During last night’s “Your Interview with the President” event sponsored by Google+, President Obama and Google completely and shamefully ignored the dominant questions — about marijuana — submitted by the American people. Questions about marijuana policy reform dominated almost all of the top “most popular question” slots, but Obama ignored them.

Yesterday’s SOPA strike was enormously successful, not only raising attention to the issue but moving a tremendous amount of politicians for a one-day event. Over 4.5 million people signed Google’s petition against SOPA. The Wikipedia action gave high-profile attention to the issue as well, and even if Facebook and Twitter’s responses were muted, overall the online community made themselves heard.

But those of us charting the protest yesterday were struck by how most of the lawmakers turning against the bill were Republicans. If you look at the latest whip count on PIPA, for example, you see that more Republicans oppose it at this point than Democrats.

The biggest Internet presence in the world will have something to add to the growing online protests against anti-piracy legislation, though they won’t go as far as shutting down their operations. Google plans to highlight the issue with an action item on their famously spare homepage.

At today’s LinkedIn town hall meeting with President Obama, a former Google executive asked “Would you please raise my taxes?” The man, identified as Doug Edwards, a former director of communications and marketing at Google, said that he wanted the country to continue to be able to invest in Pell grants and infrastructure and job training programs “that made it possible for me to get where I am.”

Tonight the Republican candidates are back at it in Orlando for the Fox News/Google debate. For some reason the shunned former governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, gets to participate but you won’t find that info in the article touting the debate at Fox News, go figure.

Anonymous’ #opBART dox dump of user names, emails and passwords presaged Larry Flynt’s Huffington Post blog today in which the free speech advocate wrote:

“Any information you put out into cyberspace could come back to bite you in the ass.”

The President is negotiating secret deals behind closed doors, with no transparency, making it almost impossible for the people directly impacted by impending cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits to learn about what’s in store for them until it’s too late.

So we are doing our best to get the word out to those affected. We created the following online ads that will be targeted at senior citizens in Florida and other key 2012 presidential election states. It takes 24 hours to get statistics back on which ones are performing the best.

We can’t sit by and wait for 2012 to roll around and hope that voters remember what happened during the budget negotiations in 2011. We need to act right now and get as many voters as possible onboard with our pledge to never vote for anyone who cuts social safety net benefits.

Can you please chip in $10 to our online ad campaign to tell voters not to support any politician who cuts social safety net benefits – including President Obama?

Corporations want to bring some money home from tax havens to the US, but in true Galtian fashion, refuse to pay taxes on it. They got what they wanted under the Republicans in 2004, but the Democrats stopped them in 2009. Fool me once… surely Congress won’t get fooled again. Will it?

I do wonder whether there’s a correlation between those telecommunication companies that try to buy political favors and those that offer federal law enforcement favors in return.