For about two centuries it was widely understood that being black at all was a disqualifying qualification for being elected president. So why don’t more people see it at as more than vaguely nauseating that the first black candidate for president with a realistic chance of getting the job is continually asked if he’s black enough?

Roll Call (sub.req.): Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS) expected to retire.

Looks like the voting in the 2008 Presidential election just might start in 2007 after all. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

At Huffington Post, Arianna and her crew have been following this angle of the Utah mine story. And it really deserves a lot more attention. We’ve seen a series of these mine tragedies in recent years. And pretty much every time it ends up being a mine — not surprisingly — with a terrible record of safety violations.

Again, that’s not exactly a shocking correlation. But it does throw into sharper relief the essential fact that these are not random lightning bolts of tragedy visited on small towns in middle America. These are guys who got killed because they worked for companies that routinely broke the rules put in place to keep their employees alive.

And there’s more. It turns out that the guy in charge of mine safety for the federal government, Assistant Secretary of Labor Richard Stickler, couldn’t even get approved by the Senate back when it was under Republican control because his own record on safety issues was so questionable. President Bush had to put him in with a recess appointment.

Perhaps it’s not time to assign fault while active rescue operations are underway. But once that’s over, maybe it would be worth the networks taking a tenth of the time they use milking ratings from these mine sagas and cast a little light on how a lot of this is preventable if the mine owners would stop breaking the rules and the federal government stopped looking the other way.

Deal?

It seems that 20-year career Foreign Service officer Patrick Syring wasn’t cut out for bringing America’s message of tolerance, peace and democracy to the Middle East.

Last summer, while the bloody but inconclusive war between Israel and Hezbollah raged over the skies of Israel and Lebanon, Syring reached out to James Zogby, the highly-respected head of the Arab-American Institute to let him know that “The only good Lebanese is a dead Lebanese. The only good Arab is a dead Arab.”

That was in a phone message left on Mr. Zogby’s voice mail.

Later he followed up in an email, noting that “You wicked evil Hezbollah-supporting Arabs should burn in the fires of hell for eternity and beyond. The United States would be safer without you.” And while Zogby does not represent the Israelis, Syring made a point of praising them for “bombing Lebanon back to the Stone Age where it belongs.”

And if all Syring’s other shortcomings weren’t enough it seems he’s also a little lacking in brainpower since he identified himself in his voice mails and sent the emails from his personal email account.

Syring retired from the Foreign Service last month and was indicted on Wednesday for sending threatening messages by phone and email.

Late Update: It seems Syring sort of made a habit of this. In a letter to the editor in response to Robert Schmuhl’s ‘Going our Way: A New Foreign Policy‘, a foreign policy think piece published in the Notre Dame alumni magazine, Syring wrote, “Professor Schmuhl’s implicit defense of the wicked regime of Saddam Hussein, and his sympathy for Arab terror, is abhorrent and despicable. His evil brings shame to American scholarship and to the University. He should burn in hell for eternity for the terrorism he advocates.”

Also nice to know, back in 1994, Syring was working out of the US Embassy in Lebanon.

How much did John Ashcroft really know about the warrantless surveillance program? As Alberto Gonzales (repeatedly) said on July 24 in testimony, it’s “complicated.”

New polls find Edwards grabbing a lead in Iowa, while Hillary is well ahead in Nevada and California. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

Wow, that’s great news. CNN is running as a breaking news headline that President Putin says that Russia will resume regular long-range flights of its ‘strategic’ bombers. To decode what that means, during the Cold War the US and the USSR both keep a fleet of bombers packed with nuclear weapons in the air at all times. That’s one third of the trident — ballistic missiles in the ground, strategic bombers in the air and nuclear submarines hidden in the vast depths of the sea, together making each sides’ nuclear arsenal impervious to a first strike knock out blow.

That was the theory at least.

If memory serves both sides stopped regular flights of their strategic bomber fleets during the first Bush administration.

Obviously, having them in the air doesn’t mean they’re going to be used. And they can be scrambled at any time. But unlike ‘targeting’ of nuclear missiles, which is I think literally a matter of keying in a few numbers to a computer, not having these jets permanently in the air is more than a symbolic sign of having the finger a bit off the nuclear trigger.

And it raises an important point. Not everything that happens these days is uniquely President Bush’s fault. Vladimir Putin is no great shakes either. And you can debate whether this is more a reaction to the White House’s aggressive push for missile defense shields and military deals with countries on Russia’s border or more part of Putin’s own growing authoritarianism, trying to stoke xenophobia and increased militarism.

What is not debatable however is that there is more going on in the world — more opportunities and more threats — than what happens in the few hundred mile radius around the ancient capital of Baghdad. There is, as we can see, Russia, which still has a few thousand nuclear warheads which could cause some serious headaches. There’s China, a vast economic and potential military power that will bulk larger and larger in our lives over the course of this century. There’s Pakistan, India, half a billion people to our south speaking Spanish and Portuguese. The list goes on and on.

But our whole national dialog, hundreds of billions of dollars and a lot more are going to Iraq. And more generally the fantasy 450 year long-war epic battle with the Islamofascists. We’re close to breaking the US Army and Marine Corps with over-extended deployments. And in hotspots around the world, there’s a vacuum, as the world sort of rushes past us. In many ways this is the greatest danger in Iraq, not that our future as a nation is at stake in staying (as the right would have it) or even that it’s necessarily at stake in leaving but that our engagement with the country has fixed us with a dangerous national myopia which is letting many other problems fester unattended for going on a decade.

Last night we brought you the news of Patrick Syring, the 20-year career Foreign Service officer, who has been indicted for harassing the staff of the Arab Institute with a string of phone messages and emails saying among other things that the “only good Arab is a dead Arab”, that various members of the staff were “wicked evil Hezbollah-supporting Arabs [who] should burn in the fires of hell for eternity and beyond” and lauding the Israelis for “bombing Lebanon back to the Stone Age where it belongs.”

Turns out the AP story left a fair amount of Syring’s tirades out of their story.

Here’s the indictment with all the details.

Late Update: For the record, the folks at the Arab American Institute, the ones on the receiving end of Syring’s abuse, released this statement …

Yesterday afternoon we were notified that the grand jury has returned two indictments charging a long-time State Department employee with Threatening Communication in Interstate Commerce and violating the civil rights of the employees of the Arab American Institute.

James Zogby, the president of AAI, said, “We are pleased with word that the grand jury has returned two indictments. This has been a matter of concern to me and my entire office. The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has been responsive, and we feel protected. The threats were both intimidating and frightening – and the fact that the defendant was a 20-year career officer at the Department of State made it of even greater concern.”

You know Alberto Gonzales the liar. But do you know the lies? Here’s our rundown of the top six untruths (or grossly misleading half-truths) that have fallen from our attorney general’s mouth.