Obama says he’ll reveal his earmarks, calls on Presidential rivals to do the same.

John Edwards planning to revamp “two Americas” theme in speech tonight outlining proposals to go after abusive lenders.

MJ Rosenberg: I could vote for Bloomberg.

We’re working on a server upgrade at TPMmuckraker.com today, so we’ll be bringing you our coverage of today’s House Judiciary Committee testimony from Deputy AG Paul McNulty right here on TPM.

Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty is just about to start his testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law. He will, as expected, field a number of pointed questions about his February testimony before the Senate.

Is it true, as Monica Goodling testified, that McNulty had not been “fully candid” about his knowledge of White House involvement in the U.S. attorney firings, of Karl Rove’s involvement? What about Goodling’s statement that McNulty had asked her not to join him at a closed door meeting with Congress, because her presence might raise questions about the White House?

But as I’ve argued before, McNulty has a lot more to answer for beyond his testimony. The deputy attorney general acts as the direct supervisor of all U.S. attorneys, yet McNulty let himself be steamrolled by junior aides like Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson – in one case agreeing to fire a U.S. attorney because he was a bachelor and thus didn’t have a family to feed (a fact that didn’t prevent him from telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that the attorney, Daniel Bogden, was removed for “performance related” reasons).

And it’s worth pointing out that McNulty’s chief of staff, Michael Elston, is also at the center of the firings. Three of the fired U.S. attorneys have come forward to say that Elston threatened them that the Justice Department would detail the reasons for their firings if they did not say quiet. National Journal reported last month that Elston had made the calls on McNulty’s orders. And that wasn’t all Elston was up to.

McNulty so far has passed for something of an innocent bystander. Let’s see if today’s hearing changes that.

Lying under oath? That’s no big deal, says Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX).

Here he is during this morning’s hearing lamenting how the U.S. attorney firings investigation has taken to scrutinizing misstatements under oath — not “real wrongdoing.” It’s part of a pattern, Smith says, of “so-called scandals” (presumably referring to Scooter Libby).

As many of you likely know, just after 9/11, the White House forced the EPA to suppress warnings about the possible toxicity of the air and dust in lower Manhattan. The culprit was an outfit called the Council on Environmental Quality headed up by a guy named James Connaughton, a former polluter lawyer and lobbyist.

Connaughton, back in 2003, claimed the press releases were rewritten in the name of ‘national security’.

Well, yesterday, Connaughton got called up to Capitol Hill for a hearing into what happened and why. And the result was such a tour de force of testimonial BS that we wanted to show you some of it. We see a lot of congressional testimony and thus a lot of non-denial-denying, obfuscation and generally bamboozling crap. But this performance stood out. Watch these excerpts of Connaughton’s explanation in today’s episode of TPMtv and see if you can figure out even what he’s saying and why the guy is still in office …

Late Update: For a transcript of today’s episode, click here.

Let’s see what Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) says about this.

Sen. Schumer has said that McNulty told him in a private conversation that Kyle Sampson and other aides, like Monica Goodling, were to blame for his incomplete testimony. According to Schumer, McNulty told him, “I was not told that these things were happening by the people who were supposed to brief me.” McNulty had asked direct questions, Schumer said, and Goodling and Sampson had stayed mum about the White House involvement in the firings.

But today, McNulty testified that he hadn’t “accused anybody of withholding information.” He’d simply acknowledged in the conversation that he hadn’t had that information when he testified — “that was basically the extent of it.” So just one big misunderstanding.

You might call this circular reasoning.

Monica Goodling testified last month that Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty had told her not to join him in a closed-door meeting with the Senate Judiciary Committee because her presence might raise questions about White House involvement in the firings.

When asked about that today, McNulty confirmed that that had happened. But he had a different explanation why.

Here’s his story: he thought that the Justice Department had made the firings at its own initiative, he said. It was his “own view” that the firings were not political and were based on substantive reasons. So he didn’t see any reason to have the White House liaison in the meeting, because she was a political figure. Got that?

Amid his flirtation with an indy Presidential run, Bloomberg has been careful to distance himself from Bush and his foreign policies.

So where was Bloomberg on Bush and the Iraq War back in 2002 and 2003, when it really counted? Answer here.