Today, we begin a new weekly segment on the show: The Steve Israel Hour, sponsored by Little Debbie 
, featuring Howie Klein of the Blue America PAC and Down With Tyranny.
In case you didn’t know about Blue America, it’s a PAC run by Howie, Digby, and Crooks & Liars’ John Amato, for the purpose of vetting and identifying the best progressive candidates out there, mostly in Congressional races, and help raise money for them.
The sad fact is the today’s Democratic Party – the DNC, led by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the DCCC, chaired by Steve Israel, tend to push candidates of the Blue Dog/New Dem variety and worse, and seem to push progressives out of races in which they’d be competitive. Thus the name of the segment and its “sponsor”.
Today, we talked a bit about Israel’s head-scratching candidate of choice for FL-13 (where Alex Sink just lost in a special election to a sleazy lobbyist), two big battles in Hawaii between the “Republican wing” and the progressive wing of the Democratic party, and a long-time Blue America endorsed candidate finally getting the nod from the LA Times!
Next week, we’ll have the new, pro version of the segment open…
Also on the show today, the future of the legal marijuana business with Robert Platshorn. His story was told in the movie Square Grouper… all about marijuana smuggling in the 70s. Platshorn was busted, the charges were trumped up, and he was sentenced to over 60 years in prison.
After serving 30 years, Platshorn was released, and began educating senior citizens about the benefits of medical marijuana with The Silver Tour, which spawned the infomercial/documentary “Should Grandma Smoke Pot?“.
This weekend, Platshorn will mount his second Meet the Experts seminar helping people navigate the future legal medical marijuana industry.