The White House has thrown the gauntlet. It has "leaked" that executive privilege excuses DoJ from enforcing contempt charges against anyone covered by privilege. What is very worrying is why this was put out publicly, and why now.

If the "run-out-the-clock" strategy was in play, the White House would wait for action by Congress, take its own sweet time responding, then announce, with sad but serious demeanor, that after careful deliberation and a close reading of applicable statute, it cannot satisfy Congress' "unconstitutional" demands. If contempt charges are brought before recess, the response would probably wait until Congress' return.

Or the WH would simply not act at all. Congress would send a letter to Gonzales, asking why DoJ hasn't enforced a citation. Gonzales takes even more time responding, letters go back and forth, and then the WH steps in, asserting blanket executive privilege and immunity from contempt.

Why test the question now? It's worrying, because it seems unnecessary. It invites speculation that the administration is planning some outrage, as Paul Craig Roberts asserts. It may be a ploy to get the case into the Supreme court before Congress acts on its own to impeach. Perhaps the White House feels confident the Supremes will support them, slowing investigations fatally, by excluding essentially all useful testimony.

Patrick Leahy should move summarily to employ inherent contempt, forcing it past the Court, directly to a test of will, with the arbiters being the DC police, who will end up detaining Ms. Miers, when the FBI recuses itself.

If Americans have good hearts, at least the British have the good sense to drop the apocalyptic language of war and will now officially view terrorism as a criminal act. Prime Minister Brown has made it policy, instructing his ministers to not use the term "War on Terror." (link hits subscription wall)

Excerpts:

When terrorists tried to blow up civilians in London and Glasgow, Gordon Brown, the new British prime minister, responded in his own distinctive way. What had just been narrowly averted, he said, was not a new jihadist

...Brown and other advocates of the terror-as-crime view are not necessarily under any delusions about jihadist thinking. Rather, they maintain that preventing terrorism requires winning the hearts and minds of actual human beings — and that declarations of war, including declarations of wars of ideas, are unlikely to be helpful in this regard.act of war but instead a criminal act.

New broom, sweeping clean.

A caller to the Stephanie Miller Show suggested we give the soldiers in Iraq the month off, along with the Iraqi government, and ours. I decided it's not just a joke---we could see what standing down patrols and other operations leads to.

If, as I suspect, not much different happens except Americans dodge IEDs, we can make it a permanent cease-fire.

Probably we should keep the Counter-Terrorism Center open, although given the respect they get it wouldn't matter, even if an A-Q cell is on its way here.

A piece in the Guardian examines the failure of a produce supplier. It exposed the fact that they were underpaying their workers, giving them only six pounds/hr. The minimum, including national insurance and holiday and sick pay (!) would be 6 pounds 27.

So the UK somehow survives giving its agricultural workers the equivalent of $12/hr or thereabouts, along with that handy National Health. The report by the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (what a great name) showed that Bomford's was underpaying, giving out as little as 5 pounds fifty last December. I dunno, twelve bucks an hour plus health and unemployment insurance would probably appeal to many Americans.

Sounds like we could use a Gangmasters Licensing Authority. Sounds like we could use a wage law that applied to agricultural "gangs", workers recruited by contractors, and to all agricultural workers.

A researcher from the University of Amsterdam has found a new variant (or species) of chimp, in (where else) the Congo. This chimp eats lions, sleeps on the ground, uses 8-ft. long sticks for ant collectiing, and smashes things apart to get to the meat. Found so far from modern human habitation they show no fear, they may represent the largest contiguous chimp culture anywhere.

The researcher is David Hicks, and he surveyed 7,000 square kilometers and found the culture uniform. He can't actually assert they hunt big cats, but he did observe them eating them, and suggests that maybe they just get left alone by the big predators. No mention, in the Guardian piece, of the chimp's social policies, but I assume male-dominated, like regular chimps. These are also apparently bigger than familiar chimps.

The missing link is of course no longer missing, with an embarrassment of relations, from the australopithecus Lucy to the Neanderthals, and the shared genes and behaviors found in our contemporary cousins, the apes, especially the chimp/bonobo line. How much longer can the Creationists hold out?