The Rest of the Week In Review

Since I'm on the road to Yearly Kos today, I thought I'd clean out my attic.

• I missed that mild-mannered New England Republican Chris Shays pulled a Cynthia McKinney and screamed at a Capitol police officer. Shockingly, this didn't get the same coverage as that CRAAAAAAAZZY black woman.

• If you're late to the US Attorney scandal, the House Judiciary Committee report on the Miers and Bolten contempt charges does a good job of laying out the case, delineating all the wrongdoing and explaining the need for the White House to provide documentation and testimony to get to the bottom of the investigation.

• If you haven't seen it, Max Blumenthal put together another great video about the "Christians United for Israel" meeting. They're a group who believes the Rapture is coming soon and that Israel must be in control of the Holy Land when that happens. Of course Joe Lieberman was there.

• The New York Times writes about the phenomenon of moving prisoners out of state, shuffling them around like pieces of furniture instead of human beings who deserve basic dignity, in order to alleviate crowding. The danger of this is that most of the new sites for these prisoners are corporate-run, prison-industrial complex sites. Private prisons are less accountable to the states in which they reside, and are solely concerned with the profit motive rather than rehabilitation, treatment and returning prisoners to civil society after they have served their time.

• Michael Bloomberg is doing a national ad buy on Google Ads when you type in the word "climate change"? And he's buying up any website with a combination of the words Mike, Bloomberg, and 2008 in it? And he still wants us to believe he's not running?

• Hamas is learning American-style democracy: they kicked off a marketing campaign to portray themselves as "safe, clean and green." And they're taking journalists on special tours to see the new "Gaza Riviera."

• The only documents allowed to come out of the executive branch are political documents.

A draft outline of a surgeon general's report on global health overseen by a Bush administration political appointee in 2005 extolled the administration's efforts to improve health care in Iraq and Afghanistan and promoted an initiative to detect terrorism-related health threats on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The outline prepared under the direction of William R. Steiger, head of the Office of Global Health Affairs, differed substantially from a draft compiled by then-Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, who has said he refused to incorporate Steiger's ideas for fear of turning a scientific document into a political one.

• The Speaker of the Oregon House, Jeff Merkley, will file to run for the US Senate against "moderate" Republican Gordon Smith. We've been looking for a good candidate in Oregon. This makes this a top-tier race in my opinion.

• While John Edwards offers a transformation of the tax code to reward fairness, Chuck Schumer shows how hard it will be to implement such changes by opposing the changing of income made by hedge fund managers from investment income to earned income. There are so many competing interests and constituencies made rich by tweaks in the tax code, that Democrats will talk about tax fairness but suddenly become very protective of THEIR tax breaks.

• Finally, there are apparently 237 reasons to have sex. Funny, I thought there was 1: because people like to have sex.