Here’s a snippet from the official announcement from Barr (read the whole thing, chock full of unfiltered unelectable hilarity, that goes on and on and on and on):

My Platform is Three fold, and will result in world peace within one year:
STEP ONE: MAKE WAR ILLEGAL, AND LEGALIZE HEMP
allow women to grow it and to make food clothing shelter and fuel from it for pennies. And legalize marijuana too, and let women integrate their divided consciousness with a natural herb instead of doctor’s pills which destroy the liver. End the War on drugs. this will take the potheads and non-violent drug users out of prisons, where you can get drugs anyway, thereby making room for the violent offenders and the real criminals–the actual threats to world peace.

STEP TWO: CHANGE THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF GOVERNMENT:
Since women make up 53% of the population, as well as the work force, a MINIMUM of Green Tea Party leadership will be female, and given that one in six Americans lives in poverty, at least one sixth of the party’s officials will officially be poor (since generations of rich guys running things has only gotten us here). As Congress people and senators, they will be able to become rich enough to eradicate their own poverty for generations, as well as that of those they represent simply by having access to public policy that decides where public money goes. They will simply direct public money TO THE PUBLIC, a novel idea and something which is not being done at all, ever. A small grant of 1500 dollars can enable a poor woman to start a business that can create wealth and jobs for as many as ten other people within two years.
Poor women know how to get things done well, and on the cheap. They know how to stretch that dollar.

In American, for speaking truth, women are called Bitches. I seek for next Mother’s Day, a march of One Million American Bitches who can get the job done–the job of getting the food to the hungry kids in this country and thereby creating real wealth, as well as saving our rich American friends and neighbors from going straight to hell and burning there for all of eternity. This is just one of my righteous spiritual goals and solutions to the real problems in America!

STEP THREE: (MOST IMPORTANT) I WILL OUTLAW BULLSHIT:
After the passage of this one law, the Patriarchy will inevitably begin to crumble, as will the concept of War itself, which is largely a large load of bullshit.

There’s a LOT more, including “THE NECESSARY RE-EDUCATION CAMPS” that do not sound very fun, or even slightly constitutional.

Worth an estimated $42 million according to a November TMZ article about some legal mess, I can easily see Barr making for an interesting campaign sideshow in the coming weeks if she has a savvy political/press team already fired up. She’s already put marijuana legalization at the forefront of her campaign and taken at least one nasty swipe at Ron Paul (and several at libertarians) on her twitter account:

The 2012 Green Party convention will take place in Baltimore, Maryland in July.

So what do you think, America? Is is good to see a longtime political critic emerge from Hollywood to help split the left-wingers without a clue away from Obama come November? Or will the media hyenas move in for the predictable commentary overkill on her waist size, and to ask her just how much of the green she’s been smoking recently?

The bizarre controversy revolves around the FDA’s attempt to regulate the Centeno-Schultz Clinic in Colorado that performs a nonsurgical stem-cell therapy called Regenexx-C. It is designed to treat moderate to severe joint, tendon, ligament, and bone pain using only adult stem cells. Doctors draw your blood, spin it through a centrifuge, extract the stem cells and re-inject them into your damaged joints. It uses no other drugs. No drugs means no FDA oversight and that does not sit well with the administration.

Paul Krugman is a very smart man. He has won the Nobel prize in economics for work on impressive sounding stuff like economic geography, and liquidity traps. He is also an opinion journalist for the New York Times. He comments from a proudly progressive perspective, and does so very successfully. The topics he covers include the causes of the financial collapse, inequality, the national debt and much, much more. His arguments are quickly recycled in discussions across the land, both electronic and personal. The problem is, when he weighs in on topics outside of his particular branch of alchemy, he is almost always wrong. This is infuriating because his work is taken as gospel by many otherwise intelligent people. Therefore, I’ve decided to start this series. It is perhaps presumptuous of me to try to take on the Krugster, but hey, if I wasn’t into Quixotic pursuits I wouldn’t be writing opinion pieces on the internet.

Here goes…

Last month Krugman released a column entitled “Nobody Understands Debt“. The column adds nothing to understanding. The message is that the national debt is no big deal, and we should be spending more to deal with unemployment. This is absurd. Thankfully, He provides all the ammunition we need to prove him wrong in the column. He says governments can happily live with high levels of debt pointing out that “Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years.” He links to an older post with a helpful graphic, reproduced above. He “marvels” at how over-blown our current “debt panic” is.

With this particular post Krugman is either entirely ignorant of history, or just lying to his readers. Britain got away with its first period of massive debt because as first movers in the industrial revolution and victors in the Napoleonic wars they had a financial and military hegemony we can’t imagine. The US got closest to that kind of dominance after the second world war, which is the other period of high debt to GDP he references in the opinion piece. In each of their respective periods of victory, Britain and the US moved quickly to pay off their debts. In the second period of massive debt, Britain had to ration food for a full decade after World War II. With the Suez Crisis of 1956, Britain’s debt ended the country’s ability to act independently on the world stage in the most humiliating way possible. Krugman’s “Massive Debt’s just fine!” message is completely disproved by his own example. My sense is that he knows this, but doesn’t care.

