WEEK IN REVIEW
Senate Democratic leaders invite President Obama and Vice President Biden to
Capitol Hill the week of July 5 to move deficit-reduction talks forward.
Democratic leaders say progress will depend on Republicans‘ willingness to end
tax breaks for the wealthy.
Senate Democrats ask Republicans to stop protecting frivolous tax breaks for the wealthy, such as loopholes for corporate jet owners, and work with Democrats to reduce the deficit
I know we’ve been asking a lot of you.
In the first major test of this campaign, you delivered.
More than 475,000 people decided to own a piece of this campaign in just our first quarter — a promising sign of what’s to come if we all stay focused and work together.
We’ll be in touch with more information as we continue to crunch the numbers. But for now, I wanted to pass along a quick video I think you’ll like.
If you missed it, the President held a press conference earlier this week. The last few minutes were really something special. It’s a good reminder of why we’re fighting so hard to get him re-elected:
Thanks again. Hope you have a great holiday weekend.
Messina
Jim Messina
Campaign Manager
Obama for America
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Human occupation of the Great Dismal Swamp began nearly 13,000 years ago. By 1650, few native Americans remained in the area, and European settlers showed little interest in the swamp. In 1665, William Drummond, a governor of North Carolina, discovered the lake which now bears his name. William Byrd II led a surveying party into the swamp to draw a dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina in 1728. George Washington first visited the swamp in 1763 and organized the Dismal Swamp Land Company that was involved in draining and logging portions of the swamp. A five-mile ditch on the west side of the refuge still bears his name.
Logging of the swamp proved to be a successful commercial activity, with regular logging operations continuing as late as 1976. The entire swamp has been logged at least once, and many areas have been burned by periodic wildfires.
The Great Dismal Swamp has been drastically altered by humans over the past two centuries. Agricultural, commercial, and residential development destroyed much of the swamp, so that the remaining portion within and around the refuge represents less than half of the original size of the swamp. Before the refuge was established, over 140 miles of roads were constructed to provide access to the timber. These roads severely disrupted the swamp’s natural hydrology, as the ditches which were dug to provide soil for the road beds drained water from the swamp. The roads also blocked the flow of water across the swamp’s surface, flooding some areas of the swamp with stagnant water. The logging operations removed natural stands of cypress and Atlantic white-cedar that were replaced by other forest types, particularly red maple. A drier swamp and the suppression of wildfires, which once cleared the land for seed germination, created environmental conditions that were less favorable to the survival of cypress and cedar stands. As a result, plant and animal diversity decreased.
The swamp is also an integral part of the cultural history of the region and remains a place of refuge for wildlife and people. The dense forests of the Great Dismal Swamp provided refuge to runaway slaves, resulting in the refuge becoming the first National Wildlife Refuge to be officially designated as a link in the “Underground Railroad Network to Freedom” in 2003. For more information click here.
Establishment of the refuge began in 1973 when the Union Camp Corporation donated 49,100 acres of land to The Nature Conservancy. This land was then conveyed to the Department of the Interior, and the refuge was officially established through The Dismal Swamp Act of 1974.
This weekend we’re celebrating our freedom and the nation’s birth with parades, fireworks and BBQs with friends and family. American women may soon have even more to celebrate — our independence from co-pays on prescription birth control — thanks to the new health care law!
Declare your independence! Join the campaign to make prescription birth control available in all new health plans without a co-pay! www.nwcl.org
Women need access to birth control to prevent unintended pregnancies, plan the timing and size of their families, and protect their health. Women know the preventive health benefits of birth control, but we also know the cost to stay on it throughout our childbearing years. Birth control can be expensive, and the high cost of birth control can affect whether women use it consistently.
Help us move women’s health forward, so we can say — we’ve got you covered! www.nwlc.org
We’ve been working on getting contraception covered in health plans for many years, and we are finally within reach of achieving this critical goal. In the coming months, the Department of Health and Human Services will decide which preventive services should be covered in new health insurance plans without a co-pay or other out-of-pocket costs.
Sign our petition and be part of the campaign to make prescription birth control more affordable and accessible to all women. www.nwlc.org
Thank you for all that you do for women and girls.
Sincerely,
Judy Waxman
Vice President for Health and Reproductive Rights
National Women’s Law Center
P.S. Your generous donation allows us to continue to work for women and their families. Support our work on reproductive health and other issues today.
