Nobody really thought Alan Simpson could top his video appearance with Alex Lawson where he talked about “the lesser people” on Social Security.  But once again, President Obama’s hand-picked Co-Chair of the Catfood Commission tasked with “tweaking” Social Security has proven us all wrong.

Simpson has written a letter to Ashley Carson of the Older Women’s League (OWL) responding to a piece she wrote on the Huffington Post that is so offensive, sexist and ageist that…well, take it away, Alan Simpson:

From: Alan K. Simpson
Sent: Monday, August 23, 2010 6:52 PM
To: Owl
Subject: To Ashley Carson re 4/27/10 article

Ashley B. Carson Executive Director, OWL

Dear Ms. Carson,

Someone was good enough to forward me your column of “Enough with the Pink Panthers Bit” of April 27, 2010.

Some of what you say is true. Much is not – but that’s nothing new about public life for me! I have news for you too, my friend. There may be no group called the Pink Panthers working to protect Social Security but I sure as hell am! I’ve spent many years in public life trying to stabilize that system while people like you babble into the vapors about “disgusting attempts at ageism and sexism” and all the rest of that crap.

Now hold on tight, because you won’t like what I’m sending you. You may obviously be aware that the Social Security system is “in trouble.” If you don’t agree with that, then there is no need to read any further. But I wish to share with you the presentation by Stephen C. Goss, Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration on May 12, 2010 to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. If you think the statistics on poverty for seniors are alarming – then you need to read this little pamphlet to know what is really alarming.

If we can’t get a handle on this system and make it sustainable and assure long term solvency, and make some changes that are “minor” at the present time and will become “major” as each year passes, then take a look at the chart on Page 6 which I hope you are able to discern if you are any good at reading graphs – or anything that might challenge your biases and prejudices.

Anyway, have a look at it and if you should choose, you might communicate with me. If you have some better suggestions about how to stabilize Social Security instead of just babbling into the vapors, let me know. And yes, I’ve made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know ‘em too. It’s the same with any system in America. We’ve reached a point now where it’s like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!

Al

What I want to know is — where’s our letter, Al? We’ve written a bazillion worse things about you.  In fact, if you Google “Alan Simpson” over half the entries on the first page are either a) FDL posts or b) posts stemming from the FDL posts slamming you and the Catfood Commission on Social Security.

My feelings are hurt.  Don’t we get letters too?

Or is your verbal largesse something you reserve for the Older Women’s League, and those  you think can’t hit back?

Well, they are hitting back.  They’re calling for your resignation from the Catfood Commission.  We’ll certainly be interested to see if the White House cares about the fact that the Commission’s Co-Chair, a former US Senator,  goes out of his way to treat older women is such a patronizing, dismissive and bullying fashion.

Jackass.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) has recently called on President Obama to fire Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers. Now I don’t know how Boehner’s mother raised him, but where I come from, that behavior would be considered downright rude. Where is the gratitude? I think John of Orange owes them an apology. Trying to get the two individuals whose actions played a major role in assuring that Boehner will be promoted (to the position of Speaker of the House after Republicans win big this November) fired is just bad manners in my book. If it weren’t for Summers’ terrible economic projections and horrible advice, combined with Geithner’s equally bad counsel, consistently putting the prosperity of Wall Street over main street while horribly mismanaging the HAMP program, Boehner would not be close to measuring the drapes for the Speaker’s office..

If President Obama had listened to, say, an individual like outgoing chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Christina Romer–who correctly understood the scale of the economic downturn–instead of the overly-optimistic-to-the-point-of-being-totally-wrong projections of Larry Summers, then the President might have opted for more stimulus, a true focus on jobs creation, and maybe even real solutions to the terrible-and-getting-worse mortgage foreclosure crisis. Obama might have taken seriously the mission of getting the unemployed back to work instead of foolishly wasting half a year trying to get Mike Enzi to vote for health care. The result could have been lower unemployment numbers and a much higher political prospects for Democrats this election cycle. Underestimating the scale of the economic crisis was the huge original failure of the Obama administration, one which created a domino effect of bad choices.

