Soon to open Off-Broadway is The Marijuana-Logues:

Ideal Entertainment Group and Magic Arts & Entertainment are stoked to present THE MARIJUANA-LOGUES, written and performed by Arj Barker, Doug Benson and Tony Camin, directed by Jim Millan. THE MARIJUANA-LOGUES is set for an open ended Off-Broadway run at The Actors Playhouse (100 Seventh Avenue South between Christopher and Bleecker). Previews begin Thursday, March 18th. Official Opening Night: Tuesday, March 30th at 7:00 PM.

Fact: 10.725 million Americans used marijuana in the past month. (U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration/SAMHSA, Office of Applied Studies, National Household Survey on Drug Abuse).

Fact: 10.95 million tickets to Broadway shows were sold in the entire 2001-2002 season. (2001-2002 League of American Theatres and Producers, Who Goes to Broadway, The Demographics of the Audience).

Put that in a pipe and smoke it! Seems it's high time for Mary-Jane's long overdue theatrical debut?....THE MARIJUANA-LOGUES is a "hit" unlike anything New York has seen. Catch the buzz as Barker, Benson and Camin riff on the rites and rituals of pot and regale the crowd with the highs and lows of marijuana. (Disclaimer: This production does not glorify drug use. It merely illustrates that cannibus culture can be a thing of substance, humor and creativity).

[link via Last One Speaks]

News to cheer about! Colorado Governor Bill Owens will not run for U.S. Senate. Congressman Mark Udall will.

Rep. Udall is one of my favorite elected officials. He is accessible, interested and responsive to constituents. He's liberal. He's personally against the death penalty. He was a champion for civil asset forfeiture reform. The only bad news is I always end up contributing more than I can afford to his campaigns. Nonetheless, he is the best Colorado has to offer and he's electable.

The Repubs can kiss this seat goodbye.

Does this sound like a suicide to you?

His family was horrified at the face staring up from the open casket. Kenneth Trentadue's forehead was blackened and bruised. His eyes were blood-marked, his left eye swollen shut. His cheeks were puffed and scraped and cut. His jaw was rubbed red. The family ordered the Orange County undertaker to strip the body and wipe away the makeup. Then they saw the rest — his battered head, his gouged throat, his arms and legs, hands and wrists, even the bottoms of his feet, all covered in deep, ugly wounds.

Kent Trentadue died in 1995. He was a small-time offender, a drug user in jail on a parole violation for a burglary charge. Authorities claimed he hanged himself. He had been arrested in San Diego and pleaded guilty to a drunk driving offense. Because he was on federal parole for a burglary, he was transferred back to the federal receiving center in Oklahoma pending a parole revocation hearing. If he lost, he was only looking at 16 months. He got to Oklahoma on Friday, and was found dead on Monday.

A new report finds that Louisiana fails to reach 9 out of 10 indigent defense standards:

If you’re poor in Louisiana, you have no real access to justice. This is the inevitable conclusion of In Defense of Public Access to Justice: An Assessment of Trial-Level Indigent Defense Services in Louisiana 40 Years After Gideon, a report released today by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and researched by the National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA). Rather than constructing a “uniform system for securing and compensating qualified counsel for indigents” at “each stage of the proceeding” as required by the Louisiana Constitution, In Defense of Public Access to Justice documents “the significant extent to which Louisiana has failed to protect the rights of people of insufficient means faced with the potential loss of liberty in criminal proceedings.” (Report at p. 19).

Forty-one years ago, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court concluded in the case of Gideon v. Wainwright that the right to counsel in criminal proceedings is a fundamental part of due process and that state governments are responsible for providing a public defense system that ensures this basic right. In Defense of Public Access to Justice documents that Louisiana fails to meet nine of the American Bar Association’s well-respected 10 Principles of a Public Defense Delivery System – principles designed to provide guidance to policymakers as they seek to ensure compliance with the Gideon mandate. “The substantial failing of the system to meet these standards can only mean that the indigent defense system devised by the legislature in Louisiana delivers ineffective, inefficient, poor quality, unethical, conflict-ridden representation to the poor.” (Report at p. 56)

Attorney General John Ashcroft's gallbladder removal surgery was a success. He'll be recuperating for several days in the hospital. Maybe he will have a laptop and internet connection. Let's send him some messages--not insults, remember, he's ill and it's bad karma to send ill will to anyone who's sick. We're thinking more about some constructive suggestions and well-mannered expressions of why his policies have been wrong for the Constitution and the American people. If we get some good ones, we'll print them and mail them to him inside a "get well" card.

Remember, what goes around comes around, so think twice before saying bad things about a person in ill health.

The American Prospect has a new article with details of Karl Rove's testimony to the FBI in the Valerie Plame investigation.

Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

What do you think? Is he being truthful? If so, who was the leaker?

Check this out - a new poll shows 57% of Americans don't support Bush and want a president who will steer us in a different direction.

The Washington Times reports that a new poll shows terrorism is the single most important issue to American voters, and that is why Bush is going after Kerry's intelligence voting record. The Dreyfuss Report says:

A new Gallup poll reports that Americans rank terrorism as the most critical threat to the United States. Ninety-two percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Democrats said terrorism was the No. 1 danger facing America. The Washington Times quotes a Republican strategist (unnamed) saying that Bush will "make the case that Kerry is not the right man to lead the war on terror." And, in the same piece, Will Marshall, the DLC's thinktank man, says it will be the "dominant issue in the presidential campaign."

