In Brief - April 10th, 2007

Here's today's quick news digest, with grilled cheese and clam chowder:

• A CBS news producer has been fired for plagiarism after a story was heisted from The Wall Street Journal.
• The House Judiciary Committee is issuing subpoenas requesting more documents from the Justice Department.
• The official website of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver is up and running.
• A plurality of Americans wants Democrats to withhold funds if Bush vetoes the supplemental authorization, according to new polling.
• Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke consider the Rutger women's news conference, and come out looking kind of foolish.
• The Legislature passes the domestic partnership bill, which Governor Christine Gregoire intends to sign.

Finally, with props to Talking Points Memo, comes a New York Times article detailing how a federal commission appears to have downplayed expert opinion suggesting that voter fraud is scarce. As Josh Marshall so aptly puts it:

You have to put all these pieces together to see the whole picture. The Republican party is heavily invested in hyping and inventing claims of voter fraud which they then use to stymie legitimate voter registration drives and institute 'ballot integrity' efforts which have the actual goal of limiting voting by racial minorities and under-income voters.

The truth can hurt but that's the unvarnished truth. And the backdrop to the US Attorney Purge was a concerted effort to enlist US Attorneys to put the power of the state criminal prosecution apparatus behind this partisan gambit.

The whole thing rested on creating a false equivalence, that "Democrats do it too." Which was always baloney.

Anyone who has ever been to a Democratic Party meeting knows we couldn't organize the theft of a salt shaker without three hours of debate.