Anyone who has followed the wiretapping story in-depth will have found that no-one provided as rigorous, thorough, and honest coverage as Glenn has.

Glenn particularly cut through the b.s. surrounding the exact requirements for FISA approval like nobody's business, while I read sooooo many articles that got it completely wrong.

I'll admit up front I don't know a whole lot about when privelege is waived.

My definition of waiver of privilege:

Difficult to assert and easy to waive.

From Lexis:

CA evidence code: A privilege . . . is waived with respect to a communication protected by the privilege if any holder of the privilege, without coercion, has disclosed a significant part of the communication or has consented to disclosure made by anyone. Consent to disclosure is manifested by any statement or other conduct of the holder of the privilege indicating consent to the disclosure, including failure to claim the privilege in any proceeding in which the holder has the legal standing and opportunity to claim the privilege.

put him under the bright lights--then send him to Gitmo. We already know enough....

This, certainly, rises to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors"--if nothing else it shows complete disregard for due process and legality (outside of some poor schmuck’s signature). In fact it shows contempt for the Congress and Constitution.

IMPEACH!

One thing that leaps out to me here--not that it's new information--is the lengths that Bush went to (virtually unchallenged and unreported, natch) in order to prevent scrutiny of a decision-making process that didn't exist. (After all, who needs a decisionmaking process when you've got the decider in the house? Processes are for girly men.)

What else can one draw from this sort of statement?

"Clearly, there are privilege issues that have to be considered," Gonzales said. "As a general matter, we would not be disclosing internal deliberations, internal recommendations. That's not something we'd do as a general matter, whether or not you're a current member of the administration or a former member of the administration."

"You have to wonder what could Messrs. Comey and Ashcroft add to the discussion," Gonzales added.

What they could add, of course, is a description of the utter farce of a "decisionmaking process," which of course brings two things immediately to mind. One is the well-known Suskind/DiIullio interview in which DiIullio spilled the beans on the complete lack of a substantive policy process.

The other--unfortunately much less well-known--is USA Today's 9/11 First Anniversary story reporting on the total lack of a formal decision-making process in deciding to go to war with Iraq, within weeks of 9/11:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-09-10-iraq-war_x.htm

Iraq course set from tight White House circle

By John Diamond, Judy Keen, Dave Moniz, Susan Page and Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Bush's determination to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision.

Before the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Bush will make his case for "regime change" in detail and in public for the first time. But he decided that Saddam must go more than 10 months ago; the debate within the administration since then has been about the means to accomplish that end.

How did Bush make the decision, perhaps the most consequential of his presidency?

USA TODAY interviewed officials at the White House, State Department, Pentagon, intelligence agencies, Congress and elsewhere to explore what factors were weighed and whose voices were heard. The process underscores Bush's confidence in his own judgment and his hard-line policy instincts. It shows his reliance on a tight circle of aides, his penchant for secrecy and his preference for unilateral action. And it illustrates how his approach has complicated his efforts now to win support from allies and members of Congress who felt they weren't adequately consulted before.

Among the key findings:

The decision to target Saddam "kind of evolved, but it's not clear and neat," a senior administration official says, calling it "policymaking by osmosis."

"There wasn't a flash moment. There's no decision meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. "But Iraq had been on the radar screen — that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually ... before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem."

Members of Congress weren't consulted. Nor were key allies. The concerns of senior military officers and intelligence analysts, some of whom remain skeptical, weren't fully aired until afterward.

This is how they do everything. It's not groupthink. It's much, much worse than groupthink. They don't even form an organized group. And they definitely don't think. So, of course, they don't want anyone talking about it.

But this is how we went to war. And there was nothing secret about it, really. This was a story in USA Today, which ran the month before Congress voted for the AUMF. But it was, characteristically, a one-off story (not even a one-day story) that no one else picked up on. It was there in plain sight, but it was ignored.

Naturally, this is also how they "prepared" for Katrina. It's how they do everything. And no one has a right to examine it. It's not something they normally do. It would be partisan, when we need to be bipartisan. It would be "going backward," when what we need is a "new way forward."

Don't you just wish you'd thought of this sort of language when you were a teenager???

Anyone notice there's been no sign of the trolls on this issue? It's because they haven't received their Hannity/Limbaugh/O'Reilly marching order and talking points yet. They'll be back soon enough, but I relish these breaking stories that leave them stymied in their tracks for a while. This feels like being a parent when the kids are staying at the grandparents for the weekend.

I've always wondered what might have driven Mr. Bush to assign a happles hack like Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General of the United States.

I think this business that went down in John Ashcroft's hospital room just gives the answer: While Gonzales might not have been confirmable the first time Mr. Bush nominated an AG, he sure as hell needed someone at the helm of the Justice Department for who wouldn't dare to develop a conscience as soon as he got a chance to remove Mr. Ashcroft.

I have one of these countdown to Bush out of office calendars in my office. The number of days shown on there suddenly appear woefully large ....