Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus in the Washington Post have some behind the scenes details of how the FISA Amendment passed.

It doesn't change anything. The Dems caved and Speaker Pelosi promising to revisit the bill doesn't make their rollover any more palatable.

There's a 16 page article on Rudy Giuliani in the new issue of the New Yorker. Too much of a puff-piece for my taste, but this quote shows the Rudy I remember:

In 1983, Giuliani was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where his ambitions and his talents fully merged.... He was one of the first prosecutors to use the perp walk as a public-relations weapon against white-collar criminals, who traditionally had been allowed to present themselves before the court for arraignment. In February of 1987, he brought charges of insider trading against two Kidder, Peabody executives. As a Wall Street Journal editorial later put it:

Giuliani had his agents burst into Kidder, Peabody, throw Richard Wigton up against the wall and handcuff him. He arranged to bust Timothy Tabor so late in the day that he had to spend a night in jail before he could post bond. Mr. Giuliani didn’t think Mr. Wigton was going to pull a knife or Mr. Tabor would flee the country. He lusted after the headlines, and hoped strong-arm tactics would coerce settlements. This is not the kind of prosecutorial zeal we need when the underlying law is far from clear.

The charges against Wigton and Tabor were subsequently dropped.

Here's another of Rudy's excesses:

From 1980, The Grateful Dead and Uncle's John Band

Whoa-oh what I want to know, where does the time go?

With the TL kid in town this week, wiretap motions due and my new MacBook arriving and beckoning me to set it up (thanks again to all who contributed) blogging fell by the wayside this week.

I should be back to regular posting Tuesday. Till then, thanks to Big Tent for keeping TalkLeft updated and to readers for stopping by.

Results:

Mitt Romney 32%
Mike Huckabee 18%
Sam Brownback 15%
Tom Tancredo 14%
Ron Paul 9%
Tommy Thompson 7%
Fred Thompson
Rudy Giuliani
Duncan Hunter
John McCain
Jon Cox

They expected 30,000. 14,000 showed up. The GOP is in trouble in 2008. As for this silly exercise, Romney lost the expectations game so he lost. Huckabee won. Watch for Huckabee talk now.

The latest low mark for the Rudy campaign - sending out reps to say that the first responders do not know who attacked us on 9/11:

A former deputy mayor, Joe Lhota, said the critics are politically motivated and wrong. "They're taking their anger out in the wrong direction," Lhota said. "He was literally there four and five times a day; he did anything but run away. "They're losing sight of the fact that this country, and this city, was attacked on that day by terrorists; it's their fault."

Rudy failed the first responders and New York City with his incompetence on terrorism. If he is going to campaign on the murder by the evil bin Laden of 3000 Americans, then his incompetence must be discussed. As a commenter at TPM shrewdly notes, conservative Jay Cost has said that Rudy's is a bloody shirt campaign:

I am reminded of the politics of the post-bellum era - in which average-to-below-average Republicans in the North could be elected by "waving the bloody shirt," i.e. referencing their (seemingly) prominent roles in the Civil War to win the support of Northerners. . . . He is, in a certain sense, waving the bloody shirt of 9/11. Can the Republican Party refuse it?

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is in Baghdad.

The Justice Department said that Gonzales arrived in Baghdad on Saturday for his third trip to Iraq to meet with department officials who have been there to help fashion the country's legal system.

Just what does the Department of Justice do in Baghdad? Here's the DOJ's 2006 press release outlining its role:

More...

Our unitary executive is at it again. Even though Congress refused to pass comprehensive immigration reform, he's taken it upon himself to issue new regulations that will crack down on immigrants, toughen border enforcement and increase the use of felony charges against those in violation.

At a news conference in Washington yesterday, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and Carlos M. Gutierrez, the secretary of commerce, formally unveiled the measures, which had been disclosed in general terms earlier, to reinforce border security and drive illegal immigrants out of the labor force.

....Mr. Chertoff said the “real hammer” would be more frequent use by the immigration authorities of criminal felony charges against employers and illegal immigrant workers. He said the authorities had made 742 criminal arrests so far this year in illegal employment cases, compared with 716 such arrests in all of last year, which was a record.

If you had any doubt this is a payback, consider this:

Rudy Giuliani campaigned in Colorado Springs Friday.

As he drew a picture of a fence on a paper coffee coaster, he said he has plans to create an identification system for everyone in the country.

“We should know who’s here,” Giuliani said. “Every other country has a system, we’re just catching up.”

A national ID system is a nightmare. The Senate rejected funding for Real ID in July. If you've forgotten what the Real ID Act requires, see below:

Douglas Lute, Bush's Iraq War Czar, today said all options are on the table with respect to a military draft.

"I think it makes sense to certainly consider it," Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

"And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation's security by one means or another," said Lute, who is sometimes referred to as the "Iraq war czar." It was his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June.

Too bad it's not his last.

In the WaPo opinion pages, Kos and SusanG argue we are all Centrists now:

Convinced that this is fundamentally a conservative nation, [Harold] Ford demanded that Democrats unceasingly inch toward the right or risk electoral irrelevance. As then-DLC official Ed Kilgore put it in 2005, "If we put a gun to everybody's head in the country and make them pick sides, we're not likely to win." But we who live outside the D.C. bubble -- in all 50 states, in counties blue and red -- were hearing voices at odds with the Washington consensus. People wanted real choices at the ballot box. And given the disastrous rule of the Bush administration, they wanted a Democratic Party that stood tall and pushed back like a true opposition.

. . . In fact, we pushed the party so far left that we positioned it squarely in the American mainstream and last year won a historic, sweeping congressional victory, something the "centrist" groups had been unable to accomplish for decades -- not even in the DLC's glory days of the 1990s.

. . . The DLC had two decades to make its case, to build an audience and community, to elect leaders the American people wanted. It failed. . . . Their time is up. The "center" is where we stand now, promoting an engaged and active politics embraced by significant majorities of Americans.

Via Think Progress:

Wow. More

Last week it was the Washington Post. Today it is columnist Ellen Goodman. What is it about the media that compels it to falsely insist liberal bloggers are a bunch of angry white males and that female bloggers were conspicuously absent from Yearly Kos?

See Jane's debunking today of this Invisible Woman myth.

There is no dearth of politically liberal blogs written by women. And there was no shortage of women at Yearly Kos. Here's Digby:

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