Roll Call reports that White House Counsel Fred Fielding is floating a bunch of names to Senators for the replacement of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales:

White House counsel Fred Fielding has been making the rounds in the Senate the past several days and met with Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on Wednesday afternoon. Although Leahy would not comment on the meeting prior to speaking with Fielding, he did say that Bush's top legal adviser has reached out to numerous Judiciary Committee Senators to vet names and gauge feedback over possible nominees.

Aides in both parties say there are six names:

Former Solicitor General Ted Olson; former Attorney General Bill Barr; former Deputy Attorney General George Terwilliger; D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman; former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson; and Michael Mukasey, a former judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Larry Thompson has said he doesn't want the job, he's happy at Pepsico. As to the others:

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Speaking only for me of course

The NYTimes reports on the lack of Dem resolve on Iraq:

With a mixed picture emerging about progress in Iraq, Senate Democratic leaders are showing a new openness to compromise as they try to attract Republican support for forcing at least modest troop withdrawals in the coming months. . . . Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said, "If we have to make the spring part a goal, rather than something that is binding, and if that is able to produce some additional votes to get us over the filibuster, my own inclination would be to consider that."

In response, Sen. Chris Dodd provides leadership on Iraq now:

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The latest twist and turn in the Larry Craig resignation saga: He's getting ready to leave by September 30 after all.

Sen. Larry Craig has all but dropped any notion of trying to complete his term, and is focused on helping Idaho send a new senator to Washington within a few weeks, his top spokesman said Thursday.

The only exception would be a court ruling by September 30 vacating his guilty plea.

My translation: His motion to vacate the plea and sentence will be on more than one ground and at least one of them cannot be determined from the face of the documents and will require a written response and possibly a hearing. That is unlikely to occur within the next three weeks.

If Craig was only going to complain about the failure of the plea form to advise him of his right to counsel, I think he could get a ruling by Sept. 30. But if he is also going to argue that the facts he admitted to don't constitute a crime, the prosecutor will want to file a brief in opposition and the court may want to hold a hearing.

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Great video, check it out.

Rudy Giuliani is promising to appoint conservative, "strict constructionist" judges if elected. Who's helping him decide who they should be? Ted Olson and Miguel Estrada.

Giuliani has even created a Justice Advisory Committee populated by bright conservative lights including former Bush solicitor general Theodore Olson as the committee's chairman; Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi, a Northwestern University law professor; and Washington lawyer Miguel Estrada, who was denied a federal appeals court bid in 2003 because Democrats feared he was too conservative

He's also courting the Federalist Society. Anyone who thinks Ted Olson wouldn't run a partisan Department of Justice if appointed Attorney General should think again.

Olson was in the room at the first meeting of the Federalist Society in 1982....The idea was to launch a counter-cultural legal movement in which conservative lawyers and scholars would roll back what they viewed as the excessive intrusion of judges into American life.

....The plan was to sow talented conservatives at every level of the federal judiciary and ultimately gain a foothold at the Supreme Court. "That was very much on our minds," Olson said.

It looks like the unidentified (and unindicted) co-ejaculator theory is alive and well in Mississippi.

After being exonerated by DNA evidence, Kennedy Brewer was freed on bond after serving 15 years in prison for a rape and murder. The DA now says he will retry him:

“I perceive that Kennedy Brewer assisted someone else in the killing of the child,” Mr. Allgood said. “Whether he actually penetrated that child or not functionally doesn’t make any difference if he was aiding, assisting and encouraging in her death.”

This case has lots of red flags, including a jailhouse snitch and a suspended forensic dentist who testified about about bitemarks, itself a junk science.

Brewer is represented by the Innocence Project which reports that Mississippi has the second largest (after Louisiana) number of incarcerated residents per 100,000:

"If the system's failure rate is a mere one percent, 215 people in prison in Mississippi are innocent," the project says.

Far from getting ready to close Guantanamo, the U.S. is spending big bucks there to build new courtrooms.

The U.S. military is building a mobile courtroom complex on an unused runway at the Guantanamo Bay naval base and plans to be ready by March to conduct as many as three terrorism trials at a time.

The $10 million project will add two new courtrooms to the existing one, which is being fitted with a new computer projection system to display evidence for the war crimes tribunals set up to try suspected al Qaeda operatives held at the U.S. naval base in eastern Cuba.

