They’ve targeted bottled water and the selling of all kinds of pets, er, “animal companions.” And now, with the soda scold who’s yanking sugary beverages from vending machines, the City by the Bay pulls off the first-ever Nanny of the Month trifecta!

Presenting Reason.tv’s Nanny of the Month for July 2010: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom!

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Cameras are everywhere today: In convenience stores, at intersections, the workplace, your computer, your cellphone, ATM machines. There’s even been a camera in news anchor Katie Couric.

Yet there’s one place cameras have never been allowed: The U.S. Supreme Court. Just what are Supreme Court justices hiding beneath their robes that they continue to say no to cameras in their courtroom?

For decades the White House and Congress have opened their public business to television cameras, but the judicial branch has remained staunchly against the practice. As C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb tells Reason.tv, the justices have rebuffed every attempt to videotape the oral arguments phase of Supreme Court proceedings. On this, an often-divided court remains unanimous, even if the arguments offered up Justices Scalia, Breyer, Thomas, Kennedy, and others remain even weaker than the majority’s logic in their awful Kelo decision, which legitimated eminent domain abuse.

Both Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan have spoken in favor of cameras in the Supreme Court. Can a new batch of justices, more attune to the benefits of transparency, finally change things for the better?

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Something ominous is happening within the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama will soon have to start paying attention. For weeks now, James Carville has been railing against the Obama administration’s handling of the oil spill in the Gulf. On Tuesday, Ed Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania, added further fuel to the flames by issuing a warning. If Obama did not start pulling troops out of Afghanistan in July, 2011 as promised, he predicted that there would be a political insurrection within the party and that the President might face a primary challenge. It is in no way surprising that the Republicans have revived Hillary Clinton’s famous “3 a.m.” political advertisement and have given it a new spin, for they smell blood in the water. “Hillary was right,” they say. After the oil spill, the proverbial telephone rang and rang and rang, and the President . . . golfed, partied with celebrities, and went on vacation again and again.

Carville and Rendell have this in common. They are Democrats; they are fiercely partisan; and they were strong supporters of Hillary Clinton during the primaries back in 2008. Their maneuvers should perhaps be read in light of an op-ed piece that Leslie Gelb published in The Wall Street Journal back in the middle of June, suggesting that, when Robert Gates retires, Hillary be made the first female Secretary of Defense; that, in 2012, she be put on the ticket in place of Joe Biden; and that Biden be awarded the booby prize and be named Secretary of State.

I have no idea whether Gelb ran his piece past the Clintons before publishing it. But I would not be surprised. He, too, is a restless, frustrated, critical Democrat on the outs, and the scenario that he paints is by no means ridiculous. Joe Biden is not an asset, and Barack Obama views him with obvious disdain. Bill Clinton is a talented campaigner and a master in the art of staging comebacks, and in 2012 Hillary might be able to turn out a host of white women to vote for Obama who would otherwise sit on their hands.

As it happens, on Saturday, President Obama will have a priceless opportunity that he would be ill-advised to pass up. On that fateful day, in Rhinebeck, New York, on the estate of John Jacob Astor IV, if the rumors are borne out, Chelsea Clinton will marry Marc Mezvinsky in the presence of 400 of their parents’ best friends. And, although Bill Clinton is not a Sicilian, he would certainly be hard-pressed on so auspicious a day to deny anyone who asked of him a favor – least of all a sitting President of the United States who came to him, saying, May their first child be a masculine child!

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When I was a kid, the only time I was allowed to say “bad words” was when I was tattling on someone else (usually my older brother or sister), such as “Mommy Paul said F**K.” These days it has become easier to tattle, the bad curse word simply became a letter, the “F” word.

Somewhere around the OJ trial, that horrible word nigger became the “N” word, and unless it is being used in by an African American comedian, it gets bleeped out when someone says it on TV or radio. On those crazy Mel Gibson tapes that have been unearthed during the past few weeks every other word is bleeped out because of his liberal use of the “F” and “N” words.

Some people believe that things have gone too far, this “F” and “N” word business an example political correctness gone too far. I say nay, nay we have not gone far enough.

“F” and “N” are only two of the 26 letters in the alphabet, what about the other 24 letters, let’s face it they must be feeling left out. So in honor of a society where some people say the scientific term “black hole” is racist, allow me to suggest it would be helpful to have a guide to all 26 letters of the alphabet. So after some consultation with the President’s word Czar NY Times Columnist Frank Rich, these are the words that we will no longer be able to say completely we will only be able to describe by letter:

• “A” Word- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obama is going to give him one more chance (again).

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At  Washington D.C. news conference, held at the Offices of the Center for American Progress,  archeologists working for the Smithsonian Institution have announced an incredible discovery, a revised copy of the U.S Constitution dated 1790. This document was passed by the original 13 States with the intention of  supplanting the version  ratified in 1788. The Chief Archeologist on the project called the document “the Dead Potomac River Scrolls,” because they were found in a previously unknown cave on the bank of the Potomac.

