The ads were apparently doing very well with the Just Say Now version garnering 38 million impressions before the site changed its mind. Facebook blamed marijuana leaves in the ads, citing a rule that bans promotion of “tobacco products,” which is strange considering a cartoon pot leaf is neither tobacco nor a product.

From FireDogLake.com which is helping organize Just Say Now:

“We’re not running ads encouraging Facebook users to smoke pot, tobacco, or to drink alcohol. We are clearly advocating for a political issue that will be voted on in Facebook’s home state in less than three months. If we can’t use the most recognizable image to organize supporters in favor of marijuana legalization, it’s essentially like being banned from showing our candidate’s face in an election.

Marijuana legalization isn’t a fringe issue: our campaign has the support of law enforcement like former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper, former Reagan Assistant Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein, and people all across the political spectrum.

Facebook’s censorship of this political issue only advances the failed drug policies of our country by blocking an open discussion of these critical issues. Marijuana legalization on the move, but Facebook wants to block the issue.”

Over on the Huffington Post, Ryan Grim points out the danger this entails for the movement saying that “for a typical college student, if it didn’t happen on Facebook, it didn’t happen.” This is especially destructive considering the fact that the voting on this subject in November will probably be split pretty heavily down generational lines. Fortunately, a number of left wing and right wing websites have agreed to promote the ad (which you can see at the top of this post).

Facebook does reserve the right to ban content from their site and they have in the past. Still, it’s hard to imagine that a cartoon pot leaf connected to a legitimate political movement belongs in the same category as a “Kill Obama” poll. Perhaps John Stossel can stop taking on traffic lights and help out a belief of his that actually has a chance of becoming a reality.

Media Matters’ Oliver Willis took Hamsher to task regarding this quote from the NYT piece:

Jane Hamsher, the publisher of the liberal blog FireDogLake, said that many bloggers like Mr. Erickson test rhetorical limits, but “that’s no reason to keep him off the air.” Ms. Hamsher said she would rather debate Mr. Erickson, whom she called an “honest broker,” than an opponent reciting prescribed talking points.

Willis immediately took to Twitter to denounce Hamsher, Tweeting: “Jane Hamsher Supports Erick Erickson, Who Called Michelle Obama “A Marxist Harpy” about 18 hours ago”

It took awhile, but after several hours of tweets, she began to respond, reinforcing her original quote: “…(Erickson) is sincere in what he believes, even if we don’t agree on much. He’s not a liar.”

She then accused Willis, and Media Matters, of mis-attributing a quote to her, before drawing Scarborough in: “Unlike @MMFA & @owilllis, I don’t think ppl with different opinions than me like @JoeNBC & @ewerickson should be purged from TV.”

Joe Scarborough, for his part, had already tweeted about the Erickson piece, observing that the Redstate chief is “no friend of the corrupt GOP Establishment. He also responded to Hamsher by saying “An open mind! What a precious thing to possess in these days of hate and rage. Reasoned debate moves us forward as a country.”

Willis and Hamsher continued to trade barbs for several hours, with Willis opining that Erickson is a “foul-mouthed hooligan who infects our culture,” and Hamsher responding that Media Matters is no better. As Willis noted, though, there are orders of magnitude of difference here.

Everybody involved is at least a little bit wrong. Hamsher’s strongest point is that Erickson is superior to a PR flack who just recites talking points, but he is definitely not an “honest broker.” But neither are Hamsher and Media Matters. They all start with a conclusion, then manipulate or create facts to support it.

In Erickson’s case, I don’t follow his work all that closely, and yet I can think of several outright lies off the top of my head. He lied straight to Stephen Colbert‘s face about White House adviser Linda Douglass, then was called out for it by Douglass herself. In defending his infamous “pull a shotgun on a census worker” remarks, Erickson claimed that census workers were threatening people with jail, when his own source material said no such thing.

Hamsher, meanwhile, drew the ire of many progressives when she led a last-minute assault on the health care reform bill. In trashing the bill, she invoked the $80 billion PhRMA deal, with which she had no problem six months earlier, when she was still on board. (See updates)

Media Matters, which does excellent work curating right-wing lunacy, has also decided to wage a dishonest, scattershot campaign against this site. While they began by making some fair points, they were last seen twisting themselves in knots trying to explain how our mention of retracted Elena Kagan rumors differs from their mention of our mention. Such is the nature of watchdogs, sometimes they don’t care who they bite.

