Washington, DC - Last week we witnessed the capo di tutti capi of political and policy evolution. President Barack Obama, after Vice-President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Arne Duncan played the role of his social-issue Shofar, came out in favour of the equality of marriage for all in the US, regardless of sexual orientation. To put it in simple terms: for the first time in the history of this country, the president of the United States supports gay marriage.

This is obviously a big moment. For those seeking to enter loving relationships recognised by law, nothing has changed in that realm. But culturally, when the president or other major political figures make strong statements on issues, it changes everything. To quote Republican House Leader Shelley Runyon in the film The Contender: "What I say, the American people will believe. And do you know why? Because I will have a very big microphone in front of me."

Towards the beginning of the cult classic Dazed & Confused, a high school senior named Slater, inquires of baby-faced freshman Mitch, "are you cool?" What Slater was really asking--in this ode to 1970s youth and the counterculture--was do you smoke pot?

Ahh the 70s. Back before the Reagan Revolution kicked the kooky, corrupt and thoroughly counterproductive War On Drugs into high gear. Suddenly this country lost its collective mind, suffering a lapse in judgment that vaunted well past ill-advised and just beyond "they have weapons of mass destruction" to what might best be labeled "the mind of Ted Nugent."

Rick Santorum has finally sauntered off the big stage, leaving him with plenty of time on his hands to harass high-school girls about their skirt length and bark at the moon about its nocturnal promiscuity.

You'd think it would be high times for Team Romney. But you'd be wrong.

What once seemed like it would be the GOP's race to lose, or at the very least a spirited general election contest, has seen Mitt Romney and what remained of his party's brand deconstructed and defenstrated. To put it in Yogi-Berra parlance, for the Romney Campaign,"it got late early out there."

Sure Santorum is technically gone, but he'll be with Romney for the rest of this race. Every time the former Massachusetts Governor has to answer to independent women in the Milwaukee or Philadelphia suburbs about why he'd "get rid" of Planned Parenthood," and explain to Latino families in Las Vegas and Phoenix why he'd "veto" the Dream Act, the ever-cherubic apparition of Santorum will be smiling gaily over his shoulder.

There was a time when there were statesmen among the GOP's elected and appointed officials. Men of academic and intellectual accomplishment, such as Dwight Eisenhower, Earl Warren, Nelson Rockefeller and yes, George H.W. Bush. Men and women who didn't brag about not having a passport (the estimable Dick Armey), misunderstand how birth control works or think French kissing was invented in Gaul.

Those were the days.

For the past generation, Republican leaders, talk-show hosts and elected officials have made it their mission to mock anyone of serious intellectual import (liberal elitist!), attack the professional class and wonder aloud about proven science on about as constant a loop as Sex In The City reruns on E!. They have fed at the trough of what the late historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed Anti-intellectualism In American Life.

In 2005, when Florida was considering its insane stand-your-ground-or-perhaps-chase-down-an-innocent-black-teenager-and-shoot-him law, state senator Dan Gelber was a voice of reason. Gelber, when asked what he thought of legislation that would transmogrify many a heat-packing Floridian into a juiced-up Judge Dredd, posed some questions of his own.

When you think someone "looks at your wife" the wrong way or "spills coffee on you," should the message be "to walk away or do we tell them that you're supposed to stand your ground and fight to the death?" According to NRA troll/super-lobbyist Marion Hammer, the supposedly smart Bush who was governor at the time (Jeb) and state senator Dennis Baxley--a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who likes racial slurs in state songs and wants to remember The great Lost Cause on license plates--the answer was of course shoot. To kill.

Earlier this week it happened again. We don't know all the details, but what we do know is this. A young man named T.J. Lane walked into high school--here in my home state of Ohio--approached a table full of kids and started shooting.

By the time the smoke cleared, three kids were dead. Three tragedies of unfulfilled dreams, unrealized potential, and abrogated Constitutional rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," their "general welfare" not protected by the state. More accurately, sacrificed on the altar of the arm's industry's puffery and profit-driven deceit.

