Midday Open Thread

• In a must-read post at the AFL-CIO blog, Tula Connell looks at employer exploitation of immigrants.
• The New York Times is taking a look back 20 years, to an op-ed piece about "the electoral success of a black presidential candidate derided by political experts as lacking in experience."
• The town of Obama in Japan is hoping a Barack Obama presidency would bring them tourist business and international renown.
• Let McCain choke on Public Financing: rikyrah at Jack and Jill Politics agrees that Obama should not take general election public financing.
• What do you do after you've spent $50 million to earn one delegate in a presidential run? Rudy Giuliani has gone back to the motivational speech business, and his Washington Speaker's Bureau bio is a thing of beauty.
• Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?

  For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad.

  - smintheus

• Chiz. The head of the GAO is resigning. That means Bush may get the chance to appoint his successor for a fifteen-year term as the federal government's chief watch dog. - smintheus
• Bush to rural America: Dry up and blow away.- smintheus
• In what's being called the deadliest attack in Afghanistan since 2001, 80 people were killed in a suicide bombing at a dog fight.
• Kosovo has declared independence. Serbia is not thrilled.
• Glenn Greenwald spots the Heritage Foundation's latest Flash application fear-mongering, in the form of a clock counting down the microseconds to your death at the hands of terrorists due to the (non)expiration of the ridiculously-named Protect America Act.

  Here's the "Before" clock:

  

  And now that you're all dead, the "After" clock:

  

  If it was a liberal outpost, conservatives would be issuing spittle-flecked fatwas, insisting that the clock means Heritage can't wait for the terrorists to win. -- Kagro X