Look at the new page up at the DNC Website:

Join the Campaign -- Make a Contribution!

The current issue of Time Magazine features a cover story about Barack Obama's mother with that wonderful picture we've all seen of the two of them together.

It turns out that Obama's nascent career peddling hope is a family business. He inherited it. And while it is true that he has not been profoundly tested, he was raised by someone who was.

In most elections, the deceased mother of a candidate in the primaries is not the subject of a magazine profile. But Ann Soetoro was not like most mothers.

The Story of Barack Obama's Mother

That's the title of a blog post over at The New York Times. Clinton made an appearance in North Dakota hoping maybe to poach some delegates.

She even promised to campaign from one end of North Dakota to the other in the general election if she wins the nomination, even though the state has not gone Democratic in a presidential election since 1964.

"I would be ecstatic to campaign across this state in the fall, doing everything in our power to persuade the good people of North Dakota that we can do better," she said. "We’ll win by running a 50-state campaign."

Clinton: No State Will Be Overlooked

There was a diary posted recently, Clinton on the stump - mispeaking?, by a registered nurse who asked three relevant questions about a story that appeared in the Washington Post.

Is it just me? Or is anybody else sick and tired of all this talk about racism and sexism? The Democratic Party is trying to choose between two people to represent them in the general election. Does it really matter that neither candidate is a white man?

I find it ironic that Alberto Gonzales said it himself. Remember this nugget from his press conference?

"As we can all imagine, in an organization of 110,000 people, I am not aware of every bit of memory that passes through the halls of the Department of Justice, nor am I aware of all memory losses. I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood with those. I would encourage you all to focus on what is positive in terms of what is going on positively in this country, in terms of all the memories that did not get lost recently."

I remember thinking at the time, "Wow, with that many employees, it is only a matter of time ..."

The teasers tonight have been good. Keith Olbermann says he is going to defend BillO on Countdown during the "Worst Person in the World" segment. And the winner is:

I've been scratching my head ever since I read the Daniel Metcalf interview last week. His description of decisions by consensus sounded eerily familar to me ... in a negative way. Then it hit me that it reminded me of the villain in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

The US Atorney Purge scandal has put the Department of Justice under a microscope. Diaries here have focused on offices of US Attorneys that weren't fired, like Betsy Devine's pursuit of the roadblocks in the New Hampshire Phone Jamming case, and Patience's wondering about A "Loyal Bushie" in Mississippi?.  And the debate continues to heat about the reason for the eight dismissals at the center of the scandle, which Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo brilliantly summarizes, explaining, "The firings were not the offense. They were the clue that suggested the offense."

I woke up today remembering an article I had read online last year in the Wall Street Journal. It was about the Contractor Fraud case against Custer Battles, which some have written about at DailyKos. But it wasn't that case in particular I was thinking about ... it was the bigger picture about how the Bush Administration and the Department of Justice are blocking more of theses cases from going forward.

I just read the transcript of an interesting interview that Bud Cummins gave to PBS. In it he points out that at the Department of Justice, they write a memo for everything they do. So here is the $64 question ... Where is the memo they wrote analyzing the performance of each of the 93 United States Attorneys to determine who they would ask to resign?

UPDATED BELOW THE FOLD: How rare is it to fire a United States Attorney? I've heard it said that it has only happened three times before in the last 25 years. I went looking to find those three cases.