Even hours after the dramatic scenes at Glasgow’s airport, details are still a little sketchy.

A Jeep Cherokee trailing a cascade of flames rammed into Glasgow’s airport on Saturday, shattering glass doors just yards from passengers at the check-in counters. Police said they believed the attack was linked to two car bombs found in London the day before.

Britain raised its terror alert to “critical” — the highest possible level — and the Bush administration announced plans to increase security at airports and on mass transit.

One of the men in the car was in critical condition at a hospital with severe burns, while the other was in police custody, said Scottish Police Chief Constable Willie Rae. Five bystanders in Glasgow were wounded, although none seriously, police said.

Rae said a “suspect device” was found on the man at the hospital and it was taken to a safe location where it was being investigated. He would not say whether the device was a suicide belt, but British security officials said evidence pointed to the attack being a suicide mission. […]

“I can confirm that we believe the incident at Glasgow airport is linked to the events in London yesterday,” Rae said at a news conference. “There are clearly similarities and we can confirm that this is being treated as a terrorist incident.”

That’s not exactly an iron-clad connection between the events, but again, officials are still gathering information. And obviously, with the British terror alert now at “critical,” the highest level possible, an aggressive investigation is underway. The latest reports indicate that two people were arrested in Cheshire, England, in connection with terrorist incidents in England and Scotland, bringing the total number of people in custody to four.

The BBC has put together an excellent Q&A on the information currently available.

This afternoon Steven Benen flagged this comment by NBC’s Chip Reid in which Reid claimed the Democrats were the “big loser” in the demise of the immigration bill. Now there are a number of things to say about this — 1) that Reid is parroting Republican talking points on this issue and 2) that no one seems to be raising the fact that, by the definition that prevailed only a year ago, Republicans are filibustering basically everything the comes up in the senate.

Yes to both. Both very important.

But you have to be far more than ordinarily clueless to believe that the Republicans aren’t overwhelmingly the losers in this whole debacle. The whole episode is only a little short of a catastrophe for the GOP, indeed, twice over.

The fact that the episode has further revealed President Bush’s political impotence is relatively unimportant, given his extreme unpopularity. More important is that the whole run-through has further divided Republicans in the lead up to the 2008 election. But even that isn’t the really big deal.

The real fall-out is that this has dealt a massive and probably enduring blow to Republican efforts to at least compete for, if not win over, the growing hispanic electorate. The model here is then-Gov. Pete Wilson’s (R) 1994 reelection campaign in California — a set of events that played out somewhat more amorphously but to real effect across the country in the mid-1990s.

Briefly, Wilson successfully rode the anti-immigration issue to victory, in particular through his embrace of Prop. 187 — a successful ballot initiative to deny social services to illegal immigrants and get local cops into the business of policing people’s immigration status. It helped Wilson get reelected. But it also basically destroyed the California Republican party. Destroyed may be too strong a word. But it put the state’s rapidly growing hispanic population firmly into the Democratic camp and played a big part in making California into the solidly Democratic state it is today. (People forget, it didn’t used to be that way.)

The kicker here is that at least Pete Wilson won his election. Indeed, anti-immigrant politics, in California and elsewhere, helped fuel the Republican sweep in 1994. In this case, the Republicans didn’t even get it together and get a win in the short run. They managed to damage themselves in the short run and deal themselves a massive long term blow. That’s great work.

Now, some people might say that Democratic votes in addition to Republican votes helped to scuttle the bill in the senate. But this ignores the salient fact that Republican opposition to the immigration bill — not just in the senate but across the board — has been overwhelmingly nativist in character. Democratic opposition has tended to focus either on the guest worker provision or other details of the bill. It’s really as simple as that, indeed so simple it barely requires saying.

This whole episode has branded the Republicans as the anti-immigrant party. And that’s not good for a party that wants to compete for the votes of America’s largest bloc of new immigrant voters.

Call in the Coalition of the Leaving.

Radar magazine recently ran a feature about the coalition of countries who offered support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, noting that there are still about 12,000 foreign troops on the ground in Iraq, even after most countries that were part of the original “Coalition of the Willing” have since withdrawn.

Radar described Australia’s contribution to the war effort this way:

Australian troops were among the very first to invade Iraq, having been assigned with taking out Saddam’s scud missiles a day before the initial U.S. bombing campaign began in March 2003. And while Australian Prime Minster John Howard has suffered politically for his outspoken support of the mission, he recently reaffirmed Australia’s commitment to keeping troops there until the Iraqi government can defend itself.

Perhaps that reaffirmation was not as solid as the Bush administration would have liked.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard is secretly planning to begin withdrawing Australian troops from Iraq by February 2008, Australian media reported on Sunday.

The Sunday Telegraph, quoting an unnamed senior military source, described Howard’s withdrawal plan as “one of the most closely guarded secrets in top levels of the bureaucracy.”

