The New York Times reports in the Sunday Magazine on Lt. Commander Matthew Diaz, a Guantanamo Bay deputy legal advisor who leaked the names of the detainees to the Center for Constitutional Rights. After spending months alone in his office compiling the list, he reduced them to large index cards and stuck them inside a Valentine's Day card he bought at the base and put them in the mail.

It wasn't hard to track him once the F.B.I. picked up the card and contents from the Center, which it was ordered to do by a federal judge.

On March 15, 2005, a federal agent in a black overcoat flew to New York from Washington. He took a cab to the center’s offices in downtown Manhattan and kept it waiting while he went to retrieve the card and its contents. Once the F.B.I. began to investigate, it had little difficulty narrowing the list of possible suspects. Diaz had printed the document from his own computer, bought the valentine at the base exchange and left his fingerprints on the list.

This past May, Matthew Diaz became the only United States serviceman to be convicted and imprisoned for an act of insubordination directed at the Bush administration’s detention policies.

This is a seven page article, but well worth the read.

Fired Seattle U.S. Attorney John McKay spoke at a bar association meeting Friday and said he thinks it's quite possible the Inspector General conducting the probe of the U.S. attorney firings will refer Alberto Gonzales and others for criminal prosecution, possibly as early as next month.

McKay said he was summoned to Washington, D.C., in June and questioned for eight hours about possible reasons for his firing by investigators with the Office of Inspector General, who will forward their final report to Congress.

“My best guess is it will be released sometime next month,’’ and likely will include recommendations for criminal prosecutions of Gonzales and maybe others, McKay said.

McKay believes the principal reason he was fired was for not opening a voter fraud investigation into Gov. Chris Gregoire’s marginal victory over Republican Dino Rossi in 2004.

He noted the White House was unhappy with San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam's conduct regarding Randy "Duke" Cunningham and with New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Yglesia's refusal to indict a Democratic candidate right before the November election.

McKay says Gonazles lied to Congress about the reasons for the firings.

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Whenever folks try to rehabilitate Andrew Sullivan, he is quick to remind us why he is so detestable.

As for the "science" of the Bell Curve, see this:

Via Greenwald, Scott Horton demonstrates that the corrupt logrolling practices of our Media are now a part of the blogs as well:

I stumbled across something pretty strange. I found Rachel Sklar’s “Ringside at the Reality Show” over at the Huffington Post. Sklar’s piece is a drooling, fawning blurb-like emission. In fact, had it been authored by Kurtz’s own PR agent, I can’t imagine he’d have changed a comma. Of course, Sklar hasn’t really read Kurtz’s book (other than the first 7500 words, she says), but her praise couldn’t be stronger . . .

He debunks it here. Read the whole thing. But this part was really a terrific aside:

Well, I’ve gotten a dismissive review in the NYT. It’s sort of a tradition. After all, The Great Unraveling received an equally dismissive review from Peter Beinart, in which he portrayed my conclusion that the Bush administration deliberately misled us into war as a crazy conspiracy theory, and contained this immortal pronouncement:

But most Americans do not consider the Bush administration corrupt, and Paul Krugman cannot convincingly prove it is.

I think David Kennedy’s review will hold up about as well as Peter Beinart’s.

Heh.

In a sense, we should be gratified that David Ignatius, in this column, the mouthpiece of Admiral William Fallon, is now writing of declaring victory and getting out of Iraq:

Let's assume that the numbers from Iraq are right and that there has been a significant reduction in violence there. Let's even agree that the Bush administration's strategy is finally showing some success. Isn't that an argument for accelerating the transfer of security to the Iraqis -- and speeding up the withdrawal of some U.S. support troops?

If that becomes the BushCo cover story for getting out of Iraq, so much the better. But Ignatius' "analysis" is bereft of reason and intelligence so one doubts whether he actually has good sources. For example:

Requiring students to speak only in English while they're at school is an affront to the students' ownership of their own identities. It may be reasonable to ask students to speak to teachers in English, but prohibiting students from speaking to each other in their native languages is insensitive, offensive, and discriminatory against students who do not speak English as a first language.

