emptywheel

Shortly before John Edwards confessed that he risked all the Democrats' hopes for a Democratic president next year, he shut down his anti-poverty program.

Murray Waas predicts that, after the two pending IG reports on politicization of DOJ come out, it'll increasingly appear that Bush is invoking executive privilege to cover up the White House involvement in that politicization. That may be right--but I doubt that's going to create the legislative firestorm that Murray predicts.

Ron Suskind writes about a letter created with the help of Tahir Jalil Habbush Al-Tikriti in The Way of the World. He doesn't mention, though, that the US seems to have planted two more letters from him.

The WaPo reveals that Bruce Ivins' supposed window in which he could have mailed the anthrax from Princeton was just barely long enough for him to have done so. That revelation offers more questions than it answers.

Apparently, Bruce Ivins passed a lie detector test in 2001. I realize people can sometimes game those tests. But we're talking about an emotional instable guy.

Fred Fielding, with a straight face, admits that he and the White House were just making shit up when they invented "absolute immunity."

Suskind provides details of how Bush and Cheney ordered up a torture scare just in time for elections. And as a result, you're still surviving off of hotel shampoo when you travel.

Henry Waxman comes up with a stat that will definitely put the financial cost of the Iraq war in concrete terms.

The Chinese just detained the plane carrying the White House press corps to the Beijing Olympics. A horrible, heavy-handed tactic, no doubt. But not a good choice of targets, IMO.

While there appears to be little doubt that the December 2003 Habbash letter was a forgery, what remains unclear is precisely what confluence of bureaucratic in-fighting created the letter.