National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell engaged in a long and meaty q and a with the El Paso Times on the FISA Amendment and NSA program.

He mentions a few times that he had "20 lawyers" working on the "fix" and at one point he says they were working on it for two years.

[W]e sent up a version like Monday, we sent up a version on Wednesday, we sent up a version on Thursday. The House leadership, or the Democratic leadership on Thursday took that bill and we talked about it. And my response was there are some things I can't live with in this bill and they said alright we're going to fix them. Now, here's the issue. I never then had a chance to read it for the fix because, again, it's so complex, if you change a word or phrase, or even a paragraph reference, you can cause unintended ...

Q: You have to make sure it's all consistent?

A: Right. So I can't agree to it until it's in writing and my 20 lawyers, who have been doing this for two years, can work through it. So in the final analysis, I was put in the position of making a call on something I hadn't read.So when it came down to crunch time, we got a copy and it had some of the offending language back in it. So I said, 'I can't support it.' And it played out in the House the way it played out in the House.

He also talks about the liability of phone companies for working with the NSA program. (He says we'll need to add an immunity from liability provision to the bill when Congress reconvenes.) He also reviews what happened in the Senate and talks about what the "offending language" was. It had to do with minimization.

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These are the numbers for the latest Gallup Poll.

The latest Gallup Poll, conducted Aug. 13-16, 2007, finds public support for the Democratic nomination at 48% for Clinton and 25% for Obama, giving Clinton a 23-point lead. Support for former North Carolina senator John Edwards, in third place with 13%, is similar to what he has received since May.

The remaining candidates are in the 1-2% range.

Gallup also examines Karl Rove's remarks about Hillary. Shorter version: Unfavorables this early and particularly in Hillary's case may not mean much. They also said:

It is notable that Giuliani stands as the most positively rated 2008 presidential candidate in terms of favorable ratings at 59% (with a 27% unfavorable rating), but still does not beat Clinton in a trial heat "if the election were held today".

President Bush unveiled a new theory as to why we need to stay in Iraq. Innocent civilians will be killed if we leave, just like they were in Vietnam, where we got out too early.

"The price of America's withdrawal [in Vietnam]was paid by millions of innocent citizens," he told war veterans in Missouri.

..."Many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people," Mr Bush said. "The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.

"Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens," Mr Bush said, mentioning reprisals against US allies in Vietnam, the displacement of Vietnamese refugees and the massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

The full transcript is here. Crooks and Liars has the video of MSNBC's Neil Shuster on the report.

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Last night, as I was walking into a local tv studio to do Dan Abram's MSNBC show, I tripped on an uneven sidewalk and splattered myself on the concrete. I'm nursing a swollen wrist and bloody cuts on both knees and palms. Whose responsibility is it anyway to keep sidewalks in good repair? Or are we just supposed to walk with our heads down all the time looking for danger spots?

I'm also writing an op-ed for tomorrow's Washington Examiner on the myth of the immigrant crime wave (the topic of my MSNBC segment last night, which you can view here, but you'll need to turn the sound up on your computer to hear it. My YouTube-ing skills apparently don't include the ability to make the sound on the video match that on the tape I'm recording from.)[Update: MSNBC now has a better version here.]

So, here's an open thread for you.

Update: Texas executed its 400th inmate today, Johnny Ray Connor.

*****
European Union Urges Halt to Texecutions

As Texas is about to execute its 400th prisoner, the President of the European Union issued this statement yesterday calling for an end to Texas executions.

We believe that elimination of the death penalty is fundamental to the protection of human dignity, and to the progressive development of human rights. We further consider this punishment to be cruel and inhumane. There is no evidence to suggest that the use of the death penalty serves as a deterrent against violent crime and the irreversibility of the punishment means that miscarriages of justice - which are inevitable in all legal systems – cannot be redressed. Consequently, the death penalty has been abolished throughout the European Union.

Joining in the statement:

The Candidate Countries Turkey, Croatia* and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia*, the Countries of the Stabilisation and Association Process and potential candidates Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and the EFTA countries Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, members of the European Economic Area, as well as Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan align themselves with this declaration.

Johnny Ray Connor is scheduled for execution in Texas today.

More....

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan lost his appeal to overturn his conviction on corruption charges yesterday. He will remain free pending a request for an "en banc" rehearing by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The main issue in the appeal involves the propriety of the Judge substituting two alternate jurors 8 days after deliberations began and a juror's bringing outside material into the jury room.

