Scalia just gave the finger in church yesterday (not kidding)  —  UPDATE: The Boston Herald is reporting Scalia's movement as "an obscene gesture" and a "flick of the wrist."  That still is unclear, it could have been the wrist-under-chin gesture mixed with the middle finger.  Either way, it's not really relevant.

On Stand, Moussaoui Says He Knew of Plan to Attack W.T.C.  —  ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House.

WELCOME TO RECONQUISTA  —  ***scroll for updates...Bush warns against stoking anti-immigrant feelings.  Wants a "civil debate."  Video here...Ok.  Tell that to the divisive militants below...***  —  As Mickey Kaus points out, the reporters at the Los Angeles Times (and all other major media …

Telling Us What We Already Knew  —  The New York Times reports on leaked notes from a US-UK White House summit in January 2003 that shows both George Bush and Tony Blair determined to remove Saddam Hussein and to put an end to the twelve-year quagmire that kept Saddam in power.

Rove said cooperating in CIA leak inquiry  —  Karl Rove, Deputy White House Chief of Staff and special adviser to President George W. Bush, has recently been providing information to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the ongoing CIA leak investigation, sources close to the investigation say.

AP's Mainscream Media Bias  —  Although this AP story is ostensibly about Iraq, we didn't bother using the "Iraq Matters" category tag because — well, because the real story here is the creative use of the media megaphone to create the news, rather than merely report it (that's so dull!)

FEC Won't Regulate Internet Politics  —  The Federal Election Commission decided Monday that the nation's new campaign finance law will not apply to most political activity on the Internet.  —  In a 6-0 vote, the commission decided to regulate only paid political ads placed on another person's Web site.

Alec Baldwin v. Sean Hannity in Radio Donnybrook  —  Hollywood liberal Alec Baldwin stormed out of an in-studio radio interview Sunday night after he was confronted on the phone by radio hosts Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.  —  Baldwin was 30 minutes into a planned two-hour-plus sitdown …

Evangelical teens rally in S.F.  —  More than 25,000 evangelical Christian youth landed Friday in San Francisco for a two-day rally at AT&T Park against "the virtue terrorism" of popular culture, and they were greeted by an official city condemnation and a clutch of protesters who said their event amounted to a "fascist mega-pep rally."

Today Tehran, Tomorrow the World  —  What's at stake in the dispute over Iranian nukes?  Ultimately, human survival  —  Like many physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman could not get the Bomb out of his mind after the war.  "I would see people building a bridge," he wrote.

Putin 'copied uni thesis'  —  THE career of Russian President Vladimir Putin was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers.  —  A new study of an economics thesis written by Mr Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text.

In Iran, Even Some On Right Warning Against Extremes  —  TEHRAN — Nine months after the election of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, Iranian politics has shifted so sharply to the right that some traditional conservatives are warning of the dangers of radicalism.