Military politics, insular media rambling, and medical marijuana, after the jump.

• The Illinois State Senate passed a bill yesterday legalizing medical marijuana. Pot, along with gay marriage, is going to make this country a better place. I can feel it. (I actually don't have any more to say on this. Let's just bask in the THC glow for a bit.)
• Jon Soltz writes in the Stimulist that military men and women are moving left politically: "The trend gained momentum with President Obama and Hillary Clinton during the primaries, and it’s about to get fast-tracked with Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney taking control of Republican messaging, ideals, practices, and policies." This is a great chance to plug Babylon By Bus, a first-person account written by two U.S. employees of their time in Baghdad in 2003. Based on their book, and on accounts from imbedded reporters, I'd wager that the rank-and-file switched political allegiances long before the top brass decided it wouldn't kill their careers to do the right thing.
• In media land: Tim Cavanaugh, former editor of Suck.com and a contributing editor at Reason and reason.com, is now blogging regularly for the latter. This is good news for all human beings who can use an Internet, as Cavanaugh was a pioneer of snarky outgoing links, snarky essays, and snarky snark-snark. He's mellowed out in the years since, but is no less great a read. (Srsly, I'm not just schilling for a some-time employer). In somewhat less groundbreaking news, I just saw that Jake Tapper pissed off a whole army of progressive idiots by twittering, "Have MediaMatters or CAP said one critical word about POTUS support of "state secrets," or military commissions, or indefinite detention?" Ha. He's just asking, people!

After everyone and his second cousin took Palmieri and CAP to task for censurship, Yglesias and Thinkprogress' Faiz Shakir finally responded, dismissing the criticism.

Here's Shakir:

Palmieri’s post was meant to clarify that ThinkProgress blogs don’t speak for the entire institution all the time — as has always been the policy. And that’s a good thing, because it means we are afforded great editorial independence to convey our honest views. Some of the criticisms of this incident are fair, but some are not.

The point that is getting lost in this debate is the fact that Palmieri’s post underscores our editorial independence, not diminishes it.

And here's Yglesias:

I wish the guest post from Jennifer Palmieri that I put up Sunday evening had been handled differently in a variety of ways since just sticking it on the blog and then going to bed seems to have given people a lot of misleading notions about the site being somehow “hijacked.” But when you get right down to it, all she was doing was reiterating what’s always been the case — I’m posting un-screened posts on an un-edited blog and covering every issue under the sun. Under the circumstances, it’s better for me, better for CAP and CAPAF, and better for everyone to understand that I’m writing as an individual not as the voice of the institution. Pointing that fact out isn’t contrary to me having an independent voice, it’s integral to having one. Nobody has deleted my post criticizing Third Way, or forced me to retract those criticisms, or prevented me from following up with a more substantive critique of something they wrote. And most of all, contrary to some of the crazier stuff I’ve read in comments, it’s not as if the senior management is leaning over my shoulder censoring every posts. For one thing, if someone was leaning over my shoulder there wouldn’t be all these typos. More seriously, the whole point of clarifying that things I write don’t automatically become “official” CAP/AF positions is that nobody is leaning over my shoulder. I’m not getting the stuff pre-approved or pre-screened by anyone, so sometimes I say stuff that other people here wouldn’t say. That’s the nature of a large organization, and especially of a large organization where different people have different roles. My role is to say what I think on the blog; that’s what I’ve always done and will keep doing.

Despite CAP's united front, this incident is not a clear indicator of editorial independence. Imagine if a newspaper publisher demanded that its editorial staff, after slamming an advertiser, run a disclaimer from the publisher in the editorial section clarifying that the criticism doesn't represent the paper as an institution. Things are obviously different in the realm of non-profits, but they aren't that different. Yglesias' blog wasn't the place for that clarification. It could have run on the homepage or on another blog (either option would've saved CAPAF the embarrassment it's suffering at the moment).

This Yglesias reader put it best:

"Why did she [Palmieri] insist on writing a post about THIS issue? I never assumed you spoke for CAP on any other subject, nor did I do so here – I didn’t need Jennifer Palmieri to shove her oar in to confirm the point. Can’t you see that – apart from making both CAP/AS and Third Way look like oversensitive idiots – what that does is imply that with all the OTHER posts, which didn’t raise CAP/AS’s hackles, you ARE in some sense speaking along the lines they approve. And if you can’t see that, you need to go back to Harvard and register for a course in linguistic pragmatics."

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. Which is fine, because Third Way isn’t really a “public policy think tank” at all, it’s a messaging and political tactics outfit.

How do we know his bosses were upset? Because CAPAF CEO Jennifer Palmieri took over Yglesias' blog in the dead of night to post this disclaimer:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects – including a homeland security transition project – and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

Palmieri is the kind of editorial commander that people like Rod Blagojevich dream about–someone who's willing to wade into the thick of a controversial editorial discussion and essentially negate everything objectionable. Not that this is surprising–CAP, after all, has advocated a revival of something that would resemble the Fairness Doctrine, though the brains at CAP wisely called it something else (because "the Fairness Doctrine never by itself fostered coverage of important issues in a way that spoke to the diversity of interests in local communities across our country." In other words, the Fairness Doctrine alone wouldn't do enough to get progressives on the air).

Funny, though, that CAP raves about conservative talk radio's threat to the First Amendment– "Our analysis revealed that conservative talk radio dominates the airwaves of our country—to the detriment of informed public discourse and the First Amendment"–and then turns around and encroaches on one of its blogger's editorial independence.