Great piece by Sara Robinson, who is running the joint at the newly minted AlterNet Visions (which I am excited to be helping promote). You want to get to a progressive future, Sara and Visions are a must read.

I'm involved with a great new piece of progressive infrastructure, We Act Radio, which has finally brought progressive radio back to DC. We just launched, so I humbly ask that you please help us keep it growing by going and checking out our lineup, featuring syndicated mainstays as well as our own produced shows, such as that of Emmy Award winning newsman David Shuster. Thanks :).

Mitt Romney, tribune of the people, still doesn't seem to get a simple concept: Social Security is popular. With everybody. And particularly with older tea-party-supporting white voters who can often be counted on to be conservative on numerous other issues, and turn out in elections in key swing states.

It's pretty simple, really. It is perhaps the most successful government program ever, is the largest insurance program for children, and seniors benefiting from their earned benefits during their golden years are rather hesitant to lay it down on the altar of Mitt's very own Golden Calf -- Wall Street. Quelle surprise, as Mitt would have said during his tour as a Mormon missionary in France.

...I think we can all (hopefully) get behind.

PS I work with Mayors Against Illegal Guns. And the ad is still funny :)

Some of you may be aware of what happened on January 12th. It is a date I think will be remembered as important in the evolution & improvement of the Internet. On that day, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)--who I am helping educate people about the changes occurring--opened the application process for generic top level domains, or gTLDS.

It is a step that I think will help foster innovation and create opportunity, in a number of ways.

As an FYI, for those not aware of what this all means, let me take a step back. The first "general purpose domains" were introduced in October of 1984, including those you know quite well, .com, .org, and .net. But now, this is going to greatly expand.

You wanna know all there is to know about social media--you simply must buy John Hlinko's book (the guy that started Draft Wes Clark and used the Internet to create a serious political candidate). The dude will teach you all there is to know--highly recommended!

It is important that today, one year after the tragedy at Tucson, we remember those who were senselessly slaughtered there, including a 9-year old girl. It is important that we honor them by doing all we can to make sure this kind of thing never happens again, by making it at least a bit harder for criminals, terrorists and the mentally ill to get their hands on weapons that can kill in a heartbeat.

We must always respect our Bill of Rights, but we must also remember

As those who read my writing know, I am an advocate for more transparency in government (to put it mildly). I've worked on a number of these efforts, such as City Forward, The Smarter Cities Challenge, and others such as the effort to track where stimulus funds were actually being spent back in 2009.

Along these lines, I found this late November interview by IBM's John Reinhardt of Julie McCarthy at The Open Government Partnership--a new initiative designed to promote open and accountable government--to be fascinating. So I figured I'd share it with you:

Lock the doors. Pull down the shades. Bring in the exorcist, stat.

As I write this, my humble abode is being transformed into a puppet-occupied den of anti-democratic sin. Yes, my kids are watching the Muppets, with some newly-discovered zeal since the theatrical release of the film by the same name.

That is only part of the agenda, of course. Upon finishing and chowing down on some premium Borscht and Beluga, the plan is a mixture of Marxian performance art, Che Guevara hat fitting & then the coupe de grace (that's right, I used the language of the land of non-freedom fries!), finger painting images of Fidel Castro throughout the house in cigar-ash.

Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney--the perfect dynamic duo for our times, if not end times.
A Batman and Robin for the 1%. Defenders of truth, justice, and a Gulag Archipelago filled with child janitors and the fandango of the foreclosed.

If you're rooting for President Obama, or just plain enjoy the guilty pleasure of watching a Real Housewives of the Neo-Confederacy, your dream contest has arrived. Even

The very first political column I wrote was Thanksgiving, 1997, my first year in graduate school. Since that time it’s become a tradition for me. Each year, I try and put pen to paper–or fingers to keyboard–and give thanks to for the good, the bad, and The Herman Cain talking about Libya.

So here is my list--albeit a bit late this year:

Thanks to Charlie Sheen for just being awesome.

