Obama took the opportunity to mock supporters of the public option last night at a DNC event in Greenwich, Connecticut (per Mike Allen): OBAMA: Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get — to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed — oh, well, the public option wasn’t [...]

I noticed that earlier this year we were overwhelmed by a wave of anti-deficit grandstanding throughout the Democratic Party while the Catfood Commission was sending up trial balloons about cutting Social Security benefits, raising the retirement age (which is just a sleight-of-hand way of cutting benefits) or cutting the health care benefits for military service [...]

This morning I joined with members of Students for Sensible Drug Policy and delivered 52,000 petition signatures to drug czar Gil Kerlikowske on behalf of the Just Say Now campaign. Daniel Pacheco, a Georgetown University student from Colombia and a member of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, handed the petition to  Kerlikowske at a press [...]

According to the new CBS News/New York Times poll, 38 percent of Americans think President Obama has a clear plan for creating jobs while 53 percent think he does not. Well, I, for one, desperately wish that those 38 percent would share with the rest of the country because as far as I can see, [...]

If there’s one member of the Senate who has consistently shown a willingness to buck their own party in defense of civil liberties, it’s been Russ Feingold.  It took a lot of courage to be the only US  Senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001. As Sarah Silverman and Sam Sedar say in [...]

Mike Bloomberg’s White House aspirations look a bit dimmer today in the wake of the drubbing that Reshma Saujani took in her primary race against Carolyn Maloney yesterday. The conventional wisdom among Democratic “strategists” is that if the economy is good in 2012, Obama wins the presidential election in a walk. And if it’s not, [...]

Nine former DEA heads held a press conference this morning to promote their letter to Eric Holder, asking the Justice Department to intervene and challenge Prop 19 if it passes (PDF).  They claim that since the Justice Department moved so quickly to oppose the Arizona immigration law, it’s their obligation to do the same here. [...]

Live at the final day of NORML’s 2010 “Just Say Now” convention in Portland, OR: former New Mexico Governor and marijuana legalization advocate Gary Johnson (also: probable 2012 GOP Presidential candidate). Watch Governor Johnson live here.

I’m about to go on a panel at the NORML convention in Portland, OR to discuss California’s Prop 19 and how it will affect the future of the marijuana legalization efforts. Watch live at 2:30 PDT on Firedoglake.

I walked in to the opening of the NORML convention here in Portland, Oregon to hear Chairman of the NORML Board of Directors, Steve Dillon, leading the audience in a chant of “Just Say Now.” I’m here with FDL’s Jon Walker, Teddy Partridge and Michael Whitney.  We’re joining Jon Perri and Amber Langston of SSDP [...]