Tonight Russ Feingold debates Republican Ron Johnson, who is challenging him for his Wisconsin Senate seat.

It’s startling to be reminded how long ago 9/11 was because our public figures keep talking about the Afghanistan War like it started last year. General Petraeus let us know back in February in a Meet the Press interview that we were just then getting “the inputs about right,” and were now “starting to see some of the outputs.” Nine years into this war, and Petraeus lets us know they’re just getting warmed up. Good God.

To say that China’s reaction to one of its countrymen winning the Nobel Peace Prize was less than celebratory would be an understatement. After all, he does sit in a jail 300 miles outside of Beijing.

National Democrats want to make this election about the past, but elections are almost always a referendum on the present, that is unless the candidates on hand have gone out of their way to make themselves truly unacceptable. This election is a vivid reminder that who the candidates are still matters, at least when they are as clearly flawed as some of the Republicans running this year.

Maybe that will clear up things for those who want to cheerlead for TARP based on some arbitrary numbers about total costs. In fact, TARP needs to be judged on a much broader level. And when you do, you find that it only delayed, or even prolonged, disaster. The same banks that crashed the economy were nursed back to health rapidly, and they kept doing exactly what they do – collecting insane bonuses and maximizing profits while papering over fraud.

Stephen Colbert picked up on a theme that Just Say Now has been pushing for some time: that marijuana legalization in California in Prop 19 is more popular than any other candidate on the state ballot.

Colbert had a great segment last night about Prop 19, featuring an addiction drug warrior named Joseph Califano and former Governor of New Mexico and legalization advocate Gary Johnson.

Presidents continue to taint their once-cherished soap boxes with false statements that quickly become exposed as such, whether about the need to go to war in Iraq or the benefits of the health care reform bill.

Attorney General Cordray is going to need some time to prosecute this case. But he has an election coming up in a little over 3 weeks, against former Senator Mike DeWine. The latest poll shows him slightly behind, 44-38. It is imperative that Cordray and his team be given the time to reach discovery in this case and untangle the crooked web everyone suspects is at the heart of the mortgage lending industry.

The core message being delivered by the President actually persuades people to vote for Republicans over Democrats.

We now know that the White House, in secret negotiations with industry lobbyists, quietly killed the public option in July 2009. But when the President gave a nationally-televised, joint address to Congress on September 9, 2009, he implied that the public option was still on the table.