But all of this “hippie punching” isn’t about turning out voters. To do that, as Obama well knows, you have to inspire them. Notice that nobody actually running for office is wagging their finger at voters and scolding them like a bunch of children.

No, this isn’t about GOTV. It’s about setting up a narrative for who will take the blame for a disastrous election. And once again, the White House doesn’t care if they make matters worse in order to deflect responsibility from Obama.

Rolling Stone has a big new article in this month’s issue about the push to legalize marijuana in California and across the country. The title of the article may sound familiar: it’s called “Just Say Now.” And our campaign gets an impressive plug.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told the Huffington Post she expects a “serious drawdown” of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. The House Rules Committee has now approved an amendment for consideration on the war supplemental that will allow Speaker Pelosi to “put her money where her mouth is.”

Lost in the self-righteous scrum of negative opinion concerning Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s mouthing off to “Rolling Stone” was the fact that this was a very good day for freedom of the press.

Now if only we could see the same respect for America’s democratic institutions elsewhere in the Obama Administration.

President Barack Obama has relieved Gen. Stanley McChrystal from his command of forces in Afghanistan and tapped Gen. David Petraeus to replace him.

From the time of his appointment, some of us have been calling for a closer look at McChrystal the Special Ops guy, who commanded the rogue troops of Camp NAMA where access by the International Red Cross was blocked, where the treatment of prisoners was so out of control that other DOD commands banned their troops from operating there – and his claims to be concerned about civilian casualties.

Stanley McChrystal, the guy in charge of winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan, okayed this article, presumably intending it to win hearts and minds in the US.

And McChrystal presumably knows US culture better than he knows Afghanistan culture.

Panic within the US government and military over the dire state of affairs in Afghanistan continues to escalate. First, in response to a constant drumbeat of failures on the military front, we had the obvious planting of the “discovery” of one three trillion dollars worth of mineral wealth in Afghanistan. Then, General David Petraeus passed out at the beginning of his Senate testimony on Afghanistan, delaying the hearing by a day. Today, however, the panic has hit its highest level yet, as General Stanley McChrystal has been summoned to Washington. The reason for McChrystal’s hurried trip to Washington, however, completely misses the mark, as he is being brought in to defend an upcoming article in Rolling Stone rather than the strategic situation in Afghanistan.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s apology for his recent too-candid interview with Rolling Stone magazine — emailed to me and other reporters well before the Rolling Stone story dropped — suggests that he wasn’t trying to walk away from his command in a blaze of arrogance. But it’s on him to repair his relationship with his colleagues and his bosses.