Midday Open Thread

• Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas will be on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher this Friday (yes, the show is back live), along with fellow guests Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, Anna Deavere Smith, and Jason Alexander.
• James L. has his usual massive quarterly fundraising roundup for key House races around the nation over at the Swing State Project.
• Big healthcare reform news: the AMA has--without reservation or caveats--endorsed the House bill.
• Watching the Huckleberry, Coburn, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III sideshow, it's hard to argue with Crawford:

  Racially-tinged inferences, snide liberal bashing and the shameless pandering to anti-intellectual sentiment that once won the day for Republicans are now falling flat. The Sotomayor nomination has proved to be yet another test case for the efficacy of traditional conservative attack lines.

  Good for Democrats, not particularly good for democracy. Not that we could have expected to see a real display of keen Constitutional analysis out of this crew, but after the beating that the rule of law took over the past eight years, it'd have been nice to see.

• Speaking of rule of law, did you know that some of the Bush legal memos for warrantless surveillance are still in place? Sen. Feingold has asked the administration to do something about it:

  [O]rder the public release of other memoranda and letters associated with that program, including the July 22,2004 letter of the Attorney General; the August 6,2004 letter of the Acting Assistant Attorney General; the August 2006 OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] memoranda on detention; and the July 2007 OLC memo on interrogation. Moreover, the OLC memoranda should be withdrawn.

• Via Atrios, who'd ever guess that former Nixon staffer and current annoying winger media personality Ben Stein would be, gasp, a "predatory bait-and-switch merchant"? Go read that before you believing anything he tells you on your teevee.
• Who knew? Birdwatchers are an economic force to be reckoned with, according to a Fish and Wildlife Service survey. In 2006, they contributed a whopping 36 billion to the U.S. economy. All in all, Americans spent over $122 billion in outdoor recreational activities in 2006 alone. Maybe they figured they'd better see it before the Bush administration sold it all off to the oil and gas companies.
• In other land use news, netroots hero Jon Tester isn't living up to his reputation very well. He's shutting regular Montanans, the primary stakeholders in a wilderness bill he's working on, out of the process. Not good, Sen. Tester, not good at all.
• Turns out history isn't actually history, its "an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America." At least, that's what right-wing textbook reviewers in Texas think. (H/T L,G&M)