Monday Roundup: A plethora of news

There is a ton of news this morning; seemingly everyone was waiting for the next cycle to begin before they started making announcements about big, important things — important things like TXU's sale to a group of private equity firms, for example. The deal promises to cut rates and coal plants, while increasing access to alternative energy sources. It is hard to believe that such a quick change was possible, but perhaps the coal plants deal was proving to be more trouble that it was worth.

This isn't news about someone that did something recently, but rather about what people did a long time ago. The Daily News and Al Sharpton both reported in the last few days that one of Sharpton's ancestors was a slave owned by — you guessed it — Strom Thurmond's ancestors. Sharpton would now like a DNA test to see if he and Thurmond are related by blood.

Joe Lieberman tried to put speculation to rest that he was thinking about joining the Republican Party late Friday, which was apparently less news-worthy than the revelation that he might switch. I'm not sure I buy it, though. Lieberman has been around long enough to know that when you say something like a party change is a "remote possibility," you know what that sort of thing implies, and you know what will be said and written about it. The crew over at MSNBC's Countdown asks whether the Democratic Party might not be better off letting him go.

The Washington Post and ABC ran a poll recently asking Americans if they trust Bush or Congressional Democrats more on Iraq. The result? Democrats are ahead 54-34%. The rest of the poll breaks down to say, essentially, that despite attempts at rebranding some issues by Republicans, Democrats have managed to hold onto what they brought with them into November.

There's even more presidential news than normal this morning, starting with a Time magazine piece about Obama in Texas. The article examines why Texas is important to Democratic primary candidates who most likely can't hope to win the state in the general election, and while it comes down to money and delegates, I think it might be something more. Sure, if the Texas primary gets moved to February 5, the Texas primary will matter far more than it has in the past, but I think the big stars of the field want to campaign here to prove what kinds of crowds they can draw and excitement they can generate in the reddest of red states.

If you're like me, you enjoy both the Internets and Presidential politics. If that's the case, you'll probably also enjoy TechPresident.com, which is a community blog dedicated entirely to how the 2008 Presidential campaign is playing out on the interweb. If you'd rather read about the endeavor than reading the endeavor itself, you can load up here, while also enjoying what might possibly be the worst picture of Bill Richardson I've ever seen.

Al Gore won his Oscar last night, and he did not announce that he's running for President when he did, so that's officially over. I'd like to see him jump in too, but if he didn't do it last night with the world watching and he does it at some other point after this, he'll deserve to get badly beaten after not taking such a prime opportunity to get even cooler than he already is. I know, I know: it would have been very cool for him to announce last night when he won. But he didn't.

Rick Perry will be at the National Governors Association and the Republican Governors Association dinner this week. Although Perry has once again reasserted that he has no desire for a role on the national stage, he has for some reason stepped into a leadership role in the governor's groups, more or less becoming the #1 finance guy for the partisan organizations. So many mixed messages.

John Edwards is hip to what matters on the national news stage, and now that Clinton and Obama are fighting all the time, he is free to snipe from the moral high ground about the vote on the Iraq War — he is not going to let the issue go, and it is a very strong move, politically. Now he has graduated to framing a "right" or "wrong" stance on any pro-war vote as dishonesty, and it will have some legs. Although Obama has been against the war forever, he didn't vote on it so he has nothing to be repentant about, which in the strange presidential political calculus works in Edwards' favor in some ways. Clinton voted for the war, and her response to calls that she apologize for her vote represents the calculating streak that a lot of people seem to dislike. Make no mistake about it: Edwards is the candidate to the left of everyone, and that's where he'll either win or lose the nomination.