James Joyner at Outside the Beltway kindly dismantles the latest ONDCP waste of taxpayer’s money, which I too witnessed while watching Special Report with Brit Hume (I TiVo it daily, mostly to watch the panel). Now the Drug Czar’s running ads that explicitly lobby for Congress not to change the drug laws using tax money. If a non-profit tried this crap, they’d have their tax exemption revoked faster than their head would spin. Truly disgusting.

Ken Layne is apparently the frontman for Blögger (whose next album should be called Scourge of the Busted Permalink). Meanwhile, Brian Emmett (in Ken’s comments) suggests that they tour with Batshit Ne0c0n, which presumably is The Corner’s house band.

Glenn Reynolds points to a post at WizBang that suggests perennial cable news also-ran MSNBC is moving to the right in a quest for ratings.

As perhaps the only American to have watched MSNBC regularly for the past few weeks (and not just to gaze into the eyes of Chris Jansing, mind you), I have to say that they’ve found a fairly winning formula of late—regular news updates every 15 minutes, coupled with decent analysis and good use of NBC’s newsgathering resources, without all the annoying sound effects that accompany Fox News’s coverage (which are downright comical when listening to the audio feed on XM). This despite the following liabilities:

1. Neither Buchanan nor Press represent any mainstream political movement in the United States (this also applies to CNN’s Bob Novak fetish).

2. Matthews is just plain annoying. I find his politics enigmatic at best.

3. Scarborough is sort of a lame ripoff of O’Reilly (he even does the “talking points” thing O’Reilly does) crossed with Fox’s weekend Kaisch show; the upside is he isn’t as annoying as O’Reilly.

On the other hand, they actually have some ethnic diversity (although my mom took some convincing that Lester Holt is black), unlike Fox’s Aryan Brotherhood approach to newscasting, and you actually get the sense that they take news seriously. (By contrast, Brit Hume and Tony Snow are the only two personalities on FNC that actually seem to act like they’re involved in a newscast. Compare that to John Gibson and Shepard Smith, who behave more like overexcited puppies than newscasters.)

Are they ripping off the Fox formula? To an extent; MSNBC feels like the “kinder, gentler” FNC in a lot of ways. And the news-watching audience is older, wealthier, and skews more male than the population at large—all conservative demographics—so it makes sense to go after that audience, especially if you can attract an audience that might agree with FNC’s ideology but dislike the Fox “attitude” approach to news.

I dreamt this morning that Dave Letterman had set up a blog. Not quite as exciting as Michele’s dream, but equally incomprehensible.

Radley Balko’s latest FoxNews.com column celebrates a group that will make you shelve your lawyer jokes forever: Washington’s libertarian law firm, the Institute for Justice. If you’re not familiar with them, just think of IJ as our answer to the ACLU. I suspect by the time I’m old and grey, IJ will have done more to expand personal freedom and individual rights than any other organization in American history.

Radley sums it up best: “These guys are right on every issue, and deserve a little sunlight.”

Steven Kruczek, whose blog The Grille I discovered via BlogMatrix, has a very interesting—and IMHO dead-on—take on what ails Republicans when they speak on legislative solutions to moral issues. The money quote:

Conservatives, it seems to me, have the same problem on moral issues as Liberals have on economic issues. Liberals see homelessness, poverty, or other suffering and say “something must be done!” Similarly, Conservatives see homosexuality or other acts they see as deviant and say “something must be done!” … Therefore the right, like Liberals for economic policy, turns to the government for solutions. Unfortunately, in both morality and economic redistribution, governments are no good at affecting [sic] solutions to these problems.

And this is where the right gets itself into trouble.

I can’t really do it justice here… just RTWT™. (And bear in mind that BPAW™.)

Johnny Two-Cents finds Santorum’s connection of the right to privacy to the Boston child molestation scandal the most bizarre part of the interview (and approvingly cites my snarky comment at Matt’s place on the two major parties). Like Kevin Drum points out, this has got to be the Most. Outrageous. Interview. Ever. The whole thing deserves a good Fisking (I wonder if Santorum thinks the right to privacy covers that?).

I made a few minor changes behind-the-scenes here at Signifying Nothing:

1. I’ve added a new “Best of Signifying Nothing” sidebar on the front page; the main criterion for inclusion is that I find the post particularly interesting, although posts that got major linkage will receive consideration as well. It’s heavily biased toward wordy entries, but otherwise should be fairly eclectic in content.

2. The title of this weblog is now just “Signifying Nothing.”

3. I’ve fiddled with the stylesheet some more; the most notable change is that blockquotes now have changebars next to them and aren’t red/orange/whatever you’d call this color any more. The underlying markup has also become a bit more semantic again, since it seems like most browsers can style <H3> credibly. (I also took out some commented-out cruft.)

4. A lot of the backend code has been made more customizable, in preparation for another LSblog release. Before that happens, I’ll probably sit down and write the blogroll code (which means I may present a blogroll while I’m testing things, even though I’m still not sold on having one).

So, to the extent you notice the changes, I hope you like them!

James Joyner at Inside the Beltway (and possible closeted roadgeek, judging from his header graphic) links to Bill Quick’s discussion of some recent recess appointments. Bill notes the direction the screaming is coming from has shifted with the partisanship of the head of the executive branch, and James thinks the recess appointment power has outlived its usefulness:

The recess appointment power is one whose purpose has long since passed into history. In the early days of the Republic, Congress adjourned for months at a time. It was inordinately hot in DC in the summertime in the days before AC, for one. For another, the Federal government didn’t have all that much to do. Of course, all that’s changed now.

Now, granted, the Senate is abusing its constitutional authority by filibustering nominees and otherwise stalling the process. So, in that sense, it balances out. But it doesn’t make it right.

I pretty much agree with that assessment. I’d have to check out a copy of Unorthodox Lawmaking by Barbara Sinclair—a must-read if you’re interested in the contemporary legislative process—but I’m pretty sure that the incidence of filibusters is increasing of late; at some point in the not-too-distant future, I’d expect a rule change to either narrow the scope of what can be filibustered or to limit the duration of a filibuster, but that largely depends on the majority leader’s willingness to force the issue by requiring “real” filibusters rather than the costless “virtual” filibusters that take place now. Make the senators sleep on cots in the cloakroom for a few nights—or not sleep at all—and I suspect they’ll decide to sharply curtail the filibuster rule in short order.

By the way (as part of my endless quest to make this blog vaguely pedagogical), the recess appointment power is buried in Article II, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution:

The President shall have the power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions, which shall expire at the end of their next session.

Just in case you were wondering…