Today’s edition of quick hits. (There’s something odd about the database’s clock today. I’m posting this at 5:30 EST, but the timer may show otherwise)
* Leahy’s patience is running thin: “Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) Wednesday set an Aug. 20 deadline for the Bush administration to produce documents related to the panel’s probe of the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program. ‘Despite my patience and flexibility, you have rejected every proposal, produced none of the responsive documents, provided no basis for any claim of privilege and no accompanying log of withheld documents,’ Leahy said in a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding.”
* TPMM: “Now that’s how you show you’re committed to fighting terrorism: by pulling out of a tribal council convened to… fight terrorism. That’s what Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan announced today. Indicating his displeasure with accusations from the U.S. that he’s acquiesced to the entrenchment of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in his country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Musharraf cited “engagements” preventing him attending a joint Afghan-Pakistan tribal conference aimed at cracking down on jihadists…. Why would anyone think Musharraf is less than 100 percent committed to fighting al-Qaeda?”
* WaPo: “Bookkeeping deficiencies allowed thousands of weapons issued to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005 to then go missing, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said yesterday. ‘Some percentage’ of weapons the U.S. military provided to the Iraqi army and Iraqi police units were not tracked by serial number because there were no procedures in place to do so within the Iraqi units, Petraeus said in an interview broadcast last night on Fox News Radio’s ‘Alan Colmes Show.'”
* Bush has spent 418 days of his presidency in Crawford, and is also about to spend the next few weeks there, but we’re not supposed to call it a “vacation.” The White House prefers “recess.”
* Another GOP sex scandal? This time it’s the chairman of a County Republican Party in North Carolina Indiana, who is suspected of alleged “criminal deviate conduct,” which in this case, involved a man who claimed that the GOP official “performed an unwanted sex act on him while the man slept.” Is someone keeping track of all of the Republican sex scandals? It seems like there have been quite a few of late.
* The Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack stirred up the political world with an NYT op-ed that immediately became The Most Important Opinion Piece Ever, at least as far as the GOP was concerned. What we didn’t know was that they were joined by Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, during the same visit to Iraq, and Cordesman had a far more pessimistic perspective.
* Wesley Clark and Kal Raustiala had a good NYT piece today, explaining why “terrorists aren’t soldiers,” and jihadists detainees shouldn’t be treated as “unlawful combatants,” but rather as criminals.
* Headline of the year: “China tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate.” (thanks, PPC, for the tip)
* Lindsey Graham apparently wasn’t paying attention to Mitt Romney’s recent sign controversy.
* Anonymous Liberal tears John Stossel’s latest healthcare piece to shreds.
* Media Matters: “On the August 7 edition of Fox News host John Gibson’s nationally syndicated radio program, the show’s executive producer, known on air as ‘Angry Rich,’ described as ‘a poor choice of words” his August 3 statement — documented by Media Matters for America — that Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards “whored his wife’s cancer as a fundraising gimmick.’ Angry Rich did not apologize for the remark and went on to say of Edwards: ‘That doesn’t mean he’s not duplicitous, which he is.'”
* I do not watch baseball and have no opinions on Barry Bonds. There. I said it.
* Apparently, right-wing activists still think there’s new mud to throw at Bill Clinton.
* Charles Krauthammer doesn’t understand FISA, but that doesn’t stop him from misleading Fox News viewers about the law.
* AP on Bush’s promises about fixing the I-35W bridge: “Nearly two years ago, with parts of New Orleans still under water after Hurricane Katrina, Bush made similar declarations in the French Quarter. The president’s promise was all Melanie Thompson needed to hear to bring back her family of five and begin work on their flooded home. But today Thompson’s family is still living in a cramped trailer and awaiting aid to rebuild. Her hope and faith in government have faded and she worries for the people of Minneapolis. ‘I just hope to God they come to their rescue a lot quicker than they did ours,’ she said.”
* And finally, Stephen Colbert is concerned about Bush’s powers: “The vice president knew that we cannot win this war if we go by the book. You do whatever it takes. You go beyond what’s legal. You go past what’s acceptable. But thanks to this new law, all that dark side is now allowed. And we know doing what’s allowed is not enough…. Now that indefinite detention, enhanced interrogation and domestic spying are acceptable, it is getting harder and harder to find those things that we as Americans theoretically cannot bring ourselves to do.”
Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.