“The Bush administration is facing growing difficulties in filling a rising number of high-level vacancies following a recent spate of senior departures. In the last 10 days alone Mr Bush has lost four senior officials and more resignations are expected to follow. ‘I wouldn’t describe this as disintegration,’ said one senior official. ‘But there are worrying large gaps opening up and it is very hard to recruit high-quality people from outside.’

“In March 2003, Bill O’Reilly called on all Americans to boycott the use of French products because of France’s disagreement with the United States decision to invade Iraq… Through the years O’Reilly has claimed his boycott of France has cost the country “billions of dollars” (O’Reilly himself quoted that figure in the non-existent “Paris Business Review“).” But now that France has elected conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, the French can rest easy. O’Reilly said yesterday, “The Factor is lifting the boycott of France. However, ‘Boycott France’ bumper stickers do remain available on BillOReilly.com for nostalgia purposes, and you never know… we may have to re-impose it.“

Controversial U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 15.

“A week after President Bush vetoed a Democratic war spending measure that set a timeline for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, House Democrats said Tuesday they hope to vote later this week on a second proposal that would impose new conditions on the administration’s prosecution of the war.”

[T]he plan developed by Reps. David Obey, D-Wis, and John P. Murtha, D-Pa. — and referred to by some Democrats as the “short-leash” plan — would guarantee about $30 billion in funding only through July for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At that point, the Bush administration would be required to report on the Iraqi government’s progress on a series of benchmarks, including disarming sectarian militias and passing laws to equitably share oil wealth across the country. Congress would then take a second vote to approve further funding through the end of September.

On Feb. 7, 2007, Alberto Gonzales’ spokesman Brian Roehrkasse told two top Gonzales aides that the Attorney General was “extremely upset” that his deputy, Paul McNulty, had told the Senate Judiciary committee the day before that U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins had been fired to make room for an aide to Karl Rove. But why was he upset?

When the Roehrkasse e-mail came to light, he told the press that Gonzales had been upset because he believed that “Bud Cummins’ removal involved performance considerations.” But on April 15, Congressional sources tell TIME, Gonzales’ former chief of staff Kyle Sampson told a different story. During a private interview with Judiciary Committee staffers Sampson said three times in as many minutes that Gonzales was angry with McNulty because he had exposed the White House’s involvement in the firings — had put its role “in the public sphere,” as Sampson phrased it, according to Congressional sources familiar with the interview.

Number of Americans who disapprove of President Bush’s decision to veto the Iraq funding bill that called for U.S. troops to leave Iraq by 2008, according to a new CNN poll. Additionally, “57 percent of Americans said they want Congress to send another spending bill with a timetable for withdrawal back to the White House.”