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Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan says the federal government shouldn't interfere with states that have legalized medical marijuana.

Your Stimulus Dollars at Work: $2 Million Per Job

Scores of Republicans and conservative Democrats who voted against the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act subsequently wrote letters requesting funds for projects in a massive, behind-the-scenes letter-writing and phone call campaign, documents obtained by the Center show. Those asking for money include Tea Party favorites like freshman Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., former presidential candidates Ron Paul and John McCain and Republican congressional leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rep.

WARNING: PDF.

This is a PDF of a letter signed by Ron Paul asking for stimulus funding of railway projects in the Houston area.

Ryan noted that the issue “is something that is not a high priority of ours.” A Ryan spokesman later emphasized that he agrees with Mitt Romney that marijuana should never be legalized. In the video embedded below you can see how Romney scoffed at a reporter who dared to ask a question about medical marijuana: “Aren’t there issues of significance that you’d like to talk about?”

Last week, Mitch and I sat down with Jonathan “Ryan” March whose home was raided by the Columbia, MO S.W.A.T. team in 2008. The S.W.A.T. team was at his home to look for marijuana. Ryan had no prior felonies and no history of violence. During the raid, Ryan’s two retreating dogs were shot and killed. In this video, Ryan March discusses what it is like to be a victim of the drug war.

President Barack Obama is considering the use of an executive order to restrict access to guns or ammunition in the wake of nationwide revulsion in the US over the Connecticut school shootings, vice-president Joe Biden said Wednesday. Such a move would be deeply controversial in the gun lobby, but Biden said the president was determined to explore every legislative avenue.

During a press conference on gun safety in Philadelphia, Vice President Joe Biden said that any reports that suggest that he was trying to take weapons away from gun owners was a “bunch of malarkey.”

Biden said that it was important for the media to dissuade the American public from the idea that the Obama administration was prepared to do something unconstitutional on guns.

Twitter said in its first transparency report that the number of government requests for user information or to block content is rising in 2012. "We've received more government requests in the first half of 2012, as outlined in this initial dataset, than in the entirety of 2011," Twitter's legal policy manager Jeremy Kessel said in a blog post on Monday. The overwhelming number of requests came from the United States, accounting for 679 of the 849 requests for user information. In 75 per cent of the US cases, Twitter gave some or all information.