TwinCities.com:

A two-day prostitution sting in St. Paul netted 35 men, including a longtime Republican operator in Minnesota politics.

Peter Hong, 41, of Minneapolis, was one of 19 men picked up Wednesday afternoon after police say he responded to an ad for sex put out in newspapers and online by the St. Paul Police Department's vice squad.

The Carleton grad was a campaign spokesman for Gov. Tim Pawlenty in 2002 and congressional press secretary to Sen. Rod Grams, R-Minn., for much of the 1990s. He also served as the Bush-Cheney Minnesota campaign spokesman in 2004. His most recent political stint was as presidential campaign spokesman for Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Hong is currently self-employed and "Always Searching for the Next Big Thing!" according to his profile on the business-networking Web site LinkedIn. Read on...

Another loyal Bushie goes down in flames. It appears Mr. Hong has indeed found the next big thing.

The Pew Research Center’s latest report notes, “Trends in the opinions of America’s youngest voters are often a barometer of shifting political winds.” If so, the winds are at Democrats’ backs, and will be for a quite a while. While young people shifted to the Democratic Party a bit in the 1990s, the bottom fell out for the GOP and younger voters during Bush’s presidency.

In 1992, Republicans enjoyed a slight edge in party identification among 18-29 year olds, 47% to 46%. Four years later, Democrats claimed a six-point edge, 50% to 44%. By the time of the 2000 election, Democrats’ lead had expanded slightly to eight points, 49% to 41%.

And voters under the age of 30 have been making a beeline from the Republican Party ever since. In 2004, Democrats’ lead among young voters’ party ID expanded to 11 points, 51% to 40%. And in 2008, the margin became a landslide — Democrats 58%, Republicans 33%.

What’s striking is not just the one-sided nature of young voters’ preferences, but the speed with which the change occurred. As recently as the 2002 midterms, voters aged 18 to 29 split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. In the 2006 midterms, they backed Democrats, 63% to 33%. Between 2004 and 2008, the party ID shift has more than doubled in Dems’ direction.

The change is also broadly based. From the Pew report:

In fact, the Democrats’ advantage among the young is now so broad-based that younger men as well as younger women favor the Democrats over the GOP — making their age category the only one in the electorate in which men are significantly more inclined to self-identify as Democrats rather than as Republicans.

While more women voters in every age group affiliate with the Democratic Party rather than the GOP, the gap is particularly striking among young women voters; more than twice as many women voters under age 30 identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party as favor the Republican Party (63% vs. 28%).

Talk about your emerging Democratic majority.

An oldie (2002) but a goodie from The Onion. Open thread below...

March 13, 2002

So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. I'm more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied; that the strategy is clear; that the coalition is strong; that when we find enemy bunched up like we did in Shahikot Mountains, that the military has all the support it needs to go in and do the job, which they did.

Q But don't you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban. (h/t Joe)

I've been trying to get some sort of handle on exactly what went on in Somalia. Something about it did not pass the smell test for me. A military expert with whom I consulted expressed some of the same reservations about the story that I had (albeit with far more specific knowledge).

First, the AC-130 is not a precision weapon in any practical term. It is fairly accurate area weapon and can contain it's fire to areas slightly larger than a football pitch (100mx90m). They may have hit "a senior terrorist figure" (who can tell from that altitude) but they hit a lot of other people in the process. Unless there were special forces on the ground calling in the fire it would be haphazard. Talk about back to the future, when every dead Vietnamese was Viet Cong -- the only requirement for identification was an unmoving corpse.

Then, as a follow up, he sent this article from the Guardian UK:

The US air strike on Somalia failed to kill any of the three top al-Qaida members accused of terror attacks in east Africa.

A senior US official said today that Sunday night's attack had killed between eight and 10 "al-Qaida affiliates" near the southern tip of Somalia.

But he said that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Abu Taha al-Sudan and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, all linked to the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2002 Mombasa hotel attack, were still on the run. "Fazul is not dead," said the official, contradicting earlier reports. "The three high-value targets are still of interest to us."

I'm not sure what to think about this. Why Somalia now? Is this another case of "Wag the Dog" the Republicans accused Clinton of during the "Monica-gate" scrutiny?

Int'l. Herald Tribune :

Observing President George W. Bush in action lately, we have to wonder if he actually watched the election returns in November, or if he was just rerunning the 2002 vote on his TiVo.
[..]In 2006, the voters sent Bush a powerful message that it was time to rein in his imperial ambitions. But we have yet to see any sign that Bush understands that. Indeed, he seems to have interpreted his party's drubbing as a mandate to keep pursuing his fantasy of victory in Iraq and to press ahead undaunted with his assault on civil liberties and the judicial system. Read full article here

From yesterdays oral argument before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Fox Television vs. Federal Communications Commission. How ironic is it that a case dealing with the FCC results in expletives being aired censor-free on national television? (h/t ScoopMag in comments)

Download | play WMP | Download | play MOV (some X-rated language)

From CSPAN :

Fox Television is challenging the FCC's indecency standards and the way it punishes broadcasters for airing shows that contain profanity. The network argues that the government is violating the First Amendment by embarking on a "radical reinterpretation and expansion" of its power to punish broadcasters for indecent speech. Fox Television contends that the FCC sharply changed its standards for profanity, that the standards are vague and make little sense in the face of industry changes. The FCC fined Fox for language used by Cher and Nicole Richie on the live broadcasts of the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards, respectively.

Now, now now. No scrubbing allowed.

"Yesterday, the SFist covered the CA-10 campaign (noting, "Oh, it's on."). But the editor also focused on the notorious photo of Bush and Tauscher:

BTW- that photo isn't from her meeting. It's from 2002 when she was about to agree with the Iraq War resolution. Expect that photo to be all over the political blogs like the Britney sans panties photos were on the gossip sites.

Last night the story hit google news and now the photo has been disappeared from Tauscher's federally funded, official government website.

Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, said in an interview that party loyalty isn't the issue. "I don't remember being elected to go to Washington to be a Democrat," she said...read on" (h/t FDL)

Kos: And if you're wondering what a netroots-backed primary challenge looks like from day one, read this. We're going to have fun with this future race.

Kenneth Starr will take the side of an Alaska school board against a student who displayed a banner that said: "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" off school property.

Frederick was suspended in 2002 after he unfurled the 14-foot-long banner -- a reference to marijuana use -- just outside school grounds as the Olympic torch relay moved through the Alaskan capital headed for the Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Even though Frederick was standing on a public sidewalk, school officials argue that he and other students were participating in a school-sponsored event. They had been let out of classes and were accompanied by their teachers.

Principal Deborah Morse ordered the 18-year-old senior to take down the sign, but he refused. That led to a 10-day suspension for violating a school policy by promoting illegal drug use. (h/t Joe)

I worked on statewide races in Kentucky in 2002 and 2003. So I know the politics reasonably well.

Republican Anne Northup in KY-03, has always found a way to win by pretending she is more moderate than she is and using pork to buy off certain African-American elites in the church community. She now trails her Democrat challenger by 50% to 48% with 81% of the vote counted.

In KY-02, where coincidentally we lost our first of many seats in 1994 in a special election, we should not be in the game. But we are up 2% right now! If we win these two races, which could be called 2nd and 3rd tier pickup opportunities, respectively, get ready for a huge night.

One more thing. Congressman Ted Strickland has already won his race for the governorship of Ohio, ending 16 years of Republican control of the Ohio statehouse. He is a star in an important state. Look for him to make VP short-list conversation in the coming months.