Quick Hits

And let's wrap up the night with some extra news you can use.

• TAPPED's blog is one of my favorites, populated by great writers who go as in-depth on the issues as any progressive out there. Ezra Klein is absolutely correct that progressives need to support existing structures like The American Prospect, a fine magazine that is an outlet for these writers. If I wasn't 4 months behind on reading my New Yorkers I'd sign up tomorrow, but I suspect I will eventually. They really are some of the best progressives in the business.

• Rudy, Rudy, Rudy...



The right hates him, the left hates him... and he's the frontrunner on the Republican side.

• Bill O'Reilly breaks Godwin's Law and compares the progressive movement of MoveOn and Daily Kos to Dr. Joseph Goebbels. If "they're Nazis" is all you got, it's probably not worth saying anything.

• This is fun:

Shortly after noon, FEMA agents began rapping on the trailer doors, their knocks resounding inside the tinny white homes. Everyone in the park, the agents announced without warning, would have to pack and leave within 48 hours [...]

To the residents of the Yorkshire Mobile Home Park, all of them families displaced by Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency crews offered answers that were uncertain and sometimes contradictory. As residents spilled out of their homes to meet their similarly bewildered neighbors, the adults wondered where they would be sent next, and how far they might wind up from their jobs. Some began sobbing. Then the children, seeing their parents' tears, began crying, too. A woman fainted, and an ambulance came.

"It was like shock and awe," recalled Ron Harrell, 40, a tenant. "We called it Hurricane FEMA."

It's bad enough that construction in New Orleans has stagnated so that no affordable housing is available. The only housing left for the working poor, who lost everything in the flood, is being shuttered, and the residents forced to leave.

• Here's a new wrinkle for the prison system, give away a kidney and shorten your sentence! Makes perfect sense, let's harvest the organs of the incarcerated! And convicts who've given up one kidney are sure to be productive members of society, and deserving of a commuted sentence! This is perfect on all levels!

• A sorority at DePauw University kicked out members of its group who were black, Latina, Asian, or considered ugly or uncool. DePauw kicked them right off campus. Good.

• The scofflaws evading paying their fair share of taxes are nothing short of treasonous. They refuse to pay for the society that helped them become rich. They'd rather use their power and influence to rewrite IRS rules:

John D. Graham, the official appointed by President Bush to streamline the federal rule-making process and give private interests a greater voice, said even he was surprised by the I.R.S. plan.

"Whoever's pen the first draft comes out of has a big advantage," said Dr. Graham, who ran the Office of Regulatory and Information Affairs for the White House before becoming dean last week of the graduate school at RAND, the nonprofit research organization.

....A single word, sometimes one letter, can change the meaning of a rule: "must" or "may"; "and" versus "or"; "could" or "would."

....In recent years there has been a quickening pace of moves to outsource the actual work of regulation, hiring contractors to write the rules. Now the I.R.S. is proposing that outside experts do it at no charge, opening up the possibility that some firms providing the draft would be working on behalf of an individual, business or association seeking to plant a favorable nuance in a rule.

• Mayans have to cleanse a site in Guatemala visited by President Bush. And honestly, that's the most REPSECTABLE reaction to the President's trip to Latin America. Is it 2008 yet?

• Finally, I think this officially qualifies as the most insane story ever:

Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found drunk and naked apart from bondage gear.

Reports say he was able to identify himself to police only after a rubber ball had been removed from his mouth [...]

Haaretz website reports that police found Mr Refael in the Israeli embassy compound where he had been found bound, gagged and naked apart from sado-masochistic sex accessories.