Obama slams Hillary’s Iraq authorization proposal as “convoluted.” That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.

From Bob Novak’s Q&A with the New York Times Magazine:

NYT: Your betrayal of [Valerie Plame’s] identity appalled not only Democrats but also some of your former conservative friends, like Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, who called your conduct reprehensible. Did that sting on a personal level?

Novak: I think it did. I really enjoyed Bill’s company, but Bill is an ideologue, much more than I am, and I think it was very hard for him to maintain a relationship with me when I took positions on the Iraq war and on the Middle East which were so far different from his.

Isn’t Novak calling someone an “ideologue” a bit like Dick Cheney calling someone “secretive”?

There was some talk in the spring that the Iraqi Parliament, barely able to function anyway, would break for the summer. The reaction was overwhelmingly negative in the U.S., even among White House allies, and soon after the talk disappeared.

Yesterday, Tony Snow acknowledged what the administration would prefer not to talk about: Iraqis lawmakers are scheduled to do what Bush likes to do: take August off.

The White House’s defense is straightforward enough: it doesn’t matter when Iraqi lawmakers are in session; what matters is what they’re accomplishing. That might even be a persuasive spin — if there was any political progress in Iraq at all.

With that in mind, I’m curious how congressional Republicans are going to deal with the news. In early May, war supporters were surprisingly livid about the prospects of a parliamentary vacation.

* Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.): “If they go off on vacation for two months while our troops fight — that would be the outrage of outrages.”

* Sen. John Warner (R-Va.): “That is not acceptable. An action of that consequence would send a very bad signal to the world that they don’t have the resolve that matches the resolve of the brave troops that are fighting in the battle today.”

* Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.): “I certainly hope they’re not going to take any sort of recess when the question is whether they’re going to make any progress.”

On May 8, 11 nervous House Republicans had an “unvarnished” conversation with the president about Iraq policy. One congressman said, “How can our sons and daughters spill their blood while the Iraqi government goes on vacation?” The president responded, “The vice president is over there to tell them, ‘Do not go on vacation.'”

And now they’re apparently poised to go on vacation.

In recent years, Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan has gone from being tragic to suspicious to scandalous. As you probably know, Tillman, a former NFL star who retired from football to become an Army Ranger, was killed in Afghanistan in 2004 and his death was quickly seized upon for public relations purposes. In fact, the Army said Tillman was killed by enemy gunfire when he led his team to help another group of ambushed soldiers.

That wasn’t true — Tillman died as a result of friendly fire. The Pentagon knew better, but was reluctant to say so. In March, we learned, “Just seven days after Pat Tillman’s death, a top general warned there were strong indications that it was friendly fire and President Bush might embarrass himself if he said the NFL star-turned-soldier died in an ambush…. The memo reinforces suspicions that the Pentagon was more concerned with sparing officials from embarrassment than with leveling with Tillman’s family.”

What’s more, it took five weeks for Tillman’s family to learn about the incident, in part because, “within hours of Pat Tillman’s death, the Army went into information-lockdown mode, cutting off phone and Internet connections at a base in Afghanistan, posting guards on a wounded platoon mate, and ordering a sergeant to burn Tillman’s uniform.”

In April, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on the issue, and heard U.S. Army Spc. Bryan O’Neal explain that he was told by a higher-up to conceal information. It led the committee to request materials from the White House and the Pentagon describing how and when the administration learned the circumstances of Tillman’s death.

Yesterday, the Bush gang delivered its answer: No.

The White House has refused to give Congress documents about the death of former NFL player Pat Tillman, with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding saying that certain papers relating to discussion of the friendly-fire shooting “implicate Executive Branch confidentiality interests.”

Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), the leading members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, objected to the refusal yesterday in letters to the White House and the Defense Department.

Waxman and Davis are clearly annoyed by the developments. They’ve scheduled another hearing for Aug. 1, after which, they’ll probably consider subpoenas. (In their letter to Fred Fielding, Waxman and Davis said, “We would like to avoid a confrontation over these documents, if possible, but cannot accept the deficient production the White House has provided to the Committee.”)

Stay tuned.

And then there were … still a whole lot.

Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore ended his long-shot campaign for the presidency today, saying he has been unable to raise enough money to compete for the Republican nomination.

Gilmore blamed his fundraising problems on his late entry into the race. He said he did not begin organizing his campaign until January, while most of the GOP frontrunners had been preparing to run for years.

The announcement doesn’t come as too big a surprise. Gilmore only raised about $380,000 during the first half of 2007, and of late, hasn’t even been hitting the campaign trail with any enthusiasm. He’d show up for the debates, but delivered lackluster performances. (Michael Crowley once labeled him the “Memento candidate” because, “As soon as he stops talking I forget everything he said.”)

I’m reluctant to kick a guy when he’s down, but the truth is, Gilmore’s presidential ambitions were always difficult to understand. He was a wildly unsuccessful governor, which preceded an equally unsuccessful tenure running the Republican National Committee (Karl Rove reportedly fired him).

