Twenty-three years later, while arguing for marijuana prohibition, Harry Anslinger also played on Americans’ fear of crime and foreigners. The Bureau of Narcotics chief spun tales of people driven to insanity or murder after ingesting the drug and spoke of the 2 to 3 tons of grass being produced in Mexico…

But the opposition cried foul. Liberals, leftists, Christians, more moderate Muslims and others had withdrawn from the assembly, saying their voices were not being heard…

NEW YORK TIMES: …Households earning more than $200,000 benefited from the largest percentage declines in total taxation as a share of income. Middle-income households benefited, too. More than 85 percent of households with earnings above $25,000 paid less in total taxes than comparable households in 1980.

HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS Editorial: We saw the same change of heart in the midstate before the election. During Patriot-News endorsement interviews with candidates, Democrats and Republicans said they would not sign the pledge. Now it is time for all our elected officials who already have signed it, including Gov. Tom Corbett, to publicly state they are no longer going to make decisions based on this ridiculous vow…

Capitolwire: Gov. Tom Corbett said he wouldn’t offer to be interviewed as part of Attorney General-elect Kathleen Kane’s examination of her predecessors, including Corbett’s, handling of the Jerry Sandusky pedophile investigation if he thought it was “a political game.”

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER / AP: A Pennsylvania state law barring its debt-ridden capital city from seeking federal bankruptcy protection expires Friday and that prospect could emerge again if and when a state appointee who oversees Harrisburg’s finances presses creditors for concessions.

NEWSMAX: …A family of four earning $75,000 will pay $7,125 in annual premiums and as much as $8,333 in co-pays and deductibles, according to a preliminary estimate by the Kaiser Family Foundation. A single 40-year-old earning $30,000 will pay $2,509 in premiums and as much as $3,125 in cost sharing.

The superbug that hit [the University of Virginia Medical Center] four years ago — and remains a threat — belongs to a once-obscure family of drug-resistant bacteria that has stalked U.S. hospitals and nursing homes for over a decade. Now, it’s attacking in hundreds of those institutions, a USA TODAY examination shows, and it’s a fight the medical community is not well positioned to win.

“I plan on being the head football coach at Penn State (in 2013),” O’Brien said Tuesday in an interview with 790 AM “The Zone” in Atlanta. “That’s my plan and that’s what I intend to do.”..

Over the past couple of days, we have heard Warren Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest persons, and Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and more recently director of the President’s National Economic Council, lavish optimism concerning the future of the American economy.

President Obama’s top reelection strategist conceded surprise Monday that Republican super PACS didn’t attack Obama far earlier, Mitt Romney didn’t invest much more in ground operations, and that the Republican nominee played narrowly to the party base in picking Rep. Paul Ryan as a running mate.

..The administration wants to convert the lottery to private management. Private companies are accountable to their stockholders rather than Pennsylvania citizens…

On August 22, 2012, Commissioner Scott Martin stuck his neck out and made the a comprehensive proposal towards solvency for the Lancaster Convention Center. The Lancaster County Convention Center Authority projects a deficit of $1,500,000 in 2013 before, and that is without setting aside a reserve for renovation and replacements.