Yes, a juror did bring improper outside information into deliberations at Ryan's trial and "there is no doubt this should not have happened," the two-judge majority wrote. The judges also acknowledged that the sudden removal of an outspoken juror after eight days of deliberations was irregular.

"The trial may not have been picture-perfect," the two judges wrote in the majority opinion.

One judge dissented from the majority's view:

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General Petraeus can not testify before Congress on 9/11. Forget about why 9/11 was chosen, it simply is unacceptable. We will not be able to even discuss Petraeus' testimony with any sense of rationality if he testifies on 9/11. Bush will be accused of politicizing the date. Petraeus' actual testimony will not even be the central focus. Adele Stan is right:

The administration has exploited the pain of that memory one too many times. Even if that's not the intention here of some White House political genius, more than half of the population will never be convinced of that. So let us remember a horrible day when we all came together without linking it to the war that is tearing us apart.

Another conservative realizes that Rudy is insane:

I am not defending Rudy, the presidential candidate. Almost no one who has lived in New York wants Rudy anywhere near the nuclear football, nor would we like to see his strongly authoritarian instincts (however much they arguably may have done for New York's policing) unleashed on the federal justice system. Rudy is craaaaaaaaazy . . .

h/t Yglesias.

It never made any sense to me that Matt Bai was chosen as the moderator of the Yearly Kos Presidential Forum. Bai has a long track record of hostility towards Left blogs and the views espoused by them. Joan Walsh reviews his new book and finds, surprise! - that Bai is very hostile to the goals of the Left blogs. Kevin Drum, in a strange reaction, ignores this and likes the book very much:

As near as I can tell, she and I had an almost (though not quite) identical reaction to Bai on substantive grounds, but despite that I loved the book and she hated it. Basically, I thought it was a terrific and insightful piece of reporting even though I thought Bai's basic theme failed to hold water, while Walsh was exasperated by the cluelessness of the book's basic theme but allowed that it also had some colorful and interesting reporting.

So Kevin likes clueless and inaccurate books apparently. Good to know.

Anne Applebaum writes:

In the end, most presidents do learn on the job: Bill Clinton would probably never have predicted he'd contemplate bombing Belgrade, just as President Bush surely had never devoted much thought to Afghanistan. It's not easy to predict whose particular set of experiences will suit which particular crisis and which weaknesses will prove fatal. But we can certainly entertain ourselves between now and November 2008 trying to guess.

(Emphasis supplied.) Actually, Anne Applebaum demonstrates her non-expertise on the issues. In 1992, the Balkans were very much a hot spot and Slobodan Milosovic very much an issue:

KagroX points to the pitfalls that the September Petraeus Bush Report creates for Dems. Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) corrects a mistake made in the USA Today article Kagro cites about his position on Iraq:

[A]s we approach this pivotal debate, I want to clearly and unequivocally express to you where I stand on the question of executing a responsible redeployment from Iraq:

I am firmly in favor of withdrawing troops on a timeline that includes both a definite start date and a definite end date ("date certain") and uses clearly-defined benchmarks. I am not in favor of an "open-ended" timeline for withdrawal, as some members of Congress have proposed recently.

As many foreign policy experts agree, setting a date certain for withdrawal is fundamental to forcing George W. Bush to bring our troops home from Iraq and ensuring the Iraqis step up and defend their own country. That's why -- even as I consider all proposals as a matter of due diligence -- I am standing strong on setting a definite redeployment end date (as an example, I recently voted for the "Responsible Redeployment from Iraq Act" to safely draw down our troops over the course of nine months).

Well done Representative McNerney.

Michelle Obama is on the campaign trail, stumping for her husband. From a recent speech,

At another stop, in Atlantic, Michelle said she travels with her husband in part "to model what it means to have family values," adding "if you can't run your own house, you can't run the White House." She didn't elaborate, but it could be interpreted as a swipe at the Clintons.

I thought playing the "family values" card was a Republican strategy. Maybe not when your candidacy appears to be, as Obama acknowledged the other day, "a stretch" for the voters".

I don't appreciate Obama (or his wife's) personal snipes at fellow Democrats. It's one thing to criticize policies or positions on issues. It's another to launch personal attacks. To use your spouse as the messenger is even lower.

Update: Obama's campaign denies his wife's remark was a swipe at the Clintons.