TED RALL IS ENDORSING HOWARD DEAN (though he has trouble spelling “preference” — there’s no “a” in it, Ted). Howard Dean is happy about it. I’m not so sure that he should be.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh thinks that this is a bad move by Dean, too. And just wait until people pull out Rall’s 9/11 widows cartoon. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: That didn’t take long. You can see that cartoon here.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dick Riley emails:

I like Dean, but the posting of the Rall endorsement on Dean’s blog is a definite negative to me. Still, I’m hesitant to say it means much about Dean’s policies or even his basic sentiments (so I think your post takes a correct low-temperature approach to this). Purely tactically, in fact, I don’t know that I’d call it negative. Deaniacs, bloggers, blog readers, and other political addicts are following the presidential race, but hardly anyone else is. So although Dean is old news to us in the addict camp and we’re ready for him to start getting statesmanlike and reaching out to the moderate middle, in terms of his national campaign Dean is probably still in keep-the-base-fired-up mode. I doubt touting the Rall endorsement will hurt him with the mass of his current supporters. If I were Dean, even with my own moderate instincts and generally pro-war stance, I don’t know that I’d take rejecting Ted Rall and all his works as a Sister Souljah moment. Doing a Sister Souljah moment now would just echo into the void.

Probably so.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More on Rall, here. And if you follow the Volokh link, above, you’ll see that the Dean campaign has edited the blog post on Rall’s endorsement. Nothing necessarily perfidious in that, but you can see both versions via Volokh.