Colorado and Washington vote to become first US states to legalize marijuana

Russia Today



Marijuana is now legal in Colorado and Washington for recreational use, and possibly in Oregon as well.

While the decision in Colorado is historic, it was not without controversy: The measure won by a close six-point margin, 53% in favor to 47% opposed. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper was an ardent opponent to the legalizaiton of recreational marijuana use, and reacted to the decision in the following statement: “The voters have spoken and we have to respect their will. This will be a complicated process, but we intend to follow through. That said, federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug so don’t break out the Cheetos or Goldfish too quickly.”

Proponents of the initiative argued that pot is safer than alcohol, and that the legal sale of marijuana could rake in $45 to 100 billion in tax revenue, according to Bloomberg. The government will also save an estimated $14 billion in cannabis-related costs in fighting the war on drugs.

Massachusetts and Arkansas have also passed ballot initiatives allowing use of marijuana for medical purposes. These are two of the six states debating medical marijuana laws in 2012, a concept already accepted in around a third of US states. In California, a state often seen at the vanguard of the medical marijuana movement, there are more than 1,000 pot dispensaries in operation. It is also estimated that there are more facilities that sell medical marijuana in Colorado than there are Starbucks coffeehouses.

While nearly two-thirds of US states support some form of cannabis legalization and taxation, there still some obstacles to overcome before pot advocates can fully celebrate. Pot is still illegal at the federal level. It is widely believed that after the first state moves towards legalization for recreational marijuana use, a fight with federal law enforcement will ensue. Now that that gauntlet has been thrown down, all eyes turn to US Attorney General Eric Holder to see how the Obama administration will proceed. It remains to be seen how the controversial war on drugs will play out in areas where state and federal laws are in conflict.

COLORADO SETS THE STAGE FOR A BOGUS ELECTION

BlackBoxVoting

Colorado’s Secretary of State Scott Gessler
and Colorado State Rep. Kathleen Conti
Believe in America
Cheat for the America you believe in.

Bev Harris

Colorado election integrity and transparency is now officially out the window, with a series of corruption protection rules and new laws.

1. Let's begin with the unflappable Donetta Davidson, who collaborated with convicted embezzler Jeffrey Dean(1) to remove voter privacy, through a contract specification that required him to redo his absentee mail software in order to embed a method to tie voted ballots to the voters. This shifty business, which now includes all absentee ballots cast on Hart eSlate machines, has led to a blockade on ALL Colorado election accounting records (see #4, below).

2. Next, in a move that has most of us scratching our heads, Colorado Sec. State Gessler proposed new rules in December 2011 to remove requirements for continuous video surveillance.(2) Though billed as "cost saving," note that most video surveillance nowadays is simply piped into digital files stored on a Web site. Since cameras are already installed, there is no significant cost savings in allowing non-continuous surveillance.

3. Sec. State Gessler also decided to reduce the number of seals on voting machines,(2) to the chagrin of election integrity groups like Voter Action, whose investigations and litigation demonstrated vulnerabilities requiring the seals in the first place. The "cost savings" in this measure can be counted in pennies.

4. A number of protective accounting measures crucial for evaluating election tampering have been taken off the table though a new law to block election-related public records examination.

Donetta Davidson led the lobbying for this law. Davidson had become a commissioner of the U.S. Election Assistence Commission, then took a step down to take over the Colorado Clerks Association. In this capacity she led a fight to block the media and citizens from examining the ballots. And no wonder: She knew that due to changes made under her administration, private companies had marks embedded on the ballots enabling them to harvest data tying votes to voters.

Thanks to a lawsuit by Colorado citizen Marilyn Marks, of The Citizen Center, sponsored and assisted by Black Box Voting, the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed right to examine ballots. Marks was shocked when she discovered that identifying marks on the ballots allowed her to immediately associate every voted ballot with the voter who cast it. Marks, The Citizen Center, (and Black Box Voting) are now involved in litigation to permanently prohibit this harvesting of personal political information. In the interim, Sec. State Gessler has required that the identifiers be removed for November 2012 only.

With ballot examination affirmed to be in the public domain, Davidson's next move was to block ballot examination until after all remedies had expired. Using her clout, she lobbied successfully for the removal of ballots -- AND OTHER CRUCIAL ELECTION RECORDS, SUCH AS POLL LISTS -- from any access by election watchdogs until 45 days after the election.(3)

One telltale sign of election tampering is when thousands more votes than voters show up. But in Colorado, neither the media nor the public will be allowed to examine the poll lists or the list of names for voters said to have voted absentee, until too late to do anything about discrepancies.

5. And then there is the matter of alleged Romney ties to the second-biggest voting machine manufacturer in America. These connections are being minimized by Internet outlets like Snopes, but the straight truth is that Hart Intercivic, the firm that supplies two-thirds of Colorado counties with their voting machines, is now owned by a spin-off of Bain & Company (H.I.G. Capital).(4)

A majority of Hart's directors are now H.I.G. guys, and the directors of H.I.G. are Romney bundlers and donors who don't hedge their bets by donating to any other presidential candidate.