Having said all of that, Hamsher is absolutely right that a TV landscape rid of anyone who ever screwed up or acted recklessly would be a barren, dull wilderness. Recklessness is the coin of the hyper-partisan blogger’s realm, and anyone who graduates it is going to have some skeletons in the closet.

My problem with the CNN job isn’t Erickson, he’s just being himself. I’ll certainly take him over MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan any day. My problem was with CNN’s above-the-fray pose. They can’t hire a guy like Erickson, then pretend to be the down-the-middle safe haven for “real journalism.” They need to admit they’re in the opinion journalism business as surely as Fox and MSNBC are, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Update: Jane Hamsher has taken offense at part of my post, so allow me to clarify further. My point about Hamsher was that she used the PhRMA deal to condemn the health care reform bill when it suited her, but had no objection to it six months earlier when arguing for the bill with Jillian Bandes. You can see the clip here. She is correct to point out that, in the interval between the two, she did express opposition to the PhRMA deal. It is possible that Hamsher was completely ignorant of the deal in July, when that clip was filmed. If so, I apologize. I gave her more credit than that, and she didn’t object when I published that piece in December.

There are many better examples of this, but I chose to use this one, and only this one, because my aim was not to trash Hamsher, but to illustrate a pretty non-controversial point, and because this was one of the few pieces of bullshit that Ezra Klein hadn’t already picked up on. Hamsher’s anti-reform rant was chock full of half-baked stats and overheated talking points.

Ironically, her rebuttal provides an even better example of the point I was trying to make. She writes a lengthy response to me and my post, then trashes Mediaite for its handling of the National Enquirer story, but omits the fact that I wrote a lengthy criticism of that very story. (Interestingly, Media Matters tried the exact same thing, but had the class to correct it.) It is that kind of factual manipulation that I was attempting to illustrate. Partisan bloggers have no duty to be fair.

As distasteful as I found Hamsher’s tactics, I still agree that leaving the public option out of the bill was a major mistake that severely damaged its value. I also reported fairly on her alliance with Grover Norquist, and defended her when her use of PAC contributions were questioned. This was not about trashing Jane Hamsher. It was about fairness.

Update 2: Jane Hamsher says she didn’t know there was any problem with the PhRMA deal when she made that TV appearance. I went back to June of 2009 on Firedoglake, and sure enough, there were no stories about the PhRMA deal, so I’ll take her at her word there. It honestly never occurred to me that she just didn’t know. While my words were technically accurate, they conveyed an unfair impression based on a faulty assumption.

Even granting that, though, I stand by my original point, as buttressed by her response. Not only did she omit my response to the National Enquirer story, she also claims that the New York Times “reported the existence” of the PhRMA deal on August 9, 2009. This is inaccurate. The existence of the PhRMA deal was “reported” on June 20, 2009, by the White House. Hamsher knows this. These are the small bits of fudge that flavor advocacy journalism. Again, I don’t think this is a controversial point.

When looking ahead at the next year, pundits turn into prognosticators. Bloggers covering all sorts of topics and industries are now giving their predictions for what’s to come in 2010. Conventional wisdom says to go the conservative route with these choices in order to avoid looking foolish when none of your projections pan out. At the same time, there’s a key difference between picking things that are realistically possible and those that are already on the road to happening. I’ve assembled my favorite predictions covering a variety of fields and what’s supposedly in store for the near future:

Recovering Economy: “Starting in Q1, unemployment will slip a half percentage point per quarter…We’re already seeing average work-week hours go up and number of temp workers go up. This is always the precursor to employers ultimately hiring new full-time employees,” says James Altucher at the Wall Street Journal. Once the jobs become available, though, the question could turn to how big a learning curve should be granted to employees adjusting back to the workforce.

Social Media Business: “Facebook will go public…Registrations are still growing nicely but showing signs of deceleration. Friendster’s remains and the slow fade at MySpace are warning signs of what can happen to a social-networking site after it peaks,”says Rick Aristotle Munarrizat at the Motley Fool. Each year, Mark Zuckerberg grows another year removed from his original college-aged audience and from the excitement of having his own venture.

