Most people who make serious threats against the lives of lawmakers turn out to look a lot like people who’d make serious threats against the lives of lawmakers.

Two wildly disparate but in their own ways very significant passings: Anatoly Dobrynin, perrenial Soviet ambassador at 90; and Malcolm McLaren, true creator of the Sex Pistols and much of the British punk movement, at 64.

The Michigan Democrat who became better known as the pro-life pivot point in the health care reform debate, will call it quits, according to multiple news outlets.

Obama weighs in on Republicans’ struggles this week to throw off the burden of slavery.

The major speakers at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans — Mary Matalin, Liz Cheney, J.C. Watts, and Newt Gingrich — managed to get through the opening day of the convention yesterday without any mention of Hurricane Katrina.

Jonathan Chait, on the “experts” who give anti-Enlightenment conservatives a patina of intellectual legitimacy: “You have a whole ideological movement that, to a substantial degree, relies upon the pseudo-expertise of cranks and hacks.”

So what did Gregory Giusti have to do to get arrested for threatening Speaker Nancy Pelosi? A fair amount, it seems. At least 48 harassing phone calls over a seven week period. Many of them pretty not nice.

In one case, according to the criminal complaint released today, Giusti got Pelosi herself on the phone at her home and “used extremely vulgar and crude language and threatened her, stating ‘when you go back to California you won’t have a home to go back to’.” Justin Elliott has all the new details released this afternoon.

Republicans are facing the fact that as bad as it might be having Michael Steele as Chairman going on TV every day saying boffo, ridiculous things, there’s a still worse possible fate: firing him and having him go on TV every day saying boffo, ridiculous things and trashing the folks who fired him. Tough pickle.

Vote suppression guru Hans van Spakovsky is back. Now apparently targeting Asian immigrants in Northern Virginia.

That diplomat involved in the apparent non-shoe-bomb misunderstanding yesterday on that flight from DC to Denver was on his way to a consular visit with a jailed al Qaeda operative. That’s according to the Associated Press.

Given that he was en route to Colorado, I’d assume that means the Supermax facility in Florence, CO. But that last part is my supposition.

Late Update: The prisoner in question is apparently Ali Al-Marri.