According to the scientists, a 13-year-old boy named Zach Emanuel was walking his dog near the river, threw a stick and and heard some glass shatter. He followed the noise into the cave and found the document amongst some broken beer bottles left over from some ancient beer summit. Scientists determined  the cave was once occupied by some ancient cult of prognosticators. Also found in the cave was and old mens-style  tutu and some leftover yarmulkes from Rahm Emanuel’s Bar Mitzvah.

The cult known in history books as the Progressenes, wrote the document in English and it begins with an amazingly prophetic preamble,

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a Union even more perfecter than we did two years ago, do ordain and establish this brand spanking new Constitution for the United States of America recognizing that the document approved in 1788 forgot to talk about social justice.

The over-all document is very similar to the Constitution passed in 1788, it just adds a few things:

• Under the census provision it adds, “if a large group of foreign nationals come into the country illegally, they are to be counted in the census as not to appear racist.”

• The executive branch articles include a provision that says, “The President is to enforce all laws equally except in the case of radical organizations such as the New Black Panthers or other African American organizations trying to intimidate voters from voting the wrong way. Housing organizations that commit voter fraud by registering illegible voters multiple times, cartoon characters, or the deceased are not to be prosecuted, as long as they are named after the seed of an oak tree.”

It is quite amazing the way these Progressenes were able to see into the future.

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Reason.tv presents Citizens Against Government Waste’s Porker of the Month for June 2010. CAGW makes this award to a politician or special interest who takes pork-barrel spending to new heights.

This month’s winner is Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)!

The Constellation Program was intended to modernize NASA and replace the aging Space Shuttle, but has been plagued by cost overruns and blown deadlines.  President Obama and NASA have proposed canceling the unsustainable program—turning instead to the emerging private space industry to oversee launches.

In response, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) co-sponsored a measure protecting Constellation, which was attached to an emergency war funding bill. Such a measure ensures millions of taxpayer dollars will continue being funneled to politically connected NASA contractors.

Contractors like Alabama’s own Radiance Technologies, which—wouldn’t you know it—just happens to be one of Shelby’s biggest campaign contributors.

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Well here we are in the middle of the worst economy in almost a century, wars on two fronts, and a monster oil spill turning our southern coast into asphalt. And what is Congress busy on? Solving gender discrimination in restrooms.

Last month, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings on the Restroom Gender Parity in Federal Buildings Act (H.R. 4869). If ever there has been an argument against a full time legislature, this was it; apparently our Legislature has  far too much time to kill.

It comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever seen the line outside the women’s room at a sporting event, or waited in a movie lobby with the other guys: women take longer in the restroom than men.

Rep. Elijah Cummings claimed that women are treated as second-class citizens. In the facilities I’ve seen, that is clearly it is not the case. Women’s facilities are always better. (Do women think we have sports bars in there?) Sometimes we don’t even have “toilets” just a wall with a drain at the bottom.

To hear some of America’s brightest minds discuss the situation you would think it’s a patriarchal plot to hold women down, by refusing to install adequate facilities in Federal buildings. That way when important bills are being voted on, women legislators would be waiting in line at the restrooms.

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President Barack Obama made news on The Today Show when he talked about kicking some ass over the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

If he is interested in punishing those responsible for what is shaping up as one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, he should think about giving himself a boot.

While BP is ultimately responsible for the spill (and for cleaning it up), the federal government is a major player in the problem for at least three reasons:

1. It owns the property on which the oil well is located.

2. It regulates offshore drilling. And

3. In order to protect small players in the drilling industry, it capped economic damages from this sort of spill at just $75 million, a way-too-low cap that encourages risky behavior.

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At the same time Gallup has released numbers that Americans believe the country’s moral outlook is bleak, another D.C. type has been taken down by sex — or, more accurately, the hypocrisy of having sex when running on moral rectitude. The Washington Examiner’s inimitable Nate Beeler has a humorous cartoon running right now:

Of course, the seemingly endless cavalcade of polticians caught in flagrante delecto isn’t the capital’s only love affair with cross-dressing politics in tones of morality. It’s almost always the moralists who will try to ruin the lives of others by claims of moral failure, right before their own lingerie-covered skeletons come tumbling out of the closet.

This is especially a concern for advocates of limited government, and it forces a tough moment to recognize that we have to defend our values through logic, rather than through the law. Many in Washington love to demand government that is just small enough to fit under the doorway of our bedrooms. Take, for instance, the Department of Justice prosecution persecution in D.C. this summer against a mainstream pornographer. Reason has the story:

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Most of you know Jon David from his famous Big Hollywood “My Date With a Liberal” series that debuted not long after the site launched. After the Tea Party movement caught fire, so did Jon’s “American Heart,” which also had its premiere right here.

My congratulations to our friend Mr. Kahn who set an example for all of us with his willingness to throw off those shades and fight the good fight. There are right-of-center “sleeper agents” like Jon all over Hollywood. He is not alone. And when others throw off the shades and declare themselves the movement to reclaim a piece of the Hollywood/pop culture pie for pro-American and pro-liberty ideas and ideals can only grow stronger.

Jon is proof that you are not alone. It’s time to activate yourselves. Join the fight.

Or, as Robert Davi memorably put it, “After all we’re only talking about saving our country.”

The Wall Street Journal: