According to the LAT:

Vice President Dick Cheney
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
Sen. Elizabeth Dole
former Republican presidential candidate Kansas Sen. Bob Dole
GOP Sen. Richard Burr, sat nearby.
Chris Dodd of Connecticut
Joe Biden of Delaware
Gov. Mike Easley
Cindy McCain

I get a lot of mail from Chris Dodd, asking me to call my congressman or send an email, and as such it was sad to see him on the above list. In much the same way that I refuse to EVER use any of Firedoglake's activism tools or to participate in any action sourced from them, I'll be unsubscribing from Dodd's list and action alerts. There are lots of ways for me to reach out to Congress without having to tacitly endorse Dodd by giving him my data or allowing him to bundle me into an aggregate list of people he can claim to have activated or corralled. As far as I'm concerned, unless you are Helms' bastard child, there's no reason for a progressive to be crying in the front row at his funeral. And even then...

But into the Book of Racial Grudges, Dodd! Right next to Hamsher!

So I will be making a concerted effort to never link to or use another AP story on the blog. Why? Because their recent attempt to charge people who quote more than five words of any AP story online just goes to show what monumental, malicious assholes the AP's lawyers and copyright people are.

I mean never, ever, not even after AP backs off once they realize how stupid the attempt to gouge bloggers makes them look. Although everyone is justifiably worried about how media will pay for itself in a free/digital world, unilaterally trying to rewrite the existing laws of fair use is not only a terrible solution, it just goes to show you why these media companies are in the fix they're in in the first place. The world is still too full of content providers for me to ever have to use AP again.

This leads me to the latest backward attempt to analyze Barack Obama and race. I think the MSM, frankly, needs to just give up on this whole topic, their record is disastrous. First Obama wasn't black enough. Then he was so black that he couldn't win the nomination. Now the question is "How black is too black?" Lemme explain something to you, dog: I just watched a black man carry Iowa and Oregon and then carry roughly nine out of ten black voters. Don't give me that business about Appalachia. You know damn well if I had told you three years ago that a black man would do that you would have laughed at me. With that backdrop I've gotta say, I don't even know what the phrase "too black" means.

One thing I do know, the Times definition of blackness--"a sense of black grievance"--is a joke. And if it weren't Al Sharpton would have dominated the black vote. That sort of flat rendering of black America, keep up this false idea that the most unifying factor of black culture is the ability to make white people feel guilty. Look, I know this is tough to believe, but black people aren't nearly as obsessed with white people, as media would have you think. Fueling that notion is a cheap and easy way to fill some column inches, while not giving a flying fuck about stripping the humanity and complexity away from black folks. [full ta-nehisi]

The NYT op-ed that Ta-Nehisi is shitting on was written by Marcus Mabry. I actually (usually) like Mabry's work, (we might be friendeded on some or another social network) but this strikes me as a case where a (youngish?) black writer was ill-served by white editors who didn't know enough to him ask the right questions. When you're the only member of your tribe in an editorial encounter, and when, moreover, the underlying narrative of that encounter involves you being imported in order to explain said tribe to the publication and its readers, well, you're basically blogging with the aid of a highly compensated human spell-checker. Your editors are very often useless in guiding the piece and are themselves basically sweating it out on their side of the computer screens praying they bet on the right horse/native informant.