When your in a tough campaign it helps if your opponent is videotape standing up for pedophiles against victims.

Kansas – Carry On My Wayward Son Them old geezers can still wail…! What’s on your mind tonite…?

This again? OK, let’s try this Team Obama. I know you’re obviously doing focus groups on this stuff somewhere, but I’ve got to tell you. I’m your target customer and trust me — you’re badly missing the mark.

I’ve noticed a consistent but baseless distortion being spread by opponents of California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize, regulate and tax cannabis. They complain that Prop 19 is poorly crafted and/or would produce an unenforceable “patchwork” of regulation. The reality is that, compared with most propositions in California’s history, Prop 19 is very sensibly written, with the express purpose of giving state and local governments maximum flexibility to make legal marijuana workable. The fictitious, nightmarish “patchwork” of regulations caused by allowing local governments to craft local ordinances is no different than how local governments handle almost everything in our economy, including alcohol, parking, pizza ovens, farmers markets and building codes.

Many have wondered why the Cat Food Commission, with a goal of stabilizing the nation’s medium-term deficit, seems poised to make recommendations mainly on Social Security when that program gets separate funding outside of the budget. The answer is that the conservatives on the panel won’t have anything to do with tax increases of any kind, and in fact would rather recommend CUTS to corporate and capital gains taxes. Social Security is among the areas where Democrats on the panel may go along with a cuts-only approach, but in order to get that long-sought consensus, they’d have to do the same on all of the budgetary items.

Following the first broadcast of this film a criminal complaint was filed against producer Matt Pascarella and reporter Greg Palast by the Department of Homeland Security. The charge, filming “critical infrastructure” was dropped.

Maybe DHS was annoyed because From Big Easy to Big Empty, filmed a year after Hurricane Katrina, is critical of infrastructure, specifically Innovative Emergency Management of Baton Rouge which was paid a half-million dollars in 2004 to deliver a emergency preparedness and evacuation plan of New Orleans–only no one could find the plan when it was needed–that’s pretty innovative; and of FEMA itself which at the time of the filming, in 2006, had displaced 73,000 residents into trailer parks. Palast interviews a resident who explains that there is only bus out of the ironically named, barb-wired ringed Camp Renaissance, and it just goes to the Wal-Mart.

Anwar al-Awlaki is very quickly becoming our next surrogate bogeyman in the war on terror (the one designed to distract from the continued freedom of the people who actually targeted us on 9/11). And along with that, the government seems intent on hanging a whole lot more terrorist designations on people — including American citizens — without ever showing the evidence that al-Awlaki himself was operational.

Rep. Henry Waxman has been trying to enshrine the terrible compromise promulgated by Google and Verizon into law, by pushing a truly terrible bill on broadband that strips the FCC of rulemaking and classification ability, and gives wireless Internet providers carte blanche to discriminate in favor of their products.

I trust it’s not a coincidence that at the same time David Axelrod is skewering Rahm from within the White House, Greg Craig is getting picked up on a live mike (oops!) skewering him from the outside.

According to the President in an interview this morning with Today Show’s Matt Lauer, money without reform won’t fix schools. Well, neither will reform without money. Because you can make the exact same statement that the President made, about how per-pupil spending has increased while results have decreased, about the reforms he seeks.