At every possible opportunity I love to point out I am a centrist. Today, in seeming response to silliness like this from ABC, E. J. Dionne points out:

. . . Whenever you use the word "left" in American politics, you feel almost compelled to add quotation marks. Today's left is not talking about nationalizing industry, abolishing capitalism or destroying the rich. What passes for "left" in American politics is quite moderate by historical standards.

Still, cliches die hard, so you hear such 20-year-old questions as: "Are Democrats moving too far to the left?" or "Will Democrats abandon the center?" This approach is about abstractions, not concrete political problems, and it misses the dynamic in American public life, which is the move away from the right and a discrediting of the conservative era. The political "center" of today is not where the "center" was even five years ago.

. . . [T]he "good ideas" that voters are demanding mostly have to do with problems that have been framed by the left, not the right: the need to disengage from Iraq, to create health security, to ease economic inequalities. It's time to update our sense of where the political center lies and to adjust our view of "the left" accordingly.

Hear, hear!

I thought after 2006, the species would have become extinct, but the "Sell Out on Choice" Dems still chasing those elusive "values voters" live! Paul Waldman has the best fisking of this ridiculous Times Op-Ed by Melinda Hennenberger, who argues, I think, that Dems should drop their pro-choice position, for political reasons apparently.

But I loved this part for its irony:

What would it take to win them back? Respect, for starters — and not only on the night of the candidate forum on faith. As it turns out, you cannot call people extremists and expect them to vote for you. . . .

Us "fringe," "idiot liberals" get that point very well. Drop a line to Rep. David Obey and all the others attacking the Dem base for being angry about not ending the Iraq war on that one Melinda.

If you believe the testimony he gave Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty was "largely out of the loop in the Justice Department's firings of U.S. attorneys." What, then, to make of Monica Goodling's testimony that "there were a number of things that I did brief him on and that that information wasn't fully -- wasn't fully revealed" when McNulty appeared before Congress.

GOODLING: I'm just saying that I didn't believe he was fully candid.

And the point that I was trying to make is that I did give him some information, I didn't withhold information, I gave him a lot of information, and he had some of that information and didn't use of all of it.

NADLER:Although, in fact, he stated things directly contrary to what your written statement says he knew to be true.

GOODLING:Those would be conclusions for others to draw.

As Monica invites, feel free to draw your own conclusions about McNulty. Gonzales also claims to have been absent from the loop. Perhaps there was no loop. Perhaps the Justice Department is loopless. Or perhaps the strategy is to point fingers in every direction (except inward) with the hope that confusion reigns until it's time to move on.

Remember when Alberto Gonzales assured the Senate that "there has not been any serious disagreement" about the NSA's domestic surveillance program within the administration? Consider this:

The administration was sharply divided over the legality of President Bush's most controversial eavesdropping policies, a congressman quoted former Attorney General John Ashcroft as telling a House panel Thursday.

"It is very apparent to us that there was robust and enormous debate within the administration about the legal basis for the president's surveillance program," Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, told reporters after a closed-door meeting with Ashcroft.

Oops. Another Gonzales lie exposed?

MSNBC reports that, as promised, President George Bush has just vetoed the bipartisan stem cell research bill.

Pushing back against the Democratic-led Congress, Bush plans to veto a bill Wednesday that would have eased restraints on federally funded embryonic stem cell research, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. In his veto threat, the president accused Democrats of recycling an old measure that he already vetoed and argued that the bill would mean American taxpayers would — for the first time — be compelled to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos.

The bill passed with significant Republican support. Does Bush have anything to say about them? I am sure the Beltway Pundits will be decrying this Bush rejection of bipartisanship. Riiiight. I won't hold my breath.

I'll be honest. The Democratic Strategist has not been a must read for me in the past. But now it will be as my friend Ed Kilgore, formerly of New Donkey, is the new Managing Editor. And Ed starts out with a bang, with a article discussing John Judis and Ruy Texeira's new the Re-Emerging Democratic Majority. Ed writes:

It's the indies, and to some extent professionals, they suggest, who make the "emerging Democratic majority" a potentially unstable coalition rather than a mass movement. And their article ends on a cautionary note. While enactment of some popular, landmark domestic legislation (e.g., universal health insurance) could solidify the Democratic majority, the dynamics of the Democratic coalition, along with built-in resistance to change in Washington's governing institutions, could make that difficult or even impossible. And without such transformative, "realigning reforms," the Democratic majority may turn out to somewhat fragile, and beset by the kinds of intraparty tensions that tend to divide the Left from the Center. The 2008 election, they suggest, could provide a critical test of Democrats' ability to manage their coalition, particularly since presidential elections inherently make it harder to accomodate the sort of state and regional customization of campaigns that worked well for Democrats in 2006.

