U.S. District Court Judge Henry Kennedy ruled today that two private groups — CREW and the National Security Archive — may continue to pursue their case against the Bush White House to recover millions of possibly missing electronic messages. “The Bush administration had argued that the courts did not have the power to order the White House to retrieve any missing e-mails.”

A recent lawsuit alleged that Nasser Kazeminy, a close friend of Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), used his business DMT to funnel $75,000 to Coleman’s wife’s insurance firm. A new lawsuit, however, claims that Kazeminy originally tried to steer the money directly to Coleman, Politico reports:

[T]he second lawsuit alleges — and it’s breathtakingly stupid if true — that Kazeminy at first ordered DMT execs to pay Coleman directly.

“Our clients were advised that Mr. Kazeminy first sought to have DMT make quarterly cash payments of $25,000 to Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota,” writes plaintiff’s attorney Anthony Paduano, citing a “confidential” informant.

What’s more, this latest suit reveals that the payments to Coleman’s wife’s firm were hardly for insurance purposes, “because DMT, which services offshore oil platforms and port facilities, already used Aon for its insurance.”

TV Decoder reports:

Keith Olbermann, the anchor of “Countdown,” will remain at MSNBC through the next presidential election season, the cable news channel announced Monday afternoon.

The announcement came less than two years into Mr. Olbermann’s current four-year deal. MSNBC essentially tore up his February 2007 contract (reported to be worth up to $4 million a year) and wrote a new one, according to two employees with knowledge of the agreement. The new contract is valued at about $7.5 million a year, one of the people said.

Mr. Olbermann will continue to anchor “Countdown” and co-host NBC’s “Football Night in America.” Reinforcing Mr. Olbermann’s value to MSNBC, the network said he would “play a prominent role” in “all major news events.”

Appearing on the View today, Olbermann admitted that he didn’t vote last week.

DNC Chairman Howard Dean is preparing to step down from his position when his term ends in January, Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reports today. According to Stein, a name being floated as Dean’s successor is Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who was an ardent supporter of President-elect Barack Obama:

In sheer political terms, the choice really wasn’t Dean’s to make. Indeed, any decision on who will serve as the next DNC chair will come with directives from Obama and his aides. And a name being floated around as a possible Dean replacement is one of the president-elect’s closest allies: Claire McCaskill, the junior Senator from Missouri and a national co-chair of the Obama campaign.

On Fox News Sunday yesterday, John Podesta, President-elect Barack Obama’s transition chief, said Obama would move swiftly to overturn a range of executive orders by President Bush, “whether that’s on energy transformation, on improving health care, on stem cell research.” Podesta explained, “I think across the board, on stem cell research, on a number of areas, you see the Bush administration even today moving aggressively to do things that I think are probably not in the interest of the country.”

Asked about it during today’s press briefing, Dana Perino defended Bush’s stem cell policy and insisted that Bush had never, in fact, banned stem cell research:

Unfortunately, the president’s position on stem cells has been misconstrued over the years, with the suggestion that President Bush put a ban on research for embryonic stem cell research. That is not true. … The President made a very important choice after a lot of careful deliberation.

Watch it:

It’s technically true that Bush did not ban stem cell research — he just strictly limited funding of it. Vetoing bipartisan legislation that even ardent pro-life conservative Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) supported, Bush arbitrarily limited funding to research of just 60 stem cell lines cultivated before Aug. 9, 2001. The number eventually shrank to a dismal 21 after some lines were found to have been contaminated or retrieved unethically. The limits make scientists’ work more difficult and less effective, and — since the thousands of embryos not implanted in women are eventually destroyed — don’t even save the embryos Bush considers to be “human life.”

Despite Perino’s attempt to blame the media for “misconstruing” Bush’s policy, even his own scientists agree that his research limits are profoundly harmful:

– Dr. Elias Zerhouni, Bush’s former Director of the National Institute of Health: “American science will be better served — and the nation will be better served — if we let our scientists have access to more cell lines that they can study with the different methods that have emerged since 2001.”

– Story Landis, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke: “We are missing out on possible breakthroughs,” she told Congress, adding that the ability to work on newly derived stem cell colonies — currently precluded from federal funding — “would be incredibly important.”

Perhaps if Bush got his ideas from scientists rather than science-fiction novels, American stem cell research would be on the path to curing diseases.