Sarah Palin Politics: “The only thing Sarah Palin will be president of in 2012 will be TV ratings. Palin will get a talk show as early as next year. We’re betting a startup like Lifetime or Bravo will make an offer she can’t refuse,” says Daniel Stone at Newsweek. It’ll remind America how likable the lady from Alaska was when she first arrived on the scene in September 2008, and viewers will find comfort in her television persona and presence.

Housing Decisions: “The threat of nuclear terrorism renews interest in living outside of large urban areas, further depressing housing prices in the larger metropolitan areas,” says a blogger at SeekingAlpha. This will re-define what real estate agents mean by “Location, location, location” as homebuyers put their safety at the top of their lists.

Foreign Affairs: “There will be many strikes in the coming months, and many demonstrations on the streets of Athens,” says Barnaby Phillips at al Jazeera. Some Middle-Eastern countries are already hosts to protests against corruption, but Greece will emerge as a nation that demands international attention due to its financial crisis.

Presidential Liability: “Michelle Obama will slip by her minders and say something outrageous. The MSM will not report it. Persons who refer to it will be denounced as racists,” says John Derbyshire in the National Review. The first lady has been relatively quiet throughout Obama’s first year in office, and she’s going to be used more going forward – with both parties bracing for it.

Internet Accessibility: “A little known technology company emerges to extend wireless across unlicensed bandwidths, with dramatic impact on the VoIP market,” says Rayne at FireDogLake. With Americans’ ever-increasing need for and reliance on wireless Internet, this service seems like a logical next step, and someone will make a major splash in the market when they figure out how to do it.

Television Technology: “TV goes 3D…The television industry is looking for the next big thing to sell us. 3D TV will be the next big push. 3D will also begin to creep into PC and console games. It might not be ready for primetime on any of these platforms, but 2010 will be the year that 3D starts to make serious headway,” says Tim Bajarin at PC Magazine. If Avatar is truly the “future of filmmaking,” then people will expect similar technology at home.

Sports Pardon: “I predict [Tiger] Woods will survive this self-created mess and the public will forgive him. What he did was a disgrace, but he remains the greatest golfer in the game and maybe the greatest ever,” says Cal Thomas at USA Today. If Tiger can get going again on the green, fans will disassociate Woods’ personal failings from the golfer’s professional prowess.

Music Listens: “It’s been coming for more than a decade, but major labels are starting to grasp the digital opportunity…Expect 2010 to be the year that the bad press on the major labels starts becoming more favorable,” says Nick Crocker at Mashable. As all other industries are now following the lead of the consumers, the music business will have to adapt in order to survive, despite whatever growing pains and financial losses they endure at the beginning of the transition.

Hamsher has responded to the criticism, but she’ll have to convince a tough critic: Jane Hamsher from July. That Jane Hamsher seemed to have a different set of priorities.

Right off the bat, let me say that I don’t see anything wrong with Democrats, progressives, or anyone at all appearing on Fox. I go on conservative talk shows all the time. If your argument has merit, it makes sense that you would bring it to people who don’t already agree with you.

Here’s the Fox & Friends clip, in which Hamsher is shocked, shocked, I tell you, to learn that the White House and the Senate Finance Committee have cut a crummy deal with PHrMA:

In Hamsher’s response to her critics, this is the section she highlights:

In 2000, the Republicans passed Medicare Part D, and it had no negotiation for prescription drug prices. And then in 2006, when the Democrats took over Congress, the first thing they did was say “hey, we’re going to roll that back, we’re going to allow for [negotiation of] prescription drug prices to be passed. But now that they actually have the chance, they’re not doing it. And you’ve got people like Jeff Sessions on the floor of the Senate saying this is criminal, this deal is criminal, but he didn’t vote for it in 2000 or 2006 when he had the chance. So we’re sort of looking at a situation where people on the right, people on the left, are looking at the Senate, and they’re saying “nobody’s there representing us. Nobody’s representing the people.” It’s just a matter of who’s in power and who’s taking PhRMA’s money.

Is she wrong about the PHrMA deal? No, she’s just 6 months late. In fact, in this clip from July, she not only knows about the PHrMA deal, she has to fight against a conservative who uses it against her:

This is the real problem with Hamsher’s Fox appearance. She’s dishonestly using the PHrMA deal as a smokescreen to whatever her real objection is. When Jillian Bandes pointed out this deal with the devil, Hamsher had nothing to say about it.

