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Whitehouse is up, hitting on the same issues he hit in his speech a week ago Friday. He accuses Mukasey and McConnell are being disingenuous when they ignore the issues outstanding on the FISA debate. These two gentlemen do know what is going on and chose to talk past the issue, ignore it's very existence.

Is David Frum really calling for competence in Republican nominees and appointees? Or is he instead calling for ideological purity in the guise of competence?

Hello there sports fans and fanettes. You have probably been wondering what happens to the New England Patriots if Tom Brady is injured or out. The second string is a pretty severe step down; for those scoring at home, or even if you are alone (shameless rip off from Keith Olbermann), Brady's backup is Matt Cassel, a perfectly fine chap, and by all accounts a good quarterback.

Is the government telling different stories about whether Nacchio was asked by the NSA for access to its circuits? Or just that he expected to get other business and lost the business after he refused to tap Americans?

In preparation for a thus-far mythical trip to Philly, I recruited someone to post for me on my driving days. It was a pretty easy decision, really. When I meet TNH/emptywheel people in person, they tend to rave about bmaz. So I thought I'd give him the keys to the front page while I'm gone.

Michael Mukasey has engaged in a remarkable bit of sophistry with his refusal to clue Congress in on the joint DOJ/CIA IG investigation into the destruction of the torture tapes. He explains his decision as an attempt to avoid "any perception that our law enforcement decisions are subject to political influence." Of course, the "political influence" Mukasey was asked to address during his nomination hearings was the kind exerted when a Senator or a Congresswoman called the Attorney General privately to demand that a USA either accelerate the prosecution of a political figure or be fired. In this matter, Mukasey has been asked to respond to what is an almost unparalleled degree of bipartisan support for an open inquiry into a matter that just stinks, already, of a cover-up. Leahy and Specter (and Reyes and Hoekstra and Durbin and Biden and more) called for a procedure that had oversight built in. And Mukasey said no.

Yet another old-school journalist calls on the Toobz to clean up its acts and adopt the "ethics" of old journalism that have already failed our society. But I'm most amused by the humorous error in his own op-ed calling for accuracy and fairness. Apparently, Professor Helzinki believes that journalists are leading the fight to debunk the "Obama in the madrassa rumor," rather than propagate it themselves.

I'm not really surprised that the Gitmo command is disseminating propaganda about the prison. But I just wish those that engage in propaganda for the government not be so pathetically bad at it.

At least that's what I take from this quote: In the e-mail version of the Politico Playbook this morning, Mike Allen quotes “a senior administration official” lamenting that “they should have burned the NIE and kept the tapes.” The official was referring to the administration’s debacles with the intelligence community since the new NIE on Iran was released and the CIA revealed that it had destroyed videotaped interrogations.

Guess what? ODNI has told Congress it doesn't want minimization procedures to be codified in statute because it would make it too hard to change those procedures. That, plus a continued emphasis on Executive Orders that George Bush can turn into pixie dust, suggests they really don't want to be held responsible for protecting US persons' privacy when conducting wiretaps.