They’re getting it. From the AP …

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Wednesday she believes the ouster of San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam was connected to Lam’s prosecution of former Republican congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, even though the Bush administration has denied it.

“In my heart of hearts I do, no matter what they say,” Feinstein, D-Calif., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Great pictures to see.

Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD), recuperating, March 13th, 2007 …

More pics on the Johnson senate website.

If you’ve got some money to wager, the odds on a Gonzales resignation before the end of the month don’t look like they’ve quite caught up with the late afternoon news.

(ed.note: TPM is a news and commentary site with occasional bonus snark. This is not investment advice. Get a clue. Blah, blah, blah …)

Hear TPMmuckraker’s Paul Kiel discussing the US Attorney Purge this evening on Open Source Radio.

It’s hard to match this hilarity.

In the evolving story of the US Attorney Purge, you know that a principal part is played by this little known provision of the USA Patriot Act which allows the Attorney General to appoint US attorneys without senate confirmation (TPMmuckraker played the central role uncovering how the provision ended up in the bill). Up until — what? days ago? — the White House was promising to veto any attempts to overturn this critical bit of legislation packed with constitutional import and critical to the prosecution of the war on terror. Now, says the Justice Department, in the words of McClatchy News Service, the provision was “designed by a mid-level department lawyer without the knowledge of his superiors or anyone at the White House.”

It’s like some pulsing gyre of Anglomania — George Orwell meets Monty Python, with Benny Hill along for the ride.

The separation of powers issue is just down the memory hole. Now it was just some Justice Department lawyer freelancing.

So not withstanding the fact that we now have emails of the Attorney General’s Chief of Staff discussing the importance of using the AG’s new power to avoid senate confirmation, apparently this is how the whole thing came about …

The e-mails released Wednesday show Moschella corresponding in 2004 with a Los Angeles attorney named Daniel Collins, who had previously worked for the Justice Department.

In telephone interviews, Moschella and Collins both said Collins had floated the idea of taking district judges out of the vacancy-filling process back in 2003, when he was still at Justice. A former assistant U.S. attorney, Collins said the ability of a district court judge to appoint an interim U.S. attorney if the Senate did not confirm a nominee raised constitutional questions about the separation of powers.

In 2004, Collins said Moschella e-mailed him saying he wanted to pursue such a change. Collins said he did not ask Moschella what triggered his interest and Moschella did not volunteer it.

Collins warned Moschella that if district judges lost their appointment power, the Justice Department would have to figure out how to fill the vacancies. Among the options were making rolling appointments; putting the deputy U.S. attorney in the job temporarily, or allowing the interim appointee to remain indefinitely, Collins said Wednesday.

Collins said that the last option “was certainly never my intention.” He added that he did not know why Moschella chose to draft the provision that way.

Just sort of thinking out loud. Just the sort of option two pals come up with when brainstorming about how to solve a critical separation of powers issue that had never occured to anyone before.

This article by Dan Eggen in tomorrow’s Post lays out in gentle but clear and persuasive terms why Attorney General Gonzales and his Deputy, Mr. McNulty, will soon be ending their tenure at the Department of Justice. Simply put, they lied to Congress. As Eggen correctly notes, prosecutions for lying to Congress are uncommon. And the standards of proof might well be too great to sustain one. But by common sense standards it’s clear that neither man testified truthfully when they answered senators’ questions earlier this year. Even the emails now public make that clear. That visible deceit in covering up an emerging scandal will be too much for them to stay in office. Sen. Sununu’s (R-NH) announcement will be followed by others.

Who wants to guess how many days remain before Gonzales decides his presence at Justice is becoming an obstacle to the fulfillment of President Bush’s important law enforcement policy objectives?

Today’s Must Read: the Congress and the White House get set for a showdown.

David Broder rushes to the GOP’s defense, attacks The New York Times for questioning the party’s political health.

Is the surge working?

Spencer Ackerman reports for TPM from Baghdad — introducing you to, among other things, the “high-profile car bomb.”

Greg Anrig and Micah Sifry chime in on the future of the campaign reform movement.