An explosion erupts during the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese navy more than half a century ago.  The attacks led the United States to war, and spurred one of our darkest and most xenphobic eras, as anti-Japanese sentiment led to internment camps and harsh racism.  It was a humanitarian failure of historic proportions.

Today, President-elect Barack Obama tapped Japanese-American four star general Eric K. Shinseki to be the secretary of Veterans Affairs.

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In an effort to shore up their image after their highly damaging approval of the executive branch’s illegal wiretapping programs, Democrats are going after corruption, bias, and improper conduct in the government.

All good things. But they’re also attempting to limit the penalties and prosecution of “casual” marijuana use. Essentially, they’re interested in making more room for medical marijuana use, and to lighten frivolous convictions of casual users so that people caught with marijuana are treated more like people caught doing something illegal with alcohol.

I’m a civil libertarian, and nothing pleases me more than seeing the government stepping back from regulating people’s lives and behavior — but only one thought occurred to me when I read that congress was considering this, and that thought was: now??

There is nothing better for our country than to decrease the amount of frivolous criminal court cases and jail space spent on prosecuting recreational drug use, including both alcohol and marijuana. Limiting the amount of time our cops, our judges, and our jails have to spend on nonsense “crimes,” opens up their ranks for the speedy prosecution of property crime, violent crime, and corruption.

But, nothing is going to get social conservatives more riled than some hippie congress being seen as endorsing drug use — no matter how wrong they may be in their opposition to it. So, if the Democrats are looking to keep their chances of a landslide victory in November alive, I would advise them not to wake the sleeping giant of social conservatism.

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Today, I can conclude that Jensen is undoubtedly correct. Stein’s pseudo-celebrity status and history of being a part-time speech writer for Republicans 40 years ago apparently earns him the right to be interviewed by CNN.com, and what he had to say was pretty revealing.

First, he said that John McCain needs to hire Karl Rove. Yes, the man responsible for the collapse of the current Republican party. The man credited with not only cheap campaign trickery, but inspiring his candidates to employ a king-to-servants relationship with their supporters. The man who continues to expand the power of the executive branch to such a degree that most constitutional analysts doubt it will ever go back. The man who essentially doomed the Republican party by convincing red staters that voting was about culture, not about governing. The GOP’s own version of Larry the Cable Guy — phenomenal success… through short-term gimmickry.

But that’s not important. What’s actually important is, Stein used this opportunity in a national interview (which he apparently held in a special, super-creepy room filled with past GOP yard signs), to call for a sequel to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Mystery solved. The guy just needs some love.

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In France you can’t wear religious tokens or garments to school. In Italy your phones are tapped by the government 365 days a year. And in the Middle East — well, I’m sure we all know the numerous human rights violations that are so popular in that region.

The latest event is Pakistan’s banishment of the user-generated-content site YouTube, which it claims has “one or more” videos which are offensive to Islam. Maybe it was a video of a woman in which you can see her hair, or her ankles. Maybe it was two men kissing. Maybe it was someone drinking a beer.

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