Like the Titanic the Bush Administration is foundering. The latest rat heading overboard is former CIA chief George Tenet, who abandons for good the Bush Administration's Ship of Fools and enters the water as another former administration official prepared to come clean on how the Bushies tried and generally succeeded in cooking the intelligence. Oh yeah. He's selling a book.

You probably cannot tell but I am outraged by this Johnny-come-lately jerk off who will assuage his guilt by dishing the dirt on what the Bush Administration really knew as he rakes in book royalties. My friend, Brent Budowsky, also is not a happy camper.

Tenet will start spilling his guts Sunday night on Sixty Minutes, which kicks off his publicity tour to hawk his book. But we don't have to wait till Sunday because David Ignatius offered an early preview last Sunday during an interview with Chris Matthews. Ignatius said that the book is:

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Yesterday Professor Charles Fried, the elegant, eridite former Solicitor General of the US and former Supreme Court Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, sparred with eminent philosopher and law professor Cass Sunstein and Harvard economist Ed Glasser in a faculty forum over "the Nanny State."

The discussion was lively and engaging, but Fried's remark on credit cards stopped me in my tracks. Fried was aggressive in his defense of unregulated consumer choice. He poo-poo'd the idea of regulating much of anything in order to protect people from themselves, following the classical conservative position that people should be free to make as many choices as possible. But Fried made a point of mentioning why current credit card practices are morally reprehensible. I'm not a perfect reporter, but I tried to scribble down what he said:

"Credit card issuers make a profit from trying to get people to hurt themselves. That isn't about consumer choice. That's just reprehensible."

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Tel Aviv, Israel
It is too early to tell if Saudi Plan II is going to have the same fate as the original, i.e, DOA. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said positive things about it, but it wasn't on the table when he met with President Abbas last Sunday for the start of their regular bi-weekly meetings.

It should have been because, although the Arab League plan relates to Israel's ties to the entire Arab world, the plan's central focus is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is, after all, the dispute the plan was crafted to resolve.

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Check out the chart that Dahlia Lithwick reproduces at the bottom of her incisive analysis in Slate of Gonzales’ testimony. Senator Leahy called it the “most astounding thing” he’s seen in 32 years. It compares the Clinton administration’s protocol for appropriate contacts between the White House and the Justice Department on pending criminal cases with the Bush protocol. Under Clinton, only four individuals in the White House were authorized to communicate with three people at Justice. Bush transformed that lean, efficient approach to governing so that 417 people in the White House could have contact with 30-odd people at Justice about pending cases.

The bigger point, though, is that the purported enthusiasts of “limited government” running the country have resorted to that kind of mindless bureaucratization again and again as a means of thwarting the civil servants who are trying to do their jobs. Because political forces make it extremely difficult for Republicans to simply cut programs in the light of day, the conservative Bush team has accomplished its mission of undercutting government by sneakily making it bigger and much more cumbersome.

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As Josh put it, the buzz seems to indicate a plummeting in fortunes for the AG. CNN is reporting that White House senior aids are saying that Gonzales is "going down in flames" and "not doing himself any favors." Coburn has turned against him and those still with him are fewer and lamer than ever.

On the other hand, we've seen members of this Administration in the corner before and they are often... stubborn.

So let's test the predictive wisdom of crowds. Is it the end?

It would be all-too easy to cast New York senior Senator Charles Schumer’s grilling of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today as the climax of a long-nursed, partisan grudge. Twenty-three years ago, during Ronald Reagan’s first term, the Republican U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York came within a millimeter of destroying Schumer with highly dubious criminal charges. None of the other indictment dodgers in Congress can be more sensitive to potential abuses of prosecutorial discretion and the Justice Department’s power to countenance or curb such abuses than Chuck Schumer, Gonzales’ chief inquisitor.

Now that I have your attention, let me complicate this a little. The masterminds of the long, unrelenting drive to indict Schumer (for deploying his New York State Assembly staffers in his first congressional campaign while paying them state salaries) were left-liberal Democrats and activist muckrakers hell-bent on nailing Schumer for personal, social, and ideological reasons. They tipped off and then collaborated closely with the zealous young U.S. Attorney Edward Korman (now a federal judge), whom they’d befriended and worked with for years. Irony of ironies, it was the Reagan Justice Department that called off this witch hunt at the last minute.

Why did Attorney General William French Smith exercise such restraint? Out of ethical principle? Jurisdictional caution? Some obscure political calculation? The Justice Department claimed only that Schumer’s campaign practices were a state, not federal, concern, and Smith’s deputy at the time, Rudolph Giuliani, actually apologized to Schumer for the two-year ordeal that preceded this decision. Unless you believe that Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove and their favorites in the press would be at least that judicious now in a case against a liberal Democrat, you can understand why Schumer has been preparing for today’s hearing, which may make clear how frighteningly, if subtly, federal law enforcement has changed from what it was even under Reagan.

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In a blow to consumers, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that mortgage lending subsidiaries of national banks are exempt from state regulation. Every state attorney general and bank regulator had urged the High Court to protect these state laws, especially in light of federal inaction in the face of abuse by predatory lenders.

But the Court in its Watters v. Wachovia decision, upheld the power of the Bush Office of the Comptroller (OCC) to pass regulations shutting down such state laws. Those federal decisions, as Progressive States discussed a few weeks ago, directly fed the predatory lending mortgage bubble and helped encourage the abuses that may lead to 2.2 million subprime borrowers facing foreclosure on their home loans.

