Sunday’s Washington Post front-pages a story entitled “Military Envisions Longer Stay in Iraq.” The article states military officials are simultaneously planning for a drawdown and a “smaller, longer-term force that would remain in the country for years“:

This goal, drawn from recent interviews with more than 20 U.S. military officers and other officials here, including senior commanders, strategists and analysts, remains in the early planning stages. It is based on officials’ assessment that a sharp drawdown of troops is likely to begin by the middle of next year, with roughly two-thirds of the current force of 150,000 moving out by late 2008 or early 2009. The questions officials are grappling with are not whether the U.S. presence will be cut, but how quickly, to what level and to what purpose.

Gov Exec reported on Friday, “The Office of Special Counsel confirmed that it delivered to President Bush today its investigative report concluding General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan violated the law that limits political activity in federal agencies, leaving Doan’s future in the hands of the White House.” The article also noted that Waxman has received transcripts from the Office of Special Counsel’s interview with Doan:

In related news, OSC has provided the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee with redacted transcripts of their nine-hour interview with Doan, along with the e-mail records obtained by OSC to determine whether Doan was using her Blackberry during specific time periods during the January meeting. The panel’s chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and ranking member, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., both received copies of the report, the OSC spokesman said.

On Wednesday Doan is scheduled to appear before the oversight committee to discuss her allegations that GSA employees who testified about her statements at the Jan. 26 meeting were biased and poor performers. Waxman also said Doan may be asked other questions about her previous statements to the committee and to officials involved in the OSC investigation.

In his Senate testimony last Tuesday, former Missouri U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman repeatedly claimed that four controversial voter fraud indictments he filed a week before the 2006 mid-term elections were “directed” and “approved” by others in the Justice Department. Specifically, Schlozman said that Craig Donsanto, the head of the Department’s Election Crimes section, “directed” him to file the charges.

He also claimed that he had consulted with Michael Elston, the chief of staff to then Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. Watch it:

Former Justice Department officials familiar with Donsanto — the man who literally wrote the Justice Department’s manual on how to approach election crimes — consider his approval of the indictments to be highly unusual. On Thursday, ThinkProgress reported that Joseph Rich, who ran the Department’s Voting Rights section from 1999 to 2005, now believes Donsanto may have been “pressured” to approve the indictments, and that Schlozman’s call to Elston “indicated he may have gone over Donsanto’s head to get approval.”

Former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and another former official, Bob Kengle, confirmed to McClatchy yesterday that the call to Elston was “inappropriate“:

Iglesias believes that the call to Elston was out of the ordinary.

The former U.S. attorney said Schlozman’s phone call to Elston was “not only strange, it’s inappropriate.” Iglesias said McNulty’s office “is not in the business of micro-managing cases at the district level.”

Others find Donsanto’s approval unusual as well.

A former deputy chief of the department’s Voting Rights Section, Bob Kengle, who worked with Donsanto for years, said Donsanto’s approval seems odd.

“I would be very surprised if Craig said yes of his own volition,” Kengle said.

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Schlozman may be seeking to revise his sworn testimony, altering it to say “that he consulted with the section and was given guidance, not direction.”

Transcript: Read more

CBS News anchor Katie Couric, during a recent commencement address:

The proliferation of celebrity magazines makes Lindsey Lohan’s latest stint in rehab seem more important than what’s happening in Darfur.

The kind of fluff that accosts us on the newsstand may seem like harmless fun, but it should also come with a warning label that says it can rot your mind and distort your values.

Steve Benen notes, during Friday’s broadcast of Couric’s CBS Evening News, “the Paris Hilton ‘news’ got more coverage on CBS than a roadside bomb killing a U.S. soldier, the immigration legislation, and passage of the stem-cell bill combined — times two.”

National Review’s William F. Buckley, the “godfather of modern conservatism,” acknowledges today that the “evidence appears to have been overwhelming that [Scooter Libby] lied to the FBI, and that in so doing he hindered the execution of justice.” But this offense, he says, is a mere “triviality,” and President Bush should “exhibit the courage for which he is loved and hated, by doing the right thing, and letting Mr. Libby get on with life.”