It’s disappointing, but not surprising. After the president scuttled a compromise between Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and congressional Democrats, Senate Dems did what many expected they would do: they caved.

The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government’s terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order.

The 60 to 28 vote, which was quickly denounced by civil rights and privacy advocates, came after Democrats in the House failed to win support for more modest changes that would have required closer court supervision of government surveillance. The legislation, which is expected to go before the House today, would expand the government’s authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas.

Bush is getting practically everything he asked for. Indeed, under Bush’s warrantless-search program launched in 2001, the administration could conduct oversight-free surveillance only if it suspected someone on the call was a terrorist. Under the bill passed by the Senate yesterday, that condition no longer exists.

As Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said, “If this bill becomes law, Americans who communicate with a person abroad can count on one thing: The NSA may be listening.”

As for the deal struck by Dems and McConnell, the Speaker’s office told the Washington Post, “We did everything [McConnell] wants, and now he says he doesn’t like the bill. They didn’t move the goal post; they moved the stadium.”

Harry Reid emphasized that yesterday’s measure is temporary, and that the Senate will revisit the issue in six months. That’s not exactly reassuring. For one thing, Dems will be just as fearful in February as they are now. For another, that’s six months of the administration having largely unchecked surveillance power.

TPM alum Matt Yglesias discusses blogger status anxiety and other topics at Yearly Kos …

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) sat down this week with Salon’s Walter Shapiro, which was a bit of a surprise, given that the magazine and the senator probably don’t agree on too much right now.

Most of Lieberman’s comments were about what you’d expect, but one exchange stood out.

JL: I worry that whoever gets the Democratic nomination will have a hard time scampering back to assure people that they’re prepared to take on the Islamist extremists and [any] other nation that threatens our security.

WS: Turning to another thing —

JL: They don’t use that. You’ll have to check it. But they don’t use the term “Islamist extremism” or “Islamist terrorism” in the debates.

WS: Are you saying it’s “political correctness” on the part of the Democrats?

JL: You’ve got to acknowledge the problem.

This, of course, is the tack Rudy Giuliani has enthusiastically embraced. It’s not enough to support aggressive counter-terrorism measures; for Lieberman and Giuliani, a person’s fealty to the cause is based largely on whether he or she is willing to use the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” next to each other.

I’m curious, then, what Lieberman and Giuliani have to say about the Bush White House, which John Dickerson noted this week, also refrains from using the phrase.

Are Bush and Cheney excessively “politically correct” in Lieberman’s eyes? And to what extent does he see that as “the problem”?

It’s been a dispiriting week in Iraq. The largest Sunni Arab bloc quit the Maliki government. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was admittedly discouraged over the lack of political progress in Iraq and conceded the administration “might have misjudged the difficulty of achieving reconciliation between Iraq’s sectarian factions.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs nominee Navy Adm. Michael Mullen acknowledged “there does not appear to be much political progress” in Iraq. Asked about success, Mullen added, “[B]ased on the…lack of political reconciliation…I would be concerned about whether we’d be winning or not.”

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, meanwhile, is “increasingly unable to pull the government out of its paralysis,” and is frequently “consumed by conspiracy theories.” What’s more, Maliki, who vowed in November that Iraqi security forces would be fully ready to take control by June 2007, now concedes he suspects U.S. troops may be needed in Iraq for at least another five years.

Even Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, the right’s two new favorite thinkers, have backpedaled away from their controversial New York Times op-ed that had been quickly embraced by the GOP establishment.

With all of this discouraging news coming just within the last several days, it should come as no surprise that William Kristol is now completely convinced that he has the momentum on his side.

For the Iraq war’s opponents, July began as a month of hope. It ended in retreat. It began with Democratic unity in proclaiming the inevitability of American defeat. It ended with respected military analysts — Democrats, no less! — reporting that the situation on the ground had improved, and that the war might be winnable. It began with a plan for a series of votes in Congress that were supposed to stampede nervous Republicans against the continued prosecution of the war. It ended with the GOP spine stiffened, no antiwar legislation passed, and the Democratic Congress adjourning in disarray, with approval ratings lower than President Bush’s.

It takes a special kind of worldview that leads a person to look at one discouraging development after another, and conclude, “Finally, everything’s going my way!”

Two years ago, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) raised more than a few eyebrows — here and around the world — when he publicly suggested bombing Mecca. On a talk show, the host asked Tancredo how the U.S. should respond to a domestic nuclear terrorist attack. “Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites,” Tancredo answered.

When the host asked if he was talking about destroying Mecca, Tancredo said, “Yeah.”

Not surprisingly, Tancredo’s comments were quickly disseminated in the Middle East, where audiences that are already pre-disposed to distrust the West heard that a U.S. lawmaker from the president’s political party was talking openly “taking out” the most sacred of Islamic holy sites.

This week, Tancredo’s was at it again: “If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina,” the GOP presidential candidate said.