Krugman makes much of the fact that we hold a lot of our own debt. This can cut both ways, however. We are not as insulated as he portrays us, but if we were we would have little incentive to clean up our fiscal act. This is not a good thing. Unsurprisingly, Krugman doesn’t bring up the most sterling (yen-ish?) example of an excessive debt-to-GDP ratio maintained by patriotic savers. The current Japanese ratio is over 200%

High savings were sustainable when the population was younger, wealthy, and growing. Instead, Japan is old, stagnant and saving less every year. That investors have repeatedly failed to short Japanese debt since the early 1990s doesn’t mean that Japanese debt is a good bet tomorrow. The country will eventually find itself in a financial catastrophe when the public stops lending money at floor-scraping 1.5 percent rates. Consider this alarming fact: If its interest rates doubled to 3 percent, interest payments would suddenly consume half of government revenue.

Japan may be able to continue like this for a while because 95% of their debt is held by patriotic locals. Nobody else wants it, for obvious reasons. Almost 50% of US debt is held by foreign investors. Ironically, the mess we’ve made of the international economy has been helpful over the past couple years. US government debt is still seen as a slightly better bet than everything else. The problem that Krugman doesn’t acknowledge is that it is an only slightly better bet, and that this won’t last.

Too sum up, Britain and the US were able to withstand excessive debt to GDP ratios after the Napoleonic Wars and after World War II. They were able to do this because they had bombed all their potential financial rivals into rubble. Europe today is in fiscal disarray, but it is not a smoking ruin. If Europe doesn’t fall apart, it will emerge as a tighter, more stable fiscal union, under stronger German influence. It will emerge as a ferocious competitor as a reserve currency and as a destination of international investment. When less people want our debt, the sky-rocketing interest rates Krugman laughs about in the beginning of the opinion piece will be a reality.

Debt matters. With this column Krugman ignores Europe. He ignores Japan. He ignores the history surrounding his own data sets. Either Krugman doesn’t understand debt, or he just doesn’t want you to. Paul Krugman is either dumb or lying.

Rob Morris likes the drug war even less than he likes Paul Krugman’s commentary, and he talks about it here.

The Speaker comes here to Florida, wants to spend untold amount of money having a colony on the moon. I know it’s very exciting on the Space Coast. In South Carolina, it was a new interstate highway, and dredging the port in Charleston. In New Hampshire, it was burying a power line coming in from Canada and building a new VA hospital in New Hampshire so that people don’t have to go to Boston. Look, this idea of going state to state and promising what people want to hear, promising billions, hundreds of billions of dollars to make people happy, that’s what got us into the trouble we’re in now.

No kidding. Is this the same Mitt Romney who went to the Iowa cornfields last year, plighting his troth to subsidies for ethanol? “I support the subsidy of ethanol,” he said. “I believe ethanol is an important part of our energy solution for this country.” That was in May. By October he was saying, “I’ve indicated I didn’t think the subsidy had to go on forever.”The subsidies would expire in December, but “I might have looked at more of a decline over time,” Romney said, because of “the importance of ethanol as a domestic fuel.”

Double oof!

A petition being circulated by the Solidarity Center [PDF] states, “Iran has suffered greatly at the hands of the U.S. We recall the U.S. overthrew the democratically elected government of Dr. M. Mossadegh and returned the Shah to the Peacock Throne – ‘the proudest achievement of the CIA’. For 25 years the Shah ruled Iran with an iron fist for the benefit of U.S. oil corporations before the people of Iran, in the millions, overthrew his tyranny at a terrible cost in lives. For the past 27 years U.S. sanctions have impeded Iran’s right to development and brought great suffering to the people.”

Do not forget the rush to invade Iraq after the attacks on September 11, 2001. In October of 2002, President Bush said, “… we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

“Now in the Obama Administration, we see reports that are all too similar being made to justify military action against the people of Iran.” The petition by the Solidarity Center continues, “taking Iran to the UN Security Council is a prelude for unilateral action. Just as in the case of Iraq, none of the claims made by the U.S. government stand up to unbiased scrutiny.”

During the recent State of the Union address, President Obama seemed intent on continuing to involve the American government in Iran. He said, “and we will safeguard America’s own security against those who threaten our citizens, our friends, and our interests. Look at Iran. Through the power of our diplomacy, a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program now stands as one. The regime is more isolated than ever before; its leaders are faced with crippling sanctions, and as long as they shirk their responsibilities, this pressure will not relent. Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.”

I urge you to make your voice heard. Let your friends, family, neighbors and elected officials know that you demand an end to the U.S. drive towards war with Iran; you demand an end to the U.S. campaign of lies, demonization, and sanctions directed at the people of Iran; and most importantly, let them know that you oppose any military attack on Iran.

