Actual headline, true story: "McCain pushes free trade at Ohio auto plant"

There's no shortage of good news for Texas Democrats over the last few days. BOR had this yesterday and I'll point you to it now: Rick Noriega just won Senator Barbara Boxer's PAC for a Change "Choose a Challenger" contest against a field that also included Al Franken and Mark Warner. As a result, Noriega will get support throughout the election cycle from Boxer's organization.

Words, they escape me:

I don't know precisely what it is in this story about Hillary Clinton's return to Capitol Hill and to work in the Senate that makes me happy, but I really liked reading it. I suppose I have Dana Milbank to thank.

The Justice Department, as of late, has been displaying a serious hiring bias against liberal and Democratic applicants. But don't take it from me, my friends: check out the findings of this internal Justice Department audit.

Just for you: ThinkProgress has the latest nugget from Bill Kristol, that word sorcerer from Beyond Reason, in which he says that if Obama gets elected, Bush will attack Iran.

On Friday, the group, who served with Mr. Kerry in Vietnam, sent a letter to T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire Texas oilman who helped finance the 2004 attack advertisements, taking him up on a challenge he issued last November: that he would give $1 million to anyone who could disprove a single charge the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made against Mr. Kerry.

The vets are taking the challenge to him directly. The full New York Times story is here, and in it Mr. Pickens is referenced as saying he is good for the money. I suppose now we'll see if he is as good as his word.

When they're thinking about going to a four day work week out in Lubbock because of gas prices, you know things are getting bad. (And you'll know things are really, really bad when even Dallas County starts considering the same thing.)

Dallasblog has a nice writeup about the state house race in District 102 between Republican incumbent Tony Goolsby and Democratic challenger Carol Kent. Harriet Miller made some serious noise in 102 in the last two cycles, and Dallasblog describes Kent, a school board member in Richardson, as someone who is "attractive, articulate, and should make a good candidate."

The speculation over who would take over Tim Russert's chair on "Meet The Press" was rampant, in our own offices and all over America. NBC News announced today that Tom Brokaw will take over moderating duties starting next Sunday and running through the general elections later this year. This is not a permanent solution, obviously, but for public affairs journalism I feel like NBC does very well with Brokaw, one of the legends of American broadcast journalism's modern era.