So, now, there are a whole lot of people who have every right to demand the heads of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. The unemployed, those actually made worse off by HAMP, community banks, every American hurt by the continued economic downturn, elected Democrats who are going to be crushed in November. . . it is sadly quite a long list. But you Mr. Boehner, as one of lucky few Americans (along with the top Wall Street executives and the rest of the Republican party leadership) whose job prospects economic standing will likely improve because of White House decisions, your calling for Tim’s and Larry’s resignation is just being ungrateful. After all they have done for you, not-yet-Speaker Boehner, I think you owe them an apology.

Gavin Dunaway, Adotas: “Listen, you dirty hippies: Facebook doesn’t wanna run your pro-legalization display ads. It ain’t down with your THC consumption or your tie-dye or your free love or your patchouli stink. It’s a family social network that only runs family-friendly advertising — like beer and liquor ads, products the family can enjoy together (especially when forced to gather for holidays).”

Chris Good at The Atlantic: Facebook may have been started by and for college kids, but it’s no lefty, hippie operation. JustSayNow.com, a marijuana legalization organization launched last month by liberal blogger/activist Jane Hamsher, had been running ads on Facebook for a week and a half, but Facebook evidently won’t run them anymore, on the grounds that pot leaves are inappropriate

Ryan Singal, Wired: “No one disputes that Facebook has the legal right to ban the ad, but Hamsher argues that it just doesn’t make sense. ‘It seems like a decision make to appease somebody’s grandma,’ Hamsher said.”

Grant Gross, IDG News Service: “It’s tantamount to banning a candidate’s face during a political campaign,” Michael Whitney, a Just Say Now organizer, said in a statement. “It’s a mystery to me why Facebook would do such a sudden about-face. This is political speech.”… Support for legalization of marijuana is growing, especially among young people, even though President Barack Obama’s administration has opposed legalization efforts, Just Say Now said.

Michael O. Powell, The Liberty Papers: One key indicator that you are dealing with unapologetic authoritarians is when you’re being harshly reprimanded for violating regulations and rules that are unpredictable, undefinable and more than likely not even known by the person touting them. That appears to be the case with Facebook’s policies.

Tanya Ganeva, AlterNet: A Facebook spokesperson claimed, “The image of a pot leaf is classified with all smoking products and therefore is not acceptable under our policies.” As Ryan Grim (who obtained the letter) points out though, Facebook’s policy specifies that tobacco products can’t be promoted on the site.So, there’s a tiny chance it might have to do with money rather than Facebook’s deep concern for users’ health.

Ryan Tate, Gawker: [W]hen it comes to pot leaves, Facebook is about 50 years behind society, judging from its ad restrictions. Which probably has something to do with trying to keep Facebook attractive to big spending, blue chip ad clients who don’t like their campaigns surrounded by seedy looking pro narcotics narcotics ads. It is, of course, Facebook’s right to make that call, and probably a smart thing to do from a business standpoint. But it does put to lie the company’s high-minded excuses about its privacy rollbacks and how they were “not about the money.” (When people say that, it means it’s totally about the money.)

And just for the irony factor: join the Just Say Now Facebook Group.

The Libertarian Party contacted us this morning following the launch of our campaign to get Facebook to relent on their decision to ban the Just Say Now logo with a marijuana leaf from advertising.

Libertarian Party spokesman Kyle Hartz said Facebook had also censored their logo, which likewise contained a marijuana leaf:

Here at the Libertarian Party, we have faced the exact same problem with facebook ads. Our ad, picture below, was also approved and then banned. Once I appealed their decision, they responded saying,

“Thanks for writing in to us. I took a look at your account and noticed that the content advertised by this ad is prohibited. We reserve the right to determine what advertising we accept, and we may choose to not accept ads containing or relating to certain products or services. We do not allow ads for marijuana or political ads for the promotion of marijuana and will not allow the creation of any further Facebook Ads for this product. We appreciate your cooperation with this policy”

Considering marijuana ads are not explicitly banned in their guidelines, I was pretty upset by this decision. The marijuana legalization ad was the best ad we ever had, we were paying less than one cent a click.

