This weekend Just Say Now is doing a huge push to call young voters about marijuana initiatives, primarily about Prop 19 to legalize marijuana in California. More than 2,000 people already pledged to make calls this weekend, and dozens of people have been consistently calling for the last several hours.

Click here to start calling young voters for marijuana reforms – all it takes is a phone, and an email address or Facebook or Twitter account.

Many books about terrorism begin with a personal anecdote about where the author was on 9/11. Political Scientist Jocelyn Jones Evans was working on the Hill when the planes hit and changed the course of American national security policy.

“For the first and only time in my life,” she recalls, “I remember rolling down my windows to see and to hear the news for myself.”

One Nation Under Siege though, isn’t a book about policy. It’s a book about how 9/11 and its aftermath changed the culture of Congress, and how those changes have affected the work of government and the American people’s access to their own representatives. Drawing on dozens of interviews with Hill staff and legislators, Evans vividly depicts the impact of the threat of terrorism on congressional culture after 9/11 through a combination of narrative and political science.

It would be quite an irony if the chief counterinsurgent prosecuted a hit-em-n-quit-em campaign that helped convince the Taliban that enough is enough. How conventional!

In the many accounts of the latest wrinkle in our huge mortgage crisis of the day, I have noticed that media always makes room for some one decrying those homeowners who stay in their homes because their mortgages are unenforceable. So color me bleeding heart liberal, but I do not see how anyone can look at those cases where due to fraud the homeowner and family have been contracted to buy a house that now the bank/mortgagor wants more than they do, and decide the case for the other party to the contract on the house. Now, without clear title to the house, that other party can’t even legitimately sell it.

The real tragedy here is that FHFA focuses on a document problem, and not a systemic problem throughout the lending industry. They’re still keeping their heads in the sand.

Watching the MOTUs as their financial services universe shakes and shudders around them reminds me of the five stages of death and dying. There’s lots of denial and anger coming out of the MOTUs, and hints of bargaining, but little sign of depression and acceptance. But it’ll come . . .

For the second year in a row, there will be no COLA increase for Social Security recipients in 2011. This effects over 58 million retired and disabled Americans, and you would think that such information coming out so close to an election would be difficult news for the party in power. However, House Democrats are making lemonade out of it, vowing to vote in November on a $250, one-time benefit for Social Security recipients.

The Democrats have a winning argument with their push to get Republicans to come clean about foreign donations to GOP allies such as the Chamber of Commerce. How do we know this? Because the GOP/Media Complex says that it isn’t and is doing all it can to trick the Democrats into dropping it.

The Soup Whisperer

Carve-O-Matic featuring Beaker and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, from Muppet Studios. The Swedish Chef provides the Birthday Cake. Hippo birdies two me — let’s party!