Yesterday, the debate on the Assembly floor got heated as Republican Del. Dave Albo stood on the floor yelling and waving a photocopy of a bar chart that allegedly showed how they were increasing funding for public education in the budget.

But anytime a Republican tells you they're increasing funding for public education, read the fine print.

As it turns out, the Republicans are really cutting the legs out from under public education while bragging that they're buying it a new hat. Here's what the Republicans new benchmarking process does:

Rick Renzi, the Republican incumbent in AZ-01 managed to keep his seat in 2006 following a vicious campaign against his Democratic challenger, Ellen Simon. Renzi, as you know, was a key player in the U.S. Attorney firings stemming from DOJ investigations into shady land deals orchestrated by the Congressman.

Desperate to keep his seat, Renzi ran slanderous ads against Simon calling her a "NAMBLA lawyer" (which she is not) and at one point calling her "the devil." Ellen Simon bowed out of the 2008 race, leaving the field open to a new Democratic challenger. But nobody's really stepped up.

I'm not one to condemn opposition research outright. It has its place in any campaign. But what's allegedly been coming out of the Obama camp isn't strategic, it's poisoning the well.

Primaries are tough campaigns, but scorched-earth policies are ultimately self-defeating do little but feed opposition narratives.

How about a little Lisa Nova as a reminder.

Tom Goldstein writes at the indispensible SCOTUSblog that the war for control of the Supreme Court is over, and the right has prevailed.

The fact that Justices’ Ginsburg and Stevens dissented from the bench in three cases – twice in late-May and early-June after all the votes had been cast – strongly suggests an exceptionally high level of frustration on the left. (Neither does such a thing lightly.) It seems entirely possible that the remaining cases involving, for example, challenges to public funding of programs with religious components (Hein), search and seizure (Brendlin), and the environment (Defenders of Wildlife) all will be decided five-to-four, with Justice Kennedy siding with the conservatives.

If that happens -- and I think it is likely that it (or something close to it) will -- the President will have gotten with his appointments precisely the Court he sought and that liberals feared. We can already count on conservative rulings on race, abortion, campaign finance, and the death penalty, and may be able to add to that religion, the Fourth Amendment, and the environment. It would be a memorable Term indeed.

This past weekend, I read that young people don't have the money to be engaged in the current campaign finance system. I also read that the University of Virginia Class of 2007 presented their school with a gift of $3.4 Million. The conventional wisdom that young people don't have money to donate to political campaigns is simply wrong. College students represent over $120 billion in spending power.

The private sector has understood this for generations - just consider the marketing revolution that is MTV. Young Americans have considerable purchasing power. The problem is, Democrats simply aren't selling anything young people want to buy. In order to tap into this crucial market, Democrats need to engage young people in such a way that students feel they are getting something for their contributions - that they are not just giving their money away, but buying something.

This Monday (June 11) at 2 PM Eastern, Nate Wilcox and James Boyce will be talking to New Mexico Governor and 2008 presidential candidate Bill Richardson on  Heading Left’s Blog Talk Radio show.

As always, you can call in to the show live at   (646) 652-4803.

So tune in on Monday at 2PM Eastern for  Heading Left on Blog Talk Radio.

Miss the show? No problem. You can always listen to the archives at www.blogtalkradio.com/headingleft where you can stream past programs or download a podcast.

William Otis, in this morning's Washington Post, argues that Bush should not pardon Libby, but commute his sentence so that he doesn't serve jail time.

A sense of proportionality argues in favor of eliminating Libby's prison term. This was an unusually harsh sentence for a first offender convicted of a nonviolent and non-drug-related crime.

And so Otis, a former federal prosecutor, with a flick of the wrist, reduces impeding a federal investigation into the outing of a covert CIA operative to something less than a teenager with a marijuana cigarette.

The indispensable Center for Media and Democracy featured a post on Wednesday on tobacco's marketing in the global south. It seems that at least one African nation, Nigeria, has had enough and is fighting back.

Nigeria's two largest states are following the lead of U.S. states, in suing British American Tobacco (BAT) of Nigeria, its U.K. parent company and Philip Morris International for the health care costs of treating sick smokers, The Times of London reported this week.