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- Deep thought: Given that he's a serial liar, why does anyone care what Dick Cheney thinks about torture, national security and the new administration?
- Greg Sargent has more details on the NY Times angle of the Jane Harman warrantless wiretapping story, getting a written statement from a Times spokesperson that seems to directly contradict Bill Keller's denial from yesterday. Maybe the executive editor and the Washington bureau chief ought to compare notes and get their stories straight, no?
- Nate Silver interprets a new Gallup poll to indicate that the libertarian wing of the Republican party is currently winning the battle for the GOP's soul at the expense of social conservatives who just aren't getting the same mileage out of their pet issues as they once did. It's an interesting thought experiment, to consider whether libertarians could find greater success under the umbrella of a currently-in-the-crapper but enduring political brand, but the GOP's political coalition is less about one faction triumphing over another and more about those factions finding some sort of peaceful coexistence.
- In case you haven't been keeping score at home, Rep. Todd Tiahrt of Kansas has become the fifth Republican to say something mildly critical of Rush Limbaugh, only to "revise" his statement a few days/hours later. I tried to come up with a comparable relationship Limbaugh has to the GOP on the Left and drew a blank.
- Seems a member of the Ohio militia wants to organize a "peaceful demonstration" of "at least one million armed militia men marching on Washington." Even if such a thing could be organized, I'm pretty sure the Park Service -- to say nothing of the Capitol Police and the Secret Service -- wouldn't permit it. But I'm curious what, precisely, they would be demonstrating against. The best I could come up with was this totalitarian federal judge ruling that you can't bring concealed weapons into national parks.
- Remainders: Inhofe promises to filibuster a noncontroversial judicial nominee; Dave Weigel writes about the "civil war" between increasingly reasonable and non-crazy blogger Charles Johnson and the rest of the paranoid right-wing blogosphere; it's Bush v. Clinton on May 29th; and Yglesias asks a question I've been wondering, "Who is Meghan McCain?"
--Mori Dinauer
