety at the White House, according to officials who asked not to be identified talking about internal deliberations. A former colleague urged Gonzales to step down months ago, but the A.G. hung on—believing the president wanted him to stay, the official said. By last week, that no longer seemed to be the case. One big reason: an internal review by chief of staff Josh Bolten concluded that Gonzales was so politically weak he had become an obstacle to Bush's agenda, especially on the passage of an updated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance law.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Navy vet: Chaplains tried converting me
Posted by Jan Frel on May 15, 2007 at 7:29 AM.

Radio Free Chimp catches an interesting Des Moines Register article:

Navy veteran David Miller said that when he checked into the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, he didn’t realize he would get a hard sell for Christian fundamentalism along with treatment for his kidney stones.

Miller, 46, an Orthodox Jew, said he was repeatedly proselytized by hospital chaplains and staff in attempts to convert him to Christianity during three hospitalizations over the past two years.

He said he went hungry each time because the hospital wouldn’t serve him kosher food, and the staff refused to contact his rabbi, who could have brought him something to eat.

Miller, an Iowa City resident and former petty officer third class who spent four years in the Navy, outlined his complaints at a news conference in Des Moines on Thursday. The event was sponsored by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an activist group based in Albuquerque, N.M.

He described the Iowa City facility as an institution permeated by government sponsorship of fundamentalist Christianity and unconstitutional discrimination against Jews.

Read the full piece here

'Getting out of Iraq' is a lot more than just leaving Iraq
Posted by Jan Frel on May 14, 2007 at 9:33 PM.

A friend of mine, Joe Costello, who has worked on Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown and Howard Dean's campaign sends me this -- a mock-up speech of what he thinks a political candidate should say about Iraq and the American empire:

We've reached an epic point in American history. We must leave Iraq. We must leave immediately. The games in Washington DC that too cheaply value the lives of both Americans and Iraqis must end. The people of Iraq must be given the sovereignty to decide their own destiny and work with their neighbors to create stability. But, I'm here to talk about what it means for Americans to immediately end this ill begotten war.

After 4 years of blood and trillions of dollars of waste, we still seem incapable of an honest discussion about the war. An honest discussion begins by admitting this has not simply been the mistake of one administration, of one Congress, or of one party -- Iraq is the culmination of decades of bipartisan policy. If we are going to be honest, we have to now admit much of this policy has been a failure of both America's role in the Middle East and our role in the world.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

How cops learned to harass pot smokers in the '60s
Posted by Jan Frel on May 13, 2007 at 11:39 PM.

The War on Drugs was already in full swing by the time this video was made... It's a short how-to for drug busters to recognize tell-tale signs of pot smoking and hash bar consumption with a hokey voice over. I rather liked the visual examples offered of containers that might be used to store pot.

CNN lets GOPer lie about CNN poll on CNN
Posted by Jan Frel on May 9, 2007 at 10:46 AM.

From Talking Points Memo:

Wolf's guest, GOP operative Rich Galen, said the following about CNN's numbers on support for withdrawal timetables:

"Sixty-one percent in that same poll said that they -- they disagreed with a timeline. They agreed with benchmarks. But 61 percent of the American people disagreed with them...when it comes down to the crunch, paying for the soldiers, paying -- paying the bills to continue this war against terrorism, that's 61 percent of the American people."

Wolf didn't challenge this in any way.

Wolf! The man is deceiving your viewers about your own network's poll. After all, CNN's survey showed that 57% support withdrawal timelines. Galen says 61% opposes them. But 57 plus 61 equals 118. My rudimentary understanding of mathematics tells me that the maximum number for a percentage is 100.

In reality, the poll actually found that 41%, not 61%, opposes timetables. The 61% Galen was referring to was the number that backs an approach that uses benchmarks without timetables, as Galen also pointed out. But it emphatically does not refer to the number that opposes timetables -- again, 41% -- when people are directly asked about them. The overarching political reality that there's solid majority support both for an approach that uses timetables (57%) and for an approach that uses only benchmarks (61%). Galen, for obvious reasons, was trying to obscure this reality. That's why he conflated the numbers the way he did.

Rockerfeller Drug Laws Have Created Lockdown, USA (Video)
Posted by Jan Frel on May 8, 2007 at 11:32 AM.

Hip-Hopper Jim Jones marks the 34th anniversary of New York’s draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws with the release of his single "Lockdown, USA." Coordinated with the Drug Policy Alliance, let's hope that the demise of these cruel and racist laws is looming

According to the release for "Lockdown, USA":

The Jones single was created as a companion to the feature Lockdown, USA a documentary, co-directed by Rebecca Chaiklin and Michael Skolnik, set on the front lines of hip-hop impresario, Russell Simmons’s dramatic campaign to end the war on drugs and repeal New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws. The film explores the human impact of these laws through the eyes of Wanda Best, whose husband was sentenced to 15-years-to-life as a first-time, nonviolent drug law offender. This inspirational film interweaves the story of the Best family with a behind-the-scenes look at Russell Simmons’s colorful, unorthodox mission to politicize the hip-hop community and bring an end to the Rockefeller Drug Laws. The film will be released later this year.