Midday open thread

• Another blurb for Taking on the System, now available for pre-order at Amazon and other online retailers.

  A guerrilla manual for political insurgency, a motivational guide to personal action, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga’s Taking on the System lays out the map on how to transform social networks into a power grid and send the funeral directors of our archaic institutions packing. Written with the high-velocity enthusiasm for a healthy shellacking that has made Daily Kos the Battlestar Galactica of the blogosphere, Taking on the System, studded with practical tips and inspirational tales, teaches and preaches how to turn your voice into a force-multiplier without losing your soul in the process. This is a book that conservatives could learn from too, if they could tear themselves away from Rush Limbaugh long enough to take a jab at something new.

  --James Wolcott, Vanity Fair columnist and author of Attack Poodles (Miramax)

  Pre-orders help build buzz, so your help is hugely appreciated!

• A coalition of California groups are suing the State of California to throw this fall's anti-gay marriage hate initiative off the ballot.

  * "The proposed initiative is invalid because it is a proposed constitutional revision, not a proposed constitutional amendment and, as such, the California Constitution provides that it may not be enacted by initiative"

  * "The description of the proposed initiative in the petitions that were circulated for signature was materially misleading and materially misstated the effect of the proposed initiative to the electors signing the petitions to qualify the measure for the ballot.

  UTBriancl explains in the diary that the case is a long-shot. We'll likely have to defeat this hate initiative at the ballot box.

• WALL-E is easily the best animated flick ever, in both story, "acting", and animation quality. Interestingly, the biggest challenge for the movie's animators was to make the movie less perfect.

  Stanton adds that the new virtual camera system was set up to make both the robots and the environments look more believable. "Life is nothing but imperfection and the computer likes perfection, so we spent probably 90% of our time putting in all of the imperfections, whether it's in the design of something or just the unconscious stuff. How the camera lens works in [a real] housing is never perfect, and we tried to put those imperfections [into the virtual camera] so that everything looks like you're in familiar [live-action] territory."

  The movie is stunning, through and through.

• What's funny about the crazy Republican in the Montana Senate race is that he thinks Baucus is paying any attention to himat all. Still, the dude spills his family's secrets anyway.

  As a 23-year-old man, Kelleher was a friar in a Carmelite monastery 18 months away from ordination into the priesthood. He dropped out, Kelleher said, because he couldn't handle the vow of chastity.

  He has been married and divorced three times. He has seven children and regrets the impact his absence had on their lives. Kelleher said he particularly regrets the way he walked out on his first wife, Gerry, mother to his six oldest children and to whom he was long married.

  “I wanted to have fun,” he said, but his fun hurt his children and his wife, whom he described as “wonderful.”

  Umm. Okay...

• Sonics leave Seattle for Oklahoma. Seattle gets to keep the name and team's history. Lawsuits abound.
• Why is no one polling South North Dakota? Obama is visiting today, and it's clearly looking in play. Yet we get lots of silly polls like Massachusetts and New York.
• Speaking of South North Dakota, the Fargo Forum, which endorsed Bush in 2004, is flirting with Obama.

  It’s a rare presidential election year when a candidate of any political party visits North Dakota more than once. In some elections, even once is a big deal. So Sen. Barack Obama’s stop in Fargo today could be a hint of what’s to come, not only from the Obama camp, but also from Sen. John McCain, the Republican standard-bearer.

  Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton packed ’em in during back-to-back campaign rallies in April in Grand Forks. The 1,000 available tickets for Obama’s visit today were hot commodities. If there were space at Fargo’s Yunker Farm, he could attract 10,000 or more. McCain supporters should pay attention [...]

  No one should conclude that Obama has a lock on North Dakota. He certainly does not. But given the surprises in this year’s presidential campaign, it would be unwise to assume McCain has the lock. That’s the dynamic the Obama campaign senses, and that’s one reason he’s in North Dakota today.

• Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is purchasing ad time in Virginia. Homeboy will be playing a lot of defense this year.