Of all the characters in the last 40 years of Doonesbury, my personal favorite is Mr. Butts—and not just because he appeared on the cover of The Nation (Jan. 1, 1996). Garry Trudeau has had lots of more compelling characters, but Mr. Butts in his own way was perfect: the smiling cigarette-man who was unfailingly cheerful about how cool it was for kids to smoke.
Mr. Butts crossed over from the comics to real life in 1994, when University of California tobacco researcher Dr. Stanton Glantz received a big Fedex box with the return address “Mr. Butts.” The box, as I reported in The Nation . . .
. . .continued at TheNation.com HERE
The election day exit polls had some good news for Obama: voters don’t blame him for “current economic problems.” But the same 
California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer defeated challenger Carly Fiorina by a ten-point margin on Tuesday, winning a total of 3.8 million votes, more than the combined vote total of ten Tea Party senate candidates.
California’s initiative to legalize marijuana failed to win a majority at the polls Tuesday. Prop 19, which received 3.3 million votes but lost 54 percent to 46 percent, would have would have legalized possession and cultivation of marijuana and authorized cities and counties to regulate and tax commercial marijuana production and sales.
When the votes are counted on Tuesday night in California, Democrats will easily sweep the top contests. Senator Barbara Boxer is likely to defeat challenger Carly Fiorina, 51-46 per cent (Nate Silver’s projection at 538.com), and last week’s California Field poll shows Democrat Jerry Brown ahead of Republican Meg Whitman in the gubernatorial race by 10 points.
As Californians prepare to vote Tuesday on a statewide initiative to legalize marijuana, The Jewish Journal, Los Angeles’s Jewish weekly, features a 
As WikiLeaks prepares to release 400,000 Iraq war documents, a former FBI agent argues that WikiLeaks could have prevented 9-11, if the website had been around in 2001. . . . Continued at TheNation.com 
Sarah Palin is coming to California this weekend, but the state’s top Republican candidates, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, don’t want to bee sen with her.
On what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday, a list of my top five Lennon solo records–and they included audio and video links to Lennon’s performances of each: Audio and video 
How do you explain the value of a rock musician to the Immigration Service? Bob Dylan tried, in his letter opposing the Nixon Administration’s move to deport John Lennon. “John and Yoko,” Dylan wrote, “inspire and transcend and stimulate,” and thereby “help put an end to this mild dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as artist art by the overpowering mass media.”