What a day... and what a difference a few days make!

To continue speculating about who our nominee is, or what direction our Party is taking, now belongs to tin-foil hat territory. With Clinton's concession & endorsement today, it's officially over. Done.

And part of the action we can take to make "unity" a deed and not an empty aspiration is to donate now to the Democratic National Committee.

According to an article in today's Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Atlanta-based cable network TNT is "sticking firmly to its plans" to air Law & Order repeats featuring former Senator -- soon to be officially-announced GOP presidential candidate -- Fred Dalton Thompson.

The cable network, also known as the "Law & Order" network for its heavy reliance on L&O reruns, appears set in its defiance of the long-established practice known as "equal time," in which non-news related airtime for one candidate is matched with comparable time for the others.

Below the jump, let's discuss how to teach TNT about justice.

From time to time, the folks on the Right realize that we progressives are right about something.

In order to combat what must clearly be a major case of cognitive dissonance that follows their realization, they have to find fault with us in some other way.

For example, consider the specious analysis promoted by Michelle Malkin that liberals aren't as charitable as conservatives. (Note also the Right's hefty promotion of "Who Really Cares?", Prof. Arthur Brooks' book detailing his surprising research results about charitable donations.)

Their point: Okay, okay! Caring for the poor and weak is a good thing. But we do it better than you do!  Nyah nyah!

Yeah, right.

And now we're seeing it on the energy and environment front: Conservatives have rediscovered conservation... and some are claiming the high ground.

It's not just the little people museums that are feeling threatened by the totalitarian tendencies of the current Administration.

No less an institution than the Smithsonian has apparently taken a dive to avoid unwelcome scrutiny from the anti-science know-nothings that currently rule DC: According to a breaking story from the AP, a former Smithsonian administrator is claiming that it "toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic, for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration."

All major media sources, and most insider blogs, are now reporting that Gonz. has only a 50/50 chance of surviving tonight, and will almost certainly be gone by Monday.

Public opinion mirrors the experts' choices on this matter: ESPN reports that...

That whirring sound you hear this morning is Strom Thurmond doing major post-mortem rotations.

It seems that professional genealogists have been looking into Al Sharpton's past, and they've discovered an ironic head-turner.

More after the jump...

A couple of weeks back, Kossak VolvoDrivingLiberal posted a diaryannouncing the formation of AtlantaKos.

He also set up a Yahoo Group, which is open to interested Kossaks. Easy to join!

Here are some reasons to sign up, if you haven't already:

Wow. What a difference a little time and distance makes. Al Gore, long dismissed (not by me!) as a candidate of the past, appears to have a future. If he wants it.

Rather than continue to mine the [GOP candidate] vs. Hillary polling, this week CNN decided to check in on Obama trends while testing the strength of yet another non-candidate, Al Gore.

Gore vs. Giuliani. Gore vs. Romney. Gore vs. McCain.

Gore doesn't lose a single matchup.

That's right. The guy who is still showing anemic numbers in the Democratic nominee polling can win it all, according to a CNN poll taken Dec. 15-17.

According to the snickering, brain-dead duo I just saw on John Gibson's "Big Story," which includes Gibson himself, the Worst President Ever is also the Worst Ex-President Ever.

"Jimmy Carter." WTF?

The anti-pastry groups are about to endure a rude awakening.  Clear evidence of pie has been found on Mars.

   Striking images taken by NASA's Mars Cholesterol Surveyor spacecraft suggest the presence of various fruit and non-fruit fillings on the Martian surface, a tantalizing find for scientists wondering if the Red Planet might harbor any good places for dessert.

And Bush's little moon trip might get affected by this as well, considering that Mars HAS PIE.

   Kenneth Edgett of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, a food scientist involved in the research, said there had been a quest for "smoking gun" evidence for high-calorie snacks currently on Mars.

   "Basically, this is the 'oozing chocolate cream gun' for pie on Mars," Edgett told reporters.

link to Yahoo News story

We've got a lot of politics to talk about today - the amazing races we won and lost, the toppling of Rumsfeld, the upcoming battle to shape the agenda, the prospects for 2008...

Can we please take a minute to thank the service men and women, past and present, who served us in war & peace?

Okay, we're getting close. Close enough to be biting our fingernails and getting really cranky with our friends and families. (Especially those ones... That's right...you know who you are.)

And now, finally, close enough that we can start looking at the weather forecasts for Election Day. Which will give us something new to talk about, without causing us to stray too too far from what really matters to us all.

The latest national forecast maps after the jump...

After a recent spate of opinion polls showing Bush at 40% approval, a reasonable question was "Is Bush slowly rebounding from his historically significant suckitude?"

Those paying close attention to these things know that Bush's fortunes have gone up and down from week to week since the beginning of his reign administration -- but after the big 9/11 elevator ride, mostly "Going down!"

There have been occasional upticks for those blue-plate specials of testosteroni, such as invasions, captures of funny-looking foreign leaders, sham elections. But each successive bump has been shorter -- and shorter-lived.

And speaking of bumps: latest news & analysis below.

Hurricane season officially started on June 1.

But it started for real today. Tropical depression #1 has formed west of Cuba, and it's soon to become a tropical storm.

World, meet Alberto. Alberto meet world:

The Editorial page of today's (Saturday) edition of the Wall Street Journal presented a large sketch of an unfamilar character. Youngish and handsome, despite the characatured exaggerations of the sketch... WSJ's entrepreneurial crush-of-the-month?

No, it was Ned Lamont. Yes, our Ned Lamont. In a big profile in the WSJ, entitled "Kos Celeb."

more after the jump...

Okay, maybe the issue of "dynamic weighting of party affiliation" in political opinion polls sounds a little esoteric.

But it's not. And pollster Rasmussen's adoption of dynamic weighting is an important bit of news -- it will make his future polls a much more accurate reflection of the public-opinion-meltdown of George W. Bush and his party.

So mentally downgrade Bush's approval on all those past Rasmussen polls by a couple of percentage points (even though he won't rewrite his own history).

More on the flip.

"Forecaster Stewart" of the National Weather Service tells us this morning that an atmospheric dance now taking place over Jamaica has the makings of the next tropical depression.

Headed where? Oh, you know the answer to that.

Just how much more fun can the Gulf take?

Hurricane season runs through November, and we're running out of alphabet. Do you think we're headed into new, Greek letter territory?

Make the jump, see the pic, take the Poll.

No one was surprised when the Harvard Business School published a short profile on Grover Norquist (MBA '81) in the June 2005 issue of its official alumni magazine, the HBS Alumni Bulletin. The Bulletin's "One on One" feature has interviewed a wide range of graduates in past issues.

And after all, our CEO-in-Chief, President Bush, also hailed from "the West Point of Capitalism."

In the September issue, other HBS alums responded to the Norquist piece in their Letters to the Editor. The shocking verdict: an astonishing, nearly unanimous wave of revulsion about Norquist, his worldview and his impact.

Comparisons to Hitler, endorsements of inheritance taxes, concerns about increasing concentration of wealth, unvarnished blasts against Cheney and the war... You might think it was the Worker's World Daily, not an HBS publication.

Read these stinging rebukes after the jump.