Nevertheless, with Gilmore’s departure, the Republican field winnows to nine declared candidates, 10 if you include Fred Thompson. With Gingrich and Hagel still mulling bids, the already-enormous field could still get bigger.

As for today, so long, Jim; we hardly knew you. And in this case, we mean that literally.

On Sirius Satellite Radio, you can listen to progressive talk shows on a dedicated station. It’s called “Sirius Left.”

Listeners can also tune into a dedicated station for conservative talk radio. It’s called “Sirius Patriot.”

Rick Perlstein suggests there’s something wrong with the labeling here. It’s a good point.

The President’s Intelligence Oversight Board, a panel that has existed for decades, helps police the government’s surveillance activities. For several recent presidents, the IOB has been an important watchdog, monitoring potential abuses and legal violations.

Given the Bush gang’s record, you’d think the panel would have been working overtime the last several years. We are, after all, talking about a White House that has endorsed secret prisons, rendition policies, torture, and unaccountable domestic wiretapping without warrants. If the IOB exists to investigate intelligence and surveillance abuses, it was tailor made for George W. Bush’s presidency.

Except, it hasn’t quite worked the way it was supposed to.

An independent oversight board created to identify intelligence abuses after the CIA scandals of the 1970s did not send any reports to the attorney general of legal violations during the first 5 1/2 years of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism effort, the Justice Department has told Congress.

Although the FBI told the board of a few hundred legal or rules violations by its agents after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the board did not identify which of them were indeed legal violations. This spring, it forwarded reports of violations in 2006, officials said.

The President’s Intelligence Oversight Board — the principal civilian watchdog of the intelligence community — is obligated under a 26-year-old executive order to tell the attorney general and the president about any intelligence activities it believes “may be unlawful.” The board was vacant for the first two years of the Bush administration.

The FBI sent copies of its violation reports directly to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. But the board’s mandate is to provide independent oversight, so the absence of such communications has prompted critics to question whether the board was doing its job.

You think?

Anthony Harrington, who served as the board’s chairman for most of the Clinton administration, said, “It’s now apparent that the IOB was not actively employed in the early part of the administration. And it was a crucial period when its counsel would seem to have been needed the most…. The White House counsel’s office and the attorney general should have known and been concerned if they did not detect an active and effective IOB.”

Well, sure, they should have been. But is anyone surprised that they weren’t?

The New York Daily News reports today that the possibility of a domestic terrorist attack this summer appears high, but Americans are skeptical about the warnings.

To American who have grown skeptical of terrorism warnings, the professionals in the intelligence community say they understand. They also say this time, it could be for real.

That’s because the level of worldwide jihadist activity this year appears disturbingly familiar to those who hunted Al Qaeda even before the 9/11 attacks.

“What you’ve been seeing has had a feeling, to me, a lot like the summer of 2001, where you’ve got a lot of things happening,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said on Friday.

“It would not surprise me at all to see another terrorist event this summer in the United States,” the official told the Daily News.

Yet many Americans have grown deeply distrustful of such doomsday scenarios which rarely materialize.

This skepticism didn’t just materialize as a result of wishful thinking. Americans have grown to be suspicious of Bush administration’s warnings because so many of them have been bogus.

The “Seas of David” cult’s planned attack on the Sears Tower, the plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, the British hijacking plot, the plot to attack Los Angeles’ Library Tower, the plans at Fort Dix, and the JFK Airport plot all turned out to be less serious than advertised. And yet, in each instance, the White House touted these thwarted attacks as dodged bullets. This contributes to the public perception that the administration is less than reliable when it comes to domestic security.

For that matter, Americans have also seen the administration fiddle with the terror alert system in irresponsible ways. Two years ago, former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge acknowledged that the Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks based on flimsy evidence. “There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, ‘For that?'” Ridge told reporters.

And it certainly doesn’t help when the administration’s top official on homeland security explains that his concerns about a possible attack this summer are based on a “gut feeling.”

Yes, the Daily News report raises an important point; Americans shouldn’t take a lackadaisical attitude about a possible threat. But let’s not forget how and why the public has come to be so cynical.

The Washington Post has been running a fairly interesting series lately, monitoring the perspectives of four disparate lawmakers during the course of the Iraq war debate on the Hill — the “Anguished Moderate” (Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine), the “Conservative Democrat” (Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma), “Antiwar Liberal” (Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois), and the “Loyal Republican” (Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia.).

Today’s item on Boren included a rather inexplicable paragraph.

“We’re moving the goal posts,” Boren said with low-key Oklahoma exasperation. “The administration, frankly, has moved the goal posts forward past September, and I disagree with that. But the members of Congress who are wanting to have this vote in July are really moving the goal posts, as well.”

A congressional effort to end the war represents “moving the goal posts?” Greg Sargent explains how nonsensical this perspective really is.

Things got a little heated on this morning’s “Meet the Press.” (via TP)

Faiz fleshes out some of the details of Graham’s errors of fact and judgment.