The Rest Of The Week In Review

OK, I know you've just been waiting for me to get home from my three-hour local Democratic Party meeting to clean up the scraps of the week!

• The upcoming week in California will be big, with the state party convention happening starting Friday. I'll be up there in San Jose, and apparently so will Bill Clinton, wooing uncommitted superdelegates. Hopefully we'll get some focus on the budget dilemma as well, and how to beat up on Republicans and get that 2/3 majority we so desperately need.

• Turns out the Pentagon did an about-face and, after much criticism, released their report showing no direct link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

• This video from the Jed Report showing the blatant falsehood that is Hillary Clinton's statement about her trip to Tuzla during the Bosnian war has to be seen to be believed.



• I'd certainly rather talk about that than whose pastor said what nasty thing, although in this case both John McCain (whose spiritual guide accused the government of "enabling black genocide) and Hillary Clinton (who participates in Bible study in a right-wing cuilt group called "The Family") don't have much of a leg to stand on in this area, either.

• This is a two-week old op-ed, but I wanted to thank the New York Times for telling the truth about our prison problem. However, what may be an even larger and more sordid tale is how "tort reform" has closed the halls of justice to anyone seeking redress from a corporation, and considering that our Supreme Court is practically an adjunct of the Chamber of Commerce, that's not likely to get any better.

• I do so like this newer, feistier 110th Congress in 2008 - several Senators are calling on HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson to resign due to a number of scandals, including multiple instances of doing political favors for friends of Bush. In addition, the White House is so fearful that their signature education policy will be left to wither that they're the ones doing the negotiating on No Child Left Behind. Bush on the defensive! Fun!

• I think we're going to be very ready for the November elections. Provided, you know, we pick a Presidential candidate sometime before then. This part is especially intriguing:

Women's Voices Women Vote plan to focus their mobilization effort on unmarried women who now make up 26% of the voting age population. For the first time ever, single women make up the same share of the population as married women and they are overwhelmingly pro-change and pro-Democratic. As Paige Gardener put it: "Unmarried women will be to Democrats in 2008 what evangelicals were to Republicans in 2004."

• Republicans and Democrats just don't operate with the same set of facts. That's all I can gather from this story, which shows widely varying opinions on the US health care system depending on political party. Of course, it varies depending on class, too, so that could be a reason for the disparity.

• Glad to know that the image of Abu Ghraib's "thumbs up lady" Lynndie England as an unrepentant asshole wasn't somehow magnified by the pictures themselves. No, in actuality she's just as much of an asshole as she seems, actually blaming media exposure of the pictures as causing the deaths of thousands in Iraq, instead of ... what she did.

• Love it or leave it, man:

Union officials in Colorado say a Qwest supervisor tried to cut down on lengthy bathroom breaks by telling workmen to use disposable urinal bags in the field.

The manager distributed the bags to 25 male field technicians, telling them not to waste time leaving a job site to search for a public bathroom, the Rocky Mountain News reported Thursday.

"We deal with a lot of silliness in corporate America, but you've got to admit, it takes the freakin' cake," Reed Roberts, an administrative director at the Communications Workers of America District 7, told the newspaper.

• And finally, Barney Frank is actually going to introduce into Congress legislation calling for decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana. Which is great just for the opportunity to watch conservative heads explode. But it's time we had a serious debate in this country about the drug war and its failures, and the implications for our broken prison system.