If you are interested in fighting back against this policy, we would love to join the fight.

Kyle Hartz
Libertarian National Committee, Inc.

One of the hardest part about ending prohibition is getting people to talk about it. We’ve worked really hard to put together a left/right coalition that makes it easier for people to speak out without fear of being attacked as “hippies.” Facebook’s decision makes it that much harder.

Or, as Jay Rosen put it:

We’re not trying to sell pot to people.  We’re trying to have a political discussion about US drug policy, as is the Libertarian Party.  In a 2.0 world of online graphics, banning the use of the subject image is not a mature decision about political discourse.  It’s a decision made to appease somebody’s finger wagging grandparents.

Ryan Grim has more on the Huffington Post.

Xeni Jardin has more on Boing Boing.

We’re asking people to switch out their Facebook avatars with the Just Say Now pot leaf and a “censored by facebook” banner.  You can find it here.  (Here’s mine, I frankly don’t think I’ve ever looked better.)

Facebook is censoring marijuana.

Just last week, the social networking giant abruptly changed its policies and decided to ban images of marijuana leaves from ads, claiming pictures of the plant promote “tobacco products.”

Just Say Now, our campaign for marijuana legalization with Students for Sensible Drug Policy, ran ads promoting our campaign that showed our logo, which uses a marijuana leaf. Despite the ad running more than 38 million times, Facebook flip-flopped and started censoring our ads and our political speech.

We’re fighting back against Facebook’s censorhip with a massive campaign to call out the social networking site.

Sign our petition to Facebook to protest censoring marijuana as political speech. We’ll send the petition to Facebook and call attention to the popular support for opening a discussion about our country’s failed drug policies.

Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has more on the story:

For a typical college student, if it didn’t happen on Facebook, it didn’t happen. That gives the social networking behemoth an out-sized influence on the confines of political debate, if that debate falls outside what Facebook deems acceptable discourse.

Proponents of marijuana legalization, which is on the California ballot in 2010, have hit a Facebook wall in their effort to grow an online campaign to rethink the nation’s pot laws. Facebook initially accepted ads from the group Just Say Now, running them from August 7 to August 16, generating 38 million impressions and helping the group’s fan page grow to over 6,000 members. But then they were abruptly removed.

Adam Noyes, a spokesman for Facebook, said that the problem was the pot leaf. “It would be fine to note that you were informed by Facebook that the image in question was no long[er] acceptable for use in Facebook ads. The image of a pot leaf is classified with all smoking products and therefore is not acceptable under our policies,” he told the group in an email, which was provided to HuffPost.

Just what kind of devious, subversive ad ran 38 million times on Facebook? See for yourself. These are the ads Facebook saw fit to censor:

Two of the ads say “End the war on marijuana,” asking Facebook users to “Sign the petition to President Obama to support states’ rights to legalize marijuana. Another says “Legalize marijuana” and “It’s time to Just Say now to marijuana legalization. Sign up to show your support.” All three ads use variations of the Just Say Now logo with a pot leaf.

As Ryan Grim notes, we’re not promoting “smoking products.” Facebook’s ad policies specifically prohibit “tobacco products,” and have guidelines for how to advertise alcohol on the site (you can show alcohol products, but can’t encourage intoxication).

We’re not running ads encouraging Facebook users to smoke pot, tobacco, or to drink alcohol. We are clearly advocating for a political issue that will be voted on in Facebook’s home state in less than three months. If we can’t use the most recognizable image to organize supporters in favor of marijuana legalization, it’s essentially like being banned from showing our candidate’s face in an election.

Marijuana legalization isn’t a fringe issue: our campaign has the support of law enforcement like former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper, former Reagan Assistant Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein, and people all across the political spectrum.

Facebook’s censorship of this political issue only advances the failed drug policies of our country by blocking an open discussion of these critical issues. Marijuana legalization on the move, but Facebook wants to block the issue.

