Meteor Blades comments:

The optimists hope that by September enough Republicans will be in boiling water that they will join enough Democrats to pass some kind of out-of-Iraq bill of the sort we haven't seen yet, or who will just cut off funding by not voting for any bill.

I think the first option - call it the Obama plan - is highly unlikely, but possible.

I think the second option - call it the Armando plan - is not possible, even though it is the one I would favor were I a Congressman or Senator.

So rounding up Republicans will be easier than holding the line with Democrats? Okaaaaaay. Let me remind my good friend MB what Krugman wrote today:

Matt Yglesias spots one of the funniest pieces of journalistic hackery I've seen in a while:

The Attorney General was not told that he was a subject or target of the…investigation, nor did he believe himself to be,” the letter said, leaving Washington to choose between Waas’ credibility and that of the Bush Justice Department.

Let's see now, Murray Waas vs. Alberto Gonzales on the credibility meter . . . hmmmmm.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Boy, they got Waas good with that one. Hahahahahahahaha!

Time to pull out the old Spanish saying, "le salio el tiro por la culata." (The gun backfired.)

Colorado Senator Ken Salazar has joined the roster of Senators urging Alberto Gonzales to resign.

Salazar, D-Denver, has long been considered one of Gonzales' few Democratic allies in Congress, and until today he had declined to join many fellow Democrats and handful of Republicans who have been calling for Gonzales to step down in the wake of a controversy over the firing of federal prosecutors last year.

In a press conference in Denver, Salazar said he has become concerned about a "politicization" of the Department of Justice. He said he spoke to Gonzales and urged him to resign, saying it was "time for the Department of Justice to get a fresh start."

Salazar is hardly a liberal Democrat. He's not only centrist, but a well known compromiser who values bi-partisanship.

I'm beginning to think Gonzales may actually resign. If it wasn't likely, I don't think Salazar would have taken a lead role in this.

Then again, perhaps Salazar, formerly the Attorney General of Colorado, just feels particularly strongly about the job.

Greg Sargent gets this from a congressional Dem staffer:

[A]side from sending the bill back there are only two apparent possibilities left: Either the White House gives on one of these points. Or the Dem Congressional leadership caves and produces a bill with some sort of benchmarks but no accountability -- in other words, something that's effectively meaningless. . . ."If this is what they go with, it begs the question, Why did we go through this whole exercise with the first supplemental and everything else?" our staffer asks. "What did we really accomplish?"

The staffer answers the question:

Getting past the smarmy pretension exhibited by Matt Yglesias and Dan Drezner in this discussion, at the 8:20 mark Matt makes an important point about brands in the political discourse. Not just for the Media, but for the entire chain, from the Times to the blogosphere. Discussing Mickey Kaus, Matt says:

It is not a political position that [Mickey Kaus]is espousing, [it is] a media product. . . . Mickey has created this persona for hmself, it is not . . . dishonest persona . . . but he is playing the Mickey Kaus character for Slate. And that is the same for columnists and stuff [I read "stuff" as all of the players in the political discussion] . . . . That is just the reality of it.

This is absolutely true. Everyone in the Media food chain is playing to persona. From figurative top to bottom. And that brings me back to what I always want to talk about, Iraq.

Just now on MSNBC, Condessa Brewer permitted GOP talking head Ron Christie to repeat the falsehood that Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet.

Supposedly Christie and James Boyce, the Democratic talking head, were to discuss the prospect of Gore runnning in 2008. But, as is usual on cable news, falsehoods were presented as opinion. By now, EVERYONE knows that Al Gore did NOT say he invented the Internet. In fact, I was a little shocked to hear Christie not only repeat the falsehood, but to get indignant when Boyce called him on it.

MSNBC has done some good things of late and I know that Jeralyn has great respect for Dan Abrams, who manages the cable network now. But please stop folks from appearing on your shows and spewing obvious falsehoods, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. The Al Gore Internet falsehood has been so thoroughly debunked that Condessa Brewer should have stopped Christie. Either she did not know it is false or she was too timid to do it. She needs to learn from Chris Matthews.

This is entirely predictable:

Democratic congressional leaders on Friday offered the first concessions in a fight with President Bush over a spending bill for Iraq, but the White House turned them down.

In a closed-door meeting with Bush's top aides on Capitol Hill, Democrats said they'd strip billions of dollars in domestic spending out of a war spending that Bush opposed if the president would accept a timetable to pull combat troops out of Iraq. As part of the deal, Democrats said they would allow the president to waive compliance with a deadline for troop withdrawals. But no deal was struck.

. . . White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten, who rejected the deal, said any timetable on the war would undermine the nation's efforts in Iraq. "We consider that to be not a significant distinction," he said. "Whether waivable or not, timelines send the wrong signal."

And so it goes. The choice for the Democratic Congress is binary. Continue to fund the Iraq Debacle on Bush's terms or end the Debacle by announcing a date certain when the Debacle will not be funded. Yes, the Reid-Feingold framework.

Rudy Giuliani disclosed on his federal tax returns that he considers his wife an employee and paid her $125k a year for speechwriting help, an arrangement that pre-dated their marriage. The money was included as income on their joint tax return and they paid taxes on it.

Rudy Giuliani's haul for the 126 speeches he gave from January 2006 to March 2007 was $11.4 million, records filed this week show, which means he kicked back something less than 2% to his wife over that period.

That's a pretty insignificant figure given his entire speech income. Because she was an employee, I assume he also got to deduct her airline and other individual travel expenses that the paying company may not have picked up. Their suite would be covered since they shared it, but what about the meals and other related items?

My take: I don't believe for a second the pay was for her speechwriting help. It sounds like a clothing, hair and makeup allowance, and the only way to deduct it was to make her an employee.

This discussion between Glenn Greenwald and Ben Smith of the Politico regarding the Politico and the Media in general is interesting and I think provides lessons both for the Media and media critics.

Glenn Greenwald is, I think by general consensus, among the very best bloggers. His detail, research, piercing arguments and eye for an interesting story is virtually unmatched. And yet, Glenn's work on the Politico story did suffer from a weakness and Ben Smith picked up on it - the conflation of the politics of certain persons in the Politico management as a strong influence on the coverage. I don't think that is true and the charge took away from Glenn's powerful case. And it allowed Ben Smith to push away some of Glenn's powerful points.

In honor of John Ashcroft's moment of honor, as described by James Comey:

And it was only a matter of minutes that the door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr. Card. . . . And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter . . . and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general. . . . Mr. Ashcroft’s chief of staff asked me something that meant a great deal to him, and that is that I not resign until Mr. Ashcroft was well enough to resign with me. SCHUMER: And it was his view that Mr. Ashcroft was likely to resign as well? COMEY: Yes.

Let the Eagle Soar

Great photos accompany this video of Crosby Stills and Nash's "Immigration Man."

Let me in, Immigration Man.

No Human is Illegal.

[This is a repeat of a post from Dec. 2006]

Berkeley, CA, which has a reputation for being politically correct, is now engaging in the ridiculous.

It passed an ordinance criminalizing smoking on city streets. Why? To be able to arrest the homeless. They figure the homeless are most likely smokers, just like drug addicts and prostitutes.

As Mayor Tom Bates sees it, the alcoholics, meth addicts and the like who make up a good portion of the homeless population on Shattuck Avenue downtown and Telegraph Avenue on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus "almost always smoke." And because smoking bans are the hot ticket these days for California cities, why not meld the two as part of a "comprehensive package" for dealing with the street problem that Bates says "has gone over the top"?

In this case, vagrants could be cited for taking a drag on the town's main drags.

To finance the effort, the city will raise parking rates $.50 an hour.