The premiere of Bill Kristol’s New York Times column, unsurprisingly, leaves much to be desired. It seems that in the face of so much frothing anticipation, Kristol opted for the kind of ordinary primary season piece that’s dominated op-ed pages in recent weeks (ok, months). If you’re looking for the Kristol we all love to hate, look elsewhere.

Instead of doing anything interesting, Kristol, like many conservatives, bemoans the slim pickings in the Republican primary. Worried that a Democratic president would, among other things, "snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq," Kristol tries to build up Huckabee as a looming threat that Democrats are too dumb to understand. But instead of selling the candidate, he offers up a very safe “maybe he is, maybe he isn’t” argument about Huckabee’s chances as the Republicans’ strongest nominee.

Despite its unoriginal thesis, it’s worth reading just to say you did. Check it out here.

The biggest scandal from last night’s Democratic presidential debate has nothing to do with driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, universal healthcare or Pakistan.

Instead, everybody’s talking about Maria Luisa, the student who used the debate’s precious final question to ask Hillary Clinton if she prefers pearls or diamonds:

This is obviously a ridiculous question—but turns out it wasn’t the one Maria wanted to ask. Several of the questions she submitted to CNN were approved, and she was going to ask Clinton about the Yucca Mountain Repository, but CNN employees chose the diamonds/pearls question and pressured her to ask it to close the debate.

So even though she submitted the dumb question, at least Maria had her priorities in order until CNN got its claws in her. And I have to say, her self-defense message on MySpace is a pretty bad-ass takedown of CNN:

See, the media chose what they wanted, not what the people or audience really wanted. That's politics; that's reality. So, if you want to read about real issues important to America--and the whole world, I suggest you pick up a copy of the Economist or the New York Times or some other independent source. If you want me to explain to you how the media works, I am more than happy to do so. But do not judge me or my integrity based on that question.

People for the American Way's spoof Facebook site, "Right-Wing Facebook" is pretty hilarious and is worth a visit. There's the obvious, like Mike Huckabee's group membership in "I Heart Huckabees" and Mitt Romney's listing of "Big Love" as one of his favorite TV shows, but there are also some hidden gems within the site. 

A few highlights include:

Fred Thompson is a member of the group, "My Wife is Hotter Than Your Wife (Unless You're Dennis Kucinich"

Romney comparing a "Poison-style 80s haircut" to his stances on abortion and gay rights

John McCain's status is set to: John McCain is looking for spare change between couch cushions.

Enjoy!

Today MySpace and MTV announced the details of the presidential candidate forums they will hold this fall. Hosted on college campuses across the country, broadcast on MTV and streamed live on MySpace, the forums seek to foster “candid, unfiltered” discussions between young voters and the major Republican and Democratic candidates.

As I write in an identical blog post at HuffPo, the blogosphere seems abuzz with optimism about the forums, the latest evidence that 2008 won’t be your mother and father’s election. “MTV and MySpace have hit up an interactive format with the potential to pioneer a whole new way of doing candidate debates/forums,” writes Michael Connery, co-founder of Future Majority, a prominent blog with well-done reporting on progressive youth politics. (Yes, that Mike Connery who came at Campus Progress back in June.)

For the first time in 23 years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development presented a report to Congress yesterday documenting the scope of the United States’ homelessness epidemic. The survey used a new approach, collecting data on the number of Americans sleeping on the street or seeking temporary shelter over a three-month period from January to April 2005, instead of just counting street-dwellers on one specific night, as past surveys have done. The results? 754,000 Americans were homeless for at least part of 2005, meaning they slept on the street or sought beds in shelters or transitional housing. One-third of the homeless were families with children. About half were black. (According to the Urban Institute, meanwhile, only 6 percent of the homeless population does not suffer from a mental illness or substance abuse problem.)

In urban America, affordable housing, job training, and public health are all solutions to homelessness. But politicians tend to focus on erasing the evidence of homelessness rather than addressing its causes. As New York mayor, of course, Rudy Giuliani epitomized this approach. Under his leadership, homelessness was seen mainly as a quality of life issue for the rest of us. I’m from New York and hey, I’ll be the first to admit that the sanitized, chain-ified Times Square has been good for the city’s public image. But when you hear talk of Giuliani being a social moderate, it’s worth remembering that this is the mayor who criminalized sleeping on the street and even laying down in public, suggested putting children into the foster care system if their parents lost their jobs and became temporarily homeless, and cut the city’s affordable housing budget in half, all while opposing a hike in the minimum wage that would have raised living standards for the working poor. After building his popularity on the backs of the city’s neediest, he of course claimed credit for “cleaning up the streets.” And sadly, many New Yorkers were just fine with that.

Cross-posted at TAPPED. 

Via Jason Zengerle at The Plank: a list of some 08 candidates' favorite movies. Hillary loves my own personal favorite, "Casablanca."

But don't read too much into that.

Today on Alternet, Courtney E. Martin asks a question that’s been on my mind a lot lately: As feminists, are we obligated to support Hillary Clinton for president, even if her politics differ from our own? Martin avoids answering the question, but she seems to be leaning away from the idea that women leaders inherently deserve any special loyalty. I’m sympathetic. After all, there would be very little debate among progressive feminists on the question of whether to vote for Condoleezza Rice or Elizabeth Dole just because they are women. Our feminist focus on women’s leadership comes with a clear ideological caveat: If a female politician opposes universal health care, a woman’s right to choose, comprehensive sex education, responsible diplomacy, and action on climate change, we will never cede crucial policy ground just for the satisfaction of having finally broken through the glass ceiling.

Yet when the ideological spectrum narrows to the confines of the center left, feminists suddenly have a tougher call to make. Hillary Clinton represents real progress on many of our key issues, even as so many of us bristle at her ongoing timidity on Iraq or recent pussy-footing around the issue of universal health care (stating, for example, that she wouldn’t be able to enact such a policy until into her second term). Still, we might be willing to make some compromises, or at least settle for more centrist rhetoric, in order to provide every little girl in the world with such a powerful role model. Women don’t have to settle for being first ladies, they can be commanders-in-chiefs, leaders of the free world, POTUS....