BuzzFlash has a good review here.

"A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degration of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason."

At the time George W. Bush ordered American forces to invade Iraq, 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11. Voters in Ohio, when asked by pollsters to list what stuck in their minds about the campaign, most frequently named two Bush television ads that played to fears of terrorism.

We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate's thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry.

At the March 5, 2007, meeting, White House aides, including counsel Fred Fielding and deputy counsel William Kelley, sought to shape testimony that Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General William Moschella was to give the next day before the House Judiciary Committee.

Although the existence of the White House meeting had been previously disclosed by the Justice Department, Rove's attendance at the strategy session was not--until both Moschella and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty talked about it in confidential testimony with congressional investigators last week.

Funny, my reading of the relevant rules of attorney ethics seems to indicate that a lawyer helping to "shape" testimony no longer gets to be the lawyer in the saga, but rather becomes disqualified because he's a (likely or potential) witness.

From the McClatchy version of this story:

According to a congressional aide, McNulty said he attended a White House meeting with Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, and other officials on March 5, the day before McNulty's deputy William Moschella was to testify to Congress about the firings.

White House officials told the Justice Department group that they needed to agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired and explain them to Congress, McNulty said, according to the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the transcript of McNulty's interview hasn't been made public.

McNulty said that White House officials never revealed during the meeting that they'd been discussing plans to replace some prosecutors with Gonzales aides, the congressional aide said.

Now, why the DoJ all had to make sure to get their stories straight if they were telling the truth, tells me they were never telling the truth.

The best part from Isikoff's story - it may well be that the WH no longer has any executive privilege claim over Rover's (older) emails - the ones they might have thought to have been destroyed:

This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoeanaed the Justice Department to turn over all e-mails in its possession from Rove--including his computer hard drive, which was turned over to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case.

Of course, what seems to be the case is that the WH and DoJ were far more interested in beating political "enemies" than in actually doing justice.  For example, it appears the US Attorney for W.D.Washington - McKay - was fired for (a) not pushing bogus voter fraud cases against Dems (especially in the 2004 governor's election), which offended Washington state Repugs, and (b) pushing too hard for more assets to investigate the murder of a pro-gun-control AUSA in his district (which investigation doubtless offended the pro-gun wingnuts in the same Washington Repug party).

I guess punishing the disloyal-to-the-party-platform by letting their murders go uninvestigated is not beyond the pale where Repugs and their base voters are the parties offended by the victim's disloyalty.

You know, I stand with TL on being generally opposed to the prosecution and so forth - there's a lot of wrong the government does in its prosecutions and especially in the criminalization of things like low-level drug offenses.  But, the US Attorney case is not susceptible of reduction to "prosecutor enemy of defendant, therefore 'bad'.  Anything bad happens to prosecutor therefore 'good'."  Nor is it susceptible of reduction to "prosecutor still prosecuting defendants, therefore shenaningans in D.C. irrelevant to local, individual prosecutions".  

Rather, we need to step back for a second and take a breath.  It needs be remembered that, regardless of whether one is pro-prosecution or pro-defense, when prosecuting the government must always be bound and forced to use less power than it could have at its call.  The idea of limitation on the government's power is at the core of the Bill of Rights, and that hard core of limits is (or at least has been) surrounded by a galaxy of other limiting doctrines, not the least of which has been the idea that the politics of the victim and the politics of the (prospective) defendant should have nothing to do with whether the prosecution is begun, waived, or continued.

In other words, an objective theory of prosecutorial discretion.

The central pollution which Rove, Miers, Gonzo, Goodling, Sampson and so on have p*ssed into this well (see infra) is the substitution of the subjective criteria of "loyalty to Bushie" into the prosecutor's calculus.  Not "revamp the office's priorities to encourage bringing more cases which are in line with the administration's policy goals", but rather to promote and protect loyal Republicans and to damage and destroy Democrats

A friend told me about the Democratic mayor in a town nearby his, who was prosecuted and pled guilty to accepting many thousands of dollars in bribes from city contractors.  Everyone in that town knew he was corrupt - he'd demand to be comped in restaurants with the implicit threat of sudden and vigorous health code enforcement, and his wife made lots of money brokering realty in developments which needed approvals to be built. And, he was corrupt.  He's still in prison.  No one (save his family) quibbled about the prosecution or alleged it was part of a partisan vendetta, and very few wept when he was convicted.  Given the conduct of this administration, though, every political corruption case will have to surmount the hurdle of "partisan witch-hunt", even when the officeholder is blatantly, thoroughly corrupt.  And, by depriving Americans of (more or less) objective prosecutorial discretion and injecting subjective partisanship, Rove and his lackeys have done serious damage - possibly worse and longer lasting than Iraq or even Guantanamo.

