Former Clinton Super Delegate Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-CA) has decided to support Barack Obama. And of course this is his right as Super delegates can change their minds right up to the Convention. But I found his rationale for the switch wanting:

While I continue to greatly respect and admire Senator Clinton and feel she has made history with her campaign, I believe that Senator Obama will inevitably be our party’s nominee for President.

Um, that's it? That's your big reason for switching. Okay. But he continues, and you'll laugh at this:

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post has extensive comments and media reaction on the Karl Rove subpoena.

The House Judiciary Committee yesterday released documents and correspondence pertaining to Rove's subpoena. Here is the letter (pdf)from the Office of Professional Responsibility stating it has opened a probe into the Don Siegelman prosecution.

As promised yesterday, here is the 99 page appeal brief filed by Siegleman.

I disagree with Big Tent Democrat on Obama's statement today on FL and MI. It's woefully inadequate and nothing he and the party haven't said before. It doesn't address the issue.

The issue is not seating the delegates at the convention. It's counting their votes and awarding delegates based on their votes BEFORE the nominee is chosen. It's about giving 2.3 million voters who took the time to go to the polls and who did nothing wrong have their votes count in deciding our party's nominee.

Obama is playing the same games he's always played on Michigan and Florida. He's not agreeing to let their votes count.

Saying they can be seated at the convention means they can cheer for the nominee and sit in on party platform and rules meetings. Big deal. If they can't have their votes count in determining the nominee, it's a shell game.

In this interview with the Palm Beach Post, Barack Obama says the Florida delegation will be seated:

Q: At this point in the race, why not seat the entire Florida delegation with a full vote based on the Jan. 29 primary?

[OBAMA]: They're definitely going to be seated. We're not the final decision maker on this. But we've said to the DNC that we want the Florida delegation to be seated, and I'm confident that it's going to be worked out sometime in the next 10 days. I expect that the delegates are going to be participating at the convention.

(Emphasis supplied.) Good for Obama. Here's a bonus - Obama gives Donna Brazile the stiff arm:

Like Colin Powell, Patrick Kennedy and NBC News anchor Brian Williams, John McCain takes Ambien.

More on Ambien:

• FDA Requests Stronger Warnings on Ambien

• Ambien, Sweet Ambien

• Driving While Ambien'ed

Does anyone not take Ambien?

(Comments now closed.)

Big news today in the case of "child soldier" Canadian Omar Khadr, who was seized in Afghanistan at age 15 and has been held ever since at Guantanamo. He and his lawyers have been preparing for trial by military commission.

The Canadian Supreme Court today ruled Omar is entitled to reports on his detention and interrogation. The Supreme Court of Canada has ordered the federal government to hand over information to alleged terrorist Omar Khadr that it gleaned from interrogation sessions that Canadian agents held with him in 2003.

The ACLU issued this press release (no link yet, received by e-mail):

The Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) ruled today that Canadian officials violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms – analogous to the U.S. Bill of Rights – by turning over interrogation records of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr to the United States. The court reached this result after finding that, at the time Canadian officials interrogated him, Khadr was being detained and prosecuted at Guantánamo in violation of U.S. and international law.

More...

The DNC has blogger credentials available for the May 31 hearing on Florida and Michigan. The hearing is at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.

If you are a lawyer who shares Hillary's view on Florida and Michigan and will be in D.C. that day and would like to live-blog the hearing for TalkLeft, I'll apply for credentials and front page your posts. You can do it anonymously or using your real name (Obviously, the DNC and I will need to know who you are.)

Just e-mail me and if you are a commenter here, let me also know the name you comment under.

The hearing will be telecast on C-SPAN and online and I'm sure BTD and I will be blogging it, but having someone in the room would add a lot of flavor and context to the reporting.

Via Jerome Armstrong, Jonathan Last argues:

If you believe that the most important precept in democratic politics is to "count every vote," then the sixth category is the most inclusive, and here Clinton leads Obama by 71,301 votes. Of course, this includes the Michigan result, where Sen. Obama had removed his name from the ballot. So while it may be the most inclusive, it may not be the most fair.

I disagree. The most inclusive vote totals properly honor the fact that most uncommitted voters in Michigan were Obama supporters. To properly honor their votes, we must assign those votes to Barack Obama. Indeed, as August J. Pollak (his unnecessary and nasty remarks about Jeralyn seriously mar his post BTW, Jeralyn is as nice and honorable a person as you can find. She does not deserve such vitriol.) points out:

Many do not accept that the popular vote in the Democratic nomination is the fairest representation of the will of the electorate in the Democratic contest. It is their right of course to feel that way. I disagree with them.

But I do object to what I have seen seeping into the coverage, especially on the Obama News Network (NBC), that the vote in places like Guam and Puerto Rico do not count because they do not vote in the Presidential Election in November. This utterly misconstrues the point. Oh and it is bigoted to boot. The latest was Jon Alter:

Jonathan Alter tops himself with this one, Popular Vote Poison. Alter's premise is that it is "pernicious" to care about who the voters actually voted for:

While [Clinton] knows that the nomination is determined by delegates, Hillary insists on saying at every opportunity that she is winning the popular vote. And she has now taken to touting the new HBO movie "Recount," which chronicles the Florida fiasco of eight years ago. Everyone can agree that the primary calendar needs reform. But popular-vote pandering is poison for Democrats. . ..

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Obama sought to reassure Florida's Jewish community he is pro-Israel today. Here's what he had to say in response to a question about Rashid Khalidi.

“You mentioned Rashid Khalidi, who’s a professor at Columbia," Obama said. "I do know him because I taught at the University of Chicago. And he is Palestinian. And I do know him and I have had conversations. He is not one of my advisors; he’s not one of my foreign policy people. His kids went to the Lab school where my kids go as well. He is a respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees with a lot of Israel’s policy.”

....“To pluck out one person who I know and who I’ve had a conversation with who has very different views than 900 of my friends and then to suggest that somehow that shows that maybe I’m not sufficiently pro-Israel, I think, is a very problematic stand to take," he said. "So we gotta be careful about guilt by association.”

He apparently didn't mention Khalidi hosted a fundraiser for him when he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2000, or or that he attended a testimonial dinner for Khalidi and praised him when Khalidi left Chicago to chair Columbia's Middle Eastern Studies Department, or that while he served on the board of the Woods Fund, it voted to grant $40,000.00 to the Arab American Network, an organization headed by Khalidi's wife. From the LA Times: [More...]

Via Corrente, the UK's New Statesman US correspondent notices the sexism pervasive in our Media as manifested in this campaign:

Gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind has been shamelessly peddled by the US media, which - sooner rather than later, I fear - will have to account for their sins. . .

I am no particular fan of Clinton. Nor, I think, would friends and colleagues accuse me of being racist. But it is quite inconceivable that any leading male presidential candidate would be treated with such hatred and scorn as Clinton has been. . . . [More...]