Ever the unprincipled opportunist, Joe Lieberman announces he’ll obstruct the growing consensus and demand we give income and estate tax breaks to the richest Americans, even though it will make the economy worse.

Do the former DEA Administrators defend the federal marijuana prohibition with evidence that marijuana’s harms to users are so great that users must be denied the liberty to take the minimal risks attendant to its use? No, they cite an annual “strategy document” that has historically been an instrument of political propaganda, and was never taken seriously a genuine policy or planning document for addressing public safety or public health problems.

Alan Simpson probably hasn’t had to lift much in the past several years, beyond his finger in rage at disabled veterans for daring to steal federal money for health care treatment, but millions of people like Jack Hartley do it for a living. In fact, one in three workers over age 58 engage in the same workday activities. And they simply cannot hold out until 70 for retirement benefits.

Nine former DEA heads held a press conference this morning to promote their letter to Eric Holder, asking the Justice Department to intervene and challenge Prop 19 if it passes. The fact is that these nine people shoulder a huge chunk of the blame for the utter and complete failure of the war on drugs that has made the situation on the Arizona border so critical. It’s quite shameless that they’d make things even worse by demagoguing the immigration law in this fashion, but it’s symptomatic of a wasteful and counterproductive bureaucracy trying to protect its power — and its enormous budget.

So The Quitter and Glenn Beck celebrated the deaths of 3,000 Americans on Saturday by charging tickets to hear them speak at an event in Alaska. There, the rubes stupid enough to fork over the dough (up to $225 per ticket) learned this historical factoid.

In a post on Thursday, I documented an investigation into a large number of real estate transactions centering around Terry Jones and Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida. More information has now emerged in my study of publicly available information. In this post, I will show that a large mortgage taken out on the Dove World Outreach property in 2006 was mis-represented in the Form 990 that was filed with the IRS for that reporting period. The executed mortgage agreement on file with the Alachua County Clerk of Court website indicates that the mortgage was for $285,000, while a mortgage with the same agreement date and from the same bank was reported on the Form 990 as being only for $113,885.

I’ve been tracking the debate within the Administration over whether we should tolerate corruption in Afghanistan in the name of sustaining a war against someone–anyone–in Afghanistan or not for some weeks. Underlying the entire debate is the fact that our goals in Afghanistan–which started as a pursuit of those who struck us on 9/11 and [...]

As far as “taking tax cuts off the table,” this just never works in an election season. Democrats will keep saying that the Republicans want tax cuts for millionaires, and they’ll be right, and Republicans will keep saying the Democrats want to raise everyone’s taxes, and they’ll be wrong. Hence Rep. Boehner’s walk-back.

As President Obama’s strategy review for Afghanistan commences, let’s hope he’s balancing the information coming to him from his happy-talking generals with some independent news reading of his own.

If we’re going to insist on continuing this imperial adventure we’re on, we’re going to have to come up with a better rationale than “democracy” or “rule of law” or “freedom from tyranny.” Because all those excuses appear as bogus, at this point, as the WMD one.