Note to the Media, the new political center is the Democratic Party. Just ask Chris Shays:

“Democrats basically grabbed the center and ran with it politically,” Mr. Shays said, adding that he would continue working with the Democrats provided they did not veer from the political center.

This lesson is one the Media needs to take to heart, so they stop acting like fools (see Lauer, Matt) whenever Matt Drudge tells them some nonsense.

Radio talk show host Don Imus joined the ranks of Mel Gibson and Grey's Anatomy star Isaiah Washington yesterday with his comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team which has 8 black members:

Imus was speaking with producer Bernard McGurk when the NCAA title game between Rutgers and Tennessee came up.

''That's some rough girls from Rutgers,'' Imus said. ''Man, they got tattoos ...''

''Some hardcore hos,'' said McGurk.

''That's some nappy headed hos there, I'm going to tell you that,'' Imus said.

Rehab, anyone? There's lots of calls for his firing, despite his apology.

''It was completely inappropriate, and we can understand why people were offended. Our characterization was thoughtless and stupid, and we are sorry.''

It wasn't just thoughtless and stupid. It was racist. MSNBC which airs his show in the morning provided this weak statement:

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I tend to get a lot of e-mails from people who have found themselves on the wrong side of the justice system. This one I received today from a woman about to begin serving a 9 year federal sentence for selling 8 pain pills to an undercover operative (snitch) really typifies to me what is wrong with the war on drugs.

In 2 months I have to self-surrender to prison for 9 years, for Conspiracy to distribute drugs, near a school. (You cannot even see the school from my house..) I am a 46 year old single mother of 4, grandmother of 4. I have no prior record. I was a successful business owner and very active in my community for 20 years. I hurt my back, working hard to support my children. The doctor gave me prescribed pain medication and I got addicted. I was entrapped into a drug deal for buying and selling 8 pills, to a snitch. They raided my home and locked me up. I spent a horrible week detoxing in jail. The judge sent me to addiction treatment center, suggested by the prosecution, and I have over 1 year clean.

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Took a while:

A top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales abruptly quit Friday, almost two weeks after telling Congress she would not testify about her role in the firings of federal prosecutors. There was no immediate reason given, but Monica M. Goodling's refusal to face Congress had intensified a controversy that threatens Gonzales' job.

She resigned in a three-sentence letter to Gonzales, calling her five-year stint at Justice an honor and telling him, "May God bless you richly as you continue your service to America."

. . . "While Monica Goodling had no choice but to resign, this is the third Justice Department official involved in the U.S attorney firings who has stepped down," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., who was among the first senators to question the firings and the first to call for Gonzales' resignation. "Attorney General Gonzales' hold on the department gets more tenuous each day," Schumer said in a statement.

After three weeks of deliberation, a federal jury in Denver has rejected the death penalty for William Sablan, an inmate at Florence who it found killed his cellmate. The facts were ugly. As I wrote here

The defendants are cousins and maximum security inmates at Florence who allegedly killed their cellmate, cut out his body organs and held them up to guards to taunt them — and to warn other inmates not to snitch them out. The aftermath of the murder was videotaped by guards.

It would have been the first federal death verdict in Colorado since Timothy McVeigh. Sablan's lawyers initially went for an insanity defense. Then, as Alan Pendergast of Westword wrote on the day of the guilty verdict,

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There is nothing funnier to me than the spectacle of Matt Lauer talking about things he has no clue about. Their dicussion of Pelosi in Syria is hilarious:

LAUER: Vice President Cheney called Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria “bad behavior,” a Washington Post editorial on Thursday called it “counter-productive and foolish,” and op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning goes a step further and suggests her trip may actually have been a felony, that it may have violated something called the Logan Act. Tim, is this the way the Democrats wanted to get off the mark in terms of foreign affairs?

Dick Cheney, Fred Hiatt and the loony tunes WSJ Editorial Page making stupid and reckless accusations is the concern? I tell you what you need to be concerned about Matt - you should be concerned about looking like a GOP puppet. This is embarrassing journalistic malpractice. But let's face it, does anyone expect anything else from the likes of you? Of course not. Here's a secret Matt, no one takes you seriously. No one.