Yesterday, Bay Buchanan, a senior Tancredo adviser, defended the comments, insisting that Tancredo’s approach “shows that we mean business.”

Tom Casey, a deputy spokesman for the State Department, told CNN that Tancredo’s comments were “reprehensible” and “absolutely crazy.”

I think it’s nice that in these contentious, politically-divisive times, Democrats and Bush administration officials can put aside their differences and agree that Tom Tancredo is a loony.

A new poll finds that most GOPers — and less than half of self-described conservatives — still don’t know that Rudy is pro-choice. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.

We’ve known for quite a while that the political affairs office at the White House conducted partisan, political briefings, despite the Hatch Act’s prohibitions on politicking in government buildings with government employees.

In April, we learned there were at least 20 private briefings on GOP electoral prospects before last November’s elections, for senior officials in at least 15 government agencies — all of which are covered by federal restrictions on partisan political activity. In July, the story got slightly worse when we learned the campaign briefings were also given to the Bush administration’s top diplomats, several ambassadors, and officials at the State Department and the Peace Corps.

With all of this in mind, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last week whether “the leadership of the Department of Justice” had participated in any of these political briefings.

“Not that I’m aware of…. I don’t believe so, sir,” Gonzales said.

Oops.

Justice Department officials attended at least a dozen political briefings at the White House since 2001, including some meetings led by Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser, and others that were focused on election trends prior to the 2006 midterm contest, according to documents released yesterday.

If political norms still had any meaning, this might be the kind of revelation that would force an Attorney General to resign. After all, a) there’s no legitimate reason for Karl Rove to brief DoJ employees on individual congressional races; and b) Gonzales testified that he didn’t believe the briefings happened at all.

Of course, political norms lost their meaning a few years ago, so there will probably be no adverse consequences for this whatsoever.

Occasionally, presidential candidates are going to embrace bad, unpopular ideas. That’s to be expected, I suppose; no candidate is going to get every issue exactly right.

But Bill Richardson’s support for a Balanced Budget Amendment is just bizarre. He not only supports a bad policy, but he brags about it, as if he assumes others are going to agree with him.

Apparently, the New Mexico governor touted his BBA policy at YearlyKos this afternoon.

Oh, man. Bill Richardson just repeated his call for a Balanced Budget Amendment to the constitution. The audience, showing what I think is a pretty impressive level of knowledge of budget policy, erupted in boos. And rightly so. This is a terrible idea. Fortunately, Richardson’s not going to be president, but imagine if we’d had such a thing in place during, say, the second world war. I dunno what Richardson thinks he’s doing.

Richardson didn’t slip up and accidentally mention this today; he frequently plugs his support for a constitutional amendment on this on the stump, and emphasizes his position in interviews.

It’s hard to imagine what Richardson hopes to accomplish by endorsing such a remarkably bad idea. Occasionally, deficit spending is absolutely necessary to the health of the economy. Indeed, during a recession or a war, deficits are practically essential.

The BBA is a rather cheap gimmick and an awful policy, which is why the audience was less than receptive today. The sooner Richardson drops the proposal from his repertoire, the better.

Following up on an item from today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup, I think that Pew poll about Rudy Giuliani is especially significant because it reminds us of a point that’s gone largely unnoticed.

A few weeks ago, Gallup conducted a national poll and found that three out of four Republicans (74%) believe Giuliani would make an “acceptable” GOP presidential nominee. None of the other Republican hopefuls came close.

The conventional wisdom suggested that these results, mirrored in other polls, spoke to a key development in Republican politics. Despite Giuliani’s support for abortion rights and gay rights as mayor, the GOP faithful apparently no longer consider his social positions a disqualifier in a presidential race.

But the conventional wisdom didn’t consider one nagging detail: most Republicans don’t know Giuliani’s positions on the hot-button, culture-war issues that have driven GOP politics for a generation.

As Eric Kleefeld explained, the new poll from the Pew Research Center found that when Republicans and GOP-leaners “are asked if they can name the Republican presidential candidate who is pro-choice, only 41% could correct name Rudy Giuliani. Among self-described conservatives, the answer wasn’t much better at a mere 47% correct.”

This is similar to results of a Pew Research poll from June, when fewer than half of Republicans realized that Giuliani has always supported abortion rights.

I haven’t seen any data on the subject, but I’d guess that an even higher percentage of the GOP probably doesn’t know that Giuliani supported gay rights and has a record as a thrice-married adulterer, either.

Maybe Republican voters care about this, maybe not. But for every poll that shows the former NYC mayor as the frontrunner, the political world should pause a moment to consider just how many of his supporters appreciate these details — and how many are likely to hear about them from Giuliani’s GOP rivals before voters head to the polls next year.

A heavily editorializing report on Yearly Kos from the AP’s Ron Fournier.

Late Update: TPMtv interviews the very same Ron Fournier: