Hunter is brilliant.

From Thursday's Daily Show, an awesome salute to Fox News.

It's so nice to see Hillary Clinton and John McCain finally finding something they can agree on.

A nice [short] documentary on liquid coal, produced by the NRDC.

Instaputz (via Atrios) gets to the bottom of McCain's trouble "distinguishing between Iraq and Iran."

The Pulitzer committee would like you to know that I have impeccable taste.

Bob Schieffer, on Face the Nation yesterday:

Well it seems to me that this [the recent fighting in Basra and Baghdad] is going beyond the reasons that America went to Iraq, and that was to provide, you know... establish some sort of stable democracy in this part of the world, to help the Iraqis put down these terrorists that were a threat to the United States. Now we have this militia fighting, it's all about the neighborhood, it seems to be now, much more so than it is about Iraq.

[Emphasis added to illustrate Bob Schieffer's tenuous grasp on recent history.] Way to be CBS's chief Washington correspondent, Bob!

Mark Penn is out (-ish). That's like whoa.

[Via MyDD, AMERICAblog, TPM, the Politico, First Read, the New York Times, and the BBC [among others].)

A fascinating issue ad that I happened across during the basketball games last night:

[Voiceover:] The FDA is supposed to protect our health, food safety, medicines, medical devices. But their own scientific experts say the agency can't do their [sic] current job properly, and warn that lives are at risk. Yet some in Congress want to add to the FDA's plate, proposing seven billion dollars for new tobacco regulations, when numerous agencies are already working to reduce tobacco use. Even the head of the FDA has concerns about the idea. Tell Congress not to add tobacco to the FDA's plate. Fix the system before it shatters.

"Paid for by Reynolds American, Inc." says the fine print. Come on, guys: you couldn't even be bothered to set up an ambiguously-named shell company? You're getting sloppy, Big Tobacco.

This just in (eight years ago): John McCain doesn't care what you "consider" to be a racial slur.

[I bookmarked this about six months ago, and then completely forgot about it, but it's awesome enough to deserve a mention despite its complete lack of currency.]

A neurobiological study out of NYU and UCLA has finally and conclusively demonstrated that liberals are smart and conservatives are stupid. (Though I may be oversimplifying.)

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work. ...

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's [natch] Institute of Personality and Social Research, [said] liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

(Via Slashdot.)

Two great blog posts worth highlighting:

• DailyKos's DHinMI explains, quite briefly, the basics of campaign finance law.
• MyDD's Todd Beeton muses on McCain, and posts an excellent email from MoveOn called "10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don't)."