Blog Highlights

I’ve been too busy to blog much for the last few days, but now I have a little time to catch up on my blog reading. Here are some highlights:

• Via The 18½ Minute Gap, I see that Howard Dean “secured a critical endorsement from the most diverse labor group in the country, the 1.6-million-member Service Employees International Union,” which is clearly good news for him.

  The 18½ Minute Gap also reports that anti-evolutionaries lost the latest battle over Texas textbooks (Thank God!).

• CalPundit endorsed Gen. Clark earlier this week; he gives a bit more detail here. Though, he hastens to add, “So how about the rest of the field? I want to make it clear that I have nothing against any of the major candidates and would support any of them against George Bush. In other words, I’m not trying to smack any of them down.” The highly sought Angry Bear endorsement remains up for grabs.

• Via just about every blog, CBS and the Senate are both full of cowards. CBS for caving on the sure-to-be-crappy-anyway Reagan miniseries and the Senate for not recording the votes on the President’s $87.5 billion for Iraq (six Senators showed up voted; five yes and one, Robert Byrd, no).

• Speaking of CBS and Reagan, last week while visiting a blog that I can’t remember right now, I commented that “conservatives won’t be happy until CBS yanks the movie and names something after Reagan,” or something very similar. Digby gives some background on the Reagan Legacy project, which spearheads efforts to name stuff after Reagan (“The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project’s mission is to honor and memorialize the historic achievements of President Ronald Reagan. It aims to do so by naming at least one notable public landmark in each state and all 3067 counties after the 40th president.” Question: could they name something after Reagan in all 3067 counties while not having each state covered?)

• Charles Kuffner spots Tom DeLay “sticking in an amendment about trademark infringement into a defense bill … And that if he’s thwarted this time, he’ll be back again, like mold on a shower curtain, right? That says all you need to know about Tom DeLay.”

• Slacktivist excerpts some words of wisdom from Tony Kushner in the current issue of the very liberal Mother Jones:
  

  Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country’s future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs — if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate — don’t give him your vote.

  Listen, here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.

• I was going to read the U.S. News cover story on Katrina Leung to see how much emphasis was placed on her work as a Republican fundraiser. But Nick Confessore saves me the time:
  

  Did U.S. News manage to publish an entire cover story on alleged Chinese spy Katrina Leung that only mentioned her work as a Republican fundraiser once, in passing, and did not mention the names of any of the politicians for whom she raised money? Yes. Yes, it did.

• TBogg read the “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2002“, and finds that “the husband or the woman’s parents (if she is not eighteen) can sue her for having an abortion.” Health exceptions? Out. Husband suing? In.

AB