Master McCarthyite Smearer Joe Lieberman sez:

And I do think there is a larger message here for our politics. I think the public is fed up. They feel that both the political parties, mostly because of the primaries, maybe because of attack ads, the kind of divisiveness of the cable news coverage of politics, talk radio, the bloggers have added another dimension of vituperation toxicity to it. The majority of people are sick of it.

No Joe, they are sick of the Bush/McCain/Lieberman/GOP Iraq Debacle:

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?"
Approve Disapprove Unsure

24% 71% 5%

Here is some cackle material from Joe:

I think if the two major parties wouldn’t hear this going into ‘08, there is a real chance of an independent third-party candidacy. and watch out if that happens.

Bwahahahahahahahaha!!!! Joe still pining for the White House. Hilarious.

Rudy on universal health care:

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani pulled out the S-word to criticize universal-health-care plans advocated by Democratic presidential candidates. The Republican hopeful said in a visit to Raleigh, N.C., that Democrats who urged "mandatory" universal health care at a debate Thursday night were "moving toward socialized medicine so fast, it'll make your head spin," according to the Associated Press.

As always, Rudy was for "socialized medicine" before he was against it:

The June issue of Vanity Fair has an article by Michael Wolff (free link) on "Crazy for Rudy." Shorter version: He may be nuts.

Wolff writes that almost anyone who’s ever worked for Rudy Giuliani expects his presidential campaign to implode at any moment, thanks to his propensity for periods of mania, outbursts, and frequent forms of behavior that generally don’t win elections.

Bernard Kerik, his frosty relationship with his children, his famous smackdown of a listener (and ferret owner) who called in during his radio show, Judith Giuliani’s stint at a medical company that experimented on live dogs (killing them in the process), the list goes on—there are plenty of past deeds that may block his path to the White House.

But what is it about Rudy that makes him so compelling? Wolff opines that the consensus among people who know him best is that, “He is nuts, actually mad.” And Wolff argues that maybe that’s just what he needs to win. After all, he writes, “You can better trust a crazy man, lacking normal artifice and equivocations, not to sh*t you.”

I'd rather see his campaign implode. I don't think you can trust a crazy man, I think you need to beware of him and watch him like a hawk, which I have no doubt, the liberal blogs will do.

Jose Medellin has been on Texas death row since he was 19. He is a Mexican National. A history of his case is here. TalkLeft background is here.

The U.S. Supreme Court today granted cert to hear his case.

The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday it would decide whether President George W. Bush had the authority to direct a state court to comply with an international tribunal's ruling in the case of a Mexican on death row in Texas.

The justices agreed to review a decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that concluded Bush had exceeded his constitutional authority by intruding into the independent powers of the judiciary.

Medellin is one of the 50 foreign death row inmates whose cases were taken to the Hague where the World Court found their rights had been violated:

The World Court in The Hague in 2004 ordered the United States to review the cases of Medellin and 50 other Mexican death row inmates because U.S. officials failed to tell them of their right under the Vienna Convention to talk to consular officers immediately after their arrests.

Bush in 2005 decided to comply with the World Court's ruling and he directed state courts to review the 51 cases to determine whether the violation of their rights caused the defendants any harm at trial or at sentencing.

The Supreme Court today refused to hear the cases of Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Omar Khadr, challenging the legality of the military tribunals under which they are to be tried.

Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer would have granted the request to hear the case, the court said in turning it down. It takes four votes, though, to hear a case.

The court's action follows its April 2 decision not to step into related aspects of the legal battle regarding other Guantanamo Bay detainees. The issue there is whether the prisoners may go to federal court to challenge their confinement.

I blogged about this Richardson gaffe earlier, but it seems the Governor of New Mexico has not put away his shovel and keeps digging:

Having blundered last week by saying Whizzer White would be his model chief justice, a reporter asks him how he can reconcile that with his strong pro-choice position when White wrote the dissent in Roe v. Wade. Richardson says, "White was in the 60s. Wasn't Roe v. Wade in the 80s?" Bzzzzzzzttt!!!

Bzzzzzzzzttt!!! indeed.

h/t Trapper John.

In the Democratic Presidential Debate. Sen. Hillary Clinton said:

"we need Republican support" to achieve the Democratic goal of leaving Iraq.

Sen. Barack Obama said:

We have to gather up 16 [Republican] votes to override [President Bush's] veto.

