Fear-mongering, obstructionism and threat-inflation: all in all, a proven recipe for gutting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Looks like the GOP Presidential candidates will be showing up at CNN’s YouTube debate, after all. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

So Karl Rove is resigning. I got up in the middle of the night last night and since I was awake I flipped on my computer. And lo and behold Karl Rove is resigning. Now, I have to admit that when I first saw this, given the way it was announced I figured it was just one of those late in an administration departures. Lots of big wigs don’t stay around until the final day of an eight year term. They leave to get a jump start on the rest of their lives and leave it to the B Team to round out the second term.

But then I thought, who am I kidding? Am I channelling Jay Carney? The innocent explanation is never right with these guys.

Of course, if there’s more to this resignation, it’s not necessarily that easy to narrow down the list of possibilities since Rove is connected to pretty much every instance of high-level wrongdoing. And then there’s the extra added wrinkle that if anything the White House’s ability to keep Rove off the witness stand is decreased, if only marginally, by his leaving the White House. With the recent news of cutbacks on funding of human intelligence in the intel budget, there’s the possibility that there were no more CIA agents whose cover could be blown and he decided to move on to greener pastures.

So what do you think? Why now?

Late Update: Special Rove resignation presentation of TPMtv’s look at Karl Rove’s 2006 voter suppression speech …

In case you missed it, fibbing goof Bill O’Reilly goes up against fibbing goof Bill O’Reilly on Fox News’ coverage of John Edwards …

Iiiiiit’s a charming dinette set! Actually no – rather, this past Saturday Mitt Romney won the Ames Straw Poll, taking 32% of a surprisingly low-turnout vote. In today’s Sunday Show Roundup episode of TPMtv, we hear from the winning contestant himself and consult the Sunday morning pundits to find out about all the fabulous prizes.

I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know by noting that being mayor on 9/11 doesn’t give Rudy Giuliani any expertise on terrorism, no matter what he might think. But it’s only crystallized in my mind in recent days — from watching him speak and seeing who his advisors are — that Giuliani appears to know virtually nothing about either the Middle East or counter-terrorism policy. And he looks very much like another George W. Bush in the making. Indeed, not the President Bush we now have, who has slowly lost the greater proportion of his more fanatic deputies and has Bob Gates and Condi Rice as his two main policy advisors, but the President Bush of 2001.

With Giuliani you have a man who appears to have very little familiarity with the Middle East but does have a personality which prioritizes gut-instinct, point-scoring and aggression. And like Bush he appears to believe he can make up for his lack of knowledge and experience with attitude and ass-kicking. To round things out, his foreign policy advisory team looks quite like the crowd of neocons who were advising President Bush while he was running for president. If anything they look like a group that was too extreme to gain entry into the original ‘vulcans’ group.

The fact that he set up his pre-9/11 counter-terrorism HQ as a love nest may make for good sizzle. But the direction he’d take US policy on the Middle East would likely be a genuine disaster.

New York TPM Reader KB on why the catastrophe of a Rudy presidency may force us to embrace the self-respect fiasco of Romneyism …

Josh, I totally agree with you about the danger to the Republic Rudy represents. He is totally and utterly unsuited to the oval office. Which is why, as allergic as you are to Romney’s phoniness, you have to see that as plastic and anodyne as Romney may be, he doesn’t represent quite the same danger as Rudy at the controls. As a Dem I’m hoping Romney gets the nomination, not only for this reason, but also because the media tends to run with the hero worshiping b——t narratives. No matter how hard we try, the narrative of a Rudy nomination will not be the one from the Village Voice’s Wayne Barett. It will be the one from Roger Ailes’s Fox News. Here’s to rooting for Mitt…

Also, very much a good point that the Fox News, in addition to operating as an adjunct of the Republican party as usual will also fall clearly behind Rudy since that’s what Roger Ailes wants.

For those of you who follow Turkish politics, you’ll be interested to learn what I take it is the at least somewhat surprising news that Prime Minister Erdogan has renominated (or I guess technically proposed) Abdullah Gul as the next President of Turkey.

Gul’s nomination was what precipitated the mini-crisis in Turkey that was resolved by the calling of new elections, which Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party won decisively.

My understanding had been that most observers expected that Erdogan, with a renewed popular mandate behind him, would nevertheless make the conciliatory gesture of nominating someone else beside Gul. But apparently that’s not the choice he’s made.

Hillary to shore up minority support with black celebrity fundraiser while Obama tests out events with smaller crowds. Those items and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

Is it me or is the most remarkable thing about Karl Rove’s resignation that it seems almost like a non-event? I had the feeling as the day wore on that all of us in the news and commentary business were trying to make it a big event. But somehow it just wasn’t there.

Rove has been one of the two or three central, polarizing figures of the decade — an often feared and hated figure among Democrats, at the center of most of the major political scandals of the Bush era, the architect (or so it seemed) of a Republican dominance slated to last a generation. Little more than a year ago you could find a half dozen newly-minted books on the shelves explaining the perpetual motion machine of right-wing dominance he had created. And yet today, when he resigns, I sense that no one really has much to say about it.

Yes, every politics or hard news publication has at least a couple articles marking the moment. But not with much ooomph or much to say.

In part this must be because Rove’s departure seems unequal to his billing. It fits no one’s expectations. He’s certainly not leaving in triumph. And, for the moment, not in handcuffs either.

As I wrote years ago now, Rove’s whole model of political advocacy and organization was built on a confidence game. Say improbable things are true often enough, and confidently enough, and the believing of it by enough people will make it so. The pyramid scheme, borrow-against-tomorrow nature of their game now seems exposed for all to see — whether it’s in the agony of Iraq or more prosaically in low state in which he appears to be leaving the Republican party. But judged in purely amoral, functional terms, for three straight elections, it was quite a run. It was only because of that improbable string of successes that many people, deep into the 2006 election cycle, still refused to believe what the polls were manifestly showing them.

I continue to think that there’s an unrevealed factor behind Rove departure. But at this point it almost doesn’t matter. This feels like a non-event because the story is already played out. The question of Iraq remains bitter and intense. But on the cynicism of Bush-Rove rule, its damage to the country and its destructiveness to the Republican party, across a broad swath of the electorate, it’s difficult to find much of an argument. So really what is there left to say?