Jim Sleeper offers a timely takedown of Time Magazine's "apologia-cum-hagiography on Rupert Murdoch."

When legal efforts are exhausted, reformers hit the streets. Mark Schmitt notes the promising shift towards "political reform with people in it."

Apparently Michael Moore's new screed against America's broken health care system is so good that it's causing Texans to organize themselves, before they've even left the theater. A reader writes in to Boing Boing:

When the credits rolled the audience filed out and into the bathrooms. At the urinals, my redneck friend couldn’t stop talking about the film, and I kept listening. He struck up a conversation with a random black man in his 40s standing next to him, and soon everyone was peeing and talking about just how fucked everything is.

I kept my distance, as we all finished and exited at the same time. Outside the restroom doors… the theater was in chaos.

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Dennis Kucinich to keynote a convention of political cartoonists. That and other political news of the day in today's Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

Join us in tracking the absurd right-wing "but Clinton pardoned!" defense.

In the Bush view, the world is a blockbuster movie where heroes strive to defeat shifty-eyed villains.

This week at TPMCafe's Book Club, Glenn Greenwald joins us to discuss his new book A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. In particular, Greenwald wants to focus on Iran, and how the "pure fiction" of the Administration's "cartoonish depiction of Iran" is exacerbating the threat and may push us to war.

Debating Greenwald's thesis, and its application to Iran, will be Ezra Klein, Seth Gitell, Danny Postel, and Chris Floyd.

Jared Bernstein lists 5 reasons economists still compete with weathermen for accuracy kudos.

President Bush just commuted Scooter Libby's prison sentence. Libby will still have to pay the "harsh punishment" of a $250,000 and 2 years probation, but he won't have to go to jail.

Shameless.

Update: Here at TPM we're on Clinton watch, expecting a wave of "Clinton did it!" from the Right. Redstate gets things started:

"Now, we get to hear what Hillary Clinton thinks about the proper uses of the pardon power."

After the break.

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What if third parties could exist without third party candidates? Dan Cantor, the head of New York's Working Familes Party, sits down at TPMCafe's Table for One to make the case for fusion voting.

Welcome to the TPMCafe Book Club! This is where we regularly invite authors to come and discuss their most recent works with readers and invited commentators.

This week we'll be discussing Glenn Greenwald's A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency.

In the book, Greenwald dissects the Bush Administration's binary approach to the world and the ways it has infected our politics and ruined our policies. This week in particular, we will examine the ways in which that perspectives is a part of our approach, and may be leading us into a war whether the American people want it or not.

Joining the conversation will be Ezra Klein, Seth Gitell, Danny Postel, and Chris Floyd.

Past Book Club authors include Thomas Frank, Anthony Shadid, Larry Diamond, George Packer, Ivo Daalder/James Lindsay, Robert Dreyfuss, Chris Mooney, Gene Sperling, Gershom Gorenberg, Peter Beinart, Kevin Phillips, Sidney Blumenthal, Reed Hundt, Anne-Marie Slaughter, John Ikenberry, Jonathan Cohn, Daniel Gross, Steven Cook, Chris Hayes, and Josh Kurlantzick.

-ahg