“I’m quite surprised the political establishment would listen to groups that have been so discredited … It wasn’t that there was one or two or institutions that, you know, got carried away and did stupid things. It was, we all did… And then the whole system came down.” – former Citigroup chairman John Reed

Snoop’s message to his 13.9 million facebook fans:

Snoop doesn’t have the full lowdown on Ron Paul in his tongue-in-cheek photoshoppery, who we can confidently say has never recommended smoking weed every day but instead encourages a hands off approach by the federal government. “Why don’t we handle the drugs like we handle alcohol?” Paul asked rhetorically to the GOP audience when the question was posed to him in a late-November CNN debate.

Instead, it’s more likely that the California lovin’ rapper ran into the Ron [Paul] Swanson tumblr page over the weekend where a mashup of quotes from NBC’s Parks and Recreation character Ron Swanson collide with Ron Paul photos, making for hilarious results.

We’ll watch and see if this latest celebrity endorsement translates into a boost in record sales similar to American Idol Kelly Clarkson’s endorsement brouhaha, but we won’t hold our breath (unless it’s to hold in the smoke).

UPDATE: It would seem remiss not to point out that Snoop Dogg is getting even more political about the legalization of marijuana in the wake of his arrest in Sierra Blanca, Texas earlier this month. He has made recent public pleas to Obama, which have apparently gone unheard.

UPDATE II: Congrats to Buzzfeed, who won the traffic deluge from Drudge Report for their awesome reporting which consisted of posting of a facebook screenshot which was actually stolen from reddit (which was actually stolen from facebook, because screenshot). INTERNET, YOU ARE HIGH!

UPDATE III: The ensuing news circus is now Ron Paulizzle Twenty-twizzle ^{special “attribution is fucked” edition}

Stewart is also estimated to have a net worth of $80 million. Depending on how he is invested, he is also earning a substantial income from his $80 million nest egg. Even if he is invested conservatively, he’s likely earning investment income of $4 million per year, which would be taxed at a rate equal to Romney’s. Indeed, between investment income and book royalties, and his salary, more than likely Stewart earns more money in the fiscal year than Romney despite paying a marginally higher tax rate.

FLASHBACK: Romney has lots to hide, destroyed 150 boxed of documents and replaced computers in Massachusetts…

Files in these categories which Romney was granted permission to destroy covered the years 1991-2006, which meant that they covered records generated by governors before Romney and also during Romney’s 2003-2007 term.

Bethesda Mansions: Your Tax Dollars at Work

She is an admirable person, and a tremendous writer. Unfortunately the entire article is shot through with a standard and misguided understanding of how poverty and tax policy work in the United States. Rather than blame the folks who crafted the systems that failed her, she seems to think it’s GE’s fault. She resents the fact that entities seek to pay the smallest amount of taxes legally possible. Through a literary alchemy I don’t understand they are meant to be exemplars of the spirit of greed. Its got something to do with kindergarten and reality TV.

Chadburn does some angry math in her article. Let’s do some more. The Federal budget in 2010 was 3.456 Trillion dollars on 2.2 trillion in Tax receipts. There are currently 46.2 million people under the poverty line. In tax receipts that’s $54,112 for every poor person in the country. In the budget, that’s $73,593. Many of those in poverty are looking after multiple poor children, so those in Chadburn’s magical anti-greed poverty-curing re-distribution machine should be doing pretty well.

As her article demonstrates, this is not the case. The money that gets funneled to the federal government mostly goes towards bombing things, our half-socialized and absurdly expensive medical system, and rich folks welfare like the social security system. This is where the money goes on paper. In practice, much of the money goes to government workers and contractors. These 14 million professionals use their expertise mostly to feed themselves. The security experts make us less secure, the poverty experts make us poorer. They do so subconsciously, but they do it. It is the only route to job security.

Chadburn movingly thanks the people who got her to where she is today. She thanks the teachers, the social workers, the bus drivers and the firefighters. This is an interesting list. With the exception of the social mobility enhancing military, none of these people got a dime from the federal government. These local officials could have done so much more for Chadburn and her family with another 50 grand per client. The money that could have made all the difference in the lives of Chadburn and millions of others has been building mansions for contractors in Bethesda, Maryland instead. How is that better? Why would we want to send more money to Washington to make more of this happen?

Even the way the federal government’s money is collected has perverse effects. The mortgage income tax deduction, and other policies, have inflated housing prices nation-wide to the point that Chadburn’s mother could never hope to afford decent housing. Viewed in this context, the money that HUD spends on affordable housing is hard to feel good about. The brutal and oppressive war on drugs is the most significant way our national government interacts with the disadvantaged, and it functions mostly to create poverty. All in all, the federal government provides a terrible deal to the poor. You should read more about Chadburn’s struggle. A lack of money going to Washington, DC is not responsible for it.

Prior to this post, Rob had a broader audience because he mostly just talked about the drug war.

“I fought cancer my entire life. I’m going to keep fighting this,” he said. “I’m not going to not give back just because my school says no.”

Gaskins’ mother, Christa Plante, says she supports her son’s effort “100 percent.”