This is just another front in the Obama administration multi-prong effort to cripple medical marijuana with legal actions both large and small.

The California based organization, Consumer Watchdog, is looking to put a measure on the 2012 November ballot in California that would create a public health insurance option in the state and provide state regulators more control of premiums.

It’s simply not fair to require that journalists not tell stories that are already out there in the public sphere. That turns them, once and for all, into stenographers. That’s not what our country needs from presidential press coverage.

SF Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders can’t stand the idea the Berkeley City Council might pass a resolution saying Berkeley welcomes the resettlement of cleared Guantanamo prisoners. So, she misrepresents recidivism rates from the government, and lies about the cases of two cleared detainees, one of whom was the only known victim of water torture at Guantanamo.

I’ve noticed a consistent but baseless distortion being spread by opponents of California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize, regulate and tax cannabis. They complain that Prop 19 is poorly crafted and/or would produce an unenforceable “patchwork” of regulation. The reality is that, compared with most propositions in California’s history, Prop 19 is very sensibly written, with the express purpose of giving state and local governments maximum flexibility to make legal marijuana workable. The fictitious, nightmarish “patchwork” of regulations caused by allowing local governments to craft local ordinances is no different than how local governments handle almost everything in our economy, including alcohol, parking, pizza ovens, farmers markets and building codes.