This isn't the first time Romney has had his buddies in charge of crucial election processes this year. Some weeks after the misreported figures in the Iowa caucus, which incorrectly cited Romney as the winner, Black Box Voting uncovered that Romney staffers had been brought in to run the Iowa Caucus, and the Nevada Caucus too. Besides heading Romney campaign functions, these guys were associated with an odious Colorado political firm which narrowly escaped prosecution for maliciously misleading political ads.(5)

And the Romney affiliation with Hart Intercivic doesn't rule out his buddies -- or Obama's buddies -- or George Soros -- or the Chinese, for that matter -- owning the other companies. Election Systems & Software (ES&S) does not reveal who its owners are, and we don't know who owns Dominion either. ES&S directly handles voting machines in three Colorado counties; it co-produces elections on the old Diebold equipment with Dominion, with ES&S supplying technicians in some U.S. locations and Dominion in others. Dominion owns Sequoia Voting Systems (or does it? No one seems to be quite sure...), used in large metro Denver County and in Pueblo.(6) Confused? American elections are now so far removed from the hands of the people that self-governance is just a memory.

6. Romney's business buddies owning Colorado's main voting machine company demonstrates, at the very least, an appearance of impropriety, but it carries with it something more: Actual opportunity to alter results.

Unlike most Diebold voting machine locations, whose county technicians set up each election using voting company software, Hart has its customers send files directly to Texas, where its programmers and technicians have their way with the files, sending them back to the counties to put in their voting machines. This centralized control point does in fact enable tampering with results from a remote location. Paper ballots? Well, not all Colorado counties even have them, but thanks to Donetta Davidson and her cronies, they are off limits for human examination and will be interpreted only by the Hart machines.

Former CIA agent’s trial postponed

OurColoradoNews
Ryan Boldrey

The bagel shop parking lot assault case of former CIA agent Raymond Davis was set to begin this past week, but is facing another postponement.

According to Larry Klayman, attorney for Jeff Maes – who was allegedly seriously injured by Davis in an argument over a parking space in Highlands Ranch – the criminal trial is now scheduled for Feb. 12, one day after the civil trial gets under way.

“It’s a very unusual circumstance,” Klayman said of the two trials being stacked on top of one another, adding that the criminal trial was delayed so that the prosecution could “rediscover what they already knew – that Maes’ injuries were caused by Davis and not pre-existing by nature.”

According to Deputy District Attorney Doug Bechtel, the prosecution is still in the process of gathering all of Maes’ medical history in order to prove that the injuries allegedly sustained outside of Einstein Brothers Bagels in October 2011 were indeed not pre-existing.

“I don’t have all the information I need and obviously I need to disclose (everything) to the defense,” Bechtel said in a recorded conversation with Klayman that Klayman released to the Herald. “In a preliminary hearing doubt, quite frankly, doesn’t matter. Is there a reasonable belief that the defendant could have committed this crime is enough. Once we start trial and are talking about ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ now I have to be able to rebut every one of their defenses.”
On that same recording, Bechtel said there are no plea deals being discussed between Davis’ defense and the prosecution at this time.

It was previously reported in an Aug. 30 story in the Herald that Klayman is under the impression that the DA has been talking with the CIA and that the CIA has been putting pressure on the DA to work a plea deal with the defense, so that Davis’ former role with the agency is not exposed in what expects to be a high-profile case.

The DA’s office has adamantly denied having had any contact with the CIA. Davis, 37, is charged with second-degree felony assault for punching the 50-year-old Highlands Ranch man, knocking him to the ground and allegedly seriously injuring his back, neck and arm.

Davis made national headlines in January 2011 when he was jailed in Pakistan for killing two Pakistani men he said were trying to rob him. An unknown source later paid $2.34 million in blood money to have him released. Seven months after his return to the U.S., Davis got into the altercation in the Highlands Ranch parking lot.

“They (CIA) want to shut down the case because they don’t want any information about Raymond Davis to get out, and I think they are also worried that if they don’t run interference for him that he may squeal in terms of what he was doing over there in Pakistan and perhaps on other matters too,” Klayman said.

If the charges remain as they are and Davis is convicted, the defendant faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison and a maximum sentence of 16 years. Davis entered a not-guilty plea April 30.

Colorado Supreme Court Decision Assures That Ballots Remain Public Records

Aspen, Colo., June 28 ---The Colorado Supreme Court's decision has reaffirmed that election ballots are open public records. As a result, the public will be able to verify that untraceable votes are accurately interpreted and counted. This decision comes as election officials are preparing for the 2012 presidential election.

