Per Pam’s House Blend, we have the Advocate’s Kerry Eleveld asking Press Secretary Robert Gibbs when the president is going to keep his campaign promise to seek repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, in order to provide federal benefits to same-sex couples legally married in five (actually six, counting the 18,000 California marriages conducted during the Rainbow Window).

Details on the Administrations new fuel efficiency standards.

• This is bad news. 
• Disbar them.
• MC Steele: it’s all good for the GOP.
• And yet…
• But…but…people won’t pay more taxes for health care.
• Not sure if I buy this.
• Awful.
• “The Producers” sans swastikas.
• The ultimate search engine.
• George Bush’s victory in Iraq, still awesome.
• Waldman kicks ass.

It’s a day ending in “y”, it must be time for a former Bush Administration official to beat the war drum in Washington Post.

Featuring music of Luke Doucet and Megan Mullins.

And another thing: since when was the legality of torture determined by opinion polls?

Ex-House Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich has been apoplectic about current Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claim that the CIA lied about briefing her about the use of torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques”) at a meeting in September 2002. Like a diminutive Zeus, thundering from the heights of Mt. Political Exile, Gingrich railed against what he called Pelosi’s “despicable, dishonest and vicious political effort.”

I used to visit my grandmother every summer in the small town of Hiawatha Kansas, population 5,000, and county seat of Brown County. There was a lot of pride in being from Kansas in that small town. My grandmother would tell me Kansas’s history could be summed up in “needing, bleeding, leading”: How the territory needed help from the government to fight the Indians, the bleeding referred to John Brown and the fight to become a free state before the Civil War, and how Kansas was now leading in grain production. She would say:

We are the breadbasket of the world

then fret about the price of soybeans and corn dropping, and worry if there was hail, or no rain.

Obama announced aggressive new CAFE standards today. But the price of that–I suspect–is the importation of Chinese assembled cars.

Roberts was the conservative wet dream candidate: candy-shell on the outside, Robert Bork on the inside.