Last night we had the first night of our contest to name FDL’s marijuana campaign. We were going to have the semifinal voting tonight, but I changed my mind. I’m having too much fun being back at Late Nite again, and Mike Whitney decided he wanted to expand the contest to everyone on our email [...]

Spencer’s got one of the big scoops of the day: that Philip Mudd left the FBI about six weeks ago (so early March). The timing of his departure is notable, given Mudd’s role in the CIA and the Counterterrorism Center in 2002-2003.

Nevada’s Republican Senate candidate Sue Lowden actually first offered the “barter” for health care idea a couple weeks ago, but defending it in public – with video – takes it to a whole other level.

Steven Hatfill, falsely accused by the FBI in the 2001 anthrax attacks, speaks out for the first time, describing relentless harassment by government agents.

Corrupt adulterer and Republican Senator John Ensign isn’t up for re-election until 2012. That’s a good thing, because his total fundraising take for the first quarter of 2010 wouldn’t pay for pens and pencils for the campaign office that he couldn’t afford rent on.

California’s budget crisis is actually much less than they’re spending on the war in Afghanistan. $26 billion for the budget vs $38 billion for war. And what do they get for it? It’s not better to live in California thanks to the war. It’s actually getting much, much worse.

It’s entirely possible that some of this is kabuki, that in the end the banksters will win out. Indeed, the Gregg-Reed derivatives package could ultimately trump Lincoln’s stronger bill. But for the moment, you get the sense that there’s a turning of the tide in Washington, and everyone’s riding the populist wave.

It is possible that three or four prominent Republican Senate candidates–each one assumed easily on their way to their party’s nomination less than a year ago–could all be defeated by insurgent primary challengers.

I don’t know why people are talking about the Lincoln bill like it just got signed by the President. All accounts show that the President, or at least the Treasury Secretary, doesn’t even support it, and now Dodd is trying to claim territorial control. This is the exact opposite of how it played out in the House of Representatives, where Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson significantly weakened the derivatives legislation that came out of Barney Frank’s FinReg bill. But in both cases, it appears the stronger language will get dropped.

It’s not just that DOJ would have to pay a defunct organization still designated as a terrorist organization. It would have to pay an organization that is only designated as a terrorist organization because it was illegally wiretapped and therefore couldn’t fight the charges against it.