BREAKING: Senator Mike Gravel admits to eating brownies 'laced' with marijuana!

The text of Senator Gravel's heartfelt confession:

Cenk Uygur: Do you still smoke up at all?
Mike Gravel: No, uh, not at all. I did when I was younger, but - I'll tell you the truth - I never got a high out of it.
Cenk Uygur: Ah, me too.
Mike Gravel: Never got a high. For some reason my metabolism did not respond. Once I had some brownies that were laced, and those were pretty good.
[Laughs]
Cenk Uygur: Well, that's why we love having Senator Gravel on the show: pure honesty. I love it.

Over the rest of the interview, the two men covered a wide range of topics - from Sarah Palin and offshore drilling (Alaska sure does produce some special politicians, doesn't it?) to direct democracy and a sitcom starring Gravel. It's a very interesting interview and I hope you watch the whole thing.

Gravel was on the show to promote his ideas, his books, and a TV show he is producing. The books mentioned - of several he has published in the past few years - were Citizen Power and A Political Odyssey. They are about Gravel's presidential platform that had a basis in direct democracy and his life, intertwined with the story of American militarism, respectively.

The television show will be based around the idea of direct democracy, just as Gravel's presidency was. And that's fitting, since the plot of the show is that Gravel was elected president. He mentioned that he is trying to distribute it worldwide and how he has already raised $250,000 for the show. A few short webisodes are being made first, and each episode will focus around a current issue, with the conclusion being that the viewers can directly vote on the issue. It will be called "I Like Mike," and if you're interested in helping in any capacity just let me know in the comments or email me (rossmlevin at gmail dot com).

The most interesting part of the interview, though, were the ideas that Uygur and Gravel talked about. They are not anything you would hear on CNN or the nightly news.

Gravel talked about his perception of Sarah Palin before and after she came onto the national political scene. He said she was actually much less partisan, at least in terms of laws regarding oil, before McCain picked her as his vice presidential candidate. And the Senator cleared up Uygur's confusion about what exactly Palin did as governor in that respect: the Alaska permanent fund, he said, which distributes oil revenue to citizens "was taken care of 20 years before she came onto the scene." Also, in terms of the more substantive issues of the environment and offshore drilling, Gravel said that as a nation we should be focusing on renewables like wind and tidal so that "we could remove our dependency from oil."

And, of course, Gravel talked about the failed war on drugs. He called the drug war "terrible" and "a disaster." Gravel not only spoke in favor of legalizing marijuana, but decriminalizing - he actually said "deregulate" in the interview - all drugs. Just as in his presidential campaign, he stressed that it is a medical and not a criminal problem when someone is addicted to a drug.

Gravel talked a lot about his idea called The National Initiative for Democracy, which would set up a specific process for citizens to put laws on the ballot and vote on them. When Uygur asked what the average citizen can do to help push through financial reform, Gravel didn't sugarcoat it. "The sad thing is," he said, "the average citizen can't do a damn thing."

But he has a solution. After talking about what's wrong with politics and government, Gravel talked about the National Initiative, which he said is,

...meta legislation that puts the tools in the hands of the people to be able to make laws. Presently, representative government has a monopoly on lawmaking. Well, lawmaking is the central power of government. And so if you're not in a position to make laws, to establish polcy through the laws, then all you can do is obey what the elites dictate to you. And that's what we have today.