Today on CNN’s Late Edition, Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Arlen Specter (R-PA), the committee’s top Republican, announced that they were interested in calling Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to testify about the CIA leak investigation.

Specter said he wanted Fitzgerald to appear so he could press him to justify the CIA leak investigation. “Why were they pursuing the matter long after there was no underlying crime on the outing of the CIA agent?” Specter said, echoing the common right-wing talking point. “Why were they pursuing it after we knew who the leaker was?”

Leahy, on the other hand, is apparently more interested in learning more about Fitzgerald’s interviews with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Watch it:

As for calling Scooter Libby to testify, Leahy said it was a dead end. “It would do no good to call Scooter Libby. His silence has been bought and paid for,” he said, referring to Bush’s commutation, “and he would just take the fifth.”

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This morning, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol — who accurately predicted the President’s decision to commute Libby’s sentence — suggested the order was timed to provide political cover for the decision by attacking President Clinton.

“Here’s why the president acted the way he did. He knew Bill Clinton was joining Hillary in Iowa on July 4th. No, I’m serious,” Kristol said. “So on July 2d, Ed Gillespie, who’s a very canny Republican operator, said, Let’s pardon Libby. Clinton will rise to the bait, and we could spend the last half of the week debating the unbelievable Clinton pardons against the defensible Bush pardon.”

Kristol concluded, “I regard this as an extremely clever Machiavellian move by the president. It cheers me up about the Bush White House, and I’m really heartened.” Watch it:

The Libby case is not comparable to anything President Clinton ever did. Libby was spared prison time because he was “charged with activities that involve knowledge of what his superiors in the White House did.” House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers said this kind of relationship in a commutation has “never existed before.”

If Kristol’s theory is correct that politics played a large role in the timing of Libby’s commutation, that provides yet another issue for Congress to delve into when it begins hearings on Bush’s abuse of clemency powers this week.

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Via Ann Friedman, Nancy Goldstein explains “why no Democratic presidential candidate is getting my gay money.” I don’t have any gay money, personally, but I think you’ve got to respect where she’s coming from. It’s worth observing, however, that presidential politics simply isn’t a particularly effective leverage point for advancing gay rights as a general matter. If you have the chance, check out Josh Green’s profile of Tim Gill a few months back in The Atlantic to see a more efficacious path.

Gill’s approach, in essence, is to try to scour the country in search of low-level elected officials who stand out of the crowd for their anti-gay activism, and then get big chunks of cash sent to their opponents. Green’s lead example is “Danny Carroll, the Republican [ex] speaker pro tempore of Iowa’s House of Representatives” who sponsored his state’s entry into the “succession of state ballot initiatives banning gay marriage.”

Over the summer, Carroll’s opponent started receiving checks from across the country—significant sums for a statehouse race, though none so large as to arouse suspicion (the gifts topped out at $1,000). Because they came from individuals and not from organizations, nothing identified the money as being “gay,” or even coordinated. Only a very astute political operative would have spotted the unusual number of out-of-state donors and pondered their interest in an obscure midwestern race. And only someone truly versed in the world of gay causes would have noticed a $1,000 contribution from Denver, Colorado, and been aware that its source, Tim Gill, is the country’s biggest gay donor, and the nexus of an aggressive new force in national politics.

Carroll lost his seat. Let that kind of thing happen a few more times over the next few cycles, and suddenly you have politicians everywhere thinking twice about whether or not they really want to be leading anti-gay demagogues. It’s much easier to impact elections for state legislature, and the preponderance of gay rights issues are state-level anyway.

A massive truck bomb killed 150 people in a northern Iraqi town and “fresh attacks in and around Baghdad killed 31 others.” The truck bomb devastated the Shiite town of Tuz Khurmato. “I just visited the scene. It looks like an earthquake happened there,” Shalal Abid al-Ahmed, a member of the Salahuddin provincial council, told Reuters.

The death toll of 150 makes it the second deadliest insurgent bombing in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. In March, a truck bomb attack also blamed on al Qaeda killed 152 people in the northern town of Tal Afar.