Hey, remember the U.S. attorney scandal? Fishy potentially-motivated-by-partisanship firings of nine U.S. attorneys by the White House?

Well, Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, hasn't forgotten. At the Democratic National Convention yesterday, Talking Points Memo's David Kurtz asked Leahy for reaction to the news that a U.S. district court judge has refused to stay an order that former White House aide Harriet Miers is legally required to testify about the firings.

Recently I've been wishing I had cable so I could watch, of all things, MTV. I'm about a million years older than their target demoographic, but I've been hearing about a new show of theirs that sounds right up my alley: "The Paper," about the angst and politicking that goes into creating a high school newspaper. (I know a bit about this already, of course, being an inveterate journalism nerd who worked as an editor on both her high school and college newspapers.)

Contemplating kids in their teens who are passionate about journalism actually makes me a bit sad, though, because they were born too late. The industry they're passionately devoted to is dying.

John Edwards wrote a letter to the New York Times recently to bring up a number that doesn't get brought up nearly often enough: the complete tally of U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq.

Whenever I read about what's going on at the Justice Department I always feel like I'm reading a story in The Onion. Because no matter what they've been doing, you can bet it runs totally counter to the goal of furthering justice -- to an utterly absurd degree.

The latest reason to wonder if the Department of Justice could possibly fail more completely to live up to its name? A report from NPR yesterday that a career attorney at the department who was universally praised for her job performance was let go from her post because of rumors that she was gay.

A Gallup poll released yesterday reports that 19% of Obama supporters say they'll vote for McCain over Clinton and a full 28% of Clinton supporters would vote for McCain over Obama. Cue much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth from Democratic party flaks who claim the increasingly bitter primary contest will mean that Democratic voters will abandon the party in the fall if their favored nominee doesn't come out on top.

I'm optimistic that this won't happen — I don't have a huge amount of faith in my fellow man, but I do assume that my fellow Democrats are a) not stupid and b) not so embroiled in ego-politics that they'll let their bruised feelings get in the way of our best chance in years to have a president who'll further progressive policy aims.

This is cool: an anti-war group called Direct Action to Stop the War has been using the microblogging tool Twitter to help coordinate their protest efforts.

No, I'm not suggesting the nation's founding fathers didn't actually exist. The "Founders" myth I'm talking about is the one that gets perpetuated every time someone says something like "The Founders would never have agreed with this."

Dear Democratic Party leaders:

Hi there. It's Laura. I'll keep this note brief, since I know you're busy people with lots of hands to shake and power lunches to attend. I just have a simple plea.

Make it stop.

By "it," of course, I mean the Democratic primary race. Seriously, it's got to end soon.

Here's something you don't see every day: hundreds of students shutting down a highway and marching seven miles to protest how difficult their local elected officials made it for them to vote.

I couldn't be more disappointed in the New York Times for its ridiculous story last week on the John McCain/Vicki Iseman connection.