Today’s edition of quick hits.
* The Vice President had a minor health scare today. Doctors found a blood clot in Cheney’s left leg Monday, but the doctors prescribed blood thinners to treat it and allowed him to return to work.
* The Supreme Court ruled this morning against Colorado Republicans who sought to overturn a congressional redistricting plan written by a judge in 2002. CNN reported, “In a unanimous decision, the justices said that the four Republicans were not entitled to sue in an effort to replace a redistricting plan ordered by a court with one passed by a Republican-controlled state legislature. In an unsigned opinion, the justices said that the only injury the Republican voters allege is that the Elections Clause had not been followed. ‘This injury is precisely the kind of undifferentiated, generalized grievance about the conduct of government that we have refused to countenance in the past,’ the court stated.”
* The Nation’s Max Blumenthal has posted a must-see video of his adventure at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It’s called, “CPAC: The Unauthorized Documentary.” Take a look.
* Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington did the logical thing today and filed an ethics complaint against Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) for interfering in an ongoing federal criminal investigation.
* In other prosecutor-purge news, Michael Battle, the Director of the Executive Office of the United States Attorney, has resigned. Battle personally contacted all of the purged U.S. Attorneys, telling them in December about their dismissals. The Justice Department insists Battle’s resignation is unrelated to the scandal. Just a coincidence, of course.
* It’s been 2001 days since the attacks of 9/11. Still no Osama.
* Fox News’ Brit Hume thinks the real problem with the Walter Reed scandal is that it “looks terrible” for the Bush administration. (Note to Brit: It is horrible — for the troops.)
* Time’s Joe Klein seems to have a way of annoying the liberal blogosphere on a surprisingly frequent basis.
* Ann Coulter’s principal employer, Universal Press Syndicate, has decided not to comment on her latest insanity.
* On a related note, “on March 1, Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency (CAA) reportedly dropped conservative radio host Michael Savage two days after announcing that he had been signed as a client. CAA’s reported decision followed Savage’s comments — documented by Media Matters for America — attacking singer Melissa Etheridge, who thanked her wife at the Academy Awards, and asserting that married gay couples’ raising of children amounts to ‘child abuse’ and ‘makes me want to puke.'”
* Last week, Fox News’ John Gibson took some heat for his coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith story. Luckily for Gibson, Stephen Colbert has rushed to his defense.
* I often get the impression that British surveillance and security measures are just as creepy as ours, if not more so.
* Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D) has “turned down about $600,000 in federal abstinence education money because new rules would limit how much recipients could talk about contraception or sexually transmitted diseases this year.” Good for him; other governors should follow his lead.
* John Ashcroft offered his lobbying services to XM Satellite Radio. When the company turned him down, he began to actively lobby against XM’s proposed merger with Sirius Satellite Radio.
* And finally, Magnet America, the largest manufacturer of the yellow-ribbon car magnets has found that demand has “collapsed” in the wake of widespread disapproval of the war in Iraq. The company has seen “sales fall from a peak of 1.2m in August 2004 to about 4,000 a month and now has an unsold stockpile of about 1m magnets.”
If none of these items are of interest, consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.