From today's press gaggle aboard Air Force One: 

Q There are reports that President Obama is going to keep all 93 U.S. attorneys; he's not going to fire any of them. Can you comment on that at all?

MR. GIBBS: Let me check on that report. I don't remember if that's quite right, so before I get out there I will -- I'll check when we land.

Excuse me??  I thought one of the driving considerations behind getting Obama in office was to mitigate the flagrantly illegal damage inflicted upon the DOJ under his predecessor. I really want to know just what the hell this is about.

From Alex Koppelman in Salon's War Room, this political ad. Easily the most powerful one I can recall seeing at anytime in recent past.

Salon.com War Room - Udall advertisement

That is one soldier whom I'd want in my foxhole.

Her remarkable ability to recover from the pain of her primary defeat, suck it in, and do what was required of her vis-a-vis supporting her Party's standard bearer will be the stuff from which legends will be made. Told.

And, were we all living in a Tolkien fantasy world - sung.

Now, having exposed my brain to CNN for that, am switching back to the safer/saner confines of MSNBC.

Perusing the various threads offering commentary re last night, I've read many posts speculating as to what the coming debates might hold in store. Specifically, will McCain finally reach his bursting point and simply lose it - on national television, in front of tens of millions of viewers??

That got me to thinking about a novel I read about a decade ago (penned by Jim Lehrer, ironically enough) entitled, The Last Debate. It covers a scenario not very dissimilar to the one being discussed in aforementioned threads - lone caveats being that the candidate is a Palin-like Rapture Freak, and that the blow-up is engendered and precipitated by the panel of journalist-moderators, after secretly colluding that that candidate simply HAD to be taken down.

Interesting, though, how times change - as does what one considers normal and politically viable...

At any rate, it's certainly worth a few bucks, should you be a political junkie (yeah, like anybody at TPM fails to meet that description <g>).

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Debate-Jim-Lehrer/dp/1586480049

How utterly convenient.  :-/

A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md., had been told about the impending prosecution, the Los Angeles Times reported for Friday editions. The laboratory has been at the center of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick (Md.) Memorial Hospital. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.

OK, maybe I'm just a paranoid mofo whose judgement is clouded my my intense disgust, fear, and loathing of these fascistic bastards. Just the same, I'd greatly appreciate any of our resident legal beagals weighing-in with their astute analysis of what this EO portends. At the very least, I'm quite struck by the apparent bitchslap to the CIA.

<i>The order has been under revision for more than a year, an attempt to update a nearly 30-year-old presidential order to reflect organizational changes made in the intelligence agencies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

It was carried on in secret in the midst of pitched national debate about the appropriate balance between civil liberties and security, spurred by the president's warrantless wiretapping program.

The briefing charts assert that the new order maintains or improves civil liberties protections for Americans.

Interest in the rewrite inside the 16 agencies has been high because it establishes what agencies' powers and limitations will be.

The order, which has not yet been publicly released, is expected to cut into one of the CIA's traditional roles. The CIA has for 50 years set the policy and largely called the shots on relationships between U.S. intelligence agencies and their foreign counterparts. According to the briefing charts, the national intelligence director will now set the rules for engaging with foreign intelligence and security services. The CIA will now just "coordinate implementation," according to the briefing charts.</i>

<b>Senator Obama, you're invited</b>

Sen. John McCain came up with a terrific idea Monday when he was handed an invitation to meet with our editorial board as part of our endorsement process.

"Why don't you invite Senator (Barack) Obama to join me?" McCain suggested.

McCain noted that he has been frustrated in his attempts to have "just the two of us stand there and answer questions" in a town-hall format.

"Unfortunately, he (Obama) has refused to do so," McCain told our colleagues Debra J. Saunders and Carla Marinucci at the start of an interview at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel.

Senator Obama: Consider this an official invitation for a debate with McCain before The Chronicle's editorial board.

The format would be straightforward and substantive, modeled after the five debates we hosted (and streamed live on the Web) with statewide candidates in 2006. The candidates would have sufficient time to answer questions. If they tried to duck a question, we would follow up. Voters would have a chance to see video of the editorial board meeting in its entirety.

Senator McCain gets extra points for proposing a unglossed, unscripted, groundbreaking version of the presidential debate in the bluest of states and at a newspaper that last endorsed a Republican for president in 1992.

What do you say, Senator Obama?

And the early reviews have come in:

Anyone who saw Barack Obama at Berlin's Siegessäule on Thursday could recognize that this man will become the 44th president of the United States. He is more than ambitious -- he wants to lay claim to become the president of the world.

It was a ton to absorb -- and what a stupendous ride through world history: the story of his own family, the Berlin Airlift, terrorists, poorly secured nuclear material, the polar caps, World War II, America's errors, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, freedom. It's amazing one could even pack such a potpourri of issues into sentences and then succeed in squeezing them all into the space of a speech that lasted less than 30 minutes.

Remind me again just which party was in office on that day??
------------------------------------

A political billboard in St. Cloud, Florida reads "Please Don't Vote for a Democrat" over an image of the burning World Trade Center.

Businessman Mike Meehan, who paid for the ad, says he's "only trying to help Republicans." The billboard also carries a link for Meehan's website, TheRepublicanSong.com, at which he says, "I claim to be a man of God" and promotes his political song and video.

Meehan's song, which appears to have racist overtones, begins, "The Democrat secular progressive move, political correctness is killing us too. They want to take the money from the hard working man, and give it to the lazy folks that don't give a damn."

This just-posted news gives me hope in spite of myself.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she will step in if necessary to make sure the presidential nomination fight between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama does not reach the Democratic national convention - though she believes it could be resolved as early as next week.

Pelosi predicted Wednesday that a presidential nominee will emerge in the week after the final Democratic primaries on June 3, but she said "I will step in" if there is no resolution by late June regarding the seating of delegates from Florida and Michigan, the two states that defied party rules by holding early primaries.

"Because we cannot take this fight to the convention," she said. "It must be over before then."

Pelosi made the comments during a wide-ranging, hour-long session before The Chronicle's editorial board. She talked about the prospects for the election of a Democratic president this fall, the legacy of President Bush and the California Supreme Court's ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/28/MNQE10V1UL.DTL&tsp=1