Breaking: Blackwater shooters may never be prosecuted for Nisour Square incident because State Department offered them immunity.

Obama will vote against Mukasey for AG without a renouncement of waterboarding.

Late Update: As it turns out, we were given the wrong statement by the campaign, an earlier non-public version. The latest is that Obama will vote against Mukasey–period. The latest–unhedged–statement is here.

Joining us this week at the TPMCafe Table for One is Democratic congressional candidate Tom Perriello, who is running for Congress in Virginia’s 5th congressional district, the seat currently occupied by Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA).

Perriello, a young progressive activist, serves up a first post on “conviction politics.”

Down below, you’ll see a post where Obama’s support of Michael Mukasey’s nomination to be attorney general is dependent on Mukasey specifically renouncing waterboarding. That was based on a statement issued to us by the Obama campaign. Turns out we were given the wrong version of that statement, an earlier non-public version.

We have now been given a later version–presumably the operative version–in which Obama says he will vote against Mukasey–period.

Former FEMA flack, on fake presser: “I should have cancelled it quickly. I did not have good situational awareness of what was happening.”

New Rudy ad fudges numbers on prostate cancer rates to criticize government-administered health care.

The FEMA press conference at which FEMA staffers asked questions as if they themselves were journalists is a pretty long tedious affair, so we spliced together the hard-hitting questions:

After watching it, I had a harder time believing that the FEMA deputy director giving the presser could really have been in the dark about the, um, fakery in front of him. But it’s embarrassing either way: he knew and pretended not to; or he didn’t know and didn’t catch on.

Rightist blogosphere launches boycott of New Republic advertisers over Scott Beauchamp affair.

We’ve been talking a little today about the GOP’s designated hatchet men for the South Carolina primary, a notoriously vicious contest in which no elbow is too sharp, no whisper too scandalous, if it serves a candidate’s electoral ends.

Greg Sargent has thumbnail sketches of the best-known bareknuckle brawlers hired by the McCain, Romney, and Giuliani campaigns.

As I’ve argued in other contexts today, Iran is the issue facing the country today. Some readers have warned me off this formulation, claiming I’m buying into the right-wing ‘frame’ by doing so. Nonsense. As long as George Bush is commander-in-chief of the US military and he and his advisors are intent on getting the US into a shooting war with Iran, Iran is the issue.

Tonight on The Newshour, Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy advisor and godfather of neoconservatism, Norman Podhoretz debated Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria on the question of whether or not to go to war with Iran. It’s perhaps an apt commentary on the rightward, lunatic turn of this country’s foreign policy that Fareed is taking what I guess must be called the left (?) in this debate. In any case, I really urge you to give this a look. And note a few things: one is the denigrating tone Podhoretz takes toward Zakaria. It’s curdled and bitter. It jumped out at me and I wonder if it does for you as well. Second are the constant references to Hitler and the Munich agreement. Hitler has become such a throwaway reference or comparison for whatever penny-ante dictator we’re up in arms about at the moment that the reference has been drained of much of its meaning and horror. But with the Munich agreement and how ‘time is not on our side’ and so forth, this is beyond nonsense.

It’s almost an insult to what the world faced in the late 1930s. Germany, industrial powerhouse, with arguably the most powerful army in the world, at the forefront of technology, overawing and invading neighboring countries. Iran, minor economic power, second or third-rate military power, which may get a couple of small nuclear-weapons compared to the couple hundred high-end nuclear warheads in Israel’s arsenal (plus, a robust second strike capacity, as Fareed notes) and the many thousands we have — and our blue water navy, satellites, air force. Please. Time’s running out for us? We’re going to look back on this fifty years from now and see the non-podhoretz-loons as the Chamberlains of the day? I don’t know what to say. Just watch …