The Catholic Diocese of Wichita says [St. Anne Catholic School] enacted the policy to deal with Spanish-speaking students who were using their native language to bully other children or insult teachers and administrators without their knowledge.

Are the teachers really insulted if they don't know they've been insulted? Wouldn't hiring more bilingual staff members be a better solution to the perceived problem?

Making contraceptives more readily available to kids prevents unwanted pregnancies. Opponents of abortion should be pleased that women have birth control options that make abortion less likely. Instead, the Republican Party chairman in Portland, Maine echoes the right's familiar response to governmental efforts to broaden access to birth control:

“It is an attack on the moral fabric of our community, and a black eye for our state.”

As if a middle school girl in Portland won't dare to have sex unless the school clinic will fill her birth control prescription.

The winning bid in a charity auction of the original "smear letter" that 41 senators sent to the CEO of Clear Channel, criticizing Rush Limbaugh's reference to "phony soldiers," was $2,100,100. Limbaugh auctioned off the "smear letter" to benefit a charity of his choosing, while promising to match the bid out of his own pocket. The recipient nonprofit: the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation Inc.

Mr. Limbaugh is a director of the organization, which had total revenues of $5.2 million last year.

Harry Reid wrote the letter. His take on the auction:

Reid did a clever thing right back. He went on the Senate floor and praised Limbaugh's attempt to raise money for a good cause off his letter and said he could have gotten every Democratic senator's signature if he'd had time.

Who would pay to support Limbaugh's assertion that the letter was a "smear," when it is in fact Limbaugh who smears soldiers who speak out against the war? Reports differ. This is the NY Times:

Monday, I came down with whatever bug is going around these parts. I finally went to the doctor yesterday who said it's a respiratory inflammation of some sort, so now I've started a course of cipro (antibiotics) and prednisone (steroids) and feeling a little out of it.

TChris and Big Tent will be posting this weekend, as I'll mostly just be reading. I'd also like to get started on my thank you e-mails to the generous readers who sent in donations this week.

So, here's an open thread for you. Let us know what's caught your attention or talk about whatever you feel like.

If there are diaries this weekend, I'll put up a diary rescue tonight.

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Adam Liptak provides a lucid explanation of President Bush's decision to nominate Michael Mukasey to replace Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General:

[I]n his two days of testimony this week, it became clear that Mr. Mukasey believes presidential power to be robust, expansive and sometimes beyond the power of Congress to control. That is perfectly aligned with the Bush administration’s views, and if Mr. Mukasey was initially a refreshing presence to the Senate Judiciary Committee, it was only because he justified in plain terms what other administration lawyers have said in secret memorandums often cloaked in obfuscation. ...

He indicated, for instance, that he favored a narrow reading of the Supreme Court’s sweeping 2006 decision, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, striking down the administration’s initial plan for military commissions to try prisoners at Guantánamo.

Is Mukasey just a smarter version of Gonzales--better able to defend the administration's indefensible positions? Liptak explains why Mukasey's reading of precedent to authorize expansive executive power in defiance of legislation is strained, at best.

The New York Times Book Review assigned Stanford history professor David Kennedy to review Paul Krugman's new book, "The Conscience of a Liberal." It is an extremely negative review. I have not read the book so can not comment on it but I did read the review. And I found it inconsistent to say the least. For example, after chiding Krugman for being, in Kennedy's words, "factually shaky," he then writes:

For this dismal state of affairs the Democratic Party is held to be blameless. Never mind the Democrats’ embrace of inherently divisive identity politics, or Democratic condescension toward the ungrammatical yokels who consider their spiritual and moral commitments no less important than the minimum wage or the Endangered Species Act, nor even the Democrats’ vulnerable post-Vietnam record on national security.

Ummm, that all sounds factually shaky to me. What is the basis of Kennedy's statement? A fact or 2 to support this sweeping claim, especially from someone throwing stones, might have been in order. Kennedy continues: