Passed on without comment:

Supporters of Sen. Larry Craig with the American Land Rights Association are calling for a boycott of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Airport.

The Battle Ground (Washington) based association says airport police who arrested the senator in a men’s room sex sting are responsible for weakening private property rights in the West. Craig is a Republican member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Late Update: More on the boycott from the website of the American Land Rights Association (.pdf):

By ambushing Senator Larry Craig, the Minneapolis St Paul Airport
Police have effectively declared war on the West. They are primarily
responsible for greatly weakening private property rights and Federal
land use advocates in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Committee and in Congress.

We are urging you to make all your flight arrangements avoiding the
Minneapolis-St Paul Airport for at least the next year and probably
longer. We’ll keep you posted as the boycott develops.

Urge your friends, neighbors and fellow workers to try to avoid any
flights that take them through Minneapolis St Paul Airport.

We must inflict economic pain on the airport authorities to get them to
change their behavior.

—–And they must apologize to Senator Larry Craig.

The Hill explores the relationship between Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Alaska businessman Bob Penney. An earmark here. A sweetheart land deal there. Pretty soon you’re talking real muck.

Mitt Romney says the surge is “apparently working,” and then John McCain out-hawks him: “The surge is working.” That and more highlights from last night in today’s Election Central Debate Roundup.

TPM Reader JB gets it …

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more commentary in the press and blogosphere regarding the fact that, in simplest terms, whatever “progress” we are making in Iraq is a function of the fact that we have switched sides. I don’t think the U.S. public, or even the media, are really grasping the fact that we are fighting for Saddam’s people now, and the Shia are rapidly becoming the primary target (along with the mystical “Al Queda”). The silence on the topic is a little eerie.

Apparently the push-back from the Senate GOP leadership has convinced Larry Craig to soften his stance about staying in the Senate–but he hasn’t completely given up retaining his seat. It would take a confluence of unlikely events–successful withdrawal of his guilty plea and a quick dismissal of the case–for Craig to be able to resolve (or would that be re-resolve?) his legal case by September 30, a reality that Craig’s spokesman is now acknowledging.

Is he resigning with full and adequate advice of counsel?

I could not care less if Larry Craig is gay or bisexual. And there is a real tragedy in the fact that his career is ending — when you really cut to the chase — because he’s gay. The fact of his public hypocrisy doesn’t diminish the tragic dimension of this. It just shoots it through with a lot of irony when you consider that he is probably as committed as anyone to rejecting this defense on his own behalf. As Matt Yglesias suggested a couple days ago, by continuing to deny his sexuality at this stage he moves from the tragic to the ridiculous, though those two states are much more often mixed than we probably realize or want to believe.

All that said, I can only imagine the veritable muck nirvana that must have gone on behind the scenes into the last 48 hours of turnabouts. What did Craig need to put on the table to get his colleagues and his Minority Leader to acquiesce in his return? And what did they put on the table to make him pack it in again?

And to paraphrase the horror movie genre, is Craig really gone even now or has he merely entered the shadowy ranks of the unresigned, destined to walk the earth for eternity tormenting his party?

The rumored short list of potential attorney general nominees doesn’t include DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff any longer.

CNN has some background on that meeting the senate Republicans had yesterday on Sen. Craig (R-ID) …

Republican senators held what one participant called a “passionate” and “spirited” closed-door discussion Wednesday afternoon about how their leaders responded to the sex scandal involving their colleague Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, CNN has learned.

At least three senators complained their leaders “rushed to judgment” while others defended the leaders for quickly pulling their support from the disgraced senator, according to one Republican senator in the room and two GOP aides familiar with the meeting.

“We had to discuss it,” the senator said.

Sen. Ted. Stevens of Alaska, whose home was recently raided as part of a federal corruption probe, stood up to say it’s wrong to prejudge these matters.

He was joined by Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Sen. Michael Enzi of Wyoming, who also “wagged their finger” at the leadership, in the words of one of the aides. (Related: Craig may not resign)

But many more senators stood to defend the leaders, even greeting Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky with applause when he was introduced to discuss the topic at the weekly Senate Republican policy luncheon in the Capitol.

I’ll give Stevens some credit for a certain odd consistency on this one. He does seem to be an odd exception to the GOP’s new ‘zero tolerance’ policy on wrongdoing.

We learned this week from Robert Draper’s new book that the Decider remained convinced until as late as 2006 that Iraq had had WMD right up until the U.S. invasion:

Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs.

Compare and contrast that point of view (article of faith) with what we learned today from Sidney Blumenthal about what President Bush had been told about Iraqi WMD by then-CIA Director George Tenet in the fall of 2002:

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

Blumenthal talked to “two former senior CIA officers” who provided accounts of what Tenent briefed to Bush:

“Tenet told me he briefed the president personally,” said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush’s response was to call the information “the same old thing.” Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. “The president had no interest in the intelligence,” said the CIA officer. The other officer said, “Bush didn’t give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up.”

It’s no surprise that this President is not one to test his beliefs and conclusions against the facts, neither the old facts nor the newly emerging facts. In the strange twilight of the Bush Presidency, the new revelation about what the President was briefed on and when about WMD falls into that category of things we thought we knew but for which we lacked all of the hard evidence.