I have to chuckle at the lipstick that the Senate Appropriations Committee put on their pig of a budget deal for 2011.

Three out of every four California voters support reducing the criminal penalty for possession of a small amount of illegal drugs for personal use, according to a new poll from Lake Research Partners.

With the anti-union bill tied up in court, Scott Walker just isn’t getting the fiscal benefits he hoped would balance his budget from forcing municipalities to cut public-sector wages. So he’s back to threatening layoffs again.

At issue is how State can still claim to be transparent when it won’t explain why it refuses to allow the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture to have an unmonitored visit with Bradley Manning. It’s not quite Baghdad Bob … quite. But it would be pure comedy gold if it weren’t about our hypocrisy on human rights.

The President created the cat food commission, reviving it after it failed in the Senate. The Ryan blueprint, with its design to deliberately tweak programs liberals hold dear, was clearly going to be something that turned the Bowles-Simpson plan, which did not get a passing vote from the commission, as the bipartisan baseline. There’s certainly enough to read into Chris Van Hollen’s tacit approval to suggest that this will happen tomorrow. Yet this would be a pre-emptive surrender, and a needless one at that.

I am extremely glad to finally hear someone of prominence acknowledge that the question of how to lower health care costs isn’t this great complex mystery, but a problem for which governments around the world have several well tested solutions.

France and Britain are getting impatient with the NATO mission in Libya. I guess France now thinks, in the aftermath of their conquest in Ivory Coast, that they can snap their fingers and bring down a government. But Libya is a different animal altogether. What they’re asking for is unrealistic.

The US Government appears to be sweating from the heat brought on by the United Nations after the international organization’s lead torture investigator publicly criticized the United States’ decision to deny official visits to Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning. Sign our letter to Quantico and Pentagon leaders: follow your own rules and allow official visits to PFC. Bradley Manning. Click here to add your name.

Hell, at this point, maybe El Rushbo or Sean Hannity should jump in.

Yes, the White House is upping the rhetoric. But while they’ve come close to giving an ultimatum on a clean debt limit bill, it hasn’t been fully articulated. And even if this Wall Street Journal article is purely speculative, and the White House hasn’t signaled that they’d allow spending cuts in exchange for a debt limit increase, it’s pretty damn good speculation. The Administration withered in the face of a potential shutdown, even though Republicans didn’t really want any part of it, and allowed a budget deal that gave Republicans 2/3 of the spending cuts they sought. Now, neither side wants a default event. There’s no scenario where failing to increase the debt limit turns out positively for the US. But the Administration appears far more frightened of that scenario than the Republicans. And that fear could translate into a bad deal.