Today’s edition of quick hits.
* In a very silly Presidents’ Day poll, Gallup found that Americans believe Abraham Lincoln was the country’s best president. Coming in a close second, for reasons that defy comprehension, is Ronald Reagan. JFK came in third, followed by Bill Clinton, then FDR.
* WaPo: “Efforts are intensifying in Congress to pass legislation that would require electronic touch-screen voting machines used in federal elections to provide paper trails that could be checked in the case of a recount. The new momentum is the result of lingering concerns about the machines as the 2008 presidential primaries fast approach, as well as strong support for changes by the new Democratic majority, with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the Rules Committee, taking a leading role. ‘We are closer to paper-trail legislation than we have been before,’ said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, an elections clearinghouse. ‘Democrats are committed to election-reform legislation that requires all voting machines produce a paper trail,’ said Brendan Daly, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).”
* Remember a month ago, when Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice whether the Bush administration believes it has the authority to take military action against Iran without permission from Congress? Rice promised to respond to Webb in writing. He still hasn’t received an answer, and he sounds pretty annoyed about it.
* Last week, the far-right Washington Times ran a bogus Lincoln quote, which ended up causing all kinds of trouble. I’m pleased to see that the Times finally ran a correction.
* My friend Cliff Schecter had an interesting chat with anti-Iraq War veteran Leonard Clark, who’s helping to head up the McCain recall effort in Arizona. (Though there is no recall mechanism in the law for U.S. senators, McCain has signed a voluntary pledge, on file with the Secretary of State’s Office, agreeing to resign immediately if defeated in a recall election.)
* Lt. Gen. William Odom, the former director of the NSA under Reagan and former head of Army intelligence, had a great interview with Hugh Hewitt last week and “provided a clinic for how the warmonger mentality of Hewitt and the Bush administration can and should be scornfully dismissed.”
* The new PIPA report on global public opinion offers some encouraging news: “PIPA polled people in a bunch of different countries about whether tensions between Islam and the West are mostly political or mostly cultural, and it turns out that most people in most countries thought they were political. This is, roughly speaking, good news, since political issues are more amenable to compromise than cultural issues.”
* CNBC is conservative. Fox News’ CNBC rival will be ridiculously conservative.
* To help determine Jose Padilla’s psychological competency, a judge wants to hear from officials at the Navy brig where Padilla was held for more than three years. Their testimony should be interesting.
* There’s a surprising amount of anti-Japanese xenophobia at the Daytona 500.
* Sean Hannity’s broadside against Al Gore was pathetic, even by Hannity standards, but I had to laugh by the time he told viewers, “I travel on private planes, I have an SUV that I’m proud of. I think this global warming hysteria of his is ridiculous.” It’s one thing to be ignorant; it’s another to revel in ignorance like a pig in slop.
* And on a related note, Drew Shindell, a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, thinks we should stop calling it “global warming,” and start calling it “climate meltdown.” Shindell said, “Global warming sounds cozy and comfortable…. ‘Climate meltdown’ sounds a little more ominous.”
If none of these particular items are of interest, consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.