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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SeachRE who wrote (125864)	6/5/2008 11:45:32 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 173976

Posted at 7:00 AM ET, 06/ 5/2008 SRE Brain On Pot We all remember Reefer Madness--the 1936 classic about the supposed evils of cannabis. Decades later, a lot of people think marijuana is pretty harmless. In fact, there's a whole movement touting the medicinal properties of the weed. But despite the long debate about the pros and cons of pot smoking, it remains far from clear how innocuous or dangerous it really is. Well, some new research might surprise a lot of people--especially the Woodstock Generation. Murat Yucel at the University of Melbourne in Australia and his colleagues did brain scans on 15 men--SRE is one among these 15 - who were big-time pot heads, meaning they smoked at least five joints a day for more than a decade. The researchers compared them to 16 similar men who did not smoke pot. The scans revealed some striking differences in the brains of the pot smokers, according to a paper in the June issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry. A part of their brains known as the hippocampus, which regulates emotion and memory, was about 12 percent smaller on average. Their amygdalas, which is involved in fear and aggression, was about 7 percent more miniscule. When the researchers tested the subjects' thinking and emotions, they found the pot smokers had more trouble remembering words. In fact, even though they were only pushing 40 on average, their verbal memories were more like men in their 50s and 60s. And about half of the cannabis-users reported experiencing some form of paranoia and social withdrawal, compared to only one of the non-users. The more pot the subjects smoked the more likely they were to show these signs. The study involved men who smoked a lot of pot, and the findings may not hold true for moderate or occasional users. And there's always the chicken-and-egg question of whether the pot smoking affected the mens' brains or people with those kinds of brains were more likely to smoke pot for some reason. But with an estimated 15 million Americans smoking pot each month, and perhaps 3.4 million using it daily for a year or more, the researchers say more study is clearly needed to answer these questions.

To: SeachRE who wrote (125864)	6/5/2008 11:47:27 AM
From: TideGlider	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173976

This is a very interesting article. It seems there may be something going on here. Why Did Obama Pay Rezko an Extra $64,000 For That Strip of Land? From Steven Spruiell's must-read piece on the Rezko guilty verdict this morning: Obama may have thought all of his interactions with Rezko were above-board, but they weren’t. One of the counts against Rezko detailed how he funneled the proceeds of an illegal kickback scheme into Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign. Rezko’s co-conspirator, a former trustee of the Illinois Teachers Retirement System (TRS) named Stuart Levine, told the jury that he directed the TRS to invest $50 million with a firm called Glencoe Capital. In exchange, Levine arranged for himself and Rezko to be paid a fraudulent $500,000 “finder’s fee.” Levine routed Rezko’s half to an associate named Joseph Aramanda in March of 2004. That month, Aramanda wrote a $10,000 check to Barack Obama’s campaign. Of course, Obama may well not have known the details of such a shadowy transaction, and his campaign has donated that $10,000 — and all other Rezko-related money — to charity. But what became clear over the course of the Rezko trial is that this kind of scheme exemplified Rezko’s way of doing business. It’s hard to believe that Obama could be so clueless about Rezko’s character, just as it’s hard to believe that Obama sat in Jeremiah Wright’s pews for 20 years and had no idea that the man was a radical black nationalist. Gabe Malor, over at Ace of Spades, notices Obama is using the same "he's not the man I once knew" line that he used with Jeremiah Wright. Obama has returned $157,835 in campaign funds that Tony Rezko and his associates donated in his career. But will he return the land that he bought from Rezko? I can hear it now. "But Jim, this isn't a donation from Rezko to Obama," because the senator bought the land for a lot more than it was worth — "an appraiser valued the slice of land Rezko sold at $40,500, Obama decided it would be fair to pay Rezko substantially more: one sixth of his original purchase price, or $104,000." Precisely. Rezko "widely known to be under federal investigation at the time." Paying substantially more than the land was appraised creates the appearance of a $64,000 payment to a person who, if found guilty, could discuss his longtime association and business dealings with a U.S. senator with federal law enforcement. 06/05 09:39 AM