OH HELL YEAH DO THIS THING: It’s the last day of something or other with the Warblog Awards! Details here, from warblog Commenter Gen. Chascates. Thank you, everyone, for your many patriotic votes! [2009 Weblog Awards and these categories too, also]

Promising young Alaska governor Sarah Palin has selected a nice new fellow named Wayne Anthony Ross to be the state’s Attorney General. He is perhaps the worst selection for anything in politics since that time that John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his vice president. Just kidding, he’s a stitch! Anyone like RAPE JOKES? Wayne Anthony Ross has good ones! So good that they don’t even *sound* like rape jokes — they’re more like, “endorsements of rape.” MORE »

John McCain may not have been able to get Congress to balance the budget by eliminating $7.7 billion in earmarked projects, but… but John McCain is very important, still. He took another important stance just yesterday in fact! At a confirmation hearing yesterday for the *deputy Secretary of the Interior*, the biggest responsibility of which is to run around national parks and pick up cheeseburger wrappers, McCain threatened to block the nominee for having once mentioned Ronald Reagan in a moderately unflattering light in a 2006 article. It is a matter of ETHICS. MORE »

A Democratic Hill staffer with a clear “liberal bias” writes to TPM, offering a taste of what we can expect from the Internet in a post-Gregg world: “It’s hard not to think that Gregg’s withdrawal, with the grumbling about the census and the stimulus, was not timed to cause the most damage possible to the Obama administration. Releasing the statement just as Obama took the stage in Peoria was clearly designed to undermine the President’s event. The fact he scheduled a presser only seems to confirm it… MORE »

While we haven’t yet turned on CNN to hear the Best Political Team On Earth tell us what we think about the politics of what we think about Sen. Judd Gregg’s decision to withdrawn his Commerce Secretary nomination, we think he’s coming off like an idiot. Other people who think Judd Gregg is coming off like an idiot include Robert Gibbs, and Judd Gregg. MORE »

OK here is the problem with labor/union disputes: they are invariably very complicated and sort of dull to the uninitiated. The articles about these disputes are fiendishly unskimmable, and they often discuss legislation that doesn’t at first glance favor one side or the other until you look into it and realize they are PURE GOOD/EVIL. Thus it is with some trepidation that we even attempt to wade into the Hilda Solis debacle. MORE »