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I'm not especially knowledgeable about reproductive rights politics and policies; it hasn't been my area. So after today's Supreme Court decision, I went looking for more information. I came upon Cynthia Gorney's amazingly thorough piece of reporting on the history of how this particular procedure was named, publicized, and banned, called "Gambling with Abortion," published in Harper's, November 2004. I thought I would pass it along.

Herewith some excerpts from its opening paragraphs:

This story is about ... how one abortion doctor and one right-to-life cartoonist helped set off the most sustained and rhetorically high-pitched battle in the forty-year history of this country's abortion wars.

The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban does not prohibit what most people think it prohibits...

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What are we to make of the bizarre contrast between our national grief over the terrible slaughter of students and faculty at Virginia Tech and our muted reaction to the continuing bloodbath in and around Baghdad? One mass killing in the 209 years since Virginia Tech was founded is not exactly a trend. It is a terrible thing but not likely to be repeated anytime soon.

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Today's 5-4 Supreme Court decision validating Congress' ban on so-called partial-birth abortions is obviously a setback for the reproductive rights of women, and a victory for those who want to roll them back. But the highly convoluted majority opinion, as reflected in the remarkably clear concurring and dissenting opinions, may make a broader attack on abortion rights harder in the long run, making the next appointment or two to the Court even more critical.

To make a long story short, the majority opinion (as brilliantly exposed in Justice Ginsburg's dissent) went to inordinate and irrational lengths to reconcile the decision with the Court's precedents, most obviously Stenberg (which struck down state "partial-birth" bans), Casey (which solidified a "health exception" to any permittable abortion restrictions), and Roe itself. Clearly the replacement of O'Conner by Alito made this result possible. But the failure of Alito and Roberts to join the concurring opinion by Thomas and Scalia calling for a reversal of all these precedents means that a further change in the Court will probably be necessary to produce a more fundamental shift in the constitutional law of abortion rights. And that's one of many reasons why Democrats need to win the presidency in 2008.

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Do you use the reader blogs? Do you read them (button above) or write on them?

I've been trying to figure out a coherent system for promoting them to the front page. We have a feature for recommending things you like, but not enough people use it for it to be a perfect criteria. So I've also been considering how relevant it is to the day's news or the day's discussion on the site. Thoughts?

Six months after the Amish school shootings in Pennsylvania and nearly eight years after Columbine, America once again mourns for the victims of another senseless mass shooting. We have all been touched by this week's tragedy at Virginia Tech. A member of my own staff is a Virginia Tech graduate, who resided in West Ambler Johnston Hall. This week, we are all Hokies.

But we must ask ourselves why this keeps happening. The answer, I believe, partially lies in the near ubiquity of hand guns and other assault weapons in this country.

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Do words matter? Do names matter? Here's one of the smarter pieces I've seen, by Caryl Rivers, about why the Imus debacle matters. I'll give a sample of it below.

But before I do, another thought. I was talking with civil libertarian and free-range thinker Wendy Kaminer last night. She said something that really moved me: that those Rutgers athletes were exploited and hurt by everyone who repeated the degrading phrase last week, when we could have referred to it obliquely. Words like those (and this is me speaking now, not Wendy Kaminer) are a social infection, as Caryl Rivers' piece explains very well. We do best when we wash our hands and refrain from passing the virus along. So herewith my pledge: I'm going to put it in <word deleted> brackets from now on.

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I took part in a rousing debate last night on Larry Kudlow’s show last about fairness and tax policy.

While I fear such debates generate more heat than light, the argument really breaks down very simply: if you want to make our tax system sound unfair, you do two things. First, you talk only about income taxes, ignoring payroll and other sources, and second, you talk about the share of taxes paid by each income class.

Note that last one. You don’t talk about the share of their income that families pay in taxes, a much more intuitive measure of fairness. You talk about the share of total tax receipts paid by different groups. Then you can say stuff like, “the top 1% pays for 25% of the total tax bill.”

Now, as I’ll stress in a minute, those points have little to do with fairness.

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Thoughts and prayers at Virginia Tech today. And, as Larry said, with those who experience this kind of tragedy every day.

The Warren Reports blogging team all have day jobs--students (or faculty) at Harvard Law School. For most of them, however, being students and bloggers isn't enough. They are working on issues they care deeply about.

One of our long-time members, Ganesh Sitaraman, has been written up for his work on a proposal to help college students pay off debt by public service work. The proposal is written up in more detail here and here.

This blogging team gives me hope for the future.

Breaking news! At least 31 Virginia Tech students gunned down. Cable news channels are wild with activity as they pump up the coverage a focus on the latest "crisis". The media is commenting that this shooting is overwhelming the local medical facilities. Crisis is in the air. Well, at least it ain't Iraq.

Okay. Big deep breath. This is horrible and this is tragic and this gives us an idea of what it is like to live just one day in Iraq. Consider the following:

04/15/07 Reuters: 19 bodies found in Baghdad on Saturday Police found the bodies of 19 people in various parts of Baghdad in the past 24 hours, police said

04/15/07 Reuters: 20 Iraqi troops and policemen abducted A group linked to al Qaeda said it abducted 20 Iraqi troops and policemen and demanded the release of all Sunni women held in Iraq's prisons, according to a Web statement

04/15/07 Reuters: 20 Iraqi troops and policemen abducted A group linked to al Qaeda said it abducted 20 Iraqi troops and policemen and demanded the release of all Sunni women held in Iraq's prisons, according to a Web statement