Maureen Groppe, writing for Gannett News Service, has a story entitled “Bloggers push Bayh for President: Senator’s following tries to create wave.”

It has this over the top quote from one blogger, a 55 year old part time school instructor in Southern California:

“I’ll never forget his strong, steel-eyed look in his eyes. Nothing
weak there,” Earl gushed in one of three online columns he posted about
the evening. “I saw the look of a president.”

The article comes back to earth with what I think is an accurate assessment:

“I don’t think bloggers are going to pick the next president,” said
David Perlmutter, a University of Kansas mass communications professor
who is writing a book on political Web logs, or blogs. But, he said,
blogs can help candidates by creating excitement for them or serving as
an “early warning system” for what’s playing well and what’s not.

A Hoosier blogger gets a mention: Confessions of a Hoosier Democrat which, upon brief review, appears to be all-Bayh, all the time (I’m sure during certain periods, my blog could have been viewed as all-DST, all the time, so I’ll add it to my RSS feed and keep an eye on it.)

Sylvia Smith, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has an article on the trend of former members of Congress becoming lobbyist once they leave office. She reports that, of the 30 legislators who have left Congress through retirement, death, or election defeat, 10 of them became part of Washington’s lobbying business. 5 of them remain active in the industry.

The Evansville Courier Press has a good editorial on the Republican strategy of grandstanding on immigration. They note that House Republicans have torpedoed the immigration bill supported by the likes of President Bush and Senator McCain and, instead, will spend the summer holding as many hearings as they can on immigration where they can hold forth on what an urgent and unmitigated evil we face.

The Courier Press puts it nicely:

The delay so that House Republicans can spend a month grandstanding on the issue means there’s a real likelihood there will be no bill at all this year, either before the lawmakers knock off to campaign for the November elections or in a lame-duck session afterward.

If that happens, everything goes back to square one in the new Congress.

The Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress. If immigration is truly the urgent national problem that they say it is, failure to even try to deal with it, in the words of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., “would be to me a sign of inability to govern.”

Hunter has another of his inspired posts over at DailyKos. Short version: Liberals don’t and never opposed the Iraq War because they were against the (so called) War on Terror(ism/ists); rather they oppose(d) the Iraq War because it actively hurts our efforts to eliminate terrorists.

But, as ever, he says it so much better than I ever could.

Not at all related to Indiana, but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a rather amusing editorial hammering on the fact that Senator Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum doesn’t live in Pennsylvania any more.

Before every election, the Post-Gazette routinely sends letters to the candidates seeking material for the Voters Guide. Back in March, as part of that process for the primary, the newspaper sent a letter to Rick Santorum at his home address, at least the one that he claims. Back from Penn Hills came the letter with a sticker from the U.S. Postal Service checked as “Not Deliverable As Addressed — Unable To Forward.”

That is all you need to know about the nasty dispute between the Republican Sen. Santorum and his Democratic opponent, Bob Casey Jr., in the November election. The whole thing is rooted in one inconvenient fact for Sen. Santorum: He doesn’t live here anymore.

The editorial repeats the sentence “He doesn’t live here anymore” at least 4 times.

For those of you who think the existence of the phenomenon of global warming is debatable, Scientific American has an article by Michael Shermer entitled: “The Flipping Point: How the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has converged to cause this environmental skeptic to make a cognitive flip.” (Quite a mouthful.)

Apparently the approach used by the environmental activists had turned him off to their message in the past. His mind was changed by, among other things, a speech by Al Gore which included before-and-after photographs of disappearing glaciers as well as Jared Diamond’s excellent book, Collapse.

He closes with:

According to Flannery, even if we reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 70 percent by 2050, average global temperatures will increase between two and nine degrees by 2100. This rise could lead to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which the March 24 issue of Science reports is already shrinking at a rate of 224 ±41 cubic kilometers a year, double the rate measured in 1996 (Los Angeles uses one cubic kilometer of water a year). If it and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melt, sea levels will rise five to 10 meters, displacing half a billion inhabitants.

Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.