Today Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the Caging Prohibition Act, a bill which would outlaw a “long-recognized voter suppression tactic which has often been used to target minority voters”:

The Caging Prohibition Act would prohibit challenges to a person’s eligibility to register to vote, or cast a vote, based solely on returned mail or a caging list. The bill would also mandate that anyone who challenges the right of another citizen to vote must set forth the specific grounds for their alleged ineligibility, under penalty of perjury.

In June, Whitehouse requested a DoJ investigation into Tim Griffin, the former Karl Rove protege who was placed as a U.S. attorney in Arkansas, on allegations that he led a “caging” scheme to suppress the votes of African-American servicemembers in Florida.

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A U.S. District Court jury has found Brent Wilkes, who was charged with bribing disgraced former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, guilty on all 13 counts in his corruption trial. TPM’s Paul Kiel notes that today’s verdict is from just the first of the two corruption trials Wilkes faces. The second involves former CIA executive director Dusty Foggo.

I’m sympathetic to the general point Atrios is making here, but I don’t think it’s right to say that “For some the 2006 election win was premature as the Democrats won without massively repositioning themselves, proving it was possible.” The Democrats did, after all, reposition themselves pretty dramatically on the highest-profile political issue of the day: Iraq. They just repositioned themselves to the left and started offering a commitment to end the war rather than 2004-vintage promises to prosecute it more vigorously.

Last Friday, around the time her husband was giving a speech in Dallas, Lynne Cheney “made a visit to the Dallas Country Club for a signing event to promote her new memoir, Blue Skies, No Fences.” The club, which was founded in 1896, is a “haven for whites” and bills itself as a “traditional,” “family oriented social club.”

It also didn’t have any African-American members until at least as recently as June 2007.

In February 2007, controversy erupted in the Dallas Mayoral race after it was reported that two of the candidates were members of the club, which at the time had no black members and was in the process of rejecting former Clinton administration USEC board member Kneeland Youngblood:

The criticism came after The Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday that the membership application of prominent businessman Kneeland Youngblood, who stands to become the first black member of the club, had stalled. Members who declined to be identified said the reason for the delay was his involvement with the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

The Dallas Morning News reported in June that Youngblood’s application was still “held up.”

An employee of the country club confirmed to ThinkProgress that Youngblood is not a member, but said the club had accepted its first African-American member, a man named Ray Robinson, at some point between June 2007 and today.

Cheney’s appearance at the traditionally exclusive club came in the same week that her husband visited a hunting lodge in upstate New York that hangs the Confederate flag.

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UPDATE: A video look inside the Dallas Country Club, courtesy of TP reader Michael.

Jon Rauch posts and discusses the above chart. One noteworthy thing about this is that unlike with a lot of stuff where you see the public’s mild disgruntlement with Democrats outweighed by masssive hatred of Republicans, here you actually seem to be looking at more pro-Democrat sentiment than anti-Republican sentiment. By historical standards, the GOP has seen worse numbers, but the Democrats have rarely been more popular.