Thus, Bush's wild-swinging attack on Kerry for having had the temerity to suggest (a decade ago!) that the bloated U.S. intelligence budget might need some trimming. (Since then, instead, the budget for U.S. intelligence has skyrocketed, up 50 percent—a wasteful increase that Kerry now says he supported.) I repeat, again: the Democrats need to come up with a way of hitting Bush on terrorism, and not by demanding a bigger war on terrorism—which is what Hillary and Joe Lieberman want. Instead, they need to quietly educate Americans about how to put terrorism in perspective. Compared to the threats that can really hurt us—say, car crashes, tobacco, environmental pollution, AIDS—terrorism isn't that big a deal. Sure, it's scary, and sure, we need to pursue Al Qaeda and its allies. But a $500 billion Pentagon budget? A huge Department of Homeland Security? Patriot Act II?

The Guardian profiles Karl Rove today. His dirty tricks date back to 1970 when working for a campaign, he flooded Chicago's red light and soup kitchen district with invitations to a campaign event promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing."

This sounds like him:

At high school in Utah, Rove was known as a nerd and a motor-mouth, unpopular but irrepressibly opinionated.

Somehow Rove got from there to here:

The nerdy political brawler with only a secondary school education is now the man the president likes to call his "boy genius" - a testament to Rove's role in orchestrating Bush's rise from a feckless, hard-drinking politician's brat to Texas governor to president in barely a decade. And unlike other electoral svengalis who have gone before him, Rove has carried his power intact from the campaign bus to the White House.

Where's he going?

The Republicans now control the presidency, the senate, and the house of representatives. Rove's task now is to consolidate that dominance of the White House and Capitol Hill and then use it to recast the Washington's third source of power, the supreme court, from its current cautious conservatism to a more red-blooded Republicanism.

But maybe the grand jury will get him first:

Last year, however, Rove's taste for personal politics entangled him in an extraordinary spy scandal. He is reported to have made calls to Washington journalists last July identifying a CIA undercover agent, Valerie Plame, who was married to Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who had called into question the administration's claims about Iraq's alleged nuclear programme. Rove allegedly told the journalists that Plame was "fair game" because her husband had gone public with his criticism.

A grand jury is now investigating the leak of Plame's name, a federal felony. Rove has denied being its source, and Wilson believes now he may have tried to push the story only after her name had already been published. Rove has yet to appear before the grand jury, but he has retained an expensive Washington lawyer.

The kicker? Bush's pet name for rove is "Turd Blossom."

....a Texanism for a flower that blooms from cattle excrement.

Skippy writes about last week's Senate vote to prevent federal civilian agencies from outsourcing American jobs. It sounds good, until you read the fine print:

in a last-minute deal, the senators made exceptions for the defense and homeland security departments, as well as intelligence agencies and security programs at the energy department. the amendment also allows agency heads to make exceptions for some security-related purchases and for items or services only produced or available outside of the country.

whew! that was close! good thing we can still send the work of homeland security and defense of this country overseas for foreign nationals to do!

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviewed exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide by cell phone in the Central African Republic. The program says his comments represent the most extensive English-language interview Aristide has given since he was removed from office and his country. You can read the transcript here or listen to the 30 minute interview here.

It begins with Aristide saying:

Five British citizens being held at Guantanamo will be sent back within 24 hours. Officials in Britain say prosecutors will decide whether to release the men or charge them with a crime.

Legal experts believe it unlikely the five British citizens to be released will face trial at home because any information gleaned from the men during interrogation would be inadmissible since they had no access to lawyers. Lawyers also said it was questionable whether British courts have jurisdiction over alleged criminal acts in Afghanistan, unless acts of terrorism or treason could be proven.

Families and lawyers of the five prisoners have insisted throughout their two-year-long detention that the men are innocent and were mistakenly caught up in the U.S. war on terror.

The Guardian reports that the families are angry -- we don't blame them:

The father of a British terror suspect held in Guantanamo Bay yesterday denounced a leak from the Bush administration which alleged his son trained at an al-Qaida training camp. Azmat Begg, 65, was in the US capital as part of a campaign for justice for the four remaining Britons held without charge or access to a lawyer for up to two years.

The US leak, to the Daily Telegraph, alleges that the four remaining men trained in terrorist camps and learned skills such as bomb-making. But lawyers for the men yesterday described the claims as "rubbish" and "tendentious" and expressed fears that they might have invented confessions under the psychological pressure of two years' detention without charge or trial and in the mistaken belief they might face the death penalty.

Mr Begg, a former bank manager from Birmingham, said the leaked claims about his son were either American lies or "definitely" obtained under duress. He said Moazzam had been in Afghanistan as an aid worker, teaching and building wells for the poor, and since his detention by the US he had been "kept like an animal in a cell".

Mr Begg continued: "Mr President, I do not plead for mercy. My son has not been charged with any crime. He does not know what is alleged against him. Neither do I. He has been held captive for more than two years. "In all that time he has never been charged and tried. I do not ask for mercy. I ask for justice."

Joining the families at the Washington protest were actress Vanessa Redgrave and former hostage Terry Waite.

We're glad to see other organizations speaking out as well: