Midday open thread

• Um, Katharine? I wrote that post a year ago. The 2007 should've given that way.
• The AP's Ron Fournier really is a problem.
• BooMan tallies the candidates and elected officials who were present at Netroots Nation. There's a crapload of them. So I guess Democrats really aren't afraid of us. And the good ones really do have little to fear.

  There were a lot of politicians from red and purple states and districts who had the common sense to understand that the (New) New Left may be anti-war but they have little else in common with the 60's counterculture (except insofar as the Netroots welcomes the veterans of those wars with open arms). The Netroots is unapologetically pro-Constitution, anti-torture, and pro-Small Business. Our consensus positions on the war, on reproductive rights, on gay rights, and the environment are now majority American opinions. They aren't fringe. We have the (Old) New Left to thank for a lot of that, but the Netroots' culture is decidedly different, as are our primary goals. The (Old) New Left was tackling the Establishment on desegregation and women's liberation in an attempt to tear down centuries-old injustices. The (New) New Left is not attempting anything so bold or transformative. We're trying to get universal health care, Fair Trade, a green energy plan, and a restoration of the consensus American governmental and legal values of the post-war period...including internationalism and human rights.

• Cool pictures of a leopard ambushing and killing a croc, apparently for no reason at all (crocodiles don't have enough meat to justify the risk and danger). (Via John Cole's place.)
• The McCain campaign lied to Bob Novak, telling him they'd be choosing a veep on Tuesday to try and steal some of the thunder from Obama's overseas trip. Now Novak is pissed. So pissed, apparently, that he ran over a pedestrian. He drives a black corvette.
• Jindal is reportedly taking himself out of the veep-stakes. Too bad. The GOP has just lost its only "not ancient and white" option.
• I write in The Hill that the left has inherent advantages online.

  This disparity isn’t surprising. While conservative bloggers can rightfully claim a couple of minor successes, they’ve been generally relegated to the fringes of their movement. There’s been little need for them. Conservatives eager for conservative voices have long had a smorgasbord of options from which to choose, from Fox News Channel to an AM radio buffet dominated by Rush Limbaugh and clones, to hordes of movement conservatives clogging up newspaper op-ed pages, to well-established online message boards. Despite "liberal media" cries, there has never been any medium truly dominated by movement progressives. So-called "liberal" voices, like Joe Klein and Richard Cohen, have been more concerned with getting approbation from their friends in the D.C. cocktail party circuit than truly fighting for progressive causes.

  Furthermore, the right-wing media machine operates in a top-bottom fashion, relying heavily on its firebrand personalities — Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Progressives instinctively chafe at this hierarchical approach. Yet the Republican ability to march in lockstep has paid huge political dividends, yielding GOP victories on the strength of simplistic, well-crafted, oft-repeated (and even more often, bogus) messages, like the fabricated quote that Al Gore claimed to have "invented" the Internet.

  But the horizontal, collaborative structure of successful online communities clearly poses a problem for right-wing bloggers, precisely because their movement excels in following orders instead of participating in bottom-up discussion and organizing. Americans get enough one-way communication on TV, radio and print; those who follow politics online do so because it allows them to engage in something larger, not because they want to hear yet another bloviator blather.

• CO-04: The wide consensus is that this is Marilyn Musgrave's swang song, increasingly out of touch with a blue-ing district and done in by her single-minded obsession with gay bashing. Colorado Independent takes a look at the numbers of one of the district's key counties:

  The number of Weld County Republicans has remained relatively flat since 2004, rising 2 percent to 50,110 as of last month, according to Secretary of State data.

  Although the number of registered Weld Democrats during the same time is up 5 percent to 31,289, it’s the 12 percent increase in unaffiliated voters that has Democrats smiling.

• Way back in the day, Obama was a rare vote against eliminating rent control in Illinois.
• Yup. This is certainly pretty darn stupid.