If the words spoken by retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) back in 1948, the same words endorsed last week by Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), don’t scare the behoosis out of you when you see them in print, take a quick walk over to Mikhaela’s News Blog for a link that will enable you to hear just how enthusiastically Sen. Thurmond spoke when he made those explicitly racist remarks.

Hey, guess what? You know that crazy project that convicted criminal John Poindexter is working on somewhere in the Pentagon, probably near the dumpsters and stuff? Yeah, the “Information Awareness Office.”

Well then you know that the IAO, as I suppose they’re already calling it, plans to track everything you and everyone else in the country buys, signs up or registers for, sends or receives e-mails to and from, blog, blog, blog. It’s all part of the war on terror.

What you may not know is that there is one thing the IAO won’t do and one specific piece of data in which the IAO is not interested, namely, anything that pertains to any firearms you’ve purchased. For the “No duh” on this, nonetheless wisely noted, visit Natasha’s The Watch.

Martin Wisse, who justifiably cannot help himself from correcting my faulty Dutch grammar, is doing an excellent job with the still quite new site, Progressive Gold. It’s a great place to find the best of the center-to-left blogs every day.

As the otherwise human right-winger Jay Caruso of the Daily Rant would say, “Just go check it out.”

As duly noted by several bloggers, Ted Barlow of Ted Barlow is back, and he’s tanned, rested, and ready, as they say. Don’t miss it. Him. The blog. Ted Barlow. (My lesson from Barlow’s return: I’m taking a longer break next time.)

Tom Tomorrow of This Modern World hits what he calls, quite rightly, “the special Eli Lilly Payback Provision” of the Homeland Security Act.

Berkeley Student: “But Professor DeLong, they said there would be no math.”

Professor Brad DeLong: “Um, this is an economics class.”

Berkeley Student: “I know, but my adviser said there would be no math.”

[Post-publication addendum: Looks like I need to pull out an old civics book or something. A smart reader wrote in to correct me on the order of presidential succession, a line in which I incorrectly placed Sen. Lott were he to become Senate majority leader. That error in the original posted has been corrected.]