Your Senate majority leader at work, trying to weaken the Highway Beautification Act’s billboard regulations–and thwarted by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN). (This requires me to invoke the weekend privilege of linking to days-old stories under the guise of reviewing the past week.)

Stepping away from politics for a moment, you might be interested in “Pearls Before Breakfast,” the cover story in Washington Post Magazine, which a friend pointed me to this evening. I’ve been offline for much of the day, so this may already be well-covered ground, but if you missed it, the Post arranged for the violin virtuoso Joshua Bell to play in a DC subway station during the morning rush hour, like any other street musician, and filmed the reaction–or the lack thereof. The only demographic group to redeem itself: the children.

We’ve long been curious about the fate of Thomas Kontogiannis, an alleged co-conspirator in the Duke Cunningham case who has thus far avoided indictment. The North County Times (via War and Piece) delves further into Kontogiannis’ background and his long-rumored intelligence connections:

One source with knowledge of the case said long ago that Kontogiannis may never face prosecution. That source, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Kontogiannis would get a “pass” because of what he said were the man’s relationships with key officials in the upper echelons of the Greek and U.S. governments.

I’m not sure I buy that. What kind of spook connections does it take to earn a get-out-of-jail-free card for bribing a sitting congressman?

Update: My skepticism is with the source’s assessment, not with the North County Times piece, which carefully reports that the most likely reason for Kontogiannis’ not being indicted yet is that he is cooperating with the government in the investigation spun out from the Duke Cunningham case.

Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) have introduced a bill that would require the intelligence community to produce a NIE on the national security implications of climate change.

More dirty tricks from the crooked crowd in the White House?

From the start of this sub-controversy over Speaker Pelosi’s comments in Damascus I’ve suspected a tampering hand from the White House.

You know the details. Pelosi said she had conveyed a message of peace from the Israelis to the Syrians. And then Prime Minister Olmert’s office issued a statement appearing to contradict what Pelosi said. The Post OpEd page, the organ of jejune establishmentarianism and neo-Blimpism, called Pelosi’s claim a ‘pratfall‘. With admirable diligence, the Post OpEd writers took Olmert’s Office’s statement at face value and then embellished it …

The Israeli prime minister entrusted Ms. Pelosi with no such message … Ms. Pelosi not only misrepresented Israel’s position but was virtually alone in failing to discern that Mr. Assad’s words were mere propaganda.

But I’ve never thought it was that simple since before Pelosi ever made her statement, the Israeli press was reporting that Olmert had entrusted Pelosi with such a message. As Ha’aretz highly respected diplomatic correspondent Aluf Benn wrote the day before Pelosi’s arrival in Damascus …

The speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is scheduled to meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus today, and will deliver a message of calm from Israel.

“We hope the message will be understood,” political sources in Israel said yesterday. “The question is whether Assad is looking for an excuse … so that he can carry out an attack against Israel in the summer, or whether this is a mistaken assessment.”

Pelosi visited Israel yesterday and told her Israeli interlocutors that the country must speak with Assad and that the door should not be closed to Syria, even though she is aware that Syria supports terrorism and continued cooperation with Iran.

If you read Benn’s article you’ll see that Olmert’s message was part of an effort to head off a possible confrontation this summer tied to Arab fears of an American strike against Iran. (It’s a complicated issue, which can find out more about by reading Benn’s article.)

Now, who else says this? Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) is the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a Holocaust survivor and very close to AIPAC. He was with Pelosi in the key meetings in Jerusalem and Damascus and he says “The speaker conveyed precisely what the prime minister and the acting president asked.”

So what happened? Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency is another person who follows these issues closely and knows a lot about them — that is to say, he doesn’t approach these issues through the prism of reading Drudge or what the Vice President said on the Rush Limbaugh show. In any case, Kampeas takes a look at the story. It’s a lengthy piece with a lot of important detail. But let me excerpt this section which touches on the issue of, again, what happened?

If that was the case, why did Olmert need to make a clarification, as Israelis were not speaking on the record. Lantos suggested there was pressure from the White House.

“It’s obvious the White House is desperate to find some phony criticism of the speaker’s trip, even though it was a bipartisan trip,” said Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who is considered the Democrat closest to the pro-Israel lobby. “I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the attempt to undermine this trip.”

The White House had no comment on the allegations by Lantos that it pressured Olmert to offer a clarification.

Such backdoor statecraft between the White House and Olmert would not be unprecedented.

Last year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked Olmert into a 48-hour cease-fire during the war with Hezbollah to allow humanitarian relief, but within hours Israeli planes were bombing again, to Rice’s surprise and anger. Olmert had received a call, apparently from Cheney’s office, telling him to ignore Rice.

So we’ve had a lot of fun over the last few days with the RNC political shop and Drudge leading a lot of dopes around by the nose. But let’s hear a bit more about this. The message the Israelis sent to Damascus was intended to convince the Syrians that the Israelis were not planning to attack the Syrians in concert with an American attack on Iran. There was concern in Israel that this might lead to a preemptive Syrian attack. A message like that from Israel to Syria might be very unwelcome to some people in the White House. Did the White House pressure Olmert? If there was no message, why was the existence of the message being discussed by Israeli officials before Pelosi went to Damascus? Will the White House deny pressuring Olmert? And did any of this occur to the folks who write the Post’s editorials?

So what’s the story? Maybe this whole episode deserves some real reporting.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, hard at work:

At a recent “prep” for a prospective Sunday talk-show interview, Gonzales’s performance was so poor that top aides scrapped any live appearances. During the March 23 session in the A.G.’s conference room, Gonzales was grilled by a team of top aides and advisers—including former Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie and former White House lawyer Tim Flanigan—about what he knew about the plan to fire seven U.S. attorneys last fall. But Gonzales kept contradicting himself and “getting his timeline confused,” said one participant who asked not to be identified talking about a private meeting. His advisers finally got “exasperated” with him, the source added.

Drawing on law enforcement records of phone calls, Newsweek has interesting new details on the circumstances of Bernie Kerik’s nomination as secretary of homeland security.

[A]round the time of his nomination, Kerik spoke by phone with two people with whom he had a potentially embarrassing history. According to the records, on Dec. 2, 2004, one day before President George W. Bush announced Kerik’s nomination, three phone calls were logged between Kerik and New Jersey businessman Frank DiTommaso. A few weeks earlier, DiTommaso’s construction firms had been described in court testimony as mob connected. (DiTommaso and his company have denied wrongdoing.)

Shortly after the nomination, Kerik exchanged several phone calls with Jeannette Pinero, a New York prison guard with whom he had an affair. . . . Similar calls were made before the Dec. 10 announcement that Kerik’s nomination would be canceled. Two days before the withdrawal, Kerik and DiTommaso exchanged three calls. On the day the nomination crashed, Kerik and Pinero exchanged three calls; the last one was about an hour before the White House pulled Kerik’s nomination. The records also show more than a dozen calls between DiTommaso and Kerik after the withdrawn nomination.

Couple the Newsweek revelations with the Post story today on how the White House fast-tracked the Kerik nomination despite internal concerns about Kerik’s background and you start to wonder who is leaking all this stuff. Is it Guiliani opponents trying to dent his presidential campaign, or Guiliani supporters trying to air his abundant dirty laundry sooner rather than later?

Today’s Must Read: two months into the surge, it’s time to measure its progress.

The Los Angeles Times delves into the White House’s parallel email system — and once again the White House’s inability to draw a distinction between politics and policy is laid bare.

Finally! A big news org aggressively goes after the GOP’s bogus attack on Pelosi’s trip to Syria.