• NYT endorses Lamont, WP, The Hartford Courant and the Connecticut Post back Lieberman. [Red State]

• Abortion cartoon not funny. [Pandagon]
• “There’s convincing evidence that the pictures from Qana were cynically staged and exploited in a way that will turn your stomach, as the Lebanese ‘rescue worker’ we see in many of these photos parades around with a dead child for four hours, even changing his clothes and continuing the exhibition.” [Little Green Footballs]
• The Administration “may have broken over two dozen federal laws and regulations — some of them multiple times — according to an unreleased report from the House Judiciary Committee Democrats.” [TPMMuckraker]

• Non-voting congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton stubbornly refutes Stephen Colbert’s claim that DC is not in the United States. Even though his mind is made up, she continues trying to confuse him with facts.

• We suspected there might have been some photoshop foul play, but it turned out Katherine Harris just wasn’t in the front of the picture. First time for everything.
• Montana Senator Conrad Burns boldly ignores post-9/11 decorum and balls out a team of firefighters. Burns’s own performance review to be completed in November.
• No surprises here, the worst campaign in America, is run by exactly who you think it is.
• Ann Coulter (pot) calls Bill Clinton (kettle) gay (black).
• Eliot Spitzer loves the wacky-backy as much as you do.
• If any OMB fraud auditors mess with Elaine L. Chao, they’ll end up with a government contracting officer’s severed head beneath their sheets.
• Dana Milbank sets the chattering class a chattering with a mystery quote from a republican candidate. But, as we all know nothing in DC stays a secret very long.

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• Liberals are mean, get slapped on collective wrist. [Blogs for Bush]

• “Instead of the donkey as a party mascot, the Democrats may want to consider a more exotic animal. Peter Beinart has a suggestion — the pander bear.” [Captain's Quarters]
• Fired-for-no-apparent-reason Gawker Editor Jesse Oxfeld hired as senior editor for New York magazine’s website. [Romenesko]
• “Sen. Hillary Clinton is looking for new ways to reach out to white working and middle class voters - especially those who live in exurbs and rural areas. According to several Democratic sources and others on the periphery of Clinton’s team, an old, press-shy face is part of her the inner circle: marketing whiz Roy Spence, a Clinton family confidant since the 1970s.” [Hotline On Call]
• The cool kids have a new way to talk about “the combination of slow growth and high inflation,” and that’s Stagflation. Just rolls off the tongue. [Political Animal]

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Friday

• Baltimore native DMX at Love, 1350 Okie St. NE. $20. [Ticketmaster]

• 1958’s The Kraft Theatre. All the King’s Men [Parts I & II]. Sidney Lumet directed this adaptation of the novel by Robert Penn Warren. Free at 7PM. LOC’s Mary Pickford Theater. [LOC]

Saturday

• Comedians Ahmed Ahmed, Aron Kader and Maz Jobrani present their “Axis of Evil Comedy Show.” 7&10PM at the Warner Theatre. $27-$37. [Warner Theatre]

• Black Heart Procession at the Black Cat. 9:30PM. $12. [Black Cat]
• Free Grey Goose until 11PM at Century Club, hosted by former WPGC DJ Big Tigger. Carnegie Library. $25 in advance; Free before 10:30PM for men and before 11PM for women. [WP]
• Of Montreal at The State Theater. $12 at 7PM. [State Theatre]

Sunday

• Yes, yes you hate improv, but you also kind of love it. The Escapists at the Warehouse. $15 at 8PM. [Theater Mania]

• The Good Fight author Peter Beinart at Politics and Prose. “Liberals, he says, can oppose the totalitarianism which stalks the Islamic world today and at the same time fight for freedom from the inside out by becoming more democratic at home.” [P&P]
• Screening of Underground with new musical score for cello and piano. “Subterranean spaces of the London Tube are the setting for a thrilling rush-hour romance…with a chill a minute.” Free at 4:30 p.m. National Gallery. [National Gallery]