Jordan Marks, of the Young America’s Foundation and a member of Just Say Now’s advisory board, summed up Facebook’s censorship best:

“If Facebook censorship policies continue to reflect those of our our government by suppressing freedom of speech then they won’t have to wait until Election Day to be voted obsolete,” said Marks.

Aaron Houston, also of Just Say Now and Students for Sensible Drug Policy, echoed those sentiments:

“Facebook’s business will suffer if they don’t reverse this decision” says Aaron Houston, Executive Director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, whose organization has over 150 chapters on campuses across the country.  “We’re way beyond reefer madness and censorship. Facebook should get with the times.”
Fight back against Facebook’s censorship: sign our petition to Facebook to stop censoring marijuana as political speech.

In addition to fighting back with this petition, we’re going around Facebook by running ads on hundreds of political blogs

Jeff Cosgrove of Common Sense Media placed the ads on blogs from across the political spectrum.  “Blogs from both the right and the left were delighted to accept the ads” says Cosgrove.  The ads will begin running today on sites including:  Reason, The Nation, The New Republic, Human Events, MyDD, Red State, Antiwar, Drug War Rant, The Young Turks, Pam’s House Blend, Stop The Drug War, The Daily Paul,  Lew Rockwell, Think Progress and AmericaBlog.

Many of the nation’s most prominent faith leaders have come together for a campaign called “Stop the War on Prayer” to protect the Park51 mosque, which includes the video above and a new website.

From their open letter:

We believe it is time to shine light on the hypocrisy of politicians and pundits who expound on the freedom of religion for their chosen sects while seeking to tell our Muslim brothers and sisters where they can and cannot worship. Using a political podium to bully a religious community threatens one of our most fundamental freedoms.

The coalition includes Rev. Jim Forbes, Director of the Healing of the Nations Foundation and former pastor of Riverside Church in Manhattan, Rev. Canon Peg Chemberlin, President of the National Council of Churches, Rabbi Burt Visotzky of the Jewish Theological Seminary,  Rev. JC Austin of the Center for Christian leadership and CEO of Sojourners Rev. Jim Wallis.

Their sentiments are echoed today by Ron Paul, who writes:

In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it.

They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill-conceived preventative wars. A select quote from soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq expressing concern over the mosque is pure propaganda and an affront to their bravery and sacrifice.

[]

This is all about hate and Islamaphobia.

The campaign website for Stop the War on Prayer can be found here.

In the waning days of the debate over health care legislation, the White House’s political team did a fairly good job of convincing Democrats in Congress, Washington reporters, and like-minded writers that the act would somehow get a lot more popular after it was actually signed into law. The latest CNN poll (PDF) shows that is not really happening–opinions about the health care law, in general and specific, are little changed.

Currently, only 40 percent favor the new health care law, while 56 percent oppose it. This represents only a modest improvement over late March, when the law polled at 39 percent in favor, 59 percent opposed. The poll has found that opposition to the legislation from the left has remained effectively unchanged. In March, 13 percent opposed the bill for not being liberal enough, which is identical to the 13 percent who currently dislike the law for the same reason.

Interestingly, for every three people who support the new law, there is one individual who opposed it for not being progressive enough. Of the 53 percent of people you could roughly consider to be center-left, a full 25 percent still oppose the act because it failed at being progressive.

Not only have overall opinions about the law changed little since March, support for several individual components are almost the same now as they were in February. Currently, 59 percent favor preventing insurance companies from dropping people who become ill, while back in February, the poll found 62 percent favored that provision. Fifty-eight percent of Americans today favor a provision to prevent insurers from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions, identical to the number back in February

The heath care fight was one of the longest and most heavily debated legislative battles in decades. It gave people plenty of time to form firm opinions about the law, and, not surprisingly (to me, at least), the opinions didn’t change simply because the bill passed. Democrats hoping time would magically make the law popular are out of luck. Of course, if the law actually started directly doing something for millions of Americans, I could see that moving opinions, but, in their infinite wisdom, Democrats delayed almost all benefits until 2014. Somehow, Democrats convinced themselves helping people with health care during the greatest economic downturn in decades was nowhere near as important as a pretty CBO score.