In September, 2011, the Colorado Appeals Court ruled that ballots are indeed open public records. The City filed requested that the Colorado Supreme Court reverse the decision. The Supreme Court has now decided not to hear the Koch v. Marks case. The Court chose to end the controversy in favor of election transparency.

"This is a welcome decision that reconfirms the vitality of the Colorado Open Records Act as a powerful tool that permits ordinary Coloradans to hold their state and local governments accountable," said Marks's attorney Robert A. McGuire of Denver.

"Colorado elections once again belong to the people. This decision puts to rest a long-standing controversy between the public and election officials across the state who improperly prohibit the public and press from verifying Colorado's elections. Just as Florida officials welcomed the press to analyze voted ballots in the 2000 Bush/Gore controversy, Colorado officials needed to accept similar transparency rights in our election battleground state," said Marilyn Marks, founder of Citizen Center, and plaintiff in the Aspen case that began in 2009.

"Colorado election officials have fought transparency, despite numerous pro-transparency court rulings and Secretary of State Gessler's guidance that anonymous, untraceable ballots are open public records. Voters' ballots must be untraceable, voted in private and counted in public, as the courts continue to affirm," Marks added.

The Court of Appeals awarded attorney's fees to Marks in an amount yet to be determined. Marks states that the fees incurred to date exceed $100,000. "Each party has well over $100,000 in resources invested in this litigation. The government must pay reasonable attorneys' fees when they improperly withhold records and the courts intervene. I trust that the City will want to put this controversy to rest and that we can come to a reasonable settlement without controversy that would be a further waste of public funds," Marks said.

The Court's decision is an important one for the work of Citizen Center, currently in litigation against the Secretary of State and six Colorado County clerks in Citizen Center v. Gessler, et al. The lawsuit seeks to vindicate Colorado voters' constitutional rights to a secret ballot. In recent years, many Colorado election officials have used computerized voting systems and record-keeping to compromise the voters' right to maintain private ballot choices and keep them secret from the prying eyes of government.

Secretary Gessler and the defendant clerks of Boulder, Chaffee, Eagle, Jefferson, Larimer, and Mesa claim that Colorado voters have no constitutional right to a secret ballot. These officials believe that Colorado election officials are not prohibited from knowing how individual voters' vote. "The Supreme Court of Colorado obviously disagrees with the outrageous position of these election officials," said Marilyn Marks. "We hope that the federal court will act in time to protect the 2012 presidential election from the clerks' improper continuing practices of creating traceable ballots."

Harvie Branscomb, election quality advocate who has worked with Marks since 2009 to seek the Aspen ballots for analysis of the Instant Runoff Voting process said, "The Supreme Court decision serves as a valuable reality check. Colorado election officials must now recognize that we ordinary citizens deserve the access we need to independently count our publicly owned and untraceable ballots."

Colorado Voter Group Trustee, Al Kolwicz, said, "The Court's decision strongly supports the concept that elections belong to the people, not to government bureaucrats."

Marks acknowledged the research, support and expertise provided by Bev Harris and BlackBoxVoting.org. as instrumental in helping achieve this victory. "The Colorado Project" of BlackBoxVoting.org also supports the efforts of Citizen Center through providing expertise and technical resources on matters of election transparency.

Citizen Center is a non-profit non-partisan organization based in Aspen, Colorado, with a focus on government transparency and election quality. For more information on The Citizen Center, visit:

http://www.thecitizencenter.com

Colorado Democratic Party Calls for Grand Jury Investigation of 9-11

World for 9/11 Truth

Brighter news for those sick of the lack of courage among Democrats. Enjoy!

The 2010 Colorado Democratic Party platform (page 31/54), approved by the 146 member platform committee states:

“Whereas many disturbing facts were consciously ignored by the 9/11 Commission; Be it resolved, therefore, that the CDP calls for the establishment of a truly independent Grand Jury and public investigation into these and other anomalies in order to find the truth of the September 11, 2001 attacks, so that we have a greater probability of preventing attacks of this nature in the future.”

This controversial plank was added to the State Democratic Party Platform after evidence supporting the critical need for a new investigation was presented at several caucuses in 2004, 2008, and 2010.

The citizens who presented arguments for a new investigation at their precinct caucuses are signatories to the Architect and Engineers for 9/11 Truth organization (www.ae911truth.org) which calls for a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001.

The quality of evidence contradicting the official 9-11 story is substantiated in part by the 2010 Platform Committee Chairman Hal Bidlack’s statement: “ ….this platform represents the consensus of the 2010 Platform Committee, guided by the results of county assemblies across our state. The folks who worked tirelessly on the Committee can rightly be proud of their efforts, and deserve our special thanks.” (Bidlack’s statement can be found on page one of the 2010 platform.)

In the upcoming Colorado election, Green Party U.S. Senatorial candidate Bob Kinsey and District One U.S. Representative candidate Gary Swing have publicly stated they would support a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001.