Quick Hits, I'm So Damned Tired Edition

I'm nearing the end of two weeks' worth of 16-18 hour workdays, and I'm ready to have a minor heart attack. What a perfect frame of mind in which to analyze the news!

• A friend of mine hipped me to this underreported story. Basically the Bush Administration wants to close all EPA technical research libraries, denying access to thousands of scientific studies that get used in emergency preparedness and - get ready - lawsuits. After protest, the EPA claimed that this would actually help researchers, because they promised to put all of their studies online... but then they revealed that there's no budget for digitizing the studies. It's another example of strategic budget-cutting to ensure that regulation of, in this case, polluters, is neutered.

• MN-06: The race is between Patty Wetterling, a strong child advocate, and Michelle Bachmann, a creationist whose husband "ungays" people. She also hid in the bushes to spy on people during a gay rights rally.

Again, Masturgate is going to be conveniently used as an excuse, but the fact is that the Democrats found some very strong candidates this year, while the Republicans, who believe in the brand carrying them through instead of the individual, came up with the usual collection of crazy people.

• In another case of America's ass writing checks its body can't cash, North Korea vows to test a nuclear weapon, and we .... vow to send a strongly, STRONGLY written letter! The lack of leverage on the Korean peninsula is direct fallout from our hideous global standing.

• A good story from last week on microtargeting using MySpace. Republicans go on and on about their vaunted Voter Vault, but in fact you don't need any kind of large database to do micro-targeting anymore. The information is all out there and readily available.

It doesn't look to me like it's reached critical mass in time for this cycle, but both MySpace and Facebook have voter-registration tools on their sites. Not quite there but close.

• One more Foley thing: The FBI has a lot of explaining to do.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General’s (I.G.) office today to ask for an investigation into why the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has fabricated and disseminated a cover-up story as to why it never investigated the Foley emails sent to it by CREW.

CBS News has reported that according to the FBI when CREW gave the Bureau the original set of emails from Rep. Mark Foley to a former House page, they were “heavily redacted.” The FBI is also claiming that it came back to CREW and asked for more information so that it could follow up, but that CREW refused to provide anything further. Reporters from several other news organizations have repeated this allegation. The FBI is lying.

Kind of flies in the face of Hastert's "How come these liberal organizations didn't act sooner?" argument, just like the facts have flown in the face of every Republican spiin attempt so far.

• And finally, I get most of my news from newspapers and blogs, and ditched my CNN long ago. But if you made me watch nothing but Paula Zahn and Jon Stewart and asked me which one had actual substance in it, I'd probably line up favorably with this study, which lists The Daily Show as a legitimate source of news.