Meet the biggest sugar daddies of wingnut welfare.

This weekend’s Stewart/Colbert gathering will almost certainly drawn nearly double what Beck’s Rally did…though they’ll be of similar body mass.

Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody

James O’Keefe is not the “boy who cried ‘wolf’.” He’s a serial liar.

Is 2012 going to be Sharia v pot?

On Monday, the UK Guardian reported that secret training materials used by the British military in recent years include actions and behaviors that are clearly abusive and outside the treatment of prisoners mandated by the Geneva conventions. The article emphasizes the use of humiliation and sensory deprivation as primary tools of the British interrogator. Even “recent training material says blindfolds, earmuffs and plastic handcuffs are essential equipment for military interrogators.”

This November 2, Prop 19 is on the ballot in CA along medical marijuana initiatives in AZ, OR and SD. A generation ago this would have been inconceivable, and marijuana advocates owe a great deal to Jack Herer whose landmark 1979 book The Emperor Has No Clothes yanked the sheets off marijuana and hemp prohibition. An advocate for legalization, Jack converted from a square john to an enlightened political activist after blowing a couple reefers. No wonder the government wants weed banned!

The Emperor of Hemp is Jack Herer’s story; the story a plant and a country; and the story of governmental hypocrisy, racism, and greed.

Steven Hill is reporting from France for the Washington Monthly, and he relays a simple fact that almost all other reporting on the proposed increase in the retirement age has missed: the French legislature changed the retirement age for FULL benefits to 67 from 65. Yet a pliant U.S. media only reports the increase in the earliest age of retirement with partial benefits.

The NYT has a worthwhile editorial lambasting the Obama DOJ’s pursuit of SCOTUS review in Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, which will probably result in expanded immunity for government officials that abuse the law so as to abuse the rights of Americans. The editorial focuses closely on the way in which DOJ’s defense of absolute immunity amounts to a defense of using the material witness law as an improper basis for detention.

Christina Romer is out of the White House, but I gather her op-ed in the New York Times doesn’t differ from what they believe there. But if the tax cuts are seen as the only viable fiscal stimulus left, we’re not headed down a good path in terms of jobs for the next several years.