The real issue isn’t whether President Obama changed some provisions and didn’t change others; it’s whether he changed the system or not. That’s the change we were looking for. If he fought tooth and nail for complete public financing of elections in the next two years, even if he didn’t win, we would all back him 100%. We don’t need 100% success, but we do need you to at least head in the right direction. And we need you to understand what we meant by change.

Right-wingers have made community organizer Saul Alinsky into one of their favorite Emmanuel Goldsteins, a semi-mythic figure they use as demon and scapegoat. But their interest in him goes beyond that. In fact, Alinsky himself accurately predicted (and feared) in Rules that the right wingers would pay more attention to his work — and use it more effectively — than any lefties would.

Boo!

Vincent Price — You’ve Got A Friend ; and The Delicious Monster; and Kermit Bites Vincent, from The Muppet Show, Season 1, Episode 19.

As you may have read here earlier today — or seen if you had the misfortune to be near a TV tuned to a cable news station — al-Qaeda appears to have made another half-hearted plea for relevance, somewhat harebrained in keeping with most of its latter-day attempts at U.S. terrorism (“Let’s send packages with [...]

They’ve secreted themselves amongst our troops, even at the senior officer levels. They look just like everyone else. But they have an agenda, and they want to impose it on their comrades and their subordinates, no matter how uncomfortable it might make them feel, no matter how much it might disrupt morale and unit cohesion. I am speaking, of course, of evangelical Christians.

The most heated policy battle over higher education today concerns the Department of Education’s effort to create rules that protect students and taxpayers from well-documented abuses and shortcomings by for-profit schools. To help lead an army of lobbyists and consultants working to block these rules, key members of the for-profit industry have selected as their general Lanny Davis, who served as a White House lawyer for President Bill Clinton.

The number of contests close enough to watch continues to grow daily. Updates today on RI-01, CT-04, CT-05, IN-02, and NC-02.

Jeff Rosenberg reports that the teabagger wing of the Minnesota Republican Party is attacking efforts by state and local officials to keep them from practicing typical Republican voter-intimidation tricks.

Americans’ support for marijuana legalization is the highest it has ever been, according to the latest Gallup poll. Currently 46 percent of Americans believe the use of marijuana should be legal, while 50 percent think it should stay illegal. The American people are now roughly evenly split on the question. The issue of marijuana legalization has gone from a once fringe position to something solidly mainstream. Most importantly, the trend line shows accelerating movement in the direction of greater acceptance for legalization.