LIGHTNING ROUND: THE BANALITY OF JUDICIAL CONFIRMATION HEARINGS.

• Barack Obama used his nomination of Alabama family physician Regina Benjamin as the next Surgeon General to address the growing sense that health care reform is stuck and that the window for passing legislation is closing fast. Perhaps. But considering that the public option has become the sine qua non for some members of the Senate Democratic caucus and has even attracted a number of Blue Dogs in the House, it isn't surprising that the administration has hinted that a delay of the August congressional recess might be in order.
• The Washington Post's ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, published a revealing mea culpa over the weekend that addressed revelations that the Beltway paper was offering pay-to-play salons for exclusive access to reporters.Whatever the ultimate consequences of this incident, and its effect on the the newspaper business, it's refreshing to see it acknowledged that such brazen ethics violations truly are antithetical to the norms of journalism.
  
• This academic study reported in The New York Times provides empirical support for what we already knew: blogs follow "traditional news outlets" by an average of 2.5 hours and rarely break news themselves. Actually, I would have thought the lag time would be considerably less, given that RSS feeds (ideally) keep us news junkies tightly in the loop. On a related note, a separate study finds that The Drudge Report -- he who "rules our world" -- is little other than an aggregator dependent on "wire services and obscure news outlets."
• This Wall Street Journal op-ed making yet another call for a conservative curriculum in the nation's universities is probably best understood alongside this profile of four up-and-coming conservative intellectuals in The Boston Globe. In the former, you have the argument that there's an omission in the study of political theory, which may or may not be true, depending on the institution. But that has little to do with conservative policy, which is what the new intellectuals are trying to articulate. The study of conservative intellectual history -- the "conservative tradition" -- isn't the same as conservative governance, where the application of said tradition has been a total failure.
  
• Weekend Remainders: How stupid talking points get started; Christian Coalition 2.0?; Newt Gingrich's idea factory never sleeps; and the myth of "Eurabia."

--Mori Dinauer