Items of Interest

~ BarbinMD says all that needs saying about the state of the media this week:

The unifying theme throughout this [Blagojevich] coverage is, when you have a corrupt politician, caught on tape peddling influence and cursing like a sailor, guilt by imaginary association trumps boring issues like the economy and health care any day of the week.

~ Counting absentee votes mistakenly set aside in the Minnesota election has become the big issue. Here's a video that helps clarify what's at stake. [via]

Also, as TPM's Eric Kleefeld notes, the number of wrongly rejected ballots continues to mount:

At least 358 Minnesotans did everything right on their absentee ballots -- they sent them in on time, signed them where they should have and were properly registered -- but their votes were not counted.

Those voters live in just 12 of the state's 87 counties and their ranks will undoubtedly grow. Counties and the state have just begun figuring out how many mistakenly or improperly rejected absentee ballots there are.

The fate of those ballots is hotly contested but unclear.

The state's canvassing board meets on Friday to consider the fate of these and other uncounted votes.

~ Here's an interesting, if unsettling, interview with Michael Ware, CNN's Iraq war correspondent. I wonder if he ever posted the video he talks about anywhere on the net. [via]