A Red Cross chapter in Ohio is offering blood donors a chance to win a 2010 Nissan Versa or a … horse and buggy, if you happen to be one of the area’s many Amish.

Tea partiers on summer vacation descend on colonial Williamsburg seeking answers from Revolutionary re-enactors on toppling tyranny.

In a big speech on Iraq today, the President will hail this month’s end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, marking the “official” end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq.

For the Citizens United files …

Target has taken the opportunity created by the Citizens United decision to drop a big chunk of change on Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial Tom Emmer — arch-foe of gays and waiters, among others. And it’s caused a real backlash.

If you’re up for a really hilarious story on a lazy Sunday, check this one out. It’s about a cross border raid by one of Mexico’s most notorious drug gangs (Los Zetas) in which they stormed across the US-Mexico border and seized two ranches near Laredo. The ranchers, thankfully, were able to retreat to American-held territory with no injuries. Another significant level of detail is that the whole thing actually never happened, though that hasn’t stopped a lot of right-wing sites from going totally nuts about it. And a good chunk of the right-wing blogosphere has now decided that the complete lack of evidence that it ever happened actually means that there’s a vast government coverup. (One conservative blogger has wittily and memorably dubbed these folks “Laredo Truthers”.) Read More

Our reporting duo gives us the round down of just what happened at today’s pro-diversity ‘Uni-Tea’ Tea Party rally in Philadelphia.

Jillian Rayfield and I spent the afternoon at Uni-Tea, which organizers billed in part as the tea party reaching out to minorities and inviting them to join the cause. Judging by the low turnout and almost completely white crowd, that goal was not achieved. (Though the tea party leaders behind Uni-Tea say it was, and plan to hold more Uni-Tea events in the future). We’ll have a full accounting of the sights and sounds of the afternoon soon.

The most anticipated speaker of the 13-speech program today was Andrew Breitbart, who took the stage near the end of the day. Verbose as always, he gave a rousing speech about the liberal elite and media conspiracy to paint the tea party as racist. There was one topic he wouldn’t touch however: Shirley Sherrod. Read our take here.

That ‘Uni-Tea Rally’ in Philadelphia intended to highlight diversity in the tea party movement? The early reports from our team in the field describe a small, not-very-diverse crowd of 100 or so.

Read our preview of the day’s events here. And check back later for updates.

As we reported earlier this month, Tea Partiers are congregating in Philadelphia tomorrow for a ‘Uni-Tea Rally’ aimed at spotlighting the diversity — racial and otherwise — of the Tea Party movement. And TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro and Jillian Rayfield are going to be there filing live reports (with video) through the day.

Update: Check out our preview of the day’s festivities here.

Here’s something I’ve been wondering about.

When I first heard the news that Charlie Rangel was likely to face a “trial” in the House on the 13 violations he’s accused of, I remember being sort of surprised. That’s not only because I think I didn’t realize things had progressed quite that far but because I didn’t know that the Ethics Committee held ‘trials’. Tonight we learned that Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) is going to face a ‘trial’ as well.

Now, there are a lot of things about Congress I’m no expert on, to put it mildly. But I’d always thought these disciplinary hearings were called ‘hearings’, not ‘trials’, which is obviously a more charged word and doesn’t seem to really describe what’s involved. Read More