- The Huffington Post reports that Sen. Lindsey Graham tried to make the case for a more diverse and open GOP to the South Carolina Republican Party convention – it did not go well.
- Steve Benen remembers back when Sen. Mitch McConnell believed filibustering a president’s judicial nominee was just about the worst thing a senator could do – but those days are over.
- Howie Klein notes that not only did Arkansas state Senate’s GOP Kim Hendren call Sen. Charles Schumer “that Jew,” but Doyle Webb, the state Republican chairman, called a Democratic legislator “that lesbian.”
- FireDogLake reports that parents, with the assistance of Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute, are fighting to keep “And Tango Makes Three” out of school curriculum.
- AU weighs in on the news that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s daily top-secret briefings to former President George W. Bush during the early part of the Iraq War in 2003 featured covers festooned with photos of soldiers praying or in action in Iraq accompanied by Bible verses.
- Finally, Jeffrey Toobin profiles Chief Justice John Roberts:
After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.
