Great Spencer Ackerman line from this afternoon …

Bush’s address to a Cleveland business organization was heavy on his old standards. Failure in Iraq will have “serious consequences for the security of your children.” (And no, he didn’t mean that as an apology.)

Richard Carmona, the very angry former Surgeon General, testified before a House committee yesterday. Marvel at the Bush administration’s ability to thoroughly politicize a largely symbolic position.

We’re currently working on putting together a Rudy Docket, a list of all Giuliani appointees who have managed to be indicted for major crimes, caught carousing in one form or another, accepting pay-offs or whatever. But I was thinking it would be interesting to have like a Rudy futures market — trying to figure out in advance who was likely to be engulfed in a major scandal or caught committing serious felonies so Rudy could hurry up and appoint them to something while the getting was so good.

In any case, that aside, so far we’ve got Kerik (wenching, bribery, assorted corruption), Ravenel (coke dealing), Ravenel Sr. (history of racist comments), Vitter (patron of prostitutes) and …? Who else can you think of? Let us know.

Karl Rove’s former aide Sara Taylor is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning about the U.S. attorney firings. According to her opening statement, she won’t say much, but she might say something. We’ll be covering it over at TPMmuckraker.

So what is a ‘fishing rodeo’? If you were reading the latest on Sen. Vitter (R) last night here on TPM, you’ll know that Vitter met one of his several alleged Madam’s at one a few years back down in Louisiana.

Now, I’m actually a pretty experienced angler. But I’d never heard the phrase before. And presumably it doesn’t refer to actually lassoing the fish, which would be a serious challenge. One TPM Reader told me it’s basically a fishing event where they have a bunch of starved fish who will basically bite at anything. And so everyone’s guaranteed a big catch. And given what we know now, you can see how that sort of arrangement would probably be a pretty familiar one for Vitter.

But more readers say it’s just the regional name for a fishing tournament — that is, in Louisiana and other parts of the South. Have you been to a fishing rodeo? What was it? And did you see David Vitter there?

Late Update: Okay, the consensus seems pretty clear on this. A ‘Fishing Rodeo’ is not the fishing version of a Dick Cheney-style staged hunt. It’s the name for a fishing tournemant — saltwater or fresh water — in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Hmmm. David Corn finds a senate phone number in the DC Madam’s phone list. And it’s pre-Vitter.

For those of you following l’affaire Vitter, we thought we’d pull together all of the good senator’s best family values moments in one quick video. It’s today’s episode of TPMtv.

As a number of you have pointed out, our TPM RSS feed seems to be a temporary casualty of our server switchover. We’re on the case. And it will be returning shortly.

Can a president really order a former employee to ignore a subpoena? On what basis? He can claim privilege, ask the former aide to comply and they can comply. But how does the president order the silence of a former aide?

Harriet Miers won’t even show up tomorrow to invoke privilege. Once again, I don’t know the law on this. But when you’re under actual subpoena I would think it’s some higher level of contempt not even to show up to invoke the purported privilege.

Update: More here on that. Sure enough, Conyers says that Miers’ not showing up could “trigger contempt proceedings.”