Minneapolis seems to be the domestic news hotspot today.

With the Republican convention scheduled to hit town next year, officials are worried about pigeon poop. So, they are going to send officials up to rooftops to spring out through trap doors and steal the pigeons' eggs after they are laid and before they hatch.

"We'll build them little condos. We'll keep taking the eggs, and they won't have little ones," said Bill Stephenson, the city's animal control supervisor. "Slowly they'll die off."

The scheme has the blessing of the St. Paul Audubon Society. Member Val Cunningham said pigeons aren't native, and their eggs aren't protected. If the plan works, "it would be sweet for the city," Cunningham said.

They considered but decided against contraceptives because they didn't want to sterilize eagles or hawks by mistake.

I've never lived in a city with pigeons, but don't they have feelings too? Where are the Republican right to lifers on this plan to kill the unborn?

I've been following the curious developments in the U.S. Attorneys office in Minneapolis for a few days, but until today, there was too little available information from which to decide if it was newsworthy.

What was known: U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger resigned in February, 2006. Rachel Paulose, age 34, a former aide to Alberto Gonzales whose last job was serving as senior counsel to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty was immediately named as his successor and made Acting U.S. Attorney. She was confirmed by the Senate in December, 2006 and sworn in in March, 2007, by which time she had already been in the job for a year.

Earlier this week there were rumblings about three career prosecutors in the office submitting resignations. DOJ sent out a mediator. Late yesterday it was announced that the three were remaining with the office, but were accepting demotions from managerial positions to rank and file prosecutors. Another top administrative official, not a prosecutor, also submitted his resignation.

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There's no love between Californians and George W. Bush. On war and the economy, his approval ratings in the state have tanked to Nixon-like numbers.

Just 26 percent of California voters surveyed by the Field Poll approved of the president's performance in office -- nearly reaching the record low 24 percent approval rating of former President Richard Nixon in August 1974, just before his resignation over the Watergate scandal.

The poll showed that just 24 percent of the state's voters saw the president's performance in Iraq in a positive light, compared with 72 percent who viewed it negatively.

There are two indicators of what the numbers mean.

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Atrios comments on E.J. Dionne's column on dogmatic atheists and brings up some interesting points while leading me to think of another.

My daughter recently celebrated her bat mitzvah and one of the readings at the service was the Red Heifer:

According to the Numbers 19:2: "Speak unto the Children of Israel that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke". In other words, it must not have hairs of any other color, it must be in perfect health, and it must never have been used to perform work. . . . The existence of a red heifer that conforms with all of the rigid requirements imposed by halakha is a biological anomaly. . . . The absolute rarity of the animal, combined with the mystical ritual in which it is used, have given the red heifer special status in Jewish tradition. It is cited as the prime example of a chok, or biblical law for which there is no apparent logic, and is therefore of absolute Divine origin. . . .

I have always viewed the Red Heifer writing as being a call for unquestioning faith. It means, I think, that there are matters to which only God can know the why. And that God demands, in essence, acceptance of dogma. It is this requirement of all religions that makes it impossible for me to be religious, or atheist for that matter. I do not, and believe can not, know if God exists. I can not accept the dogma of either path.

I love fights over words. They remind me of the Clinton era and the battle over the meaning of the word "is."

Trial starts next week in a lawsuit by the makers of Equal against the makers of Splenda. For the record, I switched to Splenda years ago, when I got the impression, however founded or unfounded, that Splenda was the more healthy of the two.

The issue: What does the phrase "made from sugar" mean?

To me, "made from sugar" means the product began with sugar and got converted to something else in the manufacturing process. Equal, which has seen a huge dip in sales since Splenda began marketing its product, says Splenda is making a false assertion because there's no sugar in the product.

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For the 'You don't say?' file:

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

In other news, Dick Cheney is still lying about it: