And some days it lifts you up

-- Dixie Chicks CD sales were up 1641% in the 24-hour period following Sunday night's Grammys, which they swept. On tap: Al Gore's Oscar for Inconvenient Truth.

-- The Washington state legislature wants to be the first (among many) to compel the US House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings. Against both the president and vice-president.

-- I had the luxury of watching some college baseball in Houston this weekend; specifically the tops-in-the-nation-ranked Rice Owls and the #5- ranked Vanderbilt Commodores. Suffice it to say that the Owls won't be ranked #1 again for some time. The Houston Press has a great story on everybody's All-American, Joe Savery.

-- "Why is Texas red???" I don't think it will continue to be much longer.

-- A special linky-dink for my regular commenter Bev. The de-geeked version (and yes, Bev and I are mad geeky about this) is: a vendor shill who gets to write voting system standards for the whole damn country -- with the EAC's blessing, of course -- is being investigated by the IEEE because some of the good guys, who are also IEEE members, wrote to them and complained. If the bad guys are sacked, there will likely be less opposition to e-voting standards that require simplified and standardized audit ability, reliability and that sort of thing.

More later today on what Texas Democrats are doing about their DREs.

-- apologies to James Blunt, but I agree with Weird Al that he's pitiful:

Never had a date
That ya couldn't inflate
And ya smell repulsive too
What a bummer bein' you

Well ya just can't dance
And forget romance
Everybody you know still calls ya
Farty Pants

But you always have a job well I mean

As long as you still can work that Slurpie machine

You're pitiful
You're pitiful
You're pitiful
It's true

-- muse's excellent Science Behind Driving to Florida in a Diaper is a Valentine's Day don't-miss.

Some days the news will bring you down

-- Amanda Marcotte has resigned from the John Edwards campaign. There's going to be some major payback for this. Update (today, p.m.): And now Melissa McEwan as well. We're going to the mattresses, you right-wing freaks.

-- North Korea appears to have rolled over on its nuclear program. It wasn't all a bluff, was it? Did they reach critical mass and then decide to cash in on some Western concessions, figuring they can restart quickly anytime they need to?

-- Ari Fleischer just might be the source of the CIA/Plame leak, at least according to the WaPo's Walter Pincus. Of course, he's been granted immunity, so ... so what? Novacula claims it was Karl Rove and Richard Armitage. Moneyshot quote from Patrick Fitzgerald, to NYT reporter David Sanger: "I believe you're the third Pulitzer prize winner to testify this morning."

-- A scathing indictment of the media by Sheila Samples. Leading off from Hunter S. :

Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

-- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Oh yesss, there's more:

If the Bush administration and the US mainstream media are united on any one issue, it's an absolute refusal to rock the political boat as they sail mercilessly through the seas of corporate profit on the good ship Terrorbush. For the most part, each group is an incurious lot -- undead creatures who neither care, nor dare, to glance over the side of the ship at the bloated, swirling bodies in the blood-red water below. From the beginning, their mission has been to perform so fantastically against a backdrop of such violent, explosive madness on so many fronts that we watch hypnotically but do not see -- listen intently but do not hear.

I can't add a thing. Read it all. Greg also has some less coarse but still worthy linkage on this subject, but per usual you have to rapidly scroll past his Hillary cheerleading.

-- an article in the Toronto Star ponders the "management" of environmental collapse.

-- the FBI is still losing laptops and weapons:

"Most troubling, we found that the FBI could not determine for 51 additional lost or stolen laptops whether they contained sensitive or classified information," the report said. "Seven of these 51 laptops were assigned to the counterintelligence or counterterrorism divisions."

You don't suppose someone could be selling them to someone else, do you? It's almost as nauseating as this:

But what was said to be an effort to protect the United States became a tool by which the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Pat Roberts (R-KS) ensured there was no serious investigation into how the administration fixed the intelligence that took the United States to war in Iraq or the fabricated documents used as evidence to do so.

-- and as the evidence accumulates that the White House is cooking up a similarly bad batch of intelligence on Iran, the media outside the United States report that we are almost ready to begin the air strikes.

Tex-centric scattershooting

... while wondering whatever happened to all those morons who hated on the Dixie Chicks ...

-- I disagree with Greg more often than not on matters of political candidates we favor, but we agree on Barack Obama (just for different reasons initially). Obama will speak in Austin on February 23rd.

-- Charles Kuffner's new baby, Audrey, is born. Pictures.

-- the lawsuit by the Texas Democratic Party and against the Attorney General of Texas, the Secretary of State, and others for e-voting irregularities and illegalities may finally be filed this week. A press conference is slated for tomorrow to publicly discuss the case.

-- one of my favorite people (not to mention bloggers) is managing the campaign of Melissa Noriega for Houston city council. Noriega's husband Rick serves in the Texas Lege, was the commander for the city's Katrina-related evacuee efforts, and while serving in Afghanistan as a reservist asked his wife to mind his House seat. She did so well she earned "Freshman of the Year" honors from her colleagues. She's running to replace the odious Shelley Sekula-Gibbs on council; there's a fundraiser this Friday in Fort Bend county.

-- a report with pictures on the "Stop the Coal Rush!" rally yesterday at the Capitol.

-- my man David is still fightin' 'em -- on the ice, in the rain, out back in the alley, and everywhere else he can find 'em. Read the latest installments here or at Texas Kaos.

-- via Texas Moratorium Network, I learned about and attended the opening of the Death Penalty Art Show at M-2, an art gallery in the Heights on Saturday. The exhibits are thought-provoking and emotional. If you can go see it this week, then by all means do so. Update (2/13): People are talking about it.

Vindication