I generally think we’re too quick to pull the trigger with charges of plagiarism. I haven’t said anything about this because I really didn’t think I had anything to add. Whatever the mechanics of how it happened, I never thought it was intentional. Dowd and the Times quickly corrected it, which I appreciated. And for me, that’s pretty much the end of it.

It’s sort of sad that it’s come to this. But it seems RNC Chief Michael Steele may have pulled off a minor feat of leadership for his party.

As you know, the RNC was to meet tomorrow and vote on whether to rename the Democratic party the “Democrat Socialist Party” — something Steele himself opposed and an apparent majority of RNC yahoos viewed as a key step on their party’s path back to power.

Now, though, Steele seems to have engineered a switch in which the full rename (i.e., “Democrat Socialist Party”) will give way to merely “condemn(ing) the Democrats’ march to socialism” which, for reasons that, when I actually think about it, aren’t exactly clear, makes the whole thing entirely different and defuses the controversy.

Obama is poised to sign a bill that would allow concealed weapons in national parks. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

At one level, scratch that, at many levels, it’s great that a growing number of banks, even some big banks are ready to pay back their TARP money. That suggests the possibility that the price of the bailout may be much less than we originally thought and feared. So that’s great. But why should we let the banks wriggle out of the terms of the loans?

Remember, the taxpayers took a huge, huge risks loaning hundreds of billions of dollars to banks, many of which were on the brink of failure — frankly, many of them still may be, but that’s another story. In exchange we got warrants — rights to buy stock at certain price points — that would give us a big upside if everything worked out well and the banks bounced back.

Now they want us to forget about the warrants or allow them to buy them back on the cheap, just pay the money back and be done with it. From my experience, that’s not how banks deal with their customers or debtors, is it?

Republicans on the Hill have the audacity to warn that a government-run heath care plan would be like government’s incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina.

A short while ago the Senate voted overwhelming to block the funding Obama was seeking to close the detention facility at Gitmo.

At a presser afterwards, where Senate Republicans were touting how well detainees are treated there, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) reportedly argued that a detainee can even get a colonoscopy there. Hoping to find video of this important moment in Senate history. We’ll keep you posted.

I feel like we need one of those long-voweled boxing announcers for this. AEI’s Danielle Pletka has a post up on AEI’s blog playing up the ‘dueling speeches’ meme for the speeches President Obama and former Vice President Cheney will be giving tomorrow.

As we noted a few days ago, tomorrow morning at AEI pulling together the themes and angles he’s advanced in his recent series of media appearances into a global argument in favor of state-sponsored torture and indefinite confinement of detainees.

The Democrats stripped funding out of the defense appropriations bill for the winding down and dismantlement of the Gitmo detention facility. And the background issue is the refusal to bring accused terrorists or possibly at some point convicted terrorists into the US for incarceration. And I’m hearing this senator or that one from this or that state, saying hey, don’t bring any of these terrorists to Maine! or maybe, don’t bring them to Arkansas or Kentucky or wherever.

But, c’mon, I’m assuming these guys aren’t going to be deposited at the county jail in Baltimore or Baton Rouge. We’ve got an incredibly secure and incredibly hellish Super Max facility in Florence, Colorado. And it seems clear that that’s where these guys would end up. (That’s where Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, now resides, along with a bunch of other high-profile terrorists.) So can’t we at least stop fools from Texas and Idaho from pretending these guys are coming to their state?

CNN and MSNBC will apparently broadcast former VP Cheney’s torture speech live tomorrow.

From TPM Reader SS …

Aren’t the folks saying “don’t bring them to my state” implicitly saying “we don’t trust the Federal Bureau of Prisons to keep us safe” But the BOP has a sterling track record with regards to guys like Ramzi Yousef, or John Gotti, or the Unabomber, or Manuel Noriega, and so forth.

Are they impugning our guys in uniform? (Correctional officers)

Shouldn’t Obama or DOJ be standing up for them?