Nobody likes the PHrMA deal (except pharmaceutical companies), but most supporters of reform have been willing to hold their noses and accept it as the price of getting a good bill. To wave it around at this late date is disingenuous at best (as is much of her opposition to the bill). Hamsher was throwing red meat to Fox’s audience instead of focusing on her real problem with the bill.

I don’t know what that is for sure, but I suspect it has something to do with this statement, from the Fox & Friends appearance:

“If you’ve got insurance right now through your employer that you like, this bill taxes the benefits, middle class benefits, and actually causes it to be worse, to cut back on benefits, and to be more expensive copays, that’s how they bend the cost curve is by making sure that you use less services.”

This is all true, and an excellent point, but neither Hamsher nor Doocy bothers to ask the question that David Shuster asked in that clip from July: What about the tens of millions of people who have no insurance, good or otherwise?

Jane Hamsher loves to remind people that she survived cancer (three times), even calling it “offensive” for someone to argue with her because of it. What she seems to have forgotten is that, for all the trouble she had with her insurance company, she had insurance. She’s urging people to kill a bill that will cover tens of millions of people who don’t have insurance now (rather than urging a strong push to improve the bill in conference), while she is living proof that having insurance can be the difference between life and death. Now, that’s offensive.

I hate when people do this, but since Jane opened the door, I have to say this. My dad dropped dead of a heart attack at age 58, without health insurance. If he had had health insurance, he’d probably still be alive today. Does that make me right about health care reform? No. This thing should be argued on the merits. I think most people would agree that we need an America in which both Jane and my dad get to survive.

First up: Keith Olbermann, who accused Lieberman of “thwart[ing] history in the making:”

Two months ago, Lieberman offered different rationales including the public option’s supposed unpopularity with the public. Except a new NBC News poll today found that 73% of Americans think that people should have the choice of a public option.  In his own state, 68% favor the public option, including 83% of Democrats, 73% of independents — and all those Republicans who already have one.

But his own state has other constituents: bigger people, if you will. Connecticut is insurance-company Ground Zero. Lieberman has gotten more than a million dollars in the last five years from the health insurance and medical sectors — a million that we know of.

Newsbusters’ Mark Finkelstein objected to the “that we know of” formulation, saying that it amounted to a suggestion that Lieberman might be “on the take.”

But the broader message of Olbermann’s segment on Lieberman was betrayal. He opened up his interview with guest Ron Wyden, a senator from Oregon, with this point-blank question: “How many more times can Senator Lieberman get away with spitting in the party — your party’s face before the Democrats say ‘no more?’”

Maddow’s critique was less bombastic and more intellectual, but she didn’t pull any punches, either. Opening up with a segment on insurance stocks rebounding shortly before Lieberman’s announcement yesterday afternoon, she, too, as much as implied that Lieberman was beholden to the health insurance industry in his state.

If Olbermann thought Lieberman was thwarting history in the making, Maddow went after him for making the wrong sort of history: paraphrasing her guest Jane Hamden of Firedoglake, she marveled at the fact that “when one party has enough members to overcome the other party’s filibuster, a member of the majority has never before crossed party lines to filibuster with the minority.”

Here’s Olbermann:

And here’s Maddow:

Said Cheney: “I think the president himself understands he didn’t earn this prize…therefore the notion that he’d go to Oslo to accept the prize just sort of adds to the farce.” She noted the wording of the citation and took it to mean that the Nobel committe “would like to live in a world in which America is not dominant” and speculated that Obama, in his speeches about global diplomacy, had convinced them that “President Obama also doesn’t believe in American dominance.” Said Cheney: “I think unfortunately they may be right.”

Kristol, for his part, joked that he should have gotten the prize because just as Obama had given a few good speeches, he’d written a few good columns. Er, yes, indeed. “This is an anti-American committee, they’ve now given the prize to President Obama — I think he should have refused it, respectfully, but I think the second-best thing would be to go over and give a pro-American speech on December 10th.” On the matter of Obama’s belief in American exceptionalism: “I don’t think he’s a believer in it in the way perhaps some previous American presidents have been.”

Video below:

Compare and contrast with John McCain’s diplomatic, if not effusive, response here.