Greetings. I was away for a couple days because I was serving jury duty. Like many of you, I suspect, I have mixed feelings when I get called for jury duty. On the one hand I feel a strong civic obligation. On the other, I feel the tug of all my professional responsibilities. And in this case in particular I was anxious because we’d just relaunched the site. So I felt particularly pained and uncomfortable not being around when we were getting the new set up up and running, since so much of it is new and different from what we’ve done before.

The only jury I’ve ever served on was one in Washington, DC about four years ago. It was a fairly straightforward drug sale at an open air drug market, cigarettes dipped in PCP, two charges. I think I was one of one or two jurors who wasn’t willing to convict on the first round. And we ended up convicting on one count (possession) and acquitting on the other (sale). There’s a certain illogic to the combination, I grant you. But in the particular set of factual findings we had to make there was a logic to it.

In the everyday sense of reasoning it was fairly clear the defendant was guilty. But it was also clear that several key facts the police claimed had happened could not have happened — it came down to pretty straightforward physics that even I can understand, like people not being able to see through buildings. There was the backdrop of the draconian punishments for small time drug crimes. But I set that aside as I was instructed to. But I could not see convicting the kid when it was clear that two of the central fact witnesses for the prosecution lied about key details to make the case stronger. We, the jury, argued for some time and decided to acquit on one count and convict on another where there was physical evidence that appeared impossible to dispute.

In any case, this time — back to the present — I was nervous about getting impanelled for the reasons I’ve described above and I had this and that person tell me their bright idea about how to get oneself knocked out of contention in the jury selection process. So I showed up yesterday morning, waited, didn’t get called, didn’t get called, then finally got called with twelve other perspective jurors down to the civil branch on the third floor.

We were escorted into a spacious and well-lighted closet for the voir dire process. One of the two attorneys, a snappily dressed man, began describing the case to us. And it became clear it was a medical malpractice claim. He gave us a brief thumbnail description of the case. And it occurred to me that having married into a family of doctors probably wouldn’t make me a particularly attractive candidate. Then the defense attorney began discussing the case and in passing told us her client’s name, the defendant.

And I’d gone to college with him. That’s a decent number of years ago now. But not a common name, the right kind of doctor, the right location. Obviously him. And not just a name I remembered, but a friend, if one I haven’t seen or heard of in going on twenty years. My hand popped up. “I think I know one of the parties to the case.” At which I drew a bunch of sharp stares like I’d just popped a balloon. And that pretty much was the end of my jury duty this time.

I got sent back to the waiting pond, came back this morning and got my walking papers at lunch.

Huge new claim of executive privilege from the White House is about to be reported in the Post.

Late Update: And here it is …

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals.

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, “whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.”

And this …

Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration’s stance “astonishing.”

“That’s a breathtakingly broad view of the president’s role in this system of separation of powers,” Rozell said. “What this statement is saying is the president’s claim of executive privilege trumps all.”

We received such a well-considered email last night from TPM Reader MA that I’m going to post the whole thing:

Your post . . . about the slowdown in cases in San Francisco got me thinking about the larger bureaucratic issue associated with more than half a dozen years under Bush.

This is a relatively trivial incident, but a while back I attempted to get my passport renewed and discovered the wait times had doubled (partly because of the new rule requiring travelers to Canada to have passports) — trivial, yes, but it also highlights some of the more mundane effects of an administration run by people who have a fundamental antipathy toward government service and government programs.

This gets writ large in the case of incidents like Hurricane Katrina, the prosecution of the Iraq war and so on…but it also gets writ small in thousands of details of everyday bureaucratic life — especially as the Bush influence trickles down through the bureaucracy from political appointees to career employees.

If the governing Bush/Cheney philosophy is that the public sector doesn’t work, that it is inherently not just inefficient and corrupt, but antagonistic to citizens and individuals, this philosophy has a way of slithering its way into the workings of the system itself — not just in the case of high profile corruption scandals, but also, again on a more mundane level, in the day-to-day operation of government bureaucracies.

