Beethoven – Moonlight Sonata.

What’s on your mind tonight?

Ah, the 4th of July! Picnics, barbecues, fireworks and a new tradition, brought to you by the folks at Fox–tea parties!

Man, I really hate to find myself nodding along to a David Brooks column. Sure, he’s a conservative columnist looking to score points off of a Democratic president and Congress, but that doesn’t make him wrong. At least not today:

Now it’s “a handful of women other than his mistress”? It sounds like Governor Sanford wanted to follow not King David’s example, but that of David’s son Solomon.

Last week, Reuters speculated on potential nominees for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a sort of successor to the famed Pecora Commission. The planted list of CW-approved possibilities was underwhelming:

A short list of names has emerged for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that includes former Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson; former Democratic head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission Brooksley Born; and Alex Pollock, a fellow at the conservative

Neither Klein nor Starr note that the Urban Institute’s paper describes both the public exchange and the public plan working together. It’s how they work together that determines how well they achieve the transformative and efficiency benefits of both. The exchange establishes the rules for reformed, efficient behavior, while the public plan modeled on those rules puts competitive pressure on private plans to make the reforms or lose market share.

“I am not going to Washington to be the 60th Democratic Senator,” said Franken to a crowd of supporters and assembled media, “I am going to be the second Senator from the state of Minnesota.”

Sometimes people can be too smart for their own good.

According to recent news stories (see Spencer Ackerman’s story at the Washington Independent), the Obama administration task force on interrogations is likely to recommend “small, mixed-agency teams for interviewing the most important terrorist targets.” Moreover, according to former Deputy Attorney General and Intelligence Science Board member Philip Heymann…

You know what to do, kitty!

Here it is, folks — the moment we’ve been waiting for since last friggin’ November: Norm Coleman concedes the election contest to Al Franken. Guess John Cornyn was sick of seeing $145k a week going into the pockets of Tony Trimble, Fritz Knaak, Joe Friedberg et al, when it could be going to shore up the campaigns of endangered Senate Republican candidates

ACSBlog has a series of discussions about the Ricci case and underlying labor law and the changes that Kennedy’s majority opinion brought to the mix which I thought might be of interest to readers. I especially found Sharon Ifill’s essay helpful.

For my money, the Ricci case takes aim square at Griggs v.