Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) today: “One day there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later.”
Former New York Daily News columnist Jim Sleeper on why Rudy Giuliani really shouldn’t be president.
GOP House leader responds: We will defeat Democratic efforts to end the war.
This is weird. Earlier today I linked to a supposed post by Michael Barone attacking the Bush administration over the fired attorneys scandal. It certainly seemed out of character, given the tone of Barone’s commentary over recent years. Some readers have been pointing out that though the post itself shows up on the specific URL, it doesn’t show up on the main blog page. The post in question very much seems to reside on the US News website. It’s not an instance of spoofing. But Michael Barone has confirmed to Andrew Sullivan that he did not write the post. According to Sullivan, relaying on Barone I assume, a hacker got into Barone’s site and inserted the post.
Late Update: Well, it’s hard to know at this point with the US News blogging platform. But it appears now that the non-post from Michael Barone actually wasn’t a hack. It shows up right there on the front page of Bonnie Erbe’s US News blog. So perhaps it’s a glitch rather than a hoax? Given it’s a US News blog, at this point I’m not making any assumptions.
(ed.note: Here at TPM we were noting that this did seem like very much a niche sort of hacking, with a rather rarefied audience. Imagine the chatter on the hacker underground discussion boards: “Dude! Just uploaded a sane post on the US Attorney story to BARONE’s blog! Freaky …”
Purge update: the administration backs down. In a meeting with senators from the Judiciary Committee today, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that he would not oppose their efforts to change the law governing the appointment of U.S. attorneys back to what it was.
Partial success! We’ve made radio contact with the president of the syndicate that distributes Ann Coulter’s column!
And as per your requests, there’s also a list of the papers that carry her weekly efforts.
And the House Dems are pressing forward in their investigation of the prosecutor purge too. Today they sent a letter to AG Gonzales requesting testimony from six Justice Department officials.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes glimpse of some of the backstage tensions that abounded among House Dems today over what to do about Iraq.
What USAgate tells us? Without congressional oversight, bad acts never see the light of day.