Ahhhh, yet more evidence the New York Times is committed to forcing the filibuster back into the closet.

Senate Narrowly Backs Bush in Rejecting Debate on Increasing Time Between Deployments, July 12, 2007

Democrats Block a Vote on Bolton for the Second Time, June 21, 2005

C’mon. This one isn’t even close, folks. Please stop spinning this to obscure what’s actually happening.

Just say it: ‘Filibuster’. It gets easier every time.

(ed.note: Special thanks to this guy for doing the legwork.)

Bush appointee judge doesn’t think much of the president’s jurisprudence …

A lawyer who admitted leaking grand jury transcripts about athletes’ steroid use to The Chronicle was sentenced to 21/2 years in prison Thursday by a federal judge who upbraided President Bush for commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former vice presidential aide who faced an identical prison term on nearly identical charges.

“Under the president’s reasoning, any white-collar defendant should receive no jail time, regardless of the reprehensibility of the crime,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, a Bush appointee, said before sentencing attorney Troy Ellerman to prison.

Ellerman’s lawyer, in seeking a lesser sentence, had cited Bush’s July 2 decision to commute the prison sentence for Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. Libby was convicted of lying to federal agents and a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA operative’s identity.

Perhaps there’s some appropriateness, in as much as that in the decision that put the president in office — Bush v. Gore — the Supreme Court said that decision was a one-off reasoning which shouldn’t be held to have applicability in any other cases. Same with Scooter justice.

Romney blows through $20 million in campaign expenditures in one quarter. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

Times Journalist, 23 year old Khalid Hassan, killed in Iraq.

Tony Snow explains the Iraqi parliament’s decision to take August off …

Hmmm. Something we should know?

Over the last three months, Alaska Representative Don Young (R) has paid close to a quarter million dollars for “legal services” to Akin Gump Strauss & Hauer. (Exact figure — $242,306.27)

That’s a decent amount of money, even in the DC defense counsel world.

During yesterday’s entertaining White House press briefing, Tony Snow rolled out an oldie but a goodie.

“[T]he al Qaeda that exists today is not the al Qaeda that existed September 11, 2001. That is an al Qaeda that was a more traditional, top-down organization where you had bin Laden and a series of lieutenants and he issued orders and they carried them out.

“That organization was smashed. Three-quarters of its leadership — or, I guess, two-thirds of its leadership has either been killed or captured.”

The White House hasn’t used this line in quite a while, and for good reason — it’s a made-up number.

White House and U.S. intelligence officials declined to provide any back-up data for how they developed the new number — or even to explain the methodology that was used, which they said was classified. The absence of any explanation, as well as the timing, prompted some counterterrorism experts to deride the figure as “meaningless” and predict the revision could fuel allegations that the administration is massaging terrorism data for political purposes.

“It’s like a shell game,” said Vince Cannistraro, a former top CIA counterterrorism official. “This kind of thing is susceptible to all kinds of manipulation.”

An official with the recently disbanded 9/11 commission also dismissed the new number, noting that it was impossible to get a firm handle on precisely the number of Al Qaeda “leaders” that were in place at the time of the September 11 attacks — the definition that the CIA says it used as its baseline for the estimate.

“It was meaningless when they said two thirds and it’s meaningless when they said three fourths,” said the official, who asked not to be identified. “This sounds like it was pulled out of somebody’s orifice.”

As war supporters see it, U.S. troops need to stay in Iraq for the indefinite future in order to provide some semblance of security in the country.

Today, Nouri al Maliki effectively said our presence is no longer necessary.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday that the Iraqi army and police are capable of keeping security in the country when American troops leave “any time they want,” though he acknowledged the forces need further weapons and training.

The embattled prime minister sought to show confidence at a time when congressional pressure is growing for a withdrawal and the Bush administration reported little progress had been made on the most vital of a series of political benchmarks it wants al-Maliki to carry out.

Al-Maliki said difficulty in enacting the measures was “natural” given Iraq’s turmoil.

But one of his top aides, Hassan al-Suneid, rankled at the assessment, saying the U.S. was treating Iraq like “an experiment in an American laboratory.” He sharply criticized the U.S. military, saying it was committing human rights violations, embarrassing the Iraqi government with its tactics and cooperating with “gangs of killers” in its campaign against al-Qaida in Iraq.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told reporters earlier this week that a U.S. withdrawal would make Iraq’s chaos worse, but Maliki dismissed his concerns, saying, “We say in full confidence that we are able, God willing, to take the responsibility completely in running the security file if the international forces withdraw at any time they want.” In other words, “We can take it from here.”

Kevin Drum noted the other day, “Both the American public and the Iraqi public want us to leave Iraq. However, both the American government and the Iraqi government want us to stay. So we’re staying. This is called ‘democracy promotion.'”

In light of today’s comments, however, it’s even more tilted. Americans and Iraqis want to see a withdrawal, and the Iraqi government is indifferent to our ongoing presence.

Any chance this might change a few Republican votes on the Hill?

The estimable Bill Moyers explored the “I” word on PBS last night, discussing George W. Bush’s “unique” approach to the presidency with conservative attorney Bruce Fein, Associate Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan, and The Nation’s John Nichols.

Here’s the money quote from the clip:

“[Bush’s crimes are more] worrisome than Clinton’s because he is seeking more institutionally to cripple checks and balances and the authority of Congress and the judiciary to superintend his assertions of power. He has claimed the authority to tell Congress they don’t have any right to know what he’s doing with relation to spying on American citizens, using that information in any way that he wants in contradiction to a federal statute called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He’s claimed authority to say he can kidnap people, throw them into dungeons abroad, dump them out into Siberia without any political or legal accountability. These are standards that are totally anathema to a democratic society devoted to the rule of law.”

Not surprisingly, nearly the entire Republican establishment has been silent on Sen. David Vitter’s (R-La.) sex scandal. Not that I blame them; it’s a tough one to spin away.

But as reader D.K. noted, some Vitter allies are starting to speak up.

“We all think that we’re not vulnerable to something like that happening,” [Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.)] said, “but the fact is this can be a very lonely and isolating place to be away from your family. So I’m certainly not going to judge him because I don’t want that kind of pressure on me.”

Is that a confession?

Well, no, probably not, but it was a strikingly odd thing to say. Here we have another very conservative senator from a very conservative state, who ran on a “family values” platform. He doesn’t want to condemn Vitter’s personal failings? Fine, no problem. He’s steering clear of the scandal because he thinks he might be “vulnerable to something like that happening” to him? Like I said, odd.

As for DeMint’s substantive point, I’m not sure why Vitter would find DC such a “lonely” place, but either way, it wouldn’t explain his related appetites back in Louisiana.