I'll write my thoughts on all this in a later post.

As if we needed further evidence that the Bush administration is inept --

Since January – and until the rule was suspended two weeks ago – Americans have been required to present a passport when flying within the Western Hemisphere, a rule Congress created as part of its response to the Sept. 11 attacks. ... In the weeks before the rule went into effect, hundreds of thousands of Americans without passports requested them; a backlog that now numbers 2 million started to develop as early as last fall.

The fiasco happened because (as in Iraq, New Orleans, and fill in the blank) the administration didn't anticipate the problem.

Federal officials in Washington acknowledge that they failed to anticipate just how much the post-Sept. 11 travel regulations would fuel demand for passports; did not hire enough workers to handle the increase; and neglected to notice or react to signs early this spring of a burgeoning problem. ...

For nearly two years, federal officials knew the revised rules were coming, along with a crush of applications. And Tuesday, during a packed subcommittee hearing on the passport backlog, senators assailed Maura Harty, assistant secretary of State for consular affairs. ... Acknowledging the department's miscalculation, Harty said that employees had been swamped by "a record-setting demand in a compressed period of time."

The House Oversight Committee has issued a report finding that e-mails of White House officials who used their RNC account are missing.

E-mail records are missing for 51 of the 88 White House officials who had electronic message accounts with the Republican National Committee, the House Oversight Committee said Monday.

The Bush administration may have committed "extensive" violations of a law requiring that certain records be preserved, said the committee's Democratic chairman, adding that the panel will deepen its probe into the use of political e-mail accounts.

The full report is here (pdf). Dan Froomkin has some highlights:

More...

The LA Times reports on how defense lawyers across the country are using the U.S. Attorney firing scandal to challenge political prosecutions.

Defense lawyers in a growing number of cases are raising questions about the motives of government lawyers who have brought charges against their clients. In court papers, they are citing the furor over the U.S. attorney dismissals as evidence that their cases may have been infected by politics.

Justice officials say those concerns are unfounded and constitute desperate measures by desperate defendants. But the affair has given defendants and their lawyers some new energy, which is complicating life for the prosecutors.

Will the challenges resonate with jurors? I wonder how much evidence about it the Judges will allow into evidence.

Even so, the Justice Department is likely to find itself facing more discovery requests based on the scandal.

More...

In today's NYT White House Memo, Sheryl Gay Stolberg insists that a confrontation over assertions of executive privilege in the investigation of U.S. Attorney firings would be risky for the White House and for Democrats. The risk for the White House is obvious: if the administration loses the battle and can't continue to stonewall, the truth might come out. The risk to Democrats is less clear.

Stolberg says Democrats "run the risk of looking like they are waging a fishing expedition." Even if Alberto Gonzales and other DOJ witnesses to date hadn't been so evasive and inconsistent in their testimony, and if White House emails hadn't disappeared, the "fishing expedition" charge would still ring hollow. At this point, it's obvious to the casual observer that Democrats are being stonewalled in their search for answers to legitimate questions. If this is a fishing trip, it's one the American public is willing to take.

To support her "Democrats need to worry about issuing a subpoena" thesis, Stolberg turns to Ari Fleischer. Democrats should take advice from Comical Ari?

Here's Fleischer's logic:

Uncomfortable on the hotseat, Michael Elston has resigned from his position at the Justice Department. Elston was chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, who resigned last month.

Mr. Elston is the fifth Justice Department official who played a role in the dismissals to resign in recent months. In addition to Mr. McNulty, others are D. Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, and Monica M. Goodling, a senior aide to Mr. Gonzales.

Karl Rove hasn't yet been served with a subpoena to testify about the role he played in the plot to fire U.S. Attorneys who didn't take politics into account when making prosecutorial decisions, but his former aide, Sara Taylor, has been subpoenaed. So has Harriet Miers. A separate subpoena directed the White House to turn over additional emails related to the firings by June 28.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto claims Congress "can easily obtain the facts they want without a confrontation by simply accepting our offer for documents and interview," but John Conyers' letter points out that "voluntary cooperation" has been a myth.

The precise role of White House officials [in the firings], however, has been kept a mystery. After an initial round of false statements to Congress on that subject - including written misstatements that the Department was forced to correct, and false testimony that remains uncorrected to this day - Justice Department witnesses have been unable or unwilling to shed any meaningful light on the basic facts regarding who at the White House played what role in selecting these U.S. Attorneys for replacement and why.

Will Rove be served with his own subpoena after the latest witnesses stonewall?