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Solicitor General: Gut Individual Mandate to Further Cannabis Legalization

Acting Attorney General Neal Katyal, who this week outlined the administration's shift from state-based health care exchanges to "chilling out"
Acting Attorney General Neal Katyal, who this week outlined the administration’s shift from state-based health care exchanges to “chilling out”

WASHINGTON — Friday morning Acting Attorney General Neal Katyal announced that the Obama administration would be backpedaling from its take on the commerce clause to forward the “holy, righteous cause” of recreational cannabis legalization. Bolstered by praise from Colorado and Washington state Democratic leaders, and directives from the highest echelons of the Obama administration, Mr. Katyal announced in a press conference that the results of the landmark case Gonzales vs. Raich were “not cool” and were keeping millions of Americans from “chilling out” and “lighting up, man.”

Reached by phone in his Fairfax office at George Mason University Law School, Professor Michael Greve said the new anti-commandeering stance would prove exciting to Libertarian Party devotees at the Mercatur Institute and millions of drug-addled American liberals, most of whom are dependent on federal largesse for their barest subsistence.

“The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” said Mr. Greve, “established a conditional pre-emption regime in which the federal government told the states, ‘establish an exchange or we will do it for you.'” Following 18 more conservative states having in essence told the government to come in and establish exchanges, Mr. Greve said, “these states have told the federal government to take responsibility for the inevitable failure of these health care regimes.”

Mr. Katyal said in a press conference Friday morning, “As long as Congress refuses to act to deschedule cannabis from the same tier as heroin — come on, heroin, people — the administration must act.” The administration’s tight, 180-degree turn came on the heel of several online townterviews, during which poll respondents consistently begged the administration to cease the notoriously racist drug war. In his weekly address today, a visibly intoxicated President Barack Obama spoke to his office webcam in a cloud of smoke, admitting, “Millions of toothless Southern and Midwestern Americans, who will never vote for me, anyway, versus a good time for the peace-loving denizens of Colorado and Washington state? That’s an easy choice for me, bra.”

Following an on-screen hit from a gravity bong haphazardly constructed from a Chicago Bears novelty cup, which the 51-year-old U.S. president described as “vicious,” he said, “I realize the insane hypocrisy of my having smoked marijuana for recreation before overseeing a federal regime that incarcerates millions of Americans — particularly African-Americans — in such record numbers. Something had to be done, and I have directed the Department of Justice to just scrap this health care reform thing.”

Attorney General Eric Holder released a statement saying he now concedes that “all of these Republican attorneys general, they’re right, man. Just as we can’t force these conservative states to establish exchanges, we also can’t use the commerce clause to force this horrible drug war down the throats of Colorado and Washington citizens. The voters have spoken. Let freedom reign.”

House Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD), speaking to Politico, said that the legislative slowdown that faced descheduling cannabis was fueled by an ambiguity around the level of taxation that the illicit industrial psychoactive crop should receive. “If we had chosen to tax it too high, we would fuel black market activity. If we had voted to tax it too low, we just wouldn’t be taking our deficit seriously, and that would be unpatriotic.”

Internet Chronicle legal analysts have long predicted that the landmark Gonzales case would prove problematic for the Obama administration’s main objective — even if that objective were only background or covert — of legalizing the sticky-icky. In the wake of this decision, Iran and Russia are expected to overtake within weeks the United States in terms of arbitrary and/or politically motivated incarceration.

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Julian Assange weighs in as Anonymous lashes out at leadership within U.S. Department of Justice

Anonymous has long been “infiltrated” by the Department of Homeland Security, whose job it is to instigate irrational, retaliatory actions within the Anonymous collective; however, the cyberwar took a giant leap forward Friday during #OPMegaUpload when Anonymous attacked the Department of Justice website, turning on what many believe to be its own leadership. Also amid the attacks are Universal Music, who once encouraged the very same file sharing tactics they now wish to charge people with using.

The root of Friday night’s story is the person(s) in control of the LOIC botnet effectively betrayed all politically active anons involved in deliberations and general IRC channels, handing their identities directly over to the federal government. In a long campaign against online anonymity, attacking the Department of Justice website “as a means of protest” is a strategic political move (on behalf of the United States Government) which appears on the surface to protest SOPA while in fact falling in line with larger plan to constrict freedom of the Internet on the whole.

When Rolling Stone magazine questioned Julian Assange about Anonymous, possibly his largest group of supporters, he said,We were involved with Anonymous from 2008. They were providing us with material related to our investigations into abuses by the Church of Scientology. It was a young pranksterish Internet culture, not something at all to be taken seriously.”

How a conspiracy theory became reality

Among anons, the rationale is as follows: (1) a major part of the collective implicates you in a LOIC attack on the DoJ website using malicious software inadvertently downloaded by a relatively large group of anons who were, unfortunately, tricked into visiting an unsafe web address address, automatically linking them into the botnet. (2) The botnet strikes, leaving your IP address on the long list of attackers involved, which, (3) signals your involvement with anonymous collectives to the authorities who simply go down the list subpoenaing the corresponding ISPs for later prosecution “at-will.”

In almost all previous cases – the LOIC attacks on PayPal and Mastercard, for example – your identity was handed over for prosecution to authorities if you were in the top 1,000 participants of the DDoS attack on their website, since government resources are not unlimited. But in this case, the identities of anons were handed directly to the government, logged by government machines for safekeeping and a few thousand anons’ names just got added to an already long list of domestic surveillance subjects. Worse yet, these are innocent bystanders who did not volunteer to participate in a DDoS attack, but were implemented anyway.

You hear that? Shh. They’re listening in now. On you, this time.

Julian Assange is waiting for the freedom to operate which may never come back in his lifetime, because “In relation to the United States, we’ll have to wait for the revolution.” Inside Anonymous, an all-too familiar feeling is sinking in as hundreds, if not thousands, of people sit at home waiting to be arrested. DDoS attacks, while somewhat useful for sending a message, are becoming widely recognized as the blunted tool of their own eventual demise.

Advice from Assange

“I have a lot of sympathy for journalists who are trying to protect their sources. [ Remaining anonymous is ] very hard now. Unless you’re an electronic-surveillance expert or you have frequent contact with one, you must stay off the Net and mobile phones. You really have to just use the old techniques, paper and whispering in people’s ears. Leave your mobile phones behind. Don’t turn them off, but tell your source to leave electronic devices in their offices. We are now in a situation where countries are recording billions of hours of conversations, and proudly proclaiming that you don’t have to select which telephone call you’re intercepting, because you intercept every telephone call.”

Julian Assange