We'll be waiting for Godot then. The Republicans will never ever cross Bush on Iraq. Here is some evidence:

The experiences of the few Republicans to vote against the war help explain the remarkable unity that the party has maintained in Washington behind an unpopular president. Just four Republicans -- two in the House, two in the Senate -- voted last week for a $124 billion war funding bill that would require troop withdrawals to begin by Oct. 1, legislation that Bush has vowed to veto. That cohesion reflects the views of the GOP's core voters, who see the war in Iraq in fundamentally different terms than Democrats and political independents do, said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

This reality is reflected in this article:

File this under Dog Bites Man. Via Atrios, NYTimes reports that Citizen Stengel has hired a Wannabee Hugh Hewitt's BFF:

Mark Halperin, who stepped down last month as the political director of ABC News, is moving to Time magazine. Mr. Halperin, a pioneer of online reporting who founded ABCnews.com’s political memo, The Note, will join Time as an editor-at-large and senior political analyst effective next Monday, the magazine said.

At Time, Mr. Halperin will report to Richard Stengel and Josh Tyrangiel, the managing editors, respectively, of Time magazine and the Time.com Web site. Mr. Stengel said that he started talking to Mr. Halperin, a longtime acquaintance, after the ABC announcement last month, with an eye to preparing for Time’s coverage of the 2008 elections.

. . . “Everybody wants to be ahead of the curve in this area, and Mark is the curve,” he said.

He is the Concern Troll Curve. You think Time will call Halperin's blog, "Why Karl Rove Is The Greatest" or "Matt Drudge Sez?" O'Reilly will no doubt be a fan.

My old Kossack friend Kid Oakland uses my analysis of the Iraq Supplemental Funding bill and turns in a very nifty piece of political analysis:

. . . Nancy Pelosi, in my view, is banking on the "political" aspects of this process. ie. Speaker Pelosi, in using language counting on "the courts," really is implying the "court of public opinion." She must be thinking that whatever Bush's obligation to follow the framework of the Iraq bill, if he does not follow the language that Congress provides him, the GOP will be under such enormous political pressure in the court of public opinion that the GOP will cave. That, in a sense, was the bottom line upshot of the blogger's conference call. There was an interesting moment, which I did not mention in that MyDD piece, in which Speaker Pelosi talked about how, at the time of the outset of the war in Afghanistan the the Presient and the GOP very much did not want a bill from Congress. They felt that the President had all the authority he needed. Congressional Democrats insisted on getting a bill because having some bill, any bill, implied some constraint on the President's authority. If that is the mindset here, a mindset of "implied constraint" then it is critical we put pressure on the Democrats in Congress to go beyond that view. Implied constraint on this President does not cut it. Implied constraint is NOT what the voters voted for in 2006.

The inadequacy of implied constraint. Wonderfully phrased by Kid O. That gets to the heart of it. Bush does not give a fig about "implied constraint." It will take more. It will take the NOT spending power.

Episode 81 is tonight: "Chasing It."

This week, Tony hits an unlucky stretch and AJ makes a life-changing decision. Meanwhile, Vito's widow Marie turns to Tony for help with her troubled son.

Is AJ going to decide to join the mob?

The torture case charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonazales, George Tenet and others have been dropped, at the request of the prosecutor.

In her decision, German Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms argued that the case does not confront crimes committed on German soil, nor involve victims or perpetrators with ties to Germany. Harms also stated that the investigation does not have a reasonable chance of succeeding.

The case was filed in Germany because of the country's obligation under the German law of universal jurisdiction to try cases that deal with torture and other serious crimes, regardless of where the crime took place or what the nationality of the victims or perpetrators.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the case, says:

"Fundamentally, this is a political and not a legal decision," said CCR President Michael Ratner. "We will continue to pursue Rumsfeld, (U.S. Attorney General Alberto) Gonzales, and the others in the future -- they should not feel they can travel outside the United States without risk. Our goal is no safe haven for torturers."

The case may be refiled in Spain.

My obsession with urging this Congress to adopt what I believe to be the only viable approach to ending the Iraq Debacle while Bush is President, adopting the goals of Reid-Feingold as the policy of the Democratic Congress. My formulation is this:

I ask for three things: First, announce NOW that the Democratic Congress will NOT fund the Iraq Debacle after a date certain. You pick the date. Whatever works politically. If October 2007 is the date Dems can agree to, then let it be then. If March 2008, then let that be the date; Second, spend the year reminding the President and the American People every day that Democrats will not fund the war past the date certain; Third, do NOT fund the Iraq Debacle PAST the date certain.

I believe the need for THIS Congress ending the Debacle is especially acute because the next President will be very reluctant to be saddled with having "lost" the war. Today, on the McLaughlin Group, Tony Blankley articulated my fear, that a Democratic President will not end the Debacle, instead slipping into some "sensible, sober" Broderist mindset. I believe Blankley is right. And of course, a Republican might win the election in 2008. It is thus incumbent on this Congress, this Democratic Congress, to end the Iraq Debacle.