News Roundup, 4/1/08: Clinton Should Drop Out? April Fool's!

Good thing it's a presidential election year — that means there's plenty of filler to run on slow news days!

We've mentioned plenty of times before that there's plenty of press punditry that happens on slow news days, and yesterday was no exception. The story of Senator Clinton's rebuttal of DNC chair Howard Dean and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's comments that she should drop out of the race spurred a lot of the discussion, including rumblings that a "superdelegate primary" may be increasingly likely as time goes on.

Michigan congressman Bart Stupak also made some news with his idea for seating Michigan delegates in a way that he hopes may be accepted by both campaigns. Effectively, it apportions some delegates by the Michigan primary numbers, but also leaves a big chunk of them to be assigned as per the results of national polling after the last primary in the campaign season.

Heck, pundits even went so far as to try and tie the opening of football season to presidential politics. It just so happens that the keynote day of the Republican National Convention this year will be the same day as the season opener. Giants vs. Redskins — I know which event I'm going to be watching, and the article implies that the Republican National Committee doesn't like my answer, or, for that matter, the likely answer of many Americans. The national champions against last year's come-from-behind inspirational story? If McCain gets better than, say, your average C-SPAN ratings, I'll be impressed.

If you want a little more general punditry, the New York Times has a piece on how the political landscape has shifted in the past few years that makes for a pretty interesting read.

To move from our next president to the one currently sitting in the White House, we note that the ship-jumping from the Bush administration continues. It just so happens that Secretary Jackson of the Department of Housing and Urban Development had some very good reasons for bailing out that weren't just Bush's unpopularity. His resignation is more likely inspired by the ongoing federal investigation into his using his office to award housing contracts to political allies in a biased and unfair fashion which gets more damning every day.

And Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined a plan yesterday that would entail one of the most comprehensive overhauls of U.S. finance market regulation in history. The plan met with some mixed reviews; the primary concern seems to be that though sweeping regulatory changes are indeed necessary, some prefer to address the more immediate issues of the housing crisis and consumer concerns first. Pro and con opinions seem to exist both on the Democratic and Republican sides of the fence on this issue, though I doubt that will be the case for long.

Lastly, some not-so-great news for the Blackberry crowd: an internationally renowned neurosurgeon has come out with some of the most serious evidence yet that use of mobile phone handsets does, indeed, increase the risk of cancer dramatically. Use of handsets for ten years can double the risk of brain cancer, the study says. If you don't have a wired or wireless headset for your phone, now may be the time to get one.