It is astonishing how often the mainstream press lets people get away with lies. Advocates can say anything and the press isn’t likely to challenge the statement in the same story. Whether it’s assertions that “Christianity is under attack” or that Social Security will be bankrupt by 2042,” powers that be can make statement that are patently untrue.

So it has been for a long time with marijuana. Several years ago, a friend of mine in Mississippi made me aware of a study at the University of Mississippi called the Potency Monitoring Project. For years, it has been taking samples of MJ available throughout the country and tested its potency. A researcher there told me then that the hype about MJ being “far more potent” is simply not true.

And yet you hear it in virtually every story about MJ, including the recent report that MJ arrests are way up.

The focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly over the past decade from hard drugs to marijuana, which now accounts for nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide, according to an analysis of federal crime statistics released yesterday.

The study of FBI data by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing Project, found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10 years later. During the same period, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent of the total to 45 percent.

And then today, we have an op-ed by former HEW secretary Joe Califano (not online) in today’s Washington Post that makes several claims that simply aren’t true, including the one about potency, as observed by Chicago Trib columnist Clarence Page a couple of years ago.

[[Then director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy John P.] Walters tries to frighten us Baby-Boomer parents by warning us that “today’s marijuana is different from that of a generation ago, with potency levels 10 to 20 times stronger than the marijuana with which they were familiar.”

As a Woodstock-generation parent of a wise 13-year-old boy, I took great interest in that statement. Unfortunately, as I noted, Walters didn’t say where he got that “whopper” of a statistic.

I had cited a federally funded study published in the January 2000 Journal of Forensic Science, which found the average THC (that’s the active ingredient that makes people high) content in confiscated marijuana had only doubled to 4.2 percent from about 2 percent from 1980 to 1997.

That brought a response from Walters claiming that I didn’t cover a long enough period. THC content averaged less than 1 percent in 1974, he said. But “by 1999, potency averaged 7 percent.”

“The THC of today’s sinsemilla (high-grade marijuana) averages 14 percent and ranges as high as 30 percent,” he said.

“Wow,” as my “deadhead” friends might say. “That must be some killer weed, dude.”

I tried once again and actually reached Walters this time. After conversations with him and some of his expert advisers, we agreed to disagree on the key question: What are the chances that your little Johnny or Jane will latch onto some of that knockout grass?

That depends on how you interpret the available data. The latest quarterly report by the University of Mississippi’s Potency Monitoring Project (which examined 46,000 samples of seized marijuana nationwide) found an average potency of 6.68 percent. Actual potencies ranged as high as 33.12 percent THC content for some extraordinarily potent sinsemilla confiscated by the Oregon state police to as low as 1 percent THC or no THC at all (Somebody apparently got burned) for grass confiscated elsewhere in the country.

But it is hard to estimate based on available data how common or how rare the high-octane dope happens to be. Purchasing weed is an art in itself. Everyone seeks the “preemo” stuff. Every dealer promises it. Fewer actually deliver.

Nor is it at all clear that the marijuana commonly available in the 1960s and 1970s really was all that weak. Potency studies at the time were plagued by such problems as small samples and poor storage in police lockers.

In his column, Califano passes as facts other exaggerations or misrepresentations, such as the assertion that MJ dependence has jumped drastically among teenagers, that MJ causes depression and other mental problems and that MJ is highly addictive.

For more on the ongoing lie campaign by our government, see clarifications and rebuttals to these assertions here, where the references to the original research are given, as opposed to Califano’s rhetoric.

As the father of three teenagers, I can tell you it doesn’t help when well-meaning people exaggerate and misrepresent the facts. Once some of these facts are perceived by teenagers as wrong after first-hand experience, all the good infromation becomes suspect, too. Then they believe nothing, and that is a shame.

The Kilgore campaign never got back to me about where and when its candidate will speak at a forum where voters can ask questions. Right now, you’ve got to pay to even hear him speak, and there’s no guarantee that you can ask questions, not that he’s likely to get tough ones at a fundraiser.

I just got an email from the Kilgore campaign that has a “preview” of a new 30-second TV ad. (No, in the preview, Kilgore doesn’t speak.) But if I want to see the entire ad, I need to donate to the campaign. That’s an approach I hadn’t seen before.

