Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) sits down at TPM Cafe to explain what happened yesterday in the Senate on FISA and telecom immunity.

We’ve put together a chart at TPM Election Central that helps to give an appreciation for just how fast Mike Huckabee’s rise in the polls has been–and how broad–compared to Rudy Giuliani, who seems to have taken much of the hit from the Huckabee surge.

Greg Sargent interviewed a Huckabee spokesperson today about the excerpts from Huckabee’s late ’90s book that received so much attention yesterday.

In trying to, um, what I guess we’ll call “clarify” what Huckabee meant in the book, Joe Carter offered the following observations:

“He’s not equating homosexuality with necrophilia,” Carter told us. “He’s saying there’s a range of aberrant behavior. He considers homosexuality aberrant, but that’s at one end of the spectrum. Necrophilia is at the other end.”

Carter added: “No way is he saying that homosexuality is like having sex with dead people. That’s not it at all.”

More of Greg’s interview here.

Interested in US history? How it ties in with current events in this country of ours? Check out the new Edge of the West blog.

Kevin Drum and Steve Clemons suss out Clinton’s strengths as a potential president vs. Obama.

I just got back from a week’s vacation out of the country on Sunday. And I did my best to clear my head of politics while I was away. So I’m just now getting back in the rhythm of the campaign. And on the Republican side, it still looks like Romney to me. But that’s by a by-default logic that applies almost uniquely to this campaign.

Clearly, Romney has had a bad few weeks as Huckabee has rocketed from being Ron Paul’s colleague down in the single digits to the leader or near leader in several key states. Hell, he’s almost tied with Rudy for the lead nationally. But as we’re now seeing day after day with Huckabee, despite the affable manner and the politics that are gaining him huge support within the GOP’s evangelical base, the dude just has way too much baggage to get him to the nomination — letting a bunch of anti-Clinton whacks convince you to let a serial rapist out of prison, all sorts of completely whacked views, wild unpreparedness on foreign policy. And they haven’t even gotten to truly nutball ideas he’s for like the ‘Fair Tax’. I’m not saying it can’t happen. But I just think Huckabee’s got too much baggage on too many fronts.

Then you have Rudy, of whom I’ve already said quite a bit. Republican voters are starting to realize that pro-choice wasn’t just a policy position for Rudy. He lived a lifestyle as mayor that made it a critical option to have on hand at any given moment. With Huckabee’s rise, attention has gone off Rudy’s mix of boffo boffing scandals and shady business deals. But there’s still so much more to be scrutinized, especially on the latter front, when and if the attention returns.

My own take is that Rudy’s campaign is near a tipping point. As long as he was dominating the national polls and running strong in big starts on or after February 5th, there was a case to be made that he could afford to getting shellacked in the early states. But he’s now close to nose-diving in the national polls and he’s fallen in almost every state. If the fall continues nationally, he’s going to be tied or just competitive nationally. And you’re going to hit a tipping point, a crisis of confidence in Rudy’s campaign, where suddenly there’s no ace in the hole to get people to ignore the fact that he’s going to get clobbered in each of the early contests that almost always determine the course of the rest of the campaign. At that point the emperor of New York City will be exposed as having no clothes, not even silk pajamas-cum-Hef-pipe to amble from one assignation to the next.

And that leaves us with … Mitt Romney.

Incredibly phony, endless flipflops and with the Mormon issue that will probably keep him from ever dominating the GOP’s evangelical base. But a fairly strong campaigner and probably no boffo scandal that makes you scratch your head and wonder what the guy was smoking.

So, all humor aside, despite his campaign’s being in the doldrums and facing real danger in Iowa, by process of elimination, it still seems to me that Mitt Romney’s the man to beat in the GOP.

From the NYT …

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

TPMCafe is hosting a live blogging discussion today from 11-12 ET about HR 3609, the proposed bankruptcy amendment that would cleanup some of the subprime mortgage mess.

Organized by OpenLeft‘s Matt Stoller and The Sunlight Foundation, participants will include amendment co-sponsors Reps. Brad Miller (D-NC) and Linda Sanchez (D-CA), TPMCafe regular Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor; Bob Lawless, a law professor at the University of Illinois who blogs at creditslips, Adam Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown; and Hale Stewart, a Houston lawyer who blogs at DailyKos and at his own blog, The Bonddad Blog.

Elizabeth Warren previews the discussion:

Congressman Miller’s bill would give some homeowners caught in upside-down loans the chance to write down the loan to the value of the home and put the homeowner in a long-term, fixed mortgage. The bill is designed to reduce the number of foreclosures, not by putting them off with a temporary rate freeze, but by moving some families into long-term mortgages they can afford.

Stop by the Cafe between 11-12 ET and join in the discussion.

The New York Times reports today that the usual suspects were in on the discussions about destroying the CIA torture tapes: Gonzales, Addington, and Miers. What remains unclear is what they advised to the CIA to do.

The White House pushes back–hard–on the NYT story on the involvement of White House attorneys in discussions about what to do with the CIA torture tapes.

Here’s the statement out this morning from White House press secretary Dana Perino, demanding a correction:

The New York Times today implies that the White House has been misleading in publicly acknowledging or discussing details related to the CIA’s decision to destroy interrogation tapes.

The sub-headline of the story inaccurately says that the “White House Role Was Wider Than It Said”, and the story states that “…the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes…was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.”

Under direction from the White House General Counsel while the Department of Justice and the CIA Inspector General conduct a preliminary inquiry, we have not publicly commented on facts relating to this issue, except to note President Bush’s immediate reaction upon being briefed on the matter. Furthermore, we have not described – neither to highlight, nor to minimize — the role or deliberations of White House officials in this matter.

The New York Times’ inference that there is an effort to mislead in this matter is pernicious and troubling, and we are formally requesting that NYT correct the sub-headline of this story.

It will not be surprising that this matter will be reported with a reliance on un-named sources and individuals lacking a full availability of the facts — and, as the New York Times story itself acknowledges, some of these sources will have wildly conflicting accounts of the facts. We will instead focus our efforts on supporting the preliminary inquiry underway, where facts can be gathered without bias or influence and later disseminated in an appropriate fashion.

We will continue to decline to comment on this issue, and in response to misleading press reports

The statement then lists all of the no comments from the White House in recent days.

The essence of the pushback isn’t about whether the White House knew of the tapes and their destruction or about whether White House attorneys were deeply involved. The White House is focusing narrowly on the issue of whether it has been misleading by minimizing its role or mis-characterizing it. The pushback, in short, is: Hey, we’ve been stonewalling and haven’t said jack about this.

Now that’s a defense.

Late Update: The White House highlights its on the record “no comments.” What about the anonymous accounts that have been coming from White House officials? We’ll have more on that soon.

Later Update: The White House’s outrage would appear to be misplaced.