I deliberately used the scatological image above because, frankly, I think it is about the most trenchant one available.  Once the taint of partisan politics is introduced into prosecutions - such that every political corruption case can rightly (or wrongly) be questioned as to whether it's a partisan attack by the "ins" against the "outs" - it is impossible to remove that taint.  As Comey testified yesterday in response to a question on that topic and how to heal the issue:  "I don't know how to put that genie back into the bottle."

emptywheel:

But then Waxman decides to call the guy who debunked the documents right when they came into State, Simon Dodge. Dodge, of course, realized that the forgeries had a funky seal. He implied, in fact, that the person who made the forgeries used the funky seal to make it look more authentic.....

....Dodge is going to get right to the core of the hoax, to the way WINPAC served as a filter for any efforts to debunk the forgeries--or any other crappy intelligence claims. And once we get into that scheme, we could blow the whole lid off this thing....

....Me, I'll take any and all evidence relating to Simon Dodge. Damn--anyone want to send me to DC next week?

Before the 2006 mid-term elections, Republicans in Missouri talked a lot about voter fraud.

They filed voter-registration lawsuits, passed a law in Jefferson City requiring voters to show ID cards and fretted that dead people might vote.

Even White House political guru Karl Rove weighed in, telling a talk-show host a couple of days before the election that he had just visited Missouri, where GOP strategists said they were "well aware of" the threat of voter fraud.

The threat to the integrity of the election was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, wielded the power of the federal government to protect the ballot.

Now, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys have led to allegations that that Republican campaign was not as it appeared.

The preoccupation with Missouri was part of a wider effort in several states, critics charge, aimed at protecting the GOP hold on Congress by dampening Democratic turnout. That effort included purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of get-out-the-vote drives by Democrats.

The Bush administration denies those claims. But they've gotten traction recently because three of the U.S. attorneys ousted by the Justice Department say they lost their jobs because they failed to prove voter fraud allegations.

Lots of mud on people's faces including the president and faculty of Duke University.

WELL over a third of US combat troops deployed in Iraq condone torture to obtain information from an insurgent and nearly one in 10 acknowledge mistreating civilians, said a survey released today.....

.......The team surveyed 1320 soldiers and 447 marines between August and October 2006 in Iraq.

Although the report was completed in November, it was only released today in censored form after its findings began to leak to the press.

On whether torture should be allowed to save the life of a soldier or marine, 44 per cent of the marines surveyed said it should, as did 41 per cent of the soldiers.

When asked if torture should be allowed to gather important information about insurgents, 39 per cent of marines and 36 per cent of soldiers surveyed said it should.

So what did I learn??

Romney said he had universl health care in MA. Who knew?? I gotta check that..

Tancredo is to be questioned only about Mexican illegals.. Boy, talk about being type cast..

Some guy from Texas thinks the Repubs are Libertarian... Who's gonna pop his bubble??

"Tommy" Thompson believes it is okay to fire Gays..

Huckabee is worth watching further..

Gilmore balanced budgets and got rid of the car tax... he also straightened things out in VA on 9/11..

Duncan, like Reagan, has been elected in CA... Now I admit that's no easy task.

McCain is gonna make the big spenders national figures...

Rudy says he doesn't like Roe v Wade but wouldn't try and change it...

Score.....(after a fourth glass of Kenall Jackson, always a dangerous thing.. but I'm not changing it 24 hours or so later...)

Fred Thompson, Rudy, McCain and Romney... with Huckabee to help keep the south....

Oh. FRED Thompson wasn't there? He didn't need to be...

Two Japanese guys told me they couldn't understand the out sourcing problem... they had been doing it for years...

I was gonna have a fifth glass, but the Franklin had disappeared...