I shoulda figured there’d be another Friday DOJ resignation before I sent everyone home for the day.

Rachel Brand, assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy, is out.

Of course, pretty soon, virtually no one will be left from the Purge crew beside Alberto Gonzalez. But c’mon. That’s the Bush system. Mistakes were made.

Ouch.

McClatchy reports from NH …

When Fred Thompson made his debut on the presidential stage here this week, he left some Republicans thinking he needs more work before his nascent campaign matches the media hype it’s gotten in advance.

The former Tennessee senator with the baritone drawl showed up Thursday in New Hampshire, the site of the first primary voting, and gave a speech that lasted only nine minutes, skipping over hot-button issues such as Iraq and immigration to invoke platitudes about freedom and strength.

Really, I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s not that I think Thompson is such a disaster. It’s just that it’s not at all clear why he should be more than a mid-tier GOP presidential contender, at best. It is only Republican desperation that has spun him into some sort of dream candidate.

Just ain’t so.

For your weekend enjoyment. One of Doug Feith’s stovepipers holds out for the Iraq-al Qaida relationship in a new column for the Washington Post.

The editorial page of the New York Times picks up on the Siegelman story, and calls for congressional intervention.

The idea of federal prosecutors putting someone in jail for partisan gain is shocking. But the United States attorneys scandal has made clear that the Bush Justice Department acts in shocking ways. We hope that the appeals court that hears Mr. Siegelman’s case will give it the same hard look that another appeals court recently gave the case of Georgia Thompson. Ms. Thompson, a low-level employee in a Democratic administration in Wisconsin, was found to have been wrongly convicted of corruption by another United States attorney.

Congress, though, should not wait. It should insist that Mr. Canary and everyone on the 2002 call, as well as Mrs. Canary and Mr. Rove, testify about the Siegelman prosecution. In standing by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales throughout the attorneys scandal, the Bush administration has made clear that it does not care about the integrity of the Justice Department. By investigating Mr. Siegelman’s case, Congress can show that it does.

It’s a story with legs….

If there’s any good news for the White House or its allies in the latest CBS News poll, it’s hiding well. (via Atrios)

More Americans than ever before, 77 percent, say the war is going badly, up from 66 percent just two months ago. Nearly half, 47 percent, say it’s going very badly.

While the springtime surge in U.S. troops to Iraq is now complete, more Americans than ever are calling for U.S. forces to withdraw. Sixty-six percent say the number of U.S. troops in Iraq should be decreased, including 40 percent who want all U.S. troops removed. That’s a 7-point increase since April.

Fewer than one in five thinks that the troop increase is helping to improve the situation in Iraq, while about half think the war is actually creating more terrorists.

The poll has bad news for President Bush, too. His job approval rating slipped to 27 percent, his lowest number ever in a CBS News poll — 3 points less than last month and 1 point below his previous low of 28 percent in January. His disapproval rating is also at an all-time high of 65 percent.

A stunning 75 percent of respondents believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, while 19 percent think the U.S. is on the right track. It’s the most lopsided response since CBS News first started asking the question in 1983.

The results, obviously, are awful news for Bush — NYU’s Paul Light said, “I think his presidency is essentially over” — and it’s just as bad for a field of Republican presidential hopefuls who are offering voters more of the same.

During his recent visit to TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Regent University, Rudy Giuliani also sat down with Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network to discuss some of the issues on the minds of Christian conservatives.

CBN: How do you feel about some of these previous Supreme Court rulings, way back in the day, about school prayer in public schools and the fact that the Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional?

GIULIANI: I thought some of them went too far in the direction of over-emphasizing separation of church and state, and underemphasizing the free exercise of religion.

I suppose that’s about what we should expect from a GOP candidate trying desperately to appeal to a far-right base with which he agrees on very little. Pandering can be an ugly game.

But in this case, it’s the kind of response that deserves a little follow-up — in Giuliani’s opinion, which Supreme Court rulings on school prayer went too far?

CBN, in asking the question, referred to school prayer cases from “way back in the day.” There are two seminal cases on the issue: Engel v. Vitale in 1962 and Abington v. Schempp in 1963. In Engel, the Court said it was unconstitutional for a public school district to write its own official prayer for use in classrooms. Students could still pray on their own, but the state had to stay out of it.

In Abington, the Court said it was unconstitutional for a public school to mandate school-sponsored Bible readings in classrooms. Students could still read scripture on their own, but the state couldn’t interfere.

Giuliani, an accomplished attorney, told Pat Robertson’s television network that “some” of these rulings went “too far.” Maybe some enterprising political reporter could ask the former mayor a simple question: which one?