The Sunday Telegraph said the drawdown of troops would focus on soldiers based in southern Iraq on security duty with Iraqi soldiers.

Ouch.

I’ve just started reading Lynne Olson’s new book Troublesome Young Men, which tells the story of the dissident Tory MPs who helped battled Stanley Baldwin’s and then Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policies and helped lay the ground for Winston Churchill’s crisis rise to the premiership in the summer of 1940.

Today Olson has a piece in the Outlook section of the Post arguing that for all his self-comparisons, President Bush much more resembles Neville Chamberlain than Churchill. She’s certainly on the mark in noting Chamberlain’s mix of inexperience in foreign affairs and certainty that he, and only he, was the one who could manage the crisis of Hitlerism.

The Chamberlain analogy only goes so far. But she’s quite good in noting the many ways that Bush is really nothing like Churchill.

Following up on Josh’s post from Friday night, Fred Thompson is not only failing to connect with GOP voters from the stump, he’s also inadvertently alienating an important Republican constituency. At a campaign stop this week in South Carolina, for example, Thompson equated immigrants from Cuba with potential terrorists.

Noting that the United States had apprehended 1,000 people from Cuba in 2005, Thompson said, “I don’t imagine they’re coming here to bring greetings from Castro. We’re living in the era of the suitcase bomb.” Fidel Castro is Cuba’s leader.

A video clip of Thompson’s remark immediately circulated on YouTube and has drawn considerable attention in Florida, a key early primary state home to many Republican-leaning Cuban Americans.

As a Miami native, perhaps I’m slightly more attuned to the concerns of Cuban-Americans, but one need not be a Dolphins fan to know that Thompson’s comments were surprisingly dumb. Immigrants from Cuba are fleeing Castro’s dictatorship, not plotting to kill Americans. What’s more, Cuban-Americans generally vote Republican and have always been considered a key GOP constituency by presidential candidates hoping to win Florida’s 27 electoral votes.

You’d think Thompson would know all of this.

Just like you’d think Thompson would have a better sense of foreign policy towards Iran.

Nifty Campaign Idea of the Month award: June’s winner is former senator and not-yet-candidate Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who advocated a blockade against Iran before taking military action to stop its nuclear plans.

“A blockade would be a possibility if we get the international cooperation,” Thompson said in a foreign policy speech in London, Bloomberg News reported. It was unclear whether this blockade — which some, especially the Iranians, might consider an act of war — would cover Iran’s lengthy land borders with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Azerbaijan.

The phrase “not ready for primetime” keeps coming to mind.

Hmm, what was the most disturbing part of Joe Lieberman’s appearance on ABC’s “This Week” this morning? It’s a surprisingly tough call.

Was it Lieberman’s reality-be-damned insistence that “the surge is working”? That was certainly disconcerting. Was it Lieberman’s assertion that leading Democrats are weak because they reject a neocon vision of foreign policy? That wasn’t much better.

But the real gem of the morning was Lieberman’s bizarre argument that terrorism in Britain should mean more warrantless domestic surveillance here. (ThinkProgress has a clip.)

“I hope that these terrorist acts in London and England wake us up here in America to stop some of the petty, partisan fighting that’s going on about…electronic surveillance, a lot of which could help stop terrorist attacks against the United States. Some of the fight is ideological. Some of it is just plan mistrust of the administration.

“I hope this week, based on what happened in the United Kingdom, President Bush, the bipartisan leadership of Congress will sit down and say, ‘Hey, let’s cut out the nonsense. We’re fiddling while our enemies are getting ready to attack us. Let’s figure out how to pass a law to modernize this electronic surveillance capacity which was critical.’ […]

“I’m talking about…the so-called FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was adopted in the ’70s. Technology has — both that used by the enemy, the terrorists, and that used by us has improved dramatically. And right now, we’re at a partisan gridlock over the question of whether the American government can listen into conversations or follow e-mail trails of non-American citizens.”

There are more than a handful of errors of fact and judgment here, but let’s stick to the two biggest.

First, Lieberman insists FISA is a generation too old. What he neglects to mention is that FISA has been updated many, many times. FISA may have been passed nearly three decades ago, but it’s been amended repeatedly to adapt to evolving threats and circumstances.

Second, Lieberman seems woefully confused about the nature of the debate. The Bush administration has engaged in electronic surveillance of Americans without warrants or oversight. Congress has requested information about how the program operates, which the administration has refused to provide. To hear Lieberman tell it, there’s a controversy about whether to spy on terrorist suspects. That’s demonstrably false, and the senator surely knows better.

Lieberman wants to “cut out the nonsense.” Good idea. The White House has apparently operated under the impression that FISA is inconvenient, and therefore irrelevant. As Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) noted way back in January 2006, “If [Bush] needs more authority, he just can’t unilaterally decide that that 1978 law is out of date and he will be the guardian of America and he will violate that law. He needs to come back, work with us, work with the courts if he has to, and we will do what we need to do to protect the civil liberties of this country and the national security of this country.”

