Poor, poor Wolfie. He didn't deserve to lose his job at the World Bank. But for the big, bad media, it never would have happened.

The only good news is that Bill Frist has taken himself out of the running for his replacement.

Meet the new Rudy -- the silly comb-over is gone. And he's trying out a new personality.

Mr. Giuliani laughs, he gestures expansively, he even pokes fun at his tendency to wax a wee bit authoritarian. (He suggests a touch of the cane was necessary to impose discipline on that liberal asylum known as New York.) He shakes hands with reporters he once viewed as “jerky” and assures them he is fine with tough questions about abortion, where he has settled on a position supporting a woman’s right to choose, and about gun control, where is he at least halfway into a policy back-flip.

Expect the next change to be to his wardrobe.

He dresses in the one-size-too-large suits he has favored since his days as a federal prosecutor, with the top shirt button fastened and tie knotted tight. It is difficult to imagine anyone asking him a “really dopey” (two favorite Giuliani words now in abeyance) question about his favored style in underwear, as someone once did of Bill Clinton.

Thank goodness only Judi has to see him in his underwear.

Jimmy Ray Bromgard was convicted of rape and later exonerated by DNA evidence and released from prison.

Montana Attorney General Mike McGrath continues to assert he believes Bromgard to be guilty.

It's not even a case of the unidentified co-ejaculator.

In most of the cases where prosecutors have refused to believe in an exoneration, they have cited evidence that more than one person was involved in the crime to argue that the DNA was left by a second, unidentified offender. It is rare for a prosecutor to dispute a DNA exoneration when there is no evidence -- as in Bromgard's case -- that more than one person committed the crime.

More....

Marcy (Empty Wheel) argues that the sentencing letters written on behalf of Scooter Libby should be made available to the public.

Team Libby disagrees (brief here), asserting that the letters are not judicial records because they haven't been filed with the Court (they were submitted in camera through the Probation Department) and aren't subject to the First Amendment, and because the privacy interests of the authors outweigh the interest of the public's right to know. Also, Libby argues, since courts have discouraged or prohibited the disclosure of such letters in the past, a change in this case might have a chilling effect and deter supporters of defendants in future cases from writing candid letters of support.

Team Libby is particularly concerned about bloggers:

Given the extraordinary media scrutiny here, if any case presents the possibility that these letters, once released, would be published on the internet and their authors discussed, even mocked, by bloggers, it is this case.

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To all who served in our wars, and their families, thank you for your sacrifice.

To our President: It's time to leave Iraq. We cannot win this civil war. We can only lose more precious lives.

Bring the troops home now.

Paul Krugman makes an interesting point, while missing a main one:

Democrats, still fearing that they will end up accused of being weak on terror and not supporting the troops, gave Mr. Bush another year’s war funding. Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public utterly disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that hasn’t happened yet.

It seems true that politicians are not convinced that voters will punish Bush-style fearmongering. But that is not the Democrats' problem. The Dems' problems is precisely that they need to be convinced of that before they will act with political courage. And everyone knows this. The last few days I have been harping on the Democrats' central political weakness - that are believed to have no convictions they will fight for.

For T-Rex and all those suffering in Georgia. Let it Rain.

This is the type of thinking that will lead to poor Democratic results in 2008:

All the Democratic sorrow and Republican gloating of the past week came from the heart. With the passage of the Iraq funding bill, Democrats will be forced to watch a thousand more soldiers die, while Republicans can enjoy many more months of pretending they're good at fighting terrorists. But the political impact of the bill is exactly the opposite of what the partisans believe. The Republican Party just signed away its best chance to avoid catastrophe in 2008. As in 2006, Republicans will be left with total ownership of the Iraq War, and in voters' eyes, total responsibility for disaster. . .

In 2006, Democrats won because there was a belief that they could do something about Iraq. In 2008, if nothing else happens, that belief willbe shattered. Why indeed would non-Dems (or purity troll progressives to use the pejorative term for folks who distrust the triangulating Dems) vote for Dems on Iraq when they proved so spineless? This is just the type of thinking that could blow 2008 for the Democrats.

One was pregnant. Another were mother and daughter, with baby in tow. Seven women went off to get firewood when men on camels in Janjaweed uniforms surrounded them, beat them and then gang-raped them, leaving them naked to walk hours back to their camp.

Rape is practically an everyday occurrance in Darfur.

U.N. workers say they registered 2,500 rapes in Darfur in 2006, but believe far more went unreported. The real figure is probably thousands a month, said a U.N. official.

Rape is a strategy of war.

In Sudan, as in many Islamic countries, society views a sexual assault as a dishonor upon the woman's entire family. "Victims can face terrible ostracism," says Maha Muna, the U.N. coordinator on this issue in Sudan.

Some aid workers believe the janjaweed use rape to intimidate the rebels, and their supporters and families. "It's a strategy of war," Muna said in an interview earlier this year in Khartoum, the capital.

As to the death tolls,

Meanwhile, more than 200,000 civilians have died and 2.5 million are homeless out of Darfur's population of 6 million, the U.N. says.

Save Darfur.

Who could forget Chandra Levy and Gary Condit? The San Francisco Chronicle featured Chandra's death this past week because it was the fifth anniversary since the discovery of her remains.

No one has been charged with the crime. It's considered a "cold case" but it's not closed. Chandra's mother still goes to D.C. once a year to meet with the police chief.

Whatever became of Gary Condit? He and his wife live primarily in Arizona where they own two ice cream shops.

"It's a family-run shop," Chad Condit told CNN's Larry King in 2005. "We scoop ice cream." Last year, Baskin-Robbins filed a federal suit claiming that the Condits had breached their franchise agreement.

Two families that just can't catch a break. Sad.

The latest tall tale on Iraq is from Dem apologists -- that even if Congress elected to not fund the Iraq Debacle, President Bush could unilaterally fund the Debacle through invocation of the Feed and Forage Act of 1861 (41 USC, Section 11.) This is the misconception of folks who simply do not understand how the Constitution and the law works. Let's consider the language of the Food and Forage Act:

(a) No contract or purchase on behalf of the United States shall be made, unless the same is authorized by law or is under an appropriation adequate to its fulfillment, except in the Department of Defense . . . for clothing, subsistence, forage, fuel, quarters, transportation, or medical and hospital supplies, which, however, shall not exceed the necessities of the current year.

Consider the implications of the interpretation being forwarded by some that this grants the President unlimited power to fund the war unilaterally. It would make the law plainly unconstitutional as it would violate the the express separation of powers, the statements of the Federalist Papers, uncontroverted by any and all writings by scholars, conservative or liberal. In short, it is an argument that is only made to excuse the inaction of the Democratic Congress. NO Republican I know of has made this argument. Only enabling Democrats. Very telling.

The White House has released the transcript of Dick Cheney's commencement address yesterday at West Point.

Scarecrow at Firedoglake takes issue with his statements.

BarbinMd at Daily Kos recaps and interprets Cheney's statements on how we are winning the war on terror:

Our government has used every legitimate tool to counter the activities of an enemy that likely has cells inside our own country. We've improved our security arrangements [dug a deeper bunker for me], reorganized intelligence capabilities [repeatedly broke the law], surveilled and interrogated the enemy [tortured], and worked closely with friends [Great Britain] and allies [Great Britain] to track terrorist movements.