Recently, the 15,000 member strong National Black Police Association endorsed Proposition 19, the California ballot initiative that proposes to legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana. Neill Franklin, the executive director Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and a retired African American police officer with over 30 years of experience in law enforcement appeared on MSNBC to discuss the endorsement.

Franklin summed up the biggest problem with our war on marijuana in one word: “Violence.” Explaining why he and other police offices supports marijuana legalization:

Primarily, violence in this country. The cartels are now in over 200 cities in our country–with that comes violence. We have our neighborhood gangs–with that comes violence. And it is all attributed to prohibition of drugs in this country. And in order to eliminate that violence and harm we have to end our war on drugs.

The money from illegal drugs has been providing a large and dependable financial pipeline to violent criminal organizations including American gangs and international drug cartels. In the last several years, the drug cartels in Mexico have killed over 28,000 people. By legalizing marijuana, it would deprive these criminal enterprises of a huge source of their funding.

Franklin pointed out that roughly three-quarters of all Americans think our current drug policy has failed, and now is the time for a debate about a new direction at both the state and federal level.

The problem with our war on marijuana isn’t limited to violence. It is a waste of resources that could be better spent elsewhere, and the enforcement of our marijuana laws has always been disproportionately detrimental and unfair to African Americans. As Ron Hampton, the executive director of the National Black Police Association, explained when laying out reasons for their endorsement of Prop 19 (via the LA Times):

“It means that we will be locking up less African American men and women and children who are using drugs,” said Hampton, a retired Washington, D.C., police officer with 25 years experience. “We’ve got more people in prison. We’ve got more young people in prison. Blacks go to jail more than whites for doing the same thing.”

Hampton said that the money being spent on the war on drugs could be better spent on education, housing and creating jobs. “It just seemed like to me that we have been distracted in this whole thing,” he said. “We can take that money, and focus and concentrate on things that really make a difference in our community.”

I can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that prominent “liberals” are pooh-poohing an end to marijuana prohibition, but I guess it was progressive energy that put alcohol prohibition over the top too.

Anyway, this morning Rolling Stone Executive Editor Eric Bates discussed Ari Berman’s latest article on marijuana legalization, appropriately entitled “Just Say Now” (catchy, isn’t it?) Maria Bartiromo notes that the CNBC special on legalization was their highest rated show. Ever.

Lawrence O’Donnell doesn’t have to worry about ratings…for now. His new show debuts in September.

I guess that leaves Cenk Uygur to scoop up the enormous, young audience who enthusiastically support an end to prohibition, and O’Donnell can arm-wrestle Bill-O for the alter kockers.

Gary Johnson, the Republican former governor of New Mexico, was on MSNBC with Cenk Uygur to talk about the need to end marijuana prohibition.  He knocked it out of the park:

CENK: Governor, should we legalize it?

JOHNSON: We should legalize marijuana.  I think that 90% of the drug problem is prohibition related, not use related. And when I talk about legalizing marijuana, it’s never going to be legal for kids to smoke marijuana, it’s never going to be legal to smoke pot, become impaired and get behind the wheel of a car.  I think we should make the same comparisons to alcohol that exist with marijuana, and regarding all the other drugs I would suggest that we adopt harm reduction strategies, which is looking at the issue first as a health issue rather than a criminal justice issue.

>Half of what we spend on law enforcement, the courts and the prisoins is drug related.  And what are we getting for all of that? Well, we’re arresting 1.8 million people a year in this country on drug related crime.

CENK:  But governor, the issue seems to be that if the Democrats ever proposed this, the Republicans would demagogue it, honestly.  Is that false, or is there any way that might change?

JOHNSON:  No, that’s not my experience. My experience is this is not a party issue.  It’s an issue with everybody who’s in elected office.  Everyone who’s in elected office won’t touch this, it’s the Emperor that has no clothes, and nobody wants to touch it.  But I think the people are way ahead on this.  And of course it’s on the ballot in California to legalize it this fall — control it, regulate it, tax it.

