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There's an amusing line in Jonathan Landay's article on the Bush Administration's discovery that Vladimir Putin has no soul. Bush and his aides "grossly misjudged Putin," considering him "agood guy and one of us," said Michael McFaul of Stanford University'sHoover Institution. The former KGB officer created that illusionpartly by appearing to share Bush's political and religiousconvictions, standard tradecraft employed by intelligence officers torecruit spies, he said. "Putin .

That's a way to make you feel good about blogging, huh? To be attacked by both Dick DeVos and KayBee Hutchison? DeVos is suing 30 anonymous bloggers and YouTube users because he believes they are among a group for former distributors who sued Amway and were put under a gag order by the judge in the suit. In the lawsuit filed this past week in Ottawa County Circuit Court,Quixtar seeks an injunction and

As the NYT broke the other day, General Michael Hayden is conducting an investigation of the CIA's Inspector General, John Helgerson. Their first report on the story intimated the reason why Hayden was conducting such an unusual investigation. A report by Mr. Helgerson’s office completed in the spring of 2004warned that some C.I.A.-approved interrogation procedures appeared toconstitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as defined by theinternational Convention Against Torture.

Amanda marks the expiration of the PATRIOT Act appointees as USA. These 11 prosecutors now “find themselves at the mercy of the same U.S. district courts that the Justice Department saw fit to cut out of the U.S. Attorney appointmentprocess last year.” The courts today will decide whether to reappointthese prosecutors who were handpicked by Gonzales and the White House.

The documents made available by the RMN yesterday provide more details about what the NSA and other government agencies have been doing with fiber optic networks--but it's still not exactly clear what those documents show. As a preliminary, I'm going to try to put the contents of this CIPA filing into a coherent chronology, to clarify some of the issues.

As you've probably already sussed out, the transcript from the Jill Simpson interview with HJC is must-read scandal porn. In it, Simpson clearly states that Rove got involved in the Siegelman prosecution and talked to Public Integrity at DOJ in doing so. But there's another bit I'd like to look at closely, which the majority counsel uses to establish that Rob Riley had an extensive relationship with Simpson and that

Scout prime hasn't forgotten NOLA, even if George Bush has. Today, she's encouraging people to donate to a fund helping out a NOLA family that has lost its house twice--once in Katrina, and once through a terrible accident. Two weeks ago I postedabout the Joseph family who lost their Lower 9th Ward home for thesecond time.

ThinkProgress got the email that Mitch McConnell's staffer claimed he had not sent out. Seen the latest blogswarm? Apparently, there’s more to the story on thekid (Graeme Frost) that did the Dems’ radio response on SCHIP. Bloggershave done a little digging and turned up that the Dad owns his ownbusiness (and the building it’s in), seems to have some commercialrental income and Graeme and a sister go to a private school that,according

Josh asks "why State?" of all departments, has such a fondness for contractors in general and Blackwater in particular. I've got two suggestions, one based on reality and one on my tinfoil hat. First, if you look back at the battle between DOD and State in 2003--in which Bush had officially sided with Colin Powell on the approach to reconstruct Iraq, but in which DOD and OVP managed to at least undermine

Or at least that's one thing we might surmise from the news that Gonzales hired George Terwilliger to represent him just after he resigned (h/t bmaz). No sooner did Alberto Gonzales resign as attorney general last monththan he retained a high-powered Washington criminal-defense lawyer torepresent him in continuing inquiries by Congress and the JusticeDepartment. [snip] The top concern for Gonzales, and now Terwilliger, is the expandinginvestigation by Glenn Fine, the Justice Department’s fiercelyindependent inspector