TIME Magazine reports:

Rep. Tom DeLay, whose iron hold on the House Republicans melted as a lobbying corruption scandal engulfed the Capitol, told TIME that he will not seek reelection and will leave Congress within months. Taking defiant swipes at “the left” and the press, he said he feels “liberated” and vowed to pursue an aggressive speaking and organizing campaign aimed at promoting foster care, Republican candidates and a closer connection between religion and government.

UPDATE: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews spoke to Tom DeLay this evening and talked about his conversation on Scarborough Country — Read more

This afternoon, President Bush was on hand to throw out the first pitch in Cincinnati as the hometown Reds took on the visiting Chicago Cubs. Before the game, President Bush had an encounter with Cubs manager Dusty Baker that was described by Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post in the White House pool report:

He greeted Cubs manager Dusty Baker with a handshake. “This is the year, right?” Bush said, in what some in the pool thought as sarcasm directed at the team’s perennial pennant futility.

“Dusty Baker, good to know you,” POTUS continued, turning to the cameras. He held the grip and grinned as the cameras snapped away. “Smile,” POTUS encouraged, and Baker complied, saying: “I’ll do what I got to do.”

And with a little cajoling, Bush got the photo-op he wanted:

From today’s press gaggle: “QUESTION: Have you had any thoughts that you might be leaving soon? MCCLELLAN: I don’t speculate on any personnel matters. QUESTION: You’re not speculating for yourself. MCCLELLAN: I’m focused on helping the President advance his agenda, just like the rest of the team at the White House.”

by Duke lacrosse players a “ho.” Media Matters has the details.

Today in a speech to the Associated Press, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) tore apart President Bush’s “plan” to reduce dependence on oil. Here’s an excerpt:

Now, after the President’s last State of the Union, when he told us that America was addicted to oil, there was a brief moment of hope that he’d finally do something on energy.

I was among the hopeful. But then I saw the plan.

His funding for renewable fuels is at the same level it was the day he took office. He refuses to call for even a modest increase in fuel-efficiency standards for cars. And his latest budget funds less then half of the energy bill he himself signed into law – leaving hundreds of millions of dollars in under-funded energy proposals.

This is not a serious effort. Saying that America is addicted to oil without following a real plan for energy independence is like admitting alcoholism and then skipping out on the 12-step program. It’s not enough to identify the challenge – we have to meet it.

(We’ve obtained the full text of the speech and posted it HERE.)

To learn what a real effort to break America’s oil addiction would look like, check out this report.

“[T]he US wants to take control of the Earth’s electromagnetic spectrum, allowing US war planners to dominate mobile phones, PDAs, the web, radio, TV and other forms of modern communication. That could see entire countries denied access to telecommunications at the flick of a switch by America,” the Sunday Herald reports.

“Card did not want to go. But he ‘heard the tom-toms,’ according to someone who knows him well, and told Bush it was in the best interests of the team for him to leave,” Time magazine reports.

says former U.S. counterterror chief Richard Clarke on ABC’s Good Morning America: “We’ve thought about military options against Iran off and on for the last 20 years and they’re just not good because you don’t know what the end game is. You know what the first move is but not the last move.”

On Sunday, George Will published an opinion piece in the Washington Post and other major papers called “Let Cooler Heads Prevail.” The highlight of the piece is a string of citations from the 1970s, which he claims shows that scientists then believed the world was entering a long-term phase of “global cooling.”

Here is Will’s first citation:

Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.”

Gilbert Martinez of the Stanford Democrats blog pulled the original article. He found that Will was being exceptionally dishonest. Specifically, Martinez discovered:

1. The article was discussing the impact of the earth’s orbital variations on global temperatures over periods of 20,000 years or longer.

2. The article’s analysis specifically excluded the impact of humans on the climate. (The predictions “apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends–and not to such anthropogenic effects as those due to the burning of fossil fuels.”

But Will’s column is deceitful in a larger sense as well. The fact is there was a temporary cooling pattern from the 1940s and the 1970s. Some in the media (notably Newsweek) improperly extrapolated that data into a long term trend of “global cooling.” But there wasn’t a single scientific publication that predicted “global cooling.” In fact, scientists warned against extrapolating the short-term trend into a long-term pattern. (Either through ignorance or malice Will concludes that, in the 1970s, scientists were “spectacularly wrong.”)

Meanwhile, Science Magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity.

Question: Is there ever a point when printing mythology about global warming is incompatible with responsible journalism?