When we last left the Leno vs. Migden contest, there was much gnashing of the teeth over these two progessive titans matching up. As SFist Rita put it, What Would the Progressives Do? Should they side with Leno or with Migden? It's like when two really good friends have a party at the same time and one guy has a keg of Meisterbrau and another of Sierra. You want to drink the Sierra, but if you go to that party, would your other friend get pissed at you? So, to make sure the campaign didn't get too nasty a peacetreaty of such was signed with both Leno and Migden pledging to be all cute and cuddly during the campaign. And so within days, a Migden ally went all NAMBLA on Leno.

In a blog entry, Migden advisor, biggest fan, and former aide, Michael "Mike Opera" Colbruno posted all sorts of nice things about Leno. Like that he's a "Porn King" and sort of implies that he's a favorite candidate of NAMBLA. Seriously, we don't know how much lower one could go. This might be a whole new political term much in the phrase "Swift Boating" has become. We'll call this "NAMBLAD." Leno got NAMBLAD.

We should probably go to the backstory here as this didn't just come out of nowhere. Way back in those wild and impetiuos days of 2006, Schwarzeneggar and the Republicans in the State Legislature decided to think about the children and start up a ballot initiative called "Jessica's Law" which was a crackdown on sex offenders. Among the provisions was that anybody convicted of a sex crime couldn't live within 2,000 feet of a school or park. It also said that if a person is caught with child pornography just once, they'd go to prison. Leno, along with others, thought the bill was too harsh and not very smart and tried to come up with an alternative bill. In that bill, he got rid of the provision about where a sex offender could live and moved the number that a person could be convicted of for child pornography to twenty-five. Leno's point was that it's too easy for somebody to accidently click on something they shouldn't click on and then find themselves in prison.

Now Leno didn't try and stop Jessica's Law. He didn't fight it. He just made some changes that he thought would make it a better law, something a lot of other people agreed with. But he made himself and easy target and yadda yadda yadda-- Leno got tagged as a pro-sex offender and child pornographer.

So now the big question is what is Opera Mike thinking. He supposedly still has Migden's ear so did he do this with Migden's approval? Was it some ploy to scare the living daylights out of people in Marin who don't know that much about Leno? Colbruno is so into it, he went on Left in SF and posted long comments in defense of all this. Did he do this all on his own? Did Carole put him up to it? Or does Opera Mike just really, reall dislike Leno. Who knows?

Photo from Michael Colbruno's Flickr page