Here finally we are — Friday!
A foggy early morning, too, on California’s north coast as the weekend swings into full view.

Smoke can come in many forms — and can be blown up the ass as well — former Obama White House adviser Van Jones slapped his “ridiculous” ex-boss on the NSA bullshit: “First of all, we do have a domestic spying program, and what we need to be able to do is figure out how to balance these things, not pretend like there’s no balancing to be done.”

(Illustration found here).

And someone should slap the shit out of Obama, too, for his ‘ridiculous’ stance on marijuana — the weed is in the news in a good way. Medical smoke is a wonder.
A Colorado couple discovered medical marijuana saved their daughter’s life — she suffers from Dravet Syndrome, which causes horrible seizures — at the peak 300 of them a week — and after a painstaking search for aid, they discovered R4, said to be low in THC and high in CBD, which is used extensively for medical purposes.
From CNN:

Today, Charlotte, 6, is thriving.
Her seizures only happen two to three times per month, almost solely in her sleep.
Not only is she walking, she can ride her bicycle.
She feeds herself and is talking more and more each day.
“I literally see Charlotte’s brain making connections that haven’t been made in years,” Matt said.
“My thought now is, why were we the ones that had to go out and find this cure?
This natural cure?
How come a doctor didn’t know about this?
How come they didn’t make me aware of this?”
…
“I didn’t hear her laugh for six months,” Paige said.
“I didn’t hear her voice at all, just her crying.
I can’t imagine that I would be watching her making these gains that she’s making, doing the things that she’s doing (without the medical marijuana).
I don’t take it for granted.
Every day is a blessing.”
Matt added, “I want to scream it from the rooftops.
I want other people, other parents, to know that this is a viable option.”

Yes indeed, but ‘ridiculous’ Obama wants to stop it. Firedoglake examines the issue:

Instead of listening to the scientific evidence or polls showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans want medical marijuana legalized, the Obama administration has actually aggressively fought in federal court against efforts to compel it to reschedule marijuana.
Holder continues to refuse to reschedule marijuana despite several governors petitioning him to make this change.
Obama has actively made the decision to keep medical marijuana illegal and make people like the Figis criminals in the eyes of the federal government. It is well best time the administration reschedule cannabis.

And yesterday, a huge stride toward clearing the hurdle on pot’s phony-bad image.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent at CNN and a CBS News contributing medical correspondent, wrote a post today on CNN.com called, “Why I changed my mind on weed,” in which he describes his change of heart that occurred while filming a documentary, aptly titled, “Weed.”
“Long before I began this project, I had steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive,” wrote Gupta.
“Well, I am here to apologize.”
Gupta says he was too dismissive of the “loud chorus” of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved with help from medical marijuana.
He now says, “I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance [a category of dangerous drugs] because of sound scientific proof.”
“They didn’t have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true,” wrote Gupta, citing patient cases including a 3-year-old whose seizures were dramatically reduced from 300 a week to three a month with medical marijuana’s help.
He adds that marijuana does not have a high potential for addiction compared to cocaine, or even cigarettes.
…
He pointed out tolerance is a real problem in existing medications: People are likely to overdose from a prescription drug every 19 minutes, but he couldn’t come across one case of a marijuana overdose.
“We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that,” said Gupta.

Marijuana has had a twisted-sister image forever — “Reefer Madness” has gone on for way-too-long and only Tea Party types who already hate everything will not be impressed by the saving of lives, and making some people’s life’s easier to live.
The Carl Sagan pix above and quote came from a 1969 essay, Marijuana Reconsidered, which detailed the awesome power of the ‘weed.’ Read more here.
What a shame — a waste of 44 years.