"Representative Hugo Velasquez Jaramillo, who proposed the bill, explained that although the cultivation of plants would be legal under the new legislation, the processing and trafficking of drugs would remain subject to criminal sentencing."

Hunton & Williams, the middleman law firm in all this (and the middleman between a major US bank and Team Themis' similar plan to take down WikiLeaks), has steadfastly refused to comment on the whole story. But it too may find itself in trouble after a professional conduct complaint (PDF) was lodged against it last week in Washington, DC"

"As the ship of New Labour tilts precariously in the waters, and the Conservatives struggle to define what they stand for other than a change of personalities at the top, various attempts are being made to define a new politics to fill the void.

This post makes a stab at trying to map the new ideological terrain that is opening up. Needless to say, ideological positions are fluid and imprecise things, and any effort of this kind is going to risk some oversimplification. In addition, by no means all interesting thinking going on at the moment can be fitted into categories like those I am about to use. But, caveats aside, here goes…"

"Mr. Cooper starts to make a point - that allowing same sex couples marriage equality would also entitle opposite sex couples to domestic partnership equality - but he can't actually say what would be wrong with this, just that nobody can prove that it *wouldn't* be harmful so maybe it would. The judge doesn't buy it. You don't have to prove that same sex marriage is harmless any more than you have to prove that freedom of speech or the press is harmless, which it sometimes isn't.

(Aside: I didn't realize that the Prop 8 people want to discriminate against gays *and* straights. It's not just important that gays can't have marriage; straights also shouldn't have civil unions.)"

"On Tuesday voters in Takoma Park, Maryland, got to try out a new, transparent voting system that lets voters go online to verify that their ballots got counted in the final tally. The system also lets anyone independently audit election results to verify the votes went to the correct candidates."

"The most common response I am seeing to the Maine referendum is, "How dare they think they can vote on my civil right to marry whom I please?!" Here's the thing: you don't have a civil right to gay marriage. We want to think of civil rights as forces of nature, but they are compacts within society. And gay marriage has not been defined as a civil right by the U.S. government..."

"I am a postman and concerned at the absence in the media of any account of how mail delivery is organised and what Royal Mail's modernisation programme entails."

"A brewery has launched a low alcohol beer called Nanny State after being branded irresponsible for creating the UK's "strongest beer"."

"It shows the keenness of leading players in Britain’s media industry and Government to lobby the quango, which rules on complaints about TV programmes and carves up the radio and mobile phone markets."

"As if the Government taking official statistics directly from partisan sources wasn't bad enough, the BBC reporter Oliver Hawkins also found that the figures were based on some highly questionable assumptions. The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m. That 6.7m was gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software - in other words, only 136 people. It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." The report's author told the BBC that the adjustment "wasn't just pulled out of thin air" but based on unspecified evidence"

"The purpose of the Bryant letters is to spell out that the British Foreign Office policy of support for gay and lesbian rights is not just a formality, but instead a central part of the government's drive for human rights that diplomats are to champion as part of British foreign policy."

"Then, launching into utopian hyperbole, he mused: "You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken."

We'd like to see him try Twittering that to people in Sudan, or Northern Sri Lanka, or Somalia."

Tsvangirai boldly states"Zimbabweans must come home.", a cacophony of protest and chanting from the crowd.

"But by referring to "professional politicians", Griffin is presumably suggesting we should elect amateurs instead. Maybe that's why the advert's so amateurish. Maybe that's why all the BNP representatives in the ad read their lines so clumsily, like DFS employees in a bank holiday sale commercial circa 1986, or recently revived chemical coma patients being forced to recite barcode numbers at gunpoint. It's deliberate incompetence. Don't vote for those nasty slick parties. Vote for a shoddy one! Never mind the extremism, feel the ineptitude."

""Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word." The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. "Boy, was she mad," says Collins with a chuckle."

"Kyle dodged and wheeled, and heard a cry: his brother, just behind him, had been struck. Next, someone clobbered Kyle, who drew a knife, but didn’t have a chance to use it. “I felt a pistol put to my head,” he said. Grazed by a bullet, he fell. When he rose, he drew his own pistol, hidden in his pocket. He spied his brother lying in the street. Someone else fired a shot, hitting Kyle in the arm. A man carrying a musket rushed at him. Another threw a brick, knocking him off his feet. George Kyle picked himself up and ran. He never did cast his vote."

"It began with a few pilot projects, and apparently these have been so successful that the Russian government has now decided to make it the standard for *all* schools."

"Rep Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) just pretended to be a Democrat. ... He then said, "I am a Democrat, and here is my energy plan" and he held up a picture of an old VW Bug with a sail attached to it. He paraded around the House floor with the sign while the crowd cheered."

Essays on the basics of and rationals behind constitutionalism.