Thanks to Michelle Bachmann’s eyes for their, um, sparkle.

Thanks to The GOP Presidential Primary for swinging back and forth faster than Nick Nolte driving a San Francisco party bus down Lombard Street.

In May of 2009, as President Barack Obama prepared to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, he let something terrible slip--something that could threaten the very fabric of our civilization! He would try and pick a new judge for our highest court that possessed "empathy," or the ability to identify “with people’s hopes and struggles” when making decisions that would intimately affect their lives.

In other words, slightly different than how Justice Clarence Thomas does it, which generally involves applying lessons learned from all-expenses covered, first-class corporate speaking gigs and serial viewing of the wacky antics of Long Dong Silver.

He of course is at a fundraiser, and Alex Lawson and other protesters simply wanna know why he won't make the 1% pay their fare share and wants to gut SS, Medicare, and pretty much any other program that helps people.

Yesterday, Congress began to look into how we can take some common-sense steps to curb the sales of firearms to criminals those mentally unfit for firearms ownership. The Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism held hearings on the Fix Gun Checks Act – a product of a nationwide, grassroots campaign led by Mayors Against Illegal Guns (for whom I consult) and Omar Samaha, whose sister was murdered at Virginia Tech in 2007.

So what do you do when financial analysts are warning that housing prices are headed for a "triple dip", the second largest Swiss Bank (Credit Suisse) announces it's piling 1,500 additional job cuts - many from the US - on top of its previously announced 2,000 (after a 12 per cent increase in profits this past quarter) and the federal government just sued one of the nation's largest privately held mortgage brokers (Allied Home Mortgage) for a decade of "fraudulent lending practices that forced thousands of Americans to lose their homes".

From Presente.org

On Tuesday, October 18th, White House official Cecilia Muñoz defended the Obama administration’s failed immigration policies and misrepresented the facts behind dangerous programs like S-COMM.

As the former vice president at the National Council of La Raza, Ms. Muñoz used to be a champion for immigrant rights. Now she is the main defender of failed programs like S-COMM that are responsible for the inhumane incarceration of hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

Can you join us in sending a message that we want our advocate back? Sign our petition asking Ms. Muñoz to set the record straight and denounce S-COMM.

Although when it comes to the specific date of our mass death, Harold Camping might as well be talking Chinese nuclear development with Herman Cain, it seems a little bit harder to doubt his general prognostication of doom in the weeks after 56 exotic animals were released into the countryside by the owner of a "private zoo" in Ohio.

Just before he shot himself to death.

If you don't know the whole story by now, to quickly summarize: In a scene that Director Emeritus of the Columbus, Ohio Zoo and television personality Jack Hanna compared to "Noah's Ark", endangered Bengal tigers, grizzly bears, monkeys, and a variety of other animals - 49 in all - were killed en masse by law enforcement.

By Lowell Feld & Cliff Schecter

Remember how much coverage the national progressive blogosphere gave the Anthony Weiner special election in NY-09 a few weeks ago? A great deal! How about the New York 23rd Congressional District special election? Again, this one got enormous coverage in the national progressive blogosphere. Or, we can go back to 2005, when the "Mean Jean" Schmidt vs. Paul Hackett special election for Congress from Ohio's 2nd district got wall-to-wall coverage in the national progressive blogosphere.

Whether it's the bronze bull encountered by those occupying Wall Street, the fixation with a Chris Christie presidency not to be, or the ex post facto transformation of Ronald Reagan into Kratos by middle-aged Republican Congresspersons who practically start to giggle and spontaneously pulsate just upon hearing his name, there is one thing you can expect to encounter a lot of on the right side of the political spectrum these days: Golden Calves.

Sure, that Bible thing conservatives claim to have read and revere strictly admonishes those who take to idolatry. But then again, it also doesn't wish death upon 30-year-olds because they lack health insurance or a poorly conceived bowl-cut by a former Speaker of the House who's running just about even with the hantavirus in Republican presidential polling.