If this is tedious to you, I suggest you're not paying attention. The congress is trying to determine what has been going on in two areas--US Attorney firings for inappropriate and possibly illegal reasons, potential illegal violations in surveillance--domestic surveillance, and in other areas, such as torture, etc.

The committees are doing this in the face of deliberate stonewalling and probably lying by sworn witnesses, as well as misleading media reports. As Fitzgerald found in his investigation, there is a lot of sand being thrown in a lot of eyes.

While this is frustrating to many of us, we have to have some minimal amount of patience so that Congress can do its job.

But for the record, remember that pointing out the utter hackery of elite reporters is NOT doing reporting yourself -- Joe Klein hath spoken.

There's a lot more in the piece than pointing out hackery. Whether one labels this journalism or not seems trivial to me. But you can't say it ain't reporting. and be *serious*, of course.

I think Gonzales is perhaps the best (but not only) gateway to the rest of the administration. By going after him, one is going directly after the Executive. Gonzales is the heat-shield. The recent leaks appear to me to be rather panic-stricken. To paraphrase the mantra, I think Bush is saying: "We're drawing the line and fighting congress @ Gonzales, so we don't have to fight them here".

Lederman, GG, and Pallast are all warning that it would be wrong to play this game of parsing a liar's words. You only get parsed lies, wasted time, no illumination of what Rumsfeld would call the "unknown unknowns" of domestic surveillance.

But I don't see much more parsing happening. I think they are pretty much done with Gonzales. There are several known and more productive witnesses, and also think that by pursuing what and where the lies are, the committee will learn more about these other activities, which must be really horrific.

I read the Ohanlon/Pollack piece early this morning and thought--"Greenwald is going to hammer this".

The groundwork for September's report is being laid so blatantly. Where, I ask you, is the art?...the subtlety? When, I wonder--when are we going to get some really high-quality propaganda?

From today's press questions to Bush and Brown, closing their first meeting. Not much new thinking to be found here:

PRIME MINISTER BROWN: Absolutely. And let me just stress that we're in a generation-long battle against terrorism, against al Qaeda-inspired terrorism, and this is a battle for which we can give no quarter; it's a battle that's got to be fought in military, diplomatic, intelligence, security, policing, and ideological terms. And we have to face groups of terrorists operating in Britain. And other countries around the world have seen -- perhaps, in 17 countries -- terrorist attacks over the last few years. And we in Britain have faced 15 of our own since September of 2001. And of course when America itself faced in September 2001 and showed such bravery, resilience, and courage in standing up against terrorism then. We know we are in a common struggle, and we know we have to work together, and we know we've got to use all means to deal with it.

So we are at one in fighting the battle against terrorism, and that struggle is one that we will fight with determination and with resilience, and right across the world.

At the end of Brown's final answer to a press question, Bush closed the questions and said to Brown: "Good Job".

Then, the next day it was reported, in a shoot-out between U.S. troops and "insurgents", two Reuters reporters were killed in the cross-fire.

Check for unusually tight bullet spacing, and whether clothing was burned immediately. This will be a sure sign that the Taliban did it.

It was equivalent to looting the Louvre.

More or less I suppose. The Louvre is full of stuff looted from other countries, while the stuff in Bagdad is likely looted from mostly inside their own country.

So that means that for a couple of hours over the weekend,

George W. Bush was technically the President of the United States.

Jeez. I guess it turned out OK. He was with Prime Minister Brown at Camp David. They were holding hands and gazing into each other's eyes. Kept him (and us) out of trouble.

Maybe.

Good. This will bring headlines and wake some folks up, I hope. and don't forget the special prosecutor. Do both at once.

Not a motion but a very appropriate first step: Inslee is sponsor, can't find any co-sponsors yet.

RESOLUTION

Directing the Committee on the Judiciary to investigate whether Alberto R. Gonzales, Attorney General of the United States, should be impeached for high crimes and

misdemeanors.

1 Resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary shall

2 investigate fully whether sufficient grounds exist for the

3 House of Representatives to impeach Alberto R. Gonzales,

4 Attorney General of the United States, for high crimes

5 and misdemeanors.

The letter from Director of NSA convinces me that TSP, as a concept and as a label for a program, is a complete piece of crap, and should no longer be used.

In reality, a single program, filled with diverse but unknown surveillance 'activities' was created by one executive order in 2001. That same program was reauthorized by one internal review every 45 days.

Only a fraction of the activities are known to the public. I have serious question as to whether they are known to the Congress. But we do know that some of those activities were absolutely illegal, in that they violated the 4th amendment to the constitution.

Regardless of the what transpires with the Gonzales perjury investigation, the Congress has an absolute duty to understand the complete range of surveillance activities undertaken by the government, both now, and since 2001. Congress should immediately recieve complete information on these activities, including all documents from the internal reviews conducted by DOJ, or any other reviewing authority.