Earlier, ThinkProgress reported that the Bush administration’s senior foreign aid coordinator had stepped down. The Blotter has the reason:

Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation. Tobias, 65, Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), had previously served as the Ambassador for the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.

A State Department press release late Friday afternoon said only he was leaving for “personal reasons.” On Thursday, Tobias told ABC News he had several times called the “Pamela Martin and Associates” escort service “to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.” Tobias, who is married, said there had been “no sex,” and that recently he had been using another service “with Central Americans” to provide massages.

UPDATE: Tobias was a strong proponent of the Bush administration’s abstinence-only policies. Before touring African countries for an AIDS program 2004, he said, “The message to young people in the schools is not either ‘Be abstinent or here are condoms, take your pick.’ It is a message of ‘Be abstinent.’ Delaying sexual activity is a means of eliminating the risk of infection.”

Digg It!

CNN has confirmed that Congress’ Iraq withdrawal legislation will be delivered to President Bush on Tuesday, making it highly likely that Bush will veto the bill on the four year anniversary of his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech:

DANA BASH: They now plan to send this bill to the White House on Tuesday. Not only that, they are considering, Democrats are considering holding a ceremony to send this bill off. The idea there: shining the spotlight one more time on Democrats before that veto, to make the case, just like they did today, that from Democrats’ perspective, the President is ignoring public opinion against his Iraq strategy.

Watch the full report:

“Randall Tobias, coordinator of the Bush administration’s foreign aid programs, resigned Friday, citing personal reasons.” Tobias’s statement is HERE, via TPM.

“A senior Justice Department official has resigned after coming under scrutiny in the Department’s expanding investigation of convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff,” McClatchy reports.

Making the situation more awkward for the embattled Department, the official, Robert E. Coughlin II, was deputy chief of staff for the criminal division, which is overseeing the Department’s probe of Abramoff.

He stepped down effective April 6 as investigators in Coughlin’s own division ratcheted up their investigation of lobbyist Kevin Ring, Coughlin’s long-time friend and a key associate of Abramoff.

U.S. attorney Bradley Schlozman is returning to the Justice Department to be an “attorney in the Counsel to the Director staff at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys.” Before being rewarded with the U.S. attorney job, Schlozman served in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. In 2005, he reversed the career staff’s recommendations to challenge a Georgia photo-ID law that a federal judge later likened to a “modern-day poll tax.”

McClatchy reports that a State Department terrorism report due out next week will show a nearly 30 percent increase in terror attacks worldwide in 2006. “Based on data compiled by the U.S. intelligence community’s National Counterterrorism Center, the reports says there were 14,338 terror attacks last year, up 29 percent from 11,111 attacks in 2005. Forty-five percent of the attacks took place in Iraq.”

to be a young soldier in the middle of Iraq and realizing that politicians have all of the sudden made military determinations. And in my judgment, that would put a kid in harm’s way, more so than he or she already is.” — President Bush, today, on how withdrawing a soldier from Iraq will place him in greater danger

In 1993, current House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) voted numerous times to limit the deployment of troops in Somalia, including one bill that set a six-month timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Like several other war supporters who once backed timelines, Boehner now attacks those who favor redeploying U.S. troops out of Iraq’s civil war as “defeatists” who want a “date certain for surrender.”

But Boehner has taken this hypocrisy to a new level. Despite clamoring for a withdrawal from Somalia in 1993, he had the temerity to charge yesterday that war critics were “walk[ing] out” on Iraq “just like we did in Somalia.”

Watch it:

Details on Boehner’s Somalia votes below: Read more

Today, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) introduced a bill to legalize same-sex marriage, making him “the first governor in the nation to introduce a gay marriage bill.” Read Spitzer’s statement HERE.

“A package left at a clinic that performs abortions contained an explosive device that investigators said Thursday could have been deadly. The incident came just days after a national abortion group alerted providers around the country to an increased risk of violence.”