TPM interviewed Dan Choi after he confronted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at Netroots Nation.

As we told you earlier, Choi gave Reid his West Point ring to make a point that Democrats' promises to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell haven't yet panned out.

Watch.

Out here in Las Vegas, the news is coming a mile-a-minute at Netroots Nation.

We'll be posting this evening but follow every development here.

Just now, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised Lt. Dan Choi he'd keep his West Point ring until the Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal is signed. See the quotes here. They hugged and the crowd gave a standing ovation.

President Obama surprises Netroots Nation with a prerecorded video.

Watch the video, and follow our up-to-the-minute coverage of both Netroots and RightOnline today here.

Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), the immigrant-bashing nativist who did not run for re-election in 2008, is threatening to run for governor of Colorado unless the two declared GOP candidates drop out.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC), who has a wicked sense of humor, introduced Vice President Joe Biden today to a crowd in South Carolina as "articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy."

It's being presented by the Tea Party Express as his decision, but Mark Williams is out as spokesperson for the group. Maybe he is doing it on his own, but hard not to think that the firestorm created by his comments like Allah is a "monkey god" and the NAACP makes "more money off of race than any slave trader, ever" didn't convince the Republican operatives behind the Tea Party Express that it was time to dump Williams. Not that they deserve any credit for it now.

I've gotten used to a pretty intense brand of hyperbole in the era of Tea Party-chasing Republicans. But Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN), who's now in a tough primary to get the nomination to run for Governor of Tennessee, is now saying that if Americans don't get it right in 2010 and 2012 and repeal Health Care Reform his state may have to secede from the union.

Remember back in the day, one of the reasons Trent Lott got into trouble after his Strom Thurmond comments was that it turned out he had long-standing ties to a neo-segregationist group called the "Council of Conservative Citizens", the successor group to the White Citizens Councils from the Civil Rights Era.

Well, they're back.

It turns out that the good folks from the CofCC have been setting up shop at Tea Party events down in Florida. And now a prominent leader of the Florida CofCC is lambasting the Tea Party for not embracing the NAACP's claim the Tea Party is a racist group.

NPR's Daniel Schorr (known to the generation before mine as CBS' Daniel Schorr) has died.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) presses President Obama to appoint Elizabeth Warren to head consumer protection bureau.

One of the points Paul Krugman notes in his column I referenced below is that Karl Rove now wants to re-litigate the series of exaggerations and frauds the Bush administration used to game the United States into the Iraq War. This has been off the radar for some time. Not only is it some years ago (it occurs to me that you've got a decent number of young journalists who don't even have a clear living memory of all that went down) but most of the reality of what happened has actually been reported (notwithstanding a few whitewash congressional investigations conducted under the GOP majority) and is there for people to see.

But there's actually a lot that remained covered up. A whole lot. For a lot of reasons. Even the very broad outlines we mainly know, from a lot of really good post-war reporting by a lot of different shoe-leather reporters.

I think Mr. Rove's idea is that he and the other folks involved can try to rewrite the history -- or at least enough of a gloss for folks who aren't paying attention or are heavily invested in getting fooled -- while everybody is distracted, busy or just generally not watching. But I'd actually be eager to see this whole debacle re-litigated. I'm assuming this means all those involved are now ready? Eager to talk?

China is dealing with its largest oil spill ever (of those spills officially reported):

Get all your live updating Netroots Nation coverage right here.

Is Obama going to take us to war with Iran? There's been increasing chatter that a military strike is back on the table. But it ain't going to happen, says Steve Clemons.

This may be the best piece I've read yet about the politics of 2010. Krugman's column in today's Times.

As Exhibit A to Josh's post yesterday on the cravenness of the legitimate press we have Politico's loving treatment of Andrew Breitbart posted today. Breitbart makes their list of "Top 50 Politicos To Watch," in the subcategory of "Scenemakers":

Read more

Andrew Breitbart emails to say that he didn't release the Sherrod video because of the Pigford settlement, but was targeting the NAACP for accusing the Tea Party of harboring racist elements:

No. Seriously. On everything I hold dear. This was never about Sherrod. It was CLEARLY telegraphed at NAACP -- on Thursday when I, gulp, told Ben Jealous to "go to hell" for spending week attacking racism with Tea Party. That the media and White House have turned this into me versus Sherrod is silly. My consistent angle is defending Tea Party from this predictable line of attack.

I mean, where to even start?

On Countdown last night, Christina Bellantoni did a bang-up job of summarizing our piece that puts the Shirley Sherrod mess in the broader context of the right-wing's deep antipathy to USDA's settlement of its well-documented history of discrimination against black farmers. Watch.

After our story earlier in the week on anti-mosque protests in several parts of the country, we got a bunch of reader emails about yet more instances of anti-mosque fervor in their communities. The more we've looked into, the more cases we've found of Muslim-bashing xenophobia manifesting itself in local zoning and land use disputes. So we've taken a second bite at the apple and run down all the similar cases out there.