The GOP should just step away from the peyote. George Bush will never be popular. Ever.

In the race to be the next governor of Nevada, Republican Brian Sandoval continues to maintain a solid double-digit lead over his Democratic opponent, Rory Reid, son of Democratic Senate leader Harry, according to a new Mason-Dixon poll for “Las Vegas Review-Journal.”

In his own race to retain his Senate seat, it appears Majority Leader (and Rory’s dad) Harry Reid’s recent surge in the polls is mainly due to GOP rival Sharron Angle’s gaffes, and it’s not translating into a statewide movement toward Democrats. Rory Reid is suffering from a serious favorability problem.

Earlier this month, Rep. Carolyn Maloney – one of the members of Congress who fought to protect 9/11 cleanup workers, and who is continuing that advocacy for workers cleaning up BP’s oil disaster – called on OSHA to explain how it would enforce the government’s respirator guidelines. Maloney also pressed the agency in charge of worker health and safety for more details on how it’s protecting workers in the Gulf.

It’s one thing to have a great idea, another to translate that onto the screen, be it big, small, or laptop. How the heck, especially with today’s credit crunch, do you find funding? And once your vision is completed, what then? New media offer many opportunities for filmmakers, and we’ll be looking at the best way to merge the traditional with the super-modern, from digital filmmaking and fundraising to publicity and distribution.

Tonight we’re chatting with several filmmakers who are utilizing some new models of funding and delivery.

Tomorrow and Wednesday, the WaPo will continue its series on the Intelligence Industrial Complex. It will describe the contractors in the BWI/Fort Meade area that contribute to the NSA’s surveillance programs. According to the DNI’s Director of Communications, that story will describe the contractors in the vicinity, but not say explicitly that those contractors clustered around Fort Meade are working for the NSA.

Nevertheless, an anonymous official–who sounds an awful lot like Acting Director of National Intelligence David Gompert did in his official statement–is already out bitching about the contractor database the WaPo published as part of this series.

Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske fears the creation of “a black market that would come into play” if California votes to legalize marijuana. Question for Kerli: what the hell would you consider the $45 billion annual industry in the US that exists despite marijuana prohibition?

Pelosi and Obey make some nods to inserting the teacher funding into a separate bill, like a revived tax extenders package, but I would say the chances of that happening are between slim and none. And so literally hundreds of thousands of teachers will pay the price of additional job cuts, because we had to fight 100 or so Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. That’s the functional trade-off here.

Elana Schor, who’s been doing yeoman’s work on reporting about data in the BP oil disaster, published a new piece with Greenwire and the New York Times in which she reveals that OSHA and NIOSH have access to worker health data from BP and its coverup firm, CTEH, but are so far refusing to release the data.

Simpson claimed that the Commission is “mainly working on solvency” for the Social Security system. But Galbraith says that addressing the “solvency” of Social Security is outside the mandate of the Catfood Commission.

Van Hollen rightly made it clear that eliminating the popular and cost-effective public Medicare program and replacing it with subsidized, badly regulated private insurance companies would be a terrible idea. He calls giving vouchers to seniors and making them buy private health insurance “throwing you over to the insurance industry.”