Ahhh Tony, Tony.

We enlisted Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) to help us factcheck Tony Snow’s performance today in the White House press briefing.

Bit sleazy in the Big Easy.

Sen. Vitter’s (R-LA) name shows up on DC Madame’s phone list.

Tells public: “This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible,”

Today’s Must Read: Alberto Gonzales lied, the FBI spied.

Welcome TPM Readers!

As you can see we’re making a few changes at TPM. So let me take a moment to explain what we’re doing and why. TPM started back in November 2000 as one little white text column on a field of navy blue. Since then it’s slowly expanded outward with new content and features. But this is our biggest revamp to date.

The premise is simple. Over the last two years, TPM has evolved from a single blog to a network of sites with an increased focus on news and original reporting. With our new design we’re expanding our commitment to original reporting while also complementing our own coverage with breaking news stories from the Associated Press and other wire services.

That brings us to a fundamental change in the design of the site. As we’ve grown and had more and more original reporting we wanted to bring to you, more and more posts on the TPM blog have been links to reports we’ve published at TPMmuckraker, Election Central and TPMCafe. That’s made the blog not just a blog but also a portal to access the rest of our content. But while that’s worked fine, it’s not ideal. It makes it hard to see at a glance what’s new at TPM and also changed the nature of the blog itself.

In our new design we’ve created a full news section that will keep you up to date through the day on our latest news stories. And if we don’t have it, we’ll have links to whoever does. Come to the site anytime during the day and we’ll have the very latest news.

And of course right here I’ll be blogging as usual — and even getting back to the blogging I’ve somewhat gotten away from in the last couple years.

Update: For more details on the new design, check out today’s episode of TPMtv …

Just for the record: Sen. David Vitter’s (R-LA) admission yesterday was a preemptive measure.

Update: Well, apparently not so much. Hustler Magazine says a reporter had found Vitter’s number, and Vitter went to the AP to avoid the ignominy of being outed by Hustler.

For years TPM Readers have been asking us to install a print function on the site. That way you don’t have to waste a lot of paper printing out what may be as many as a few dozen posts. Well, now we have it. If you look right up there at the upper right of each post there’s a little ‘print’ button. Push that and it brings up a print dialog box that will print just the text of the specific post. No ads, no extraneous formatting. Just the genuine TPM article, so to speak.

Ahhh, those were the days. Just a year ago, Sen. Vitter on the floor of the Senate extolling the virtues of ‘traditional’ marriage and the need to amend the constitution to defend it from scary homosexuals.

Seems he could have taken a few more practical steps to defend it.

Most excellent. Rudy Giuliani has named newly-determined crackpot Norman Podhoretz as one of his key foreign policy advisors.

Here’s Norm discussing the need to bomb Iran to “smithereens” and here he is explaining how the Iraq War has been a huge success and how the WMD were actually carted off to Syria before we could find them.

This has to be the best appointment Rudy’s made since Thomas Ravenel (indicted for dealing coke) his South Carolina campaign chair and Sen. David Vitter (aka Sen. Wild Thang) his Southern Regional Chairman.

Hard to believe this is the same guy who made Bernie Kerik the top cop in New York City.

Hard to believe.

(ed.note: Should anyone wonder, I’m quite aware of the vaunted if arguably pernicious role Podhoretz played in the intellectual history of modern conservativsm. But anyone who holds those views and expresses them thusly is quite deservedly termed a crackpot.)

Sen. David Vitter probably isn’t too happy with Larry Flynt today, after the porn-king reportedly was the one responsible for revealing Vitters’ adventures in DC hookerdom.

But Eric Kleefeld notes that Vitter probably can’t get too high on his high horse because now-Senator Vitter (but for how long?) was first elected to the House of Representatives after his predecessor Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA) was himself run out of office when Flynt exposed him as an adulterer.

Hundreds of you have written in today with your opinions about the new site design. And I was pleasantly surprised that the response have been overwhelmingly positive. But I want to thank everyone who’s written in with comments, critiques, suggestions, etc. The praise is much more fun. But we value the criticisms too; and especially those we can incorporate in a concrete way. So thank you.

Next, let me thank two companies that made this possible. Threespot did the design work for the new TPM. And Apperceptive.com did the back-end implementation. A big thanks to both of them.

And finally, a big thanks to the people who work for TPM. It’s funny. I look at the site now. And it looks deceptively simple. Probably any half way decent designer could replicate it without too much difficulty. And probably fairly quickly. But the whole process was really a marathon, taking far longer than I imagined. We started late last year and originally I thought we’d be up and going in like February.

Here at the risk of some embarrassment to myself is the sketch I sent to the designers the day before we had our first design meeting.

In any case, I raise all this because I have an amazing group of people who work with me. Put in long hours, deal with a pretty demanding boss and just generally did an amazing amount of work to help bring this off. So a big thanks to Paul Kiel, Spencer Ackerman, Andrew Cleary, Ben Craw, T.W. Farnam, Andrew Golis, Eric Kleefeld, Laura McGann, Greg Sargent, Benjy Sarlin, Evann Smith, Will Thomas, Tanvir Vahora and Rachel Weiner.