The Pentagon now plans to try 80 of the prisoners on war crimes and to hold up to 3 trials at a time. Called a "mobile courtroom complex" the new project appears to be made of tents:

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I don't have much interest in the Republican debate (I'll be watching former President Clinton on Larry King Live)but I think it's telling that Fred Thompson is skipping the debate and will appear on the Tonight Show instead to announce his candidacy.

He's been losing staffers in droves. New Hampshire voters don't sound pleased they're being snubbed:

"There is a genuine interest in Senator Thompson here, a real curiosity about him," New Hampshire Republican Chairman Fergus Cullen said Tuesday. "But that curiosity is giving way to skepticism and maybe even cynicism about him in part because of how he's handling his grand entrance. For him to then go on Jay Leno the same night and be trading jokes while other candidates are having a substantive discussion on issues is not going to be missed by New Hampshire voters."

The other candidates have an 8 month lead on him and more money.

I don't think any Republican candidate has warmed the hearts and minds of voters. Not that I'm complaining.

Sen. Larry Craig told Sen. Mitch McConnell today he will finish out his term in the Senate if he's successful at getting his plea withdrawn.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters that he spoke with Craig this morning. Craig told him that if he could "dispose" of the guilty plea he made last month after being accused of soliciting sex in a Minnesota airport men's room, "it would be his intention to come back to the Senate and deal with the Ethics Committee case . . . and to try to finish his term."

"He is going to try to get the case in Minneapolis dismissed," McConnell added.

I'm sticking by my earlier comments that his guilty plea was defective for failing to advise him of his right to counsel and contain an acknowledgment by him that he understood the right and was waiving it. Minnesota law is very clear on that. His guilty plea form is here.

It shouldn't even require a hearing. A Judge could grant the motion based on the paperwork. I won't be surprised if the prosecutor confesses the motion. I also think Craig's statement to McConnell is based on Billy Martin thinking there's a good chance the Judge will rule on his motion to withdraw the plea within the next three weeks.

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(Guest Post by Matt Stoller of Open Left)

I appreciate the opportunity that Jeralyn is affording me to post on this site in response to Big Tent Democrat's repeated criticisms of my blogging and activism. Here's BTD's essential argument.

If the Democratic Party listens to Shrum, Carville, Stoller and Greenwald on Iraq, and runs on the idea that nothing can be done about Iraq until 2009, Democrats will suffer politically.

If I were arguing that we ought to do nothing about Iraq, I would deserve this scorn, and more. But far from arguing for apathy, a strange position for an activist blogger who is constantly asking his readers to engage in political activities, I'm pushing for the opposite: concerted, strategic action within the political system by activists like us.

Now, I do think it's highly unlikely that the Democrats in Congress will stop the war or do anything meaningful to stop the war until at least 2009, and even beyond then I have no confidence that Edwards, Obama, or Clinton will end the war without extreme pressure from activists and the public. You can read their various pathetic non-withdrawal plans compiled by Chris Bowers, my blogging partner who is obsessively pushing candidates to take a pro-withdrawal stance. But that means our job as activists and voters is clear: to create that pressure.

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Norman Hsu was a no-show at his court hearing to reduce bail today. Instead of reducing bail, the Judge revoked it and said he would be held without bail if apprehended.

His lawyer, James Brosnahan, didn't have a ready excuse:

``Mr. Hsu is not here and we do not know where Mr. Hsu is,'' Brosnahan said outside court. Brosnahan said that ``there was some contact'' with Hsu a few hours before the scheduled 9 a.m. court appearance, but he declined to say how and who talked to Hsu.

Hsu also failed to comply with the Court's order to turn his passport over to his counsel for delivery to the Court.

Say goodbye to Operation Advise, which cost $42 million. The DHS announced today it was scrapping the program, probably for good.

Known as ADVISE and begun in 2003, the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program was developed by the department and the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest national laboratories for use by many DHS components, including immigration, customs, border protection, biological defense and its intelligence office.

Reason for abandonment: It didn't comply with privacy rules.

[T]wo internal Homeland Security reports found that tests had used live data about real people rather than made-up data for one to two years without meeting privacy requirements...