Glenn Greenwald has a new post up this morning telling us what the Corporate Owned Media (COM) won't: John Edwards experienced a national surge that the other Democratic candidates didn't until the last two days.

As but one example, consider this new daily tracking poll today from Rasumussen Reports. At least according to this poll, it is true that there has been one candidate who has been genuinely surging in the last week or two among Democratic voters nationally -- John Edwards

More after the flip.

Norman Finkelstein, political scientist at DePaul and child of holocaust survivors, has been denied tenure after Alan Dershowitz's scorched-truth campaign against him.  As many, if not most, at DKos are aware, Dershowitless's connection to veracity is somewhere between weak and nonexistent.  His support of torture as state policy shows Dersh as one of America's monsters of modernity.  DePaul apparently denied Finkelstein tenure because he hurt their fund-raising.

Academic freedom's corpse will be available for viewing later today.

I just saw this article up over at the NYTimes regarding Grey's Anatomy star Isaiah Washington's repeated use of an "anti-gay slur."  Here's the quote that really caught my eye:

The executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because company officials were instructed not to go beyond a prepared statement, said that Mr. Washington’s behavior could be considered grounds for dismissal under Disney’s corporate antidiscrimination policy.

ABC and Touchstone, Disney’s television studio, called Mr. Washington’s behavior "unacceptable" in a statement issued on Thursday, three days after Mr. Washington’s most recent remark, which occurred in the backstage press room at the Golden Globes ceremony last week.

I know this is late in the news cycle, but in case no one else mentioned it, George Will bloviated about the minimum wage on the WaPo op-ed page today, saying,

But the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices.

Will really disgraced himself and everything he professes to believe in by making this statement. Calling labor a commodity, i.e. something that has a price in a market, is the same as calling humanity a commodity. This is the ideology of slavery, including our own present version known as a wage slavery, where one just rents oneself out to the highest bidder and which was sorely resented as the "daring new depravity of the times" by Civil War veterans returning from battle.

Someone George Will may be familiar with had a little bit different take:

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

This is from Abraham Lincoln's First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861.

George Will is odious and loathsome.