Pew Foundation estimated that the price of marijuana would drop from $380 to $38 an ounce with a 50% tax on that.  So I look at this from a cost benefit analysis.  What are we spending and what are we getting?

And of course there is the human toll involved in this.  The situation with drug abuse is that it’s always made worse because it’s criminal.

CENK:  So how do we get the politicians to flip?  Because you’re right, the whole country’s getting there…California’s there, many other states are beginning that process, but we can’t just move the politicians. Look prohibition didn’t work for alcohol, and we realized that fairly quickly and we changed that. Now we have this mindset that if we’re going down the wrong path, we have to stay there. How do we change that?

JOHNSON:  You know what, I think the issue is at a tipping point.  During the last election, Massachusetts voted to decriminalize pot by a vote of 65% to 35%. I’ve smoked marijuana, I’ve drank alcohol in my life.  I don’t do either today, but I will tell you from experience that marijuana is safer than alcohol.  Citizens of Denver got to vote on decriminalizing marijuana on the basis of marijuana being safer than alcohol.  Six hundred thousand Denver citizens agree with me on that one.

So I think that it is at a tipping point.  People are ahead of the politicians on this one, and it’s still going to happen.  It’s going to happen.  I think statistically  we’re about two and a half years from 50% of Americans actually understanding this. From my own experience, it’s really thin ice.  That with just a little bit of knowledge on this issue, people seem to move on this issue.  People seem to be embracing this notion of “gee it’s not working, we really have to do something different.”

CENK:  It’s really good to see former politicians getting on board for that, Republicans etc.  So thank you for joining us, we really appreciate the conversation.

JOHNSON:  Well I’ll just tell you too — in office I espoused this.  I looked at it hard in 1999 and really came to this conclusion while in office, trying to implement this change then.

Contrast that with:

Last week’s surprise statement by former Mexican President Vicente Fox in support of “legalizing production, sales and distribution” of drugs made big headlines around the world.
[]
Fox’s statement, first published Saturday in his blog, went far beyond a 2009 joint declaration by former Presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Cesar Gaviria of Colombia. In that statement, the three former leaders questioned the effectiveness of the U.S. war on drugs and proposed de-criminalizing possession of marijuana for personal use.
[]
In a separate interview, White House drug czar R. Gil Kerlikowske told me that drug legalization is a “non-starter” in the Obama administration.
Kerlikowske disputed the idea that alcohol prohibition drove up crime in the United States in the 1920s, arguing that there were no reliable crime statistics at the time.

After Obama took office, the transition team took three polls on its website about which issues were most important to Obama’s supporters.  Marijuana reform won all three.  And a recent Colorado poll by AmericaVotes indicates that 45% of Obama 2008 “surge” voters say they are more likely to vote if marijuana legalization is on the ballot.

It’s always mystified me that in the wake of that kind of intense support for legalization from one of his key electoral constituencies, Obama has always been pretty dismissive of the whole issue.

In 2004 Obama supported decriminalization, but in early 2008 “reversed course and declared he does not support eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana possession and use.”  In 2009 the Justice Department issued a directive not to “waste resources” by raiding medical marijuana dispensaries and growers that were operating legally, but Obama’s DEA appointee Michele Leonhart has been splitting hairs right and left and finding ways to ignore it.

It’s no mystery, however, that Gary Johnson has an eye on the 2012 presidential election.  Conor Friesdorf, subbing for Andrew Sullivan, says Johnson is  “a man who deserves to be viable in 2012. And Ron Paul says that if he doesn’t run in 2012, he could see himself supporting Johnson.

Johnson is a strong libertarian who says that “we should not be in either Iraq or Afghanistan.” He supports abortion rights, gay marriage and would have vetoed Arizona’s SB 1070.

Johnson has been touring the country, appearing on shows like the Colbert Report speaking in favor of legalization.  And unless I miss my guess, courting one of Obama’s key constituencies: young voters.