Midday Open Thread

• Stop a bad bill in the Senate. Chris Dodd makes it easy. Seriously, the Dems need to hear from us in the kinds of numbers that the Republicans got during the immigration debate. Their phones never stopped ringing. Call your Congressperson and your Senators and tell them no more funding without a strict timetable for withdrawal.
• Democracy Corps has a new public polling report out today, with no great surprises for anyone who's been paying attention. Among their critical conclusions:

  Even if President Bush and the Republicans in Congress are determined to block Democratic efforts – as they already have on Iraq and stem cells and as they have threatened to do on student loans, lower drug prices, homeland security, and children’s health care, to name just a few – Democrats should still engage in those fights, show the public that they are committed to these goals, and force congressional Republicans to oppose popular issues for which they must answer in the next election.

  By all means, Dems, fight. That's what we put you back there for. Who knows, you might just end up ending a war in the process.

• Here's Tony Snow on benchmarks, then and now:

  May 10, 2007: "Keep in mind, benchmarks ... are not new. The president talked about them in [the] State of the Union. We talked about them in Amman in November. Secretary Rice put a list of 17 together in a letter to Sen. Levin. So you do need to have metrics."

  Sept. 12, 2007: "No, benchmarks were something that Congress wanted to use as a metric. And we're going to produce a report. But the fact is that the situation is bigger and more complex, and you need to look at the whole picture."

• Media Matters proves again how invaluable it is to the progressive movement, this time with an exhaustive report on the reach of conservative syndicated columnists.

  The results show that in paper after paper, state after state, and region after region, conservative syndicated columnists get more space than their progressive counterparts. As Editor & Publisher paraphrased one syndicate executive noting, "U.S. dailies run more conservative than liberal columns, but some are willing to consider liberal voices."

• Larry Craig gets his day in court, scheduled four days before he's supposed to resign. Meanwhile, Ted "Tubes" Stevens's name keeps coming up in other people's trials and not in a good way.
• Swing State has a pretty comprehensive roundup of all the names we are still waiting to hear from in terms of Senate races, from the big to the small, from the possible to the improbable.
• Free Press wants to know what motivated the Justice Department's Sept. 6 anti-Net Neutrality filing at the Federal Communications Commission -- which came months after the FCC's formal comment period had closed. They've submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to try to get to the bottom of it.