And here’s the weird thing, even though that sounds so unexciting, there’s something almost stifling about imagining a bureaucracy that really is antagonistic to individuals — one that not only slows down, but finds some vindication in throwing up road blocks, thwarting citizen requests, and, in the end, not serving the public. I have family members who lived in former communist countries — and that’s really how the bureaucracy was there, and life under those circumstances was made much more difficult, bureaucratic responsibilities increasingly cumbersome, much of the time the system just didn’t work, and had to be gamed (or bribed).

Although I have large scale concerns about Bush’s handling of the war, the economy, and so on, I also have some more micro scale concerns about what his philosophy of governance means for everyday life and our everyday interactions with the bureaucracy. Indeed, this scale, though more mundane, is also the one that in some ways affects the majority of the population more directly, even if much less dramatically. I’ve lived in places where the bureaucracy functions quite well, and where citizens take a certain pride in the fact that the government serves them.

The idea of living in a country where the administration’s goal is to demonstrate just how bad government is/can be scares me at this very prosaic level — I want my schools and courts and inspection agencies and passport agencies and so on to be run by people who really believe in government service and in the fact that the government can work effectively to serve the populace. Bush seems to be doing everything he can to dismantle such a world — and he risks fueling a vicious circle in so doing.

Sounds like he really may be the guy to carry on the Bush legacy …

In an apparent violation of the law, a controverisal aide to ex-Gov. Mitt Romney created phony law enforcement badges that he and other staffers used on the campaign trail to strong-arm reporters, avoid paying tolls and trick security guards into giving them immediate access to campaign venues, sources told the Herald.

The bogus badges were part of the bizarre security tactics allegedly employed by Jay Garrity, the director of operations for Romney who is under investigation for impersonating a law enforcement officer in two states. Garrity is on a leave of absence from the campaign while the probe is ongoing.

A campaign source said Garrity directed underlings on Romney’s presidential staff to use the badges at events nationwide to create an image of security and to ensure that the governor’s events went smoothly.

Earlier reports suggested this was just Garrity’s hobbyhorse. But if the whole staff was involved, did Mitt really not know?

“America is too consumed with Iraq,” says Rudy Giuliani. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

Now that the administration has told Congress where they can stick their subpoena, what’s next?

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking in March about the Iraq debate in Congress:

I believe that the debate here on the Hill and the issues that have been raised have been helpful in bringing pressure to bear on the Maliki government and on the Iraqis in knowing that there is a very real limit to American patience in this entire enterprise.

Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman, in a July 16 letter to Sen. Hillary Clinton:

Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.

Alberto Gonzales went behind closed doors on the Hill yesterday where he was peppered with questions about that notorious visit to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft while he was hospitalized:

In a closed-door session, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes said members were especially interested in the reasons behind Gonzales’ controversial 2004 visit to the hospital bedside of John Ashcroft, reportedly to pressure the ailing attorney general to endorse Bush’s surveillance program. Ashcroft, said to have been barely conscious at the time, refused.

Gonzales did not express any regret, Reyes said after the hearing ended.

“He, I thought, explained it very well in terms of why they had gone there,” said Reyes, D-Texas, declining to provide specifics because many details are classified. . . .

Details of the hospital visit, first revealed in congressional testimony by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, intensified calls by Democrats and some Republicans for Gonzales’ resignation. The attorney general has shown no signs that he will step down.

Congressional Republicans, by and large, still have Gonzales’ back:

Ranking Republican Pete Hoekstra urged Congress to move on from speculation over the hospital visit, which he likened to a discussion of “exactly what (flavor) Jell-O Ashcroft was eating in the hospital.”

With statesmen like Hoekstra, it’s hard to believe the GOP lost its majority.

Update: Speaking of Comey, he’s touting Patrick Fitzgerald as a future attorney general.

Late update: Speaking of Fitzgerald, he will be a guest on the NPR show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me.” The show was taped last evening, and Fitzgerald received a scooter as a parting gift, engraved with “To Patrick Fitzgerald, USA, This one will stay where you put it.” [via War and Piece.]