Gee, if I don’t contribute does that mean I won’t see it on my TV? And does it mean I need to pay to hear him speak?

Maybe. I notice that all the events on the Kilgore web site are fundraisers, as in “don’t come unless you write a check.” Kaine, on the other hand, gets coverage today for his town hall meetings, which unlike GWB’s staged events, apparently anyone can come to and ask questions.

There may be a lack of substance to both campaigns, but at least Kaine is willing to be grilled by the public.

I’m awaiting a call back from the Kilgore campign to let me know of any planned, free town hall meeting-type events. I’ll let you know where and when they are.

When the editorial page of the Richmond Times Dispatch says you should resign, there’s no reason to think you can step out of it: You’re in deep do-do.

Congressman Tom Davis is trying to keep Democrats from moving into his district.

Some local elected Democrats say that in private conversations, Davis has made it clear that he has no interest in supporting high-density developments near Metro stations because he believes the residents they attract tend to vote for Democrats.

Yeah, and by taking Metro they don’t have the courtesy to help the GOP pollute the environment, too.

Democrats on the Hill are asking the PBS Inspector General to probe a series of questionable moves by the new Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Ken Tomlinson. They say he’s injecting a right-wing bias into programming decisions on public TV programs.

Today’s Diane Rhem show on WAMU had a discussion of what it called the Conservative Christian movement, but in more precise terms — and one I wasn’t familiar with — is Dominonism.

Guests included Chris Hedges, a former NY Times reporter (whose name rang a bell for me as he was a reporter for the Dallas Morning News during my time in that prairie town), Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Bob Edgar, general secretary of National Council of Churches and the ubiquitous E.J. Dionne.

Hedges said the National Religious Broadcasters Association runs “a parallel information network” that seeks to make this a Christian nation. Leaders of this movement include the well known James Dobson who called Roe v. Wade the “biggest Holocaust in history.” The NRBA has pushed out even evangelicals. Dionne made the point that these leaders aren’t just “people of religion” or evangelicals but radicals intent on forcing their view on the rest of us.

Perkins used many of the phrases we’ve come to know well. He talked about how Christians are “under assault” and how there is “hostility toward Christians.” He accused the judiciary of imposing a “public policy that is hostile to Christian heritage of this country.” He specifically mentioned sex ed and homosexuality as battlegrounds for today’s Christians.

Hedges has an article in this month’s Harpers (begins on page 10 of the linked pdf file) that chroncilces his attendance at the NRBA convention.

[Illinois evangelist and radio host James MacDonald] reminds us, quoting theologian Peter Berger, that “ages of faith are not marked by dialogue but by proclarnation” and that “there is power in the unapologetic proclamation of truth. There is power in it. This is a kingdom of power.” When he says the word “power,” he draws it out for emphasis. He tells the crowd to shun the “persuasive words of human wisdom.”

Truth, he says, does “not rest in the wisdom of men but the power of God.” Then, in a lisping, limp-wristed imitation of liberals, he mocks, to laughter and applause, those who want to “share” and be sensitive to the needs of others.

…[Frank Wright, the new president of NRB, says] “Today, the calls for diversity and multiculturalism
are nothing more than thinly veiled attacks on anyone willing, desirous, or compelled to proclaim Christian truths,” he says. “Today, calls for tolerance are often a subterfuge, because they will tolerate just about anything except Christian truth. Today, we live in a time when the message entrusted to you is more important than ever before to reach a world desperate to know Christ.”

Hedges describes the Dominionism movement.

What the disparate sects of this movement, known as Dominionism, share is an obsession with political power. A decades-long refusal to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over the earth itself. Dominionists preach that Jesus has called them to build the kingdom of God in the here and now, whereas previously it was thought that we would have to wait for it. America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, Creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all.

Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and “homeland” security.’ Some Dominionists (not all of whom accept the label, at least not publicly) would further require all citizens to pay “tithes” to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social welfare agencies, and a number of influential figures advocate the death penalty for a host of “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft. The only legitimate voices in this state will be Christian. All others will be silenced.