Usually, for security purposes, VIP trips to Iraq are kept secret until the visit actually occurs. But that hasn’t stopped John McCain from boasting about his upcoming excursion. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.

The New York Times report on the defused bombs in London included this disconcerting graf:

[T]he idea of a multiple attack using car bombs — a departure from the backpack suicide attacks of the London bombings of July 2005 — raised concerns among security experts that jihadist groups linked to Al Qaeda may have imported tactics more familiar in Iraq.

It is, unfortunately, immediately reminiscent of a Times report from a month ago.

The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond, according to American, European and Middle Eastern government officials and interviews with militant leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and London.

Some of the fighters appear to be leaving as part of the waves of Iraqi refugees crossing borders that government officials acknowledge they struggle to control. But others are dispatched from Iraq for specific missions. In the Jordanian airport plot, the authorities said they believed that the bomb maker flew from Baghdad to prepare the explosives for Mr. Darsi.

Estimating the number of fighters leaving Iraq is at least as difficult as it has been to count foreign militants joining the insurgency. But early signs of an exodus are clear, and officials in the United States and the Middle East say the potential for veterans of the insurgency to spread far beyond Iraq is significant.

Insurgents are treating Iraq as some kind of Terrorism School, and are applying the lessons they’ve learned after graduation.

Here’s a crazy idea: we could withdraw from Iraq, deny terrorists a “cause celebre” for jihadists, and stop making it harder to combat terrorism.

As Ryan Powers noted, the State Department has acknowledged the war in Iraq “has been used by terrorists as a rallying cry for radicalization and extremist activity that has contributed to instability in neighboring countries.” There’s additional evidence of tactics from Iraq being exported to Europe.

The longer we stay, the worse it gets.

As of yesterday, three years to the week after the president triumphantly proclaimed, “Let freedom reign,” we are now seeing the end of the deadliest quarter for U.S. forces in Iraq since the war began.

As reader W.B. noted via email, using this data, we’re also ending the deadliest four-month period and the deadliest five-month period. For all the talk from war supporters about “progress,” the fatality rates are sobering.

That is, if you consider these rates important. Outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace said the other day that violence in Iraq is a “self-defeating approach to tracking results.” He recommends a more sensitive approach.

“What’s most important is do the Iraqi people feel better about today than they did about yesterday, and do they think tomorrow’s going to be better than today?

“If the answer to those two questions is yes, then we’re on the right path. If the answer to those two questions is no, then we’re not doing it right and we need to adjust our processes.”

First, why Iraqis’ sanguinity is a more reliable “metric” than U.S. fatalities is apparently only clear to Pace.

Second, even if we’re playing by Pace’s rules, Iraqis aren’t feeling better today than yesterday: “The optimism that helped sustain Iraqis during the first few years of the war has dissolved into widespread fear, anger and distress amid unrelenting violence”:

And third, we’re measuring success in a war based on a population’s feelings? Isn’t that the kind of thing conservatives usually dismiss as namby-pamby liberalism?

Reporters covering the Hill really ought to know better than this.

On the June 29 edition of MSNBC Live, NBC News congressional correspondent Chip Reid asserted that after the failure of a June 28 cloture motion on the Senate immigration bill, “[t]he Democratic Congress is a big loser because, more and more, Republicans are accusing them of being a do-nothing Congress.”

Republicans may be accusing Dems of coming up short, but NBC viewers might benefit if they knew whether those accusations are accurate.

There’s a context that goes missing from most reports about congressional progress, or lack thereof: Senate Republicans are blocking everything that moves.

For the last several years, Republicans, with a 55-seat majority, cried like young children if Dems even considered a procedural hurdle. They said voters would punish obstructionists. They said it was borderline unconstitutional. They said to stand in the way of majority rule was to undermine a basic principle of our democratic system.

And wouldn’t you know it; the shameless hypocrites didn’t mean a word of it. As Roll Call reported this week, 239 separate bills have passed the House, only to find Senate Republicans “objecting to just about every major piece of legislation” that Harry Reid has tried to bring to the floor, whether it enjoys bi-partisan support or not.

Indeed, Senate Republicans — the ones accusing Dems of being a “do-nothing Congress” — are proud of their efforts. Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott boasted, “The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it’s working for us.”

Voters are understandably frustrated about the lack of legislative achievements thus far, but the explanation is surprisingly straightforward: Republicans won’t allow up-or-down votes on anything of significance.

Robert Borosage of the Campaign For America’s Future is launching a campaign to challenge and bring more attention to Senate obstructionism. It’s a worthwhile effort — most Americans probably don’t even know what a filibuster is. When they see headlines that say, “Congress comes up short again,” they need to know who’s responsible.