I find these to be utterly telling and I haven't been reading long at all. What the hell is the white house doing dicking around on illegal immigrants so much when they're supposedly against them?

• They have the pro-DLC Hillary-centric Walter Shapiro covering her campaign
  
• They completely missed the Fox-Nevada fight (the story was breaking for a week so there was plenty of opportunity to pick it up). First mention was from Camile Paglia a week later who called Dems cowards for refusing to participate
  
• They continue to publishPaglia spouting rightwing memes (liberals control ABC, CBS, NBC, NYT, TIme and Newsweek, etc.)
  
• They publish the incoherent Debra Dickerson trying to do her best Marueen Dowd Democrat teardown imitation (Obama isn't really black) and stirring up in-party controversy by picking up rightwing stories from the NY Post alleging Al Sharpton and Obama are attacking each other.
  
• Editor Joan Walsh hearts the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz in her own blog launch on the site today for name dropping Salon somewhere in his column (after many extensive articles by Glenn Greenwald demostrating Kurtz's rightwing bias).
  

on a CV?

I've never seen that before, I wonder if it was specifically requested, because they're present on some (I've only looked at a few so far) of the CVs included in the documents (the only one I've looked at so far, at random, is 2-9).

And, of course, this guy was a serious Republican backer, from College Republicans all the way through County Director for Bush '04 in South Dakota.

why the SD USA has such an atrocious record prosecuting illegal immigration cases and what can be done to improve it because the Border Patrol agents find it demoralizing to have so few cases prosecuted and have stopped referring their cases there, i.e. they're letting people through because of lax enforcement --- that's a curious twist!

Here's an early scoop from the DoJ document dump... Cunningham complained about Lam to Gonzales barely a month before he plead guilty in her corruption investigation.

More details here.

"resignation," as Conyers had apparently written with concern that her firing was to disrupt an investigation (into Republican corruption).

I wonder how often we'll see this argument:

"USAs serve at the pleasure of the President.Like other highranking Executive Branch officials, they may be removed for any reason or no reason. (snip) That on occasion in an organization as large as the Justice Department some USAS resign-- for whatever reason-- should come as no surprise."

For whatever reason!? Ha, that's rich, why don't we ask her?

when I have a computer with a real internet connection.  Ugh.  

Any Iglesias stuff?

talking about the "forced resignations" and making bold accusations about political motivations.  There are money quotes in there!

or at least small abstracts of the editorials and columnists (2-7, p. 37).

Is there any chance of the released documents containing anything about the cancelled wiretapping probe, or is it just going to be limited to the prosecutor firings? And if the latter, are there any plans to look into the wiretapping probe thing once the prosecutor firings have been dealt with?

Also, incidentally, how's this promised "pay-as-you-go" thing going? Maybe I missed something, but so far I've seen quite a lot of payouts to various often admittedly worthy causes (for example, a few billion for veteran care in the Iraq supplemental) but not actually yet seen any sign whatsoever of that overdue budget.

Heh. Down on page 38 of 1-11, after pages and pages of Senate committee testimony, is someone's illegible To-Do list. It appears to be mostly whited out. All I can make out:

titled "ME to do" and in the corner it says "DAG"
"The list:
*Items for recording statements (AZ)
*SDCA - dealing w/Carol
*AUSA phone call project
*[illegible] - EARS - Margolis"

Looks like jibber-jabber to me. All I get is that DAG presumably stands for "Deputy Attorney General" -- and of course, "SDCA" is San Diego, CA, and "Carol" is Carol Lam. I guess "dealing with" her is one way you could describe it... ;)

Anyone know what the rest of this refers to?

Even more creepily, the next page (39) appears to be the backside of the previous one -- it just has a little note that says "Mike's column," but you can clearly see the backwards text showing through, and it matches up with the bits of page 38 we get. Of course, this version isn't whited out! Is anyone out there in Tinfoil Hat City particularly good at reading faded/backward text?

I know it's open thread and I just wanted to share this with everyone.

2008 Democratic Presidential Primary

Clinton 35% Obama 30% Edwards 11%

March 19, 2007

The race for the Democratic Presidential nomination is getting a bit tighter. Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D) has closed to within five points of the frontrunner--Senator Hillary Clinton. A week ago, Clinton held a 12-point lead.

The former First Lady now attracts 35% of the vote down slightly from 38% last week. Obama gained four points and now is the top choice for 30% of Likely Voters. That's the highest level of support for Obama in any Rasmussen Reports survey since the Election 2008 season began.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/Politica l%20Tracking/Democratic%20Primaries/Demo craticPresidentialPrimary.htm

If I had to call it right now I'd say obama will win or at least beat hillary. Hillary has front runner status (Which will diminish rapidly most likely) and a campaign chest that's utterly huge. But obama has a rapidly multipling skilled group of supporters. He's got a movement, something hillary never will. That's something far more valueble than money, and I seriously doubt hillary will want to start dropping mad cash on it before the general election.

Page 19 of http://judiciary.house.gov/media/pdfs/DO JDocsPt2-1070319.pdf says it all: "We have to be committed to following through once the pressure comes."

The most telling gap seems to have been uncovered by "Donp" over at Talking Points Memo (tpmmuckraker.com). The DOJ and White House are clearly holding back whole sheaves of damaging documents. The TPM readers' thread is already hundreds of messages long and does not offer an easy navigation path or sub-threads, so here is "Donp's" comment in toto:

"2-1 page 15-18

THE 18 MINUTE GAP??? (Are these in chronological order?)

The email of Nov 15 ends with "Who will determine if this requires the President's attention" and Meiers says it will take a while as he is gone. The plan attached (page 15) to that says to begin making calls on Nov 15. Sampson had also recommended informing Karl.

The next email is dated Dec 4! From William Kelley at 4:48 pm it says:
"We're a go for the US atty plan. WH leg, political, and communications have signed off and acknowledged that we will have to be committed to following through once the pressure comes."

(so Nov 15 says it's time to talk to Karl and maybe the President, but that would take time...and the plan had been to start Nov 15. In this email, the plan has been changed to start calls Dec 7 - 2-1 page 20)

What happened between Nov 15 and Dec 4 to hold up the plan and require a change in execution from Nov 15 to Dec 7? The answer is from Kelley: We're a go for the US atty plan. WH leg, political, and communications have signed off"

Posted by: Donp
Date: March 20, 2007 02:19 AM"

...to send any relevant date to TPM!

Josh Marshall has his readers on it but more eyes are good and TPM is the blogosphere center for US Attorney research and information.

It's like social security all over again!

I posted a diary on a way that Democratic activists and allies can "increase the pain" when the GOP attempts to inflict a document dump burial of self-damning document amidst garbage.  Please let me know there or here what you think of the concept.