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:

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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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TPM has the video of Rudy as Zelig, claiming to have experienced what the first responders of 9/11 experienced:

What an unfeeling, narcissistic boor the man is.

Eugene Volokh discusses a Univ. of Iowa definition of sexual harassment, and, it seems to me, unecessarily complicates what seems very straight forward to me. Volokh writes:

From Iowa's sexual harassment policy, which covers student-student interactions and not just employment:

Sexual harassment occurs when somebody says or does something sexually related that you don’t want them to say or do, regardless of who it is. . . .

This seems simple enough. And it makes sense. Don't invade someone's space with sex talk unless such talk is welcome. What is hard about that? Plenty apparently, according to Volokh. I'll explain on the flip.

Via Kos, Harold Ford finds himself the new darling of the WSJ Ed Board:

Mr. Ford, for his part, has dark warnings for those activists selling the line that last year's election is proof that their liberal ideas are now "mainstream" . . . "That's called short-term memory," he says . . .

Perhaps Harold Ford has forgotten that he lost his race in 2006 in a big Dem year. Or perhaps he is as ignorant as the WSJ regarding the 2006 election:

David Sirota is thinking creatively about how to end the Iraq Debgacle. Unfortunately, David does not deal with the reality that the possibility of achieving a veto-proof majority is a myth. David proposes:

So here's the concept (which, though I'm not 100 percent sure, I don't think has been tried yet in Congress): How about when Congress reconvenes in September, Democrats bring a bill to the floor of the House and Senate mandating that, say, 25,000 National Guardsmen be taken out of combat in Iraq and be immediately redeployed to guard America's porous domestic borders - both southern and northern? If Democrats wanted to get even more creative, they could additionally mandate that some of these National Guardsmen being redeployed be immediately sent to forest fire emergency zones - many of which are in Republican states right now. Think this through for a moment. All of a sudden, the illegal-immigration-obsessed Tom Tancredo wing of the Republican Party, which also happens to be the most reflexively pro-war wing of the GOP, would be forced to choose either the Iraq War or beefed up border security. All of a sudden, we would be having a debate about two very real, very pressing priorities, rather than theoreticals and hypotheticals, and we would be discussing exactly how the misuse of our National Guard as a wing of the regular Army harms our ability to deal with the domestic challenges the National Guard was originally established to deal with.

This is imaginative thinking, and I'll even give David a pass on the militarization of the borders. The trouble is it will not work. Bush will oppose it, call it an end run to surrender in Iraq and Republicans ion Congress will fall in line. See, David's problem is he is not dealing with the central reality here, not enough Republicans will ever break with the President to make a strategy requiring a veto proof majority work. This is simply the way it is. It is why I have always urged an approach that does not require Republican votes - the NOT funding after a date certain approach:

Via Benen, on Hardball yesterday, Ezra Klein had this exchange with Tweety and GOP operative Karen Hanratty:

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about this more tricky question of Albert Gonzales. The president said the guy has done nothing wrong. Point to something he has done, Ezra. Because either that or the president is right completely. Point to something he did wrong.

KLEIN: Aside from the firing of the prosecutors?

MATTHEWS: No, what did he do wrong?

HANRETTY: That wasn’t wrong.

KLEIN: Well, there you go.

MATTHEWS: What crime did he commit? (CROSSTALK)

KLEIN: I’m not going to speak on whether or not he committed a crime, I’m not a lawyer. But what he did wrong was fire prosecutors for political reasons. I think we can agree on whether that is an ethical violation.

MATTHEWS: And that has never been done before?

HANRETTY: That is not illegal…. Yes, you absolutely can fire someone midterm for political reasons. It is not against the law.

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