Via Josh Marshall, McClatchy reports tonight, “The Justice Department last year considered firing two U.S. attorneys in Florida and Colorado, states where allegations of voter fraud and countercharges of voter intimidation have flown in recent years.”

That brings to nine the number of battleground election states where the Bush administration set out to replace some of the nation’s top prosecutors. In at least seven states, it now appears, U.S. attorneys were fired or considered for firing as Republicans in those states urged investigations or prosecutions of alleged Democratic voter fraud.

The two prosecutors who were targeted were Gregory Miller, the U.S. attorney for the northern district of Florida in Tallahassee, and Bill Leone, the former acting U.S. attorney for Colorado.

Miller appeared on multiple target lists for possible firing from early 2005 through last November, according to a senior congressional aide familiar with Justice Department documents. Miller kept his job. [...]

Asked whether activists outside Washington had asked his office to look into any controversial voter fraud allegations, he declined to comment, saying Justice Department policy prohibits prosecutors from commenting on closed or ongoing cases.

Marshall also notes a key new detail buried at the bottom of the story: that former Minnesota U.S. Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger, who left last year to be replaced by controversial 33-year-old Rachel Paulose, was “asked to resign.”

“Complaints that mobile homes and trailers housing hurricane Katrina and Rita victims have unhealthy levels of formaldehyde were dismissed by Federal Emergency Management Agency Director David Paulison on Tuesday. … ‘We’ve told people they can air those trailers out,’ he said.”

White House budget officials said Wednesday in a statement of administration policy laying out objections to the House version of the 2008 defense authorization bill. … Bush budget officials said the administration ‘strongly opposes’ both the 3.5 percent raise for 2008 and the follow-on increases, calling extra pay increases ‘unnecessary.’“

Yesterday we noted a measure sponsored by Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ) that would have blocked funds authorized for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from being used for a military strike on Iran. That amendment was just defeated, 216-202. Twenty-nine Democrats opposed the measure, 6 Republicans supported it.

Karl Rove’s former assistant, Susan Ralston, “is currently seeking immunity to testify before Waxman’s committee,” Robert Novak reports. “Ralston is a former assistant to Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Washington super-lobbyist and Republican fund-raiser. … For Waxman, she is a link between Abramoff and Rove. Ralston was deposed behind closed doors prior to her request for immunity. According to her friends, she has nothing to say that would cause problems for Rove.”

Ralston’s quest for immunity may mean nothing, or it could be very bad news for Rove. On the one hand, immunity requests are becoming par for the course in congressional hearings. Monica Goodling of the Justice Department did the same, despite the fact that it would be difficult to suggest that laws were broken in the case of the fired U.S. attorneys. Ralston may be seeking immunity merely for self-protection rather than to nail her former boss, and she could turn out to be a dud for Waxman. Still, there may actually be violations here pertaining to the legal preservation of presidential records.

Last night in the Republican presidential debate, Rudy Giuliani was asked if he had an “open-ended” commitment to Iraq. He failed to directly answer the question, and instead advocated staying in Iraq in order to fight terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them here. He referenced the foiled Fort Dix terrorist plot as an example. Giuliani said, “These people do want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago.”

Giuliani’s claim that the Fort Dix terrorists are an example of why we need to stay in Iraq is extremely flawed. As TalkLeft noted, the individuals arrested at Fort Dix had been in the United States well before the Iraq war, some of them for more than 23 years.

After the debate, Giuliani went on Fox, where Alan Colmes pressed him on this point. “Three of the brothers came when they were one and six and in single digits chronologically. They didn’t come here to commit jihad. They came here when they were kids. They grew up in the United States,” Colmes said. Flummoxed by the question, Giuliani visibly stuttered and could only offer, “This whole thing is a tremendous danger for us, abroad and here.” Watch a video compilation:

Giuliani also said last night, “These people [al Qaeda terrorists] came here and killed us because of our freedom of religion, because of our freedom for women, because they hate us. … The reality is, if you are confused about this, I think you put our country in much greater jeopardy.” Sadly, it is Giuliani who is confused in his diagnosis about the root cause of terrorism.