UPDATE 7/3: The State deadline for signatures is Friday, July 8th. Please allow sufficient time for your petitions to arrive at our headquarters for processing. Given the July 4th holiday, anything being mailed at this point needs to be sent via overnight delivery.
If you’re holding completed or partially completed I-1149 petitions, it’s time to get them back to Sensible Washington headquarters. No amount of signatures is too small. By all means, keep collecting signatures for the next two weeks, but it’s critically important to submit those signatures already collected.
To make things easy, there are several ways to get them back to the mothership:
Sensible Washington
PO Box 1184
Seattle, WA 98111-1184
Don’t wait until July. Send those petitions back to us. And thank you for your continued hard work in the fight for freedom.
Many people don’t know this, but there are now dispensary-like businesses and cooperatives in Washington where you can obtain tested medical marijuana safely over the counter with a credit card.
Unfortunately, medical marijuana is only available in these kinds of safe environments for those who know the right people and can afford or find a doctor who will make the recommendation.
Sensible Washington intends to fix that. We are organizing a team of 10,000+ activists statewide to gather signatures and place Initiative 1149 on the November 2011 ballot. The initiative is simple: it removes all criminal penalties for possession, use, manufacture or delivery of cannabis among adults and directs the Legislature to create taxation and regulatory system as appropriate.
It makes medicine safely available to patients without having to go to the black market.
Why take this simple approach to the initiative?
History shows that the best way to end prohibition is to simply repeal prohibition language. In 1932 Washington was one of the states that repealed prohibition on alcohol through a statewide initiative. The initiative removed all state laws criminalizing alcohol, leaving the Legislature the task of creating regulations, which it did. Their initiative language gave nothing for the Federal Government to attack since it simply removed state prohibition laws and nothing new was being added that would conflict with Federal law.
This is still the best strategy. When trying to legalize a federally controlled substance, there is always the problem of conflict with the supreme law of the land. If we pass code that includes regulation for something that is not allowed federally, the government has the power to trump the law leaving us back at square one, but with our funders and our volunteers demoralized. It could happen immediately or years down the road when a hostile Federal administration takes power.
Polling this year affirms that we can win in Washington as soon as legalization is put to the popular vote. Washington is one of the best polling states in the country for legalizing cannabis, with 52% of the public in favor of legalizing marijuana and only 35% opposed statewide.
Looking at the bigger picture, it makes sense nationally as well as locally to repeal prohibition in Washington in 2011. National legalization organizations are gearing up for a big push in 2012. Their resources could be used in tougher states if Washington were to legalize in 2011 and no resources were then needed here in 2012. Sensible Washington can get on the ballot with minimal funding because of the breadth of our volunteer base. Plus, if Washington State does not have an initiative running in 2011, the issue will be quiet for a year at a time when we need to make it louder. An early victory in Washington would be a powerful precedent in the 2012 elections for other states.
But there is another reason to proceed in 2011. This issue is just too urgent to wait until it’s a sure thing. We all know the terrible toll of marijuana prohibition– 15,000 arrests in Washington every year, $100 million-plus of tax dollars wasted, dying medical patients being prosecuted for medical use, organ transplants denied to legitimate medical cannabis patients, people losing their children. . . We lawyers see the dark side of prohibition in our work.
We can’t allow this to go on. Many of us have been fighting to protect people in the courts, and some of us have even made our livings defending marijuana cases, but the time is right to fix the problem. We can’t wait any longer to repeal prohibition knowing that every year, 15,000 people will be harmed and that the public supports us now.
Sensible Washington is already on the ground recruiting and mobilizing thousands of grass-roots activists, developing our cutting edge online networking technology, keeping the issue alive in the press, and filling positions in our vast campaign infrastructure.
During the 2010 effort, our I-1068 initiative got 2/3 of the required signatures with a base of 1,500 activists and little money. Next year, we’ll be starting with 10,000 people or more. We have the early endorsement of NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) and many others. We anticipate beginning signature gathering in January or February of 2011.
If you believe in this cause, now is the time to support it. You know firsthand just how dysfunctional prohibition is. Dig Deep. This year your dollars will actually make a difference.
Click here to give online or to mail a check or credit card contribution in the address listed there.
Thank you and we look forward to your response!
Jeffrey Steinborn – Initiative Co-sponsor
Douglas Hiatt – Initiative Co-author
Be a Seed for Change 
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