ABC News reports: “New documents show Gonzales approved firings of U.S. attorneys, contradicting earlier claims he was not closely involved.”

UPDATE: The AP reports:

Gonzales approved plans to fire several U.S. attorneys in a November meeting. …

The Nov. 27 meeting, in which the attorney general and at least five top Justice Department officials participated, focused on a five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors, Justice Department officials said late Friday.

There, Gonzales signed off on the plan, which was crafted by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. Sampson resigned last week in the wake of the political firestorm surrounding the firings.

UPDATE II: On March 12, Gonzales denied any involvement in the prosecutor purge:

I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on … That’s basically what I knew as attorney general.

UPDATE III: New documents released tonight, “including Gonzales’s appointment calendar, show that the attorney general and his deputy, Paul McNulty, participated in an hour-long meeting about the firings on Nov. 27. Seven of the eight prosecutors were let go on Dec. 7.” The meeting occurred during the 18-day gap in documents the Justice Department had previously released.

Kyle Sampson, the former aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who resigned last week, has agreed to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys last year. “His appearance will mark the first congressional testimony by a Justice Department aide since the release of thousands of documents that show the firings were orchestrated, in part, by the White House.” “He was right at the center of things,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY said. “He has said publicly that what others have said is not how it happened. … He contradicts DOJ.”

Tomorrow, ThinkProgress will be in Las Vegas to cover the New Leadership on Health Care presidential forum. The forum will force presidential candidates to go on the record about their proposals for systemic health care reform. Currently, the “U.S. health care system is a scandal and a disgrace,” as nearly 47 million Americans lack health insurance, health care premiums continue to rise, and 71 percent of Americans believe our health care system is in a state of crisis.

The dire situation has led more and more Americans to support universal coverage. Polling done over the last decade shows support for guaranteed health insurance has consistently grown:

“Maybe, just maybe, 2007 will be the year we start the move toward universal coverage,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote recently. But as Drew Altman of the Kaiser Family Foundation and Robert Blendon from the Harvard School of Public Health argue, ” [W]hat health needs most to rise up in American politics is for national political candidates, whether from the political left, right, or center, to begin talking about the issue again as they did in the early nineties. Most important of all are the presidential candidates, who receive so much national media attention.”

The forum includes a ThinkProgress.org interactive candidate response round that will allow readers to ask questions of each presidential candidate in real-time. Here’s how it will work:

1. During the forum, ThinkProgress will feature streaming video and and a form for you to submit follow-up questions to the candidates.

2. The submissions will be filtered to a panel of health care experts who will select the best entries.

3. Towards the end of each candidate’s question-and-answer period, the moderator will ask the candidate a selected question from ThinkProgress.org readers.

We hope you’ll join us tomorrow morning.

There’s much wisdom in what Kevin Drum writes here, but I think he’s wrong to believe that public opinion growing more tolerant and socially progressive heralds an era in which right-wing culture war tactics will grow less politically effective. If anything, the reverse. Culture war battles overwhelmingly involve the left throwing the first shot, then getting burned politically as the right fire back, and then winning the substantive battle. After all, as long as public opinion on race was sufficiently conservative that there was no meaningful pressure on politicians to back civil rights, racial backlash politics were useless. Similarly, there was no political mobilization around banning abortions until pubic opinion became sufficiently pro-choice to make political mobilization around legalizing abortions seem like a reasonable way to spend your time.

And, again, as long as public opinion was massively hostile to gay rights, there was no use in trying to use anti-gay sentiment as a tool of political mobilization. Liberals will win the gay marriage battle soon enough, but then some new thing will come along. Besides race, after all, the overwhelming majority of these fights have had to do with traditional ideas about gender roles. Clearly, adherence gender norms has become much more relaxed over the past 40-50 years. At the same time, however, we’ve hardly emerged as a behaviorally androgynous society. Kwame Anthony Appiah used to point out in seminar that he could guess the sex of the students around the table pretty accurately simply by looking at everyone’s shoes. Which isn’t to say that we’re going to have a political fight over shoes per se (just as there was never a “women can wear pants now” legislative fight during which moderates brokered a compromise appending “but their pants should be tighter than men’s pants” to the text) but we’ve got all these “mommy wars,” hook-up controversies, etc. to keep chewing over.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared on radio in Seattle this morning to defend the Justice Department’s decision to fire eight U.S. attorneys. When asked why former U.S. attorney John McKay of Washington state was ousted, Gonzales responded:

Listen, we made a decision at the Department as to the appropriate way forward. There was nothing improper about the decision here … There’s no evidence whatsoever, and it’s reckless and irresponsible to allege that these decisions were based in any way on improper motives.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO GONZALES

Gonzales’ statements are distortions. McKay revealed earlier this month that Rep. Doc Hasting’s (R-WA) office contacted him and pressured him as to the status of an ongoing investigation into voter fraud in the midst of a tight gubernatorial election. Emails released this week show that then-Gonzales’ chief of staff Kyle Sampson touted McKay for a federal judgeship, saying that it is “highly unlikely we could do better in Seattle.” But one month later, McKay was listed as one of the seven attorneys in the process of being “pushed out.” “What happened between those dates to reverse McKay’s political fortunes is a bit of a mystery.”

Gonzales’ defiant tone comes in the midst of a last ditch attempt to avoid being fired himself. This week, Gonzales is touring the country in an attempt to get away from Washington, as he “appeared to be launching a campaign to save his job by repairing relations with prosecutors in the field and reaching out to political supporters.”

“The U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay will likely remain open for the rest of George W. Bush’s presidency, because it will take time to conduct the legal proceedings of the detainees there, the White House said on Friday.”

From today’s press briefing:

Q: So, realistically, are you saying that Guantanamo Bay will not be shut down before the end of his presidency?

SNOW: I doubt it, no. I don’t think it will.

“I will veto it if it comes to my desk,” Bush said, adding that he thinks the legislation has “no chance of becoming law.”

UPDATE: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reacts to the bill’s passage: “The American people have lost faith in the president’s conduct of this war. … The American people see the reality of the war, the president does not.”