Counterrorism expert Michael Scheuer has correctly noted:

Osama doesn’t hate our freedom: The fundamental flaw in our thinking about Bin Laden is that ‘Muslims hate and attack us for what we are and think, rather than what we do.’ Muslims are bothered by our modernity, democracy, and sexuality, but they are rarely spurred to action unless American forces encroach on their lands. It’s American foreign policy that enrages Osama and al-Qaida, not American culture and society.

UPDATE: SJBrian at Blue Jersey has more.

As CNN’s Ed Henry noted this evening on The Situation Room, “It’s striking that the President did not publicly introduce Gen. Lute, choosing instead to announce the appointment via a written press release. Normally for a high-profile appointment, the President would make a big splash, raising questions about just how much clout this appointee will have.”

Michael Baroody, a senior lobbyist at the National Association of Manufacturers nominated by President Bush to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission, “will receive a $150,000 departing payment from the association when he takes his new government job, which involves enforcing consumer laws against members of the association.”

Mr. Baroody said in the letter that the payment would not prevent him from considering matters involving individual companies that are members of the manufacturers’ association, many of whom are defendants in agency proceedings over defective products or have other business before the commission. Nor would it preclude him from involvement with smaller trade groups like those representing makers of home appliances and children’s products that have alliances with the association. [...]

As a major trade organization for the largest companies in the country, the National Association of Manufacturers often has issues before the Consumer Product Safety Commission. It recently prevailed on the agency, for instance, to relax the requirements for when companies must notify the agency about defective products.

Proportion of Americans who are happy with the state of the country, one of the lowest levels since Gallup started asking the question in 1979.

Former head of the World Bank ethics committee, Ad Melkert, has stated that his panel was never consulted on, nor approved of, the hefty compensation package bank president Paul Wolfowitz arranged for his love interest, Shaha Riza.

But new documents released by a special committee of The World Bank Group show that a team at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher did sign off on the deal. That team included President Bush’s former Solicitor General Ted Olson and Eugene Scalia, son of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Law.com reports:

Documents released by the bank show that Wolfowitz asked Gibson to review the deal in the summer of 2005. A Gibson Dunn team, including Theodore Olson and Eugene Scalia, concluded that the contract was “a reasonable resolution of the perceived underlying conflict of interest.”

Earlier this week, the Bank’s special committee investigating the scandal “concluded that the limited and after-the-fact review by Gibson ‘is squarely at odds with the high degree of … concern for the interests of’ the World Bank.”

Both Scalia and Olson are solid Bush loyalists, and it’s no surprise that they signed off on Wolfowitz’s arrangement. Some highlights of their career defending the Bush administration:

Eugene Scalia: Facing rejection from the Senate, in Jan. 2002, Bush gave Scalia a controversial recess appoint to become solicitor at the Department of Labor. Gibson, Scalia’s law firm, also represented Bush in the 2000 Supreme Court case that gave Bush the presidency. Even though Scalia benefited from the case, his father refused to recuse himself, as federal statute requires.

Ted Olson: Olson personally represented Bush in the 2000 Supreme Court case, and was then awarded the position of Solicitor General. Olson also provided “assistance” to the Paula Jones legal team in her case against former President Clinton, and “was a public supporter of his longtime friend, Kenneth Starr” during Whitewater.

But even Scalia and Olson weren’t willing to fully embrace Wolfowitz’s compensation package. They added a caveat to their conclusion that the arrangement was “a reasonable resolution”: “Our review has been limited,” Gibson Dunn partner Douglas Cox wrote in an Aug. 31 memo to Wolfowitz. “The key elements of the contract had been accepted and agreed to by all parties to the contract before we were retained.”