When Lieberman tells a national television audience that the question is over “whether the American government can listen into conversations or follow e-mail trails of non-American citizens,” he’s either intentionally trying to deceive or he’s embarrassingly confused about the issue at hand.

Barack Obama appears to have broken the record for quarterly fundraising in a primary, pulling in a whopping $30 million over the last three months. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.

There’s a lengthy analysis of political independents in the Washington Post today, based on an extensive survey conducted by the Post in collaboration with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. The piece doesn’t exactly break a lot of new ground, but it’s interesting enough to check out. Matt Yglesias summarizes the piece’s conclusions quite well: “Many independents are actually partisans. Many others just have no idea what they’re talking about. A few really do pay attention and swing anyway.”

There was, however, one piece of information from the report that struck me as odd.

While these independents swung substantially to the Democratic side in 2006, 77 percent of them say they would seriously consider voting for an independent if one were running.

Is it me, or is 77% a little low? Nearly one-in-four self-described independents wouldn’t consider voting for an independent? Then why even consider yourself an independent?

Must be part of that no-idea-what-they’re-talking-about bloc.

In May, former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias explained that he met for several hours, shortly before the 2006 election, with Pat Rogers, a well-connected Republican lawyer in Albuquerque, who was after him to prosecute dubious allegations of voter fraud. Iglesias told Rogers the truth — that he’d reviewed more than 100 complaints filed by New Mexico Republicans, but found no substantial evidence of a crime.

What Iglesias didn’t know at the time was that Rogers had, before their pre-election meeting, already taken his concerns to Washington. With help from Monica Goodling, Rogers complained about Iglesias’ reluctance on voter-fraud cases directly to top Justice Department officials, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), and Karl Rove. Rogers and another Republican attorney from New Mexico, Mickey Barnett, made clear that they wanted Iglesias fired. Not long after, he was.

Today, McClatchy moves the ball forward quite a bit more. (thanks to V.S. for the tip)

A New Mexico lawyer who pressed to oust U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was an officer of a nonprofit group that aided Republican candidates in 2006 by pressing for tougher voter identification laws.

Iglesias, who was one of nine U.S. attorneys the administration fired last year, said that Albuquerque lawyer Patrick Rogers pressured him several times to bring voter fraud prosecutions where little evidence existed. Iglesias believes that he was fired in part because he failed to pursue such cases.

He described Rogers, who declined to discuss the exchanges, as “obsessed … convinced there was massive voter fraud going on in this state, and I needed to do something to stop it.”

Iglesias said he only recently learned of Rogers’ involvement as secretary of the non-profit American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund – an activist group that defended tighter voter identification requirements in court against charges that they were designed to hamper voting by poor minorities.

As Rick Hasen recently explained, that would be the “incredible, disappearing” American Center for Voting Rights.

McClatchy’s report offers several helpful details about Rogers and the broader election strategy. Take a look.

This could get ugly.

The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House for information related to the U.S. Attorney purge scandal. The White House announced a few days ago that it would ignore the subpoenas. This morning on “Meet the Press,” Tim Russert asked Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) what happens next.

RUSSERT: You have asked the White House and others to respond to your subpoenas. They are now invoking executive privilege, and you said this: “We will take the necessary steps to enforce our subpoenas backed by the full force of law so that Congress and the public can get to the truth behind this matter.” What does that mean, full force of the law? Is — are we headed to a constitutional crisis?

LEAHY: I would hope not. That’s why I say, they — they’ve chosen confrontation rather than compromise or cooperation. The other administration — in fact, I’ve been here with six administrations, Democratic and Republican, they’ve always found a way to, to work out and get the information Congress is entitled to. […]

RUSSERT: Are you prepared to hold the Bush White House, the vice president, the attorney general and his office under contempt of Congress?

LEAHY: That is something that the whole Congress has to vote on. In our case, in the Senate, we’d have to vote on it; in the House, they would have to vote on it. I can’t…

RUSSERT: Would you go that far?

LEAHY: If they don’t cooperate, yes, I’d go that far. I mean, this is very important to the American people. If you’re going to have — for example, the, the bottom line on this, the U.S. attorneys investigation, is that we had people manipulation law enforcement. You — law enforcement has, can’t be partisan. Law enforcement can’t decide, “Well, we’ll arrest this person because they’re a Democrat but not this person because they’re Republican” or the other way around. And that is why I think you’ve found so many Republicans and Democrats who have been so critical and, and many of those, the most critical, are, like myself, former prosecutors.

If Congress passes a contempt-of-Congress measure, lawmakers would effectively be formally accusing the White House of a crime, which would then be referred to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia for consideration. Russert asked Leahy this morning, “Are you sure the U.S. Attorney would prosecute?” The chairman responded, “Well, I think it’d be very difficult for him not to.” (Crooks & Liars has a video clip of the interview.)

Stay tuned.