Happy Saturday, everyone!

Here are links to some weekend reading:

Glenn Greenwald on this week's news with an excellent chronology and updates about the anthrax scare.

There is a move to promote the idea of Wes Clark for VP here and here.

China parks 1.5 million cars, closes factories and spends 18 billion dollars (yup, that's B for billion and $ for dollars) to turn dirty gray skies to blue in time for the Olympic games.

Have you noticed McCain's recently-flipped stance on squeaky clean campaigning? It's because there's been a change of personnel. Here's a piece about the nasty campaign tactics being used against Obama by Steve Schmidt, who ran "Karl Rove's war room" against Kerry in 2004.

What Schmidt and his associates have apparently concluded is that McCain’s weaknesses—on the election’s most salient issues and as a candidate—are so pronounced and Obama’s vulnerabilities so glaring that the low road is their guy’s best, and maybe only, route to the White House.

More later (maybe)...

BREAKING NEWS

TWO stories in the category of NEWS YOU NEVER BELIEVED YOU'D HEAR:

From TPM:

The House Judiciary Committee has just voted to hold Karl Rove in contempt for failing to respond to a subpoena to face questioning from the Committee on the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman.

AND
from Federal Times
IG: Justice illegally weighed political leanings of job applicants

Senior aides to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales violated federal law and Justice Department policy by using political affiliation as a factor in hiring decisions — a process that slowed the hiring process and left key positions unfilled, according to a new report from the department’s inspector general.

In one case, an experienced prosecutor, with more than 15 years in criminal law, was turned down for a job on a counterterrorism detail because his wife was an elected Democratic official. The job went to a Republican prosecutor with less than three years’ experience. Another candidate was recommended for a job because she was “pro-God in public life” and “pro-marriage, anti-civil union.”

Watch the video of the Inspector General testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on c-span (link in the blogroll on the right). Since it happened this morning, there's no permanent link to post yet, but the video is available on the front page of the c-span site.

Oh, one more irresistible quote from the Federal Times:

Goodling also used the Internet to search for information about candidates’ political and ideological beliefs, running searches for terms like “sex,” “NAFTA,” “Iran-Contra” and “spotted owl.”

What an amazing day!