• Liz Smith: Reading about Wednesday’s screening of Woody Allen’s latest, Scoop, we learned that Capote director Bennett Miller may make a Bob Dylan music video with Scarlett Johansson. [NYP]
• Reliable Source: Bob Casey Jr. returns a $2,100 campaign contribution from Dan Savage because of “the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.” The Casey campaign took the money, invited Savage to a fundraiser, then changed their minds. [WP]
• Page Six: Ex-Paris Review Editor James Linville is making Ernest Hemingway’s elusive The Garden of Eden into a movie. “Linville was a longtime protégé of the Review’s George Plimpton, who himself was mentored by ‘Papa.’” [NYP]
• LA Times Entertainment News: Fake movie “Aquaman” on HBO’s Entourage might become a real movie. “In one of the strangest twists of this life-imitating-art tale, the talent agent at the center of the informal ‘Aquaman’ talks is Ari Emanuel, the brassy Endeavor partner on whom ‘Entourage’ agent Ari Gold is based.” [LAT]

• Americans fighting terrorism may be protected from “prosecution for past violations of the War Crimes Act of 1996…That law criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions governing conduct in war and threatens the death penalty if U.S.-held detainees die in custody from abusive treatment.” [WP]
• No significant troop withdrawal in sight this year. [LAT]
• “Unable to agree on major lobbying and ethics legislation, Senate and House leaders have made plans to adopt vastly scaled-back versions of the measures as part of their rules so that lawmakers can claim that they responded to recent congressional scandals.” [WP]
• Pro-immigrant rights groups divided by Senate immigration measure, some say it contains “loopholes that could criminalize individuals, including legal immigrants, for helping family members or friends who are in the country illegally.” [WP]
• Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) has a wife and close friend inside consulting firm ICG Government, “a consulting company for technology firms seeking government contracts.” [WP]
• Minimum wage may increase to $7.15, House votes today. [NYT]

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• An Egyptian conspiracy-theory music video with cartoon representations of America and Israel is the depressing comic gold Ionesco warned us about. [Andrew Sullivan]
• Novelist Frederick Forsyth loves global terrorism, couldn’t pay mortgage without it. [Galleycat]
• Iraq party scene soon to explode, and not with bombs this time. [Mother Jones]
• Crawford, TX has a new fake ranch owner. [Star-Telegram]
• Fred Phelps has a son, and that son has a cute ass. [You Tube]

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If you missed it, this picture was the front page of today’s NYT.
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• DC: a less shitty place to live than other places that are more shitty. [Lawsomnia]
• Redskins’ marketing department great at coming up with ways to, “distract our moronic fans from realizing how we constantly bend them over and fuck them in the ass.” [Why I Hate DC]
• List obsessed Forbes magazine ranks DC 9th in best cities for singles. [Metroblogging DC]
• The ranking would have been higher if not for the fat flasher of 16th street. [Shiftless Badger]
• City Paper EIC Erik Wemple is less of a journalist, more of a crusader against hypocrisy in city government and, ah, doggy day spas. [Circumlocutor]
• The alt-weekly can, however, still be trusted to not miss a single instance of the loony-toon crazy ramblings of Brother Marion.
  [City Paper]

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• Ed Peck, chief of the U.S. mission to Iraq under Jimmy Carter, defends Hezbollah. [Hot Air]
• Talking Points Memo launches new sub-site called Election Central. [TPM's Election Central]
• CNN this AM: “In keeping with her mood and to reflect the world crises she tackles daily, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to play a somber piece of music to her Asian colleagues in Malaysia this week. ‘It is not a time that is frivolous. It is a serious time. I will play something that is in accordance with my serious mood,’ said Rice, who had just attended a conference in Rome aimed at helping resolve the Lebanon crisis.” [Crooks and Liars]
• “‘Malice’ has several definitions, but the legal definition that applies to homicide is ‘the intention or desire to cause harm to another through an unlawful or wrongful act without justification or excuse.’ It’s intent that’s at issue here, not evil motives. And there’s no question that doctors who perform abortions or harvest stem cells have intent aplenty.” [Political Animal]