I love the idea of public campaign financing. I love the idea of making the candidate process accessible to anyone regardless of income, and I think it would be great if our elected officials could be less beholden to big-money interests. But let's be honest — the only way public financing would work is if it were mandatory, so everyone would have to play by the same rules. Otherwise, those with ties to those big-money interests could simply bypass public financing and raise much more than a public system would ever be able to provide. And mandatory public financing is a tough sell to people who were elected by and whose incumbent advantage largely relies on the system as it stands now. It will be a very long time before we see that happen, if at all. And voluntary public financing is simply not viable.

Or is it?

The MSM is having a field day with Bush's lack of ability to do his job. We'll start the roundup by looking at the U.S. attorney firings: David Iglesias has a scathing op/ed in the New York Times on why he was fired. I imagine somebody could find the reasons for his being fired in the mass of emails the Justice Department released on the subject — if there weren't a significant gap in the emails released. The Washington Post has nevertheless started to piece together what is in those emails into a continuous narrative, which is good. The New York Times points out how all this very likely leaves the realm of the incompetent and enters the realm of the illegal — not a very subtle way to hint at the I word, if you ask me.

For many of us, the posted speed limit is more of a “guideline,” to borrow a phrase from Pirates of the Caribbean. Over the course of a couple of years, we may find ourselves having an unwanted conversation with a DPS trooper. And we all know that if we properly time our bad driving behavior, we are rewarded with those two insurance-saving words, “defensive driving.”

The big news on the blogosphere is that the Congressional judiciary committees received over 3000 pages of emails in a document dump from the Justice Department. Why is this big news on the blogosphere? Because the House Judiciary Committee put PDF scans of all those emails online, and TPM Muckraker asked their online community to go through the documents and comment on anything of interest they find. Now, that's some clever leveraging of the netroots.