As you probably know, on Monday TPMmuckraker’s Laura McGann broke the story of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) sweetheart land deal with a big Alaska political contributor, Bob Penney, who’s also involved in the investigation of fellow Sen. Stevens (R-AK). It’s what everyone seems to be talking about in Alaska today and perhaps soon in Washington too.

Yesterday the Anchorage Daily News picked up Laura’s story. And at this point it’s really quite clear that Murkowski got an illegal gift to the tune of possibly $150,000. Perhaps a bit less, but possibly a bit more. One way or another it seems pretty clear that Penney sold her this piece of choice riverfront land (where there seems to be amazing fishing — believe me, I’m jealous) for about half price.

So today I’m reading the ADN’s follow-up in which Murkowski and various pals try to explain away what happened.

Here’s what one defender, Buzz Kyllonen, tells the paper. “They’ve been friends with Penney for years and years and years, and he probably said, ‘I’ll sell for a whole lot less than I would somebody walking down the street.”

Well, okay, I think I can probably sign on for that explanation too.

But Penney’s explanation was even better. From the ADN …

Penney said Wednesday that the land had not been for sale but he offered it because he wanted Murkowski and her family as neighbors. On Thursday Murkowski reiterated that they were old friends.

Imagine that, a politically-wired Alaska moneyman wants the state’s junior senator to live next door to him. Who can question that?

Now, Murkowski says they’re old friend; they go back to grade school or something. But remember, Murkowski inherited her senate seat (though she subsequently won it in her own right) from her pop, Frank Murkowski, who was senator from 1980 to 2002 and a big player in state politics for another decade before that. So for Lisa, being pals with someone since way before she became senator doesn’t mean the same thing as it woud for an ordinary mortal.

In any case, here’s how Murkowski says it all came down …

She said the family sold its house in Anchorage because her sons will be leaving for school and she and her husband wanted to be on the Kenai, a river whose salmon first drew Martell to Alaska. When she mentioned that to Penney, she said, he offered the lot.

“And I remember saying, ‘Oh yeah, but I can’t buy a lot from you. I know you,'” she said. “And he said, ‘Lisa, you know everybody in the state.”

Good gracious. So apparently, Murkowski knew there was a problem buying the land from Penney. But he reassured her that Alaska was a small state and she knew everyone. So it wasn’t a problem. Sort of like he gave her a quick impromptu ethics advisory. And then they agreed he’d sell it to her for half price.

It helps to have a lot of friends.

Anyway, there are a few other wrinkles to this story. This hasn’t gotten into our reporting that much. But while Laura was reporting on this story over the last few weeks one thing that came up was a series of very weird little details about Murkowski’s disclosure reports. Some things that were supposed to be disclosed about this deal weren’t. Then on forms where she did disclose there were valuation sections that happened for some reason not to be checked. Then where a date was supposed to be listed a key digit was left off, which made it impossible to know when the transaction had occurred. Taken in total, each individual snafu could be written off as a mistake. But taken together, they made it virtually impossible to see what had happened unless you independently knew exactly what to look for.

From an editor’s perspective it was a bit hard to know how to treat this. You don’t want to go too far out on a thin reed dealing with what could be mere errors in filling out the form. Knowing what we know now though I don’t think there’s much question that Murkowski knew this purchase was a big problem and the forms were filled out or not filled out in such a way as to kick up as much dust as possible.

Turns out there’s one place GOP prez candidates spent a lot more than their Dem rivals last quarter: direct mail. Don’t want to read too much into one factoid or imply that direct mail is an outmoded campaign money technology. But it was very much a key pillar of what the late 20th century GOP machine was built on. And I would imagine the political future belongs to the digital equivalents of direct mail.

I’d be curious to hear from our political and campaign operative readers about whether I’m reading too much into these numbers or whether the GOP campaign infrastructure is slower to make the switch.