The traditional evangelicals, those who come out of Billy Graham’s mold, are not necessarily comfortable with the direction taken by the Dominionists, who now control most of America’s major evangelical organizations, from the NRB to the Southern Baptist Convention, and may already claim dominion over the Christian media outlets. But Christians who challenge Dominionists, even if they are fundamentalist or conservative or born-again, tend to be ruthlessly thrust aside.

…Luis Palau, a well-known evangelical preacher who is close to Billy Graham. “I don’t think it is wrong to want to see political change, especially in places like Latin America,” he says. “Something has to happen
in politics. But it has to be based on convictions. We have to overcome the sense of despair.

I worked in Latin America in the days when almost every country had a dictator. I dreamed, especially as a kid, of change, of freedom and justice. But I believe that change comes from personal conviction, from leading a more biblical lifestyle, not by Christianizing a nation. If we become called to Christ, we will
build an effective nation through personal ethics. When you lead a life of purity, when you respect your wife and are good to your family, when you don’t waste money gambling and womanizing, you begin to work for better schools, for more protection and safety from your community. All change, historically,
comes from the bottom up.”

Hedges, who studied to be a minister like his dad, concludes,

I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric
seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts.

Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Adams had watched American intellectuals and industrialists flirt with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini’s “Corporatism,” which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, had appealed to many at the time as an effective counterweight to the New Deal. In 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists
at the expense of workers. Then as now, Adams said, too many liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical Christians came, these people would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state. Adams had watched German academics fall silent or conform. -He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable lies told by totalitarian movements, how easily those lies lull moderates into passivity.

Adam told us to watch closely the Christian right’s persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933, then imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and publications. Then came raids on the places where homosexuals gathered, culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual
Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first “deviants” singled out by the Christian right.

We would be the next.

Here’s another interview with Hedges.

It’s wise for us — and certainly for the politicians we support — to distinguish Christians and evangelicals from their Dominionist leaders. But we need to encourage them, especially those like Tim Kaine and others whose Christian faith is important to them, to make that distinction. In fact, it’s imperative for them to explain to Christians that they are not the enemy. Perhaps we can recruit some of those in the East Waynesville Baptist Church who know that a line has been crossed.

I wonder how my conservative friends — yes, I really have some — feel about this latest example of corporate welfare and irresponsibility. Proponents of private enterprise performing functions best left to governments (building roads, managing schools, and a host of public private partnerships) are always mum when corporate malfeasance raises its ugly head.

United Airlines promised its employees a certain retirement benefit. But after a long period of irresponsibility, poor leadership and no doubt exorbitant executive salaries, United executives say they can’t fulfill their obligations and request that the government bail them out.

Yet when individuals, especially the poor, immigrant, and black individuals ask for government help, we hear get lectures on self-reliance from regressives. Not only will retires lose up to 50 percent if their promised retirement, but taxpayers will pick up some of the slack. While the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. will pay benefits from premiums companies have paid the organization over the years, it is fast approaching its own bankruptcy, requiring tax dollars to bail it out.

The pastor of the small Baptist church in Waynesville, N.C. resigned today over his attempt to kick out members who voted for John Kerry. But in this AP story, there is hope for the progressive/moderate coalition.

Many of those who opposed Chandler’s leadership said they agreed with the pastor’s positions on abortion and other hot-button religious topics, but disliked linking those beliefs to specific political positions and candidates.

“If we wanted politics, we would stay home and watch it 24 hours a day on TV,” said Charles Gaddy, 70. “I like Chan. He can preach a good sermon. I just wish he would keep some things out of the church.”

Frank Lowe, 73, a leader of the members who left the church in opposition to Chandler’s leadership, said, “I think his duty was to preach God’s word and let the people sort out what they want to do.”

Chandler supporter Rhonda Trantham, 27, saw no problem with Chandler’s approach. “If it’s in the Bible, I believe it should be preached,” she said.

Can someone please cite me chapter and verse of where in the Bible it says “Vote Bush”?

Still, when conservative, devout Christians say people like the Rev. Chan Chandler have gone to far, I think there’s an opening for progressives to acknowledge — and if they are so inclined – embrace their own religiosity but also support tolerance and a clear separation of church and state.