Missed the forum last night? Here are the highlights from the three who matter most on their opinion about the top issue, gay marriage:

Hillary Clinton (see more highlights here):

Barack Obama (see more highlights here):

John Edwards (see more highlights here):

According to The Telegraph, Gordon Brown, the UK’s new Prime Minister, has had enough of paying the Ministry of Defense’s 1,000 PR practitioners an average annual salary of £39 thousand ($80 thousand—yes, I’m in the wrong country) to foster public support—or lack thereof—for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they can’t seem to figure out who these 1,000 practitioners are:

Yet in a striking admission, an internal Ministry of Defence (MoD) document reveals that senior officials have “no clear idea” of who they are, whether they are making an impact, or their actual cost to the country.

The document, The Defence Communications Strategy, also contains what is believed to be the first official admission by the Government that there is little or no support for the war in Iraq among the British public.

It looks as though Brown is trying to clean house but is a bit lost at the moment. However, he is taking the lead and trying to create change in a country where public opinion of its previous PM, Tony Blair, took a severe nose dive on issues like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even further for his alliance with the Bush administration on these and other sensitive international issues. In the meantime, Brown is listening to his people who are demanding change. Now let’s just wait and see if he can pull it off.

Missing: MoD’s army of 1,000 press officers [via Strumpette]

I might actually buy this one because I totally wrote a paper about this, but alas, I missed the book deal:

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason.

Book excerpt: The Assault on Reason [via Time]

Yet another reason why Imus simply deserved it:

It’s a good question, deserving a “blunt” answer, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. Blacks and whites have an ugly, 388-year history in this country, beginning when “the first shackled African slaves arrived at Jamestown.” Given that history, a 67-year-old white disc jockey in a cowboy hat cannot call a young black woman a “nappy-headed ho,” even if black rappers use those same despicable words. Yes, there’s a double standard, and white guys shouldn’t bother whining about it. “Last time I checked, guys, you still ran most of the world.”

If I hear one more person trying to defend Imus, I’ll throw every cultural studies, critical studies, and sociology book at them, until they’re bleeding profusely and unsure why they have over 40k in college debt…..oh wait that’s me…..never mind. And, btw, if you don’t read The Week now, I suggest you start.

I used to subscribe to and read The Economist (kinda like Times or Newsweek but with more real news), but The Week actually has, ummm…..news. The best way to explain how The Week works is as if you had the best (non-biased AND Liberal) articles (or the TRUTH, for lack of a better term) from every news source out there aggregated via RSS (syndication) feed into a print version……and viola!………The Week is born. It’s green this week, but Lexus will realize they wasted their money. Oops! Should have taken me shopping instead…