“President Bush’s senior advisers on Iraq have recommended he stand by his current war strategy, and he is unlikely to order more than a symbolic cut in troops before the end of the year, administration officials told The Associated Press Tuesday.” This advice reaffirms Bush’s stated desire to stay in Iraq.

UPDATE: Watch Keith Olbermann’s special comment on this issue tonight.

The LA Times reports that in 2001, Michael Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, met with the conservative group Judicial Watch and “personally assured” them that he would pursue criminal charges against Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) “in connection with a lavish fundraising event in Los Angeles.” Chertoff is now one of the names mentioned to take over the Justice Department, which has been criticized for a lack of independence.

Last week, Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) announced, “It is with sadness and deep regret that I announce that it is my intent to resign from the Senate, effective Sept. 30.” Apparently, he is now reconsidering. MSNBC’s Dan Abrams reports that the man who said “he would resign to avoid becoming a distraction is now once again a distraction.” Sidney Smith, Craig’s spokesman, said, “It’s not such a foregone conclusion anymore, that the only thing he could do was resign.” Watch it:

UPDATE: The AP reported today, “Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested Craig’s GOP colleagues who pressured him last week to resign should re-examine the facts surrounding his arrest June 11. ‘The more people take a look at the situation, there may well be second thoughts,’ Specter, a former prosecutor, said Tuesday.”

On this evening’s Hardball, Ron Christie, a former aide to Vice President Cheney, equated his work in the White House to serving in Iraq. While debating Iraq war veteran Jon Soltz, Christie said to Soltz, “I am pleased and honored by the fact that you chose to wear the uniform of this country, but I also chose to serve this country, and I’ve been involved in public service serving the United States and the American people.” “Unlike you Jon,” he continued, “I’ve actually sat in the Oval Office.” Watch it:

In June, House investigators learned that Vice President Cheney exempted his office from a presidential executive order, arguing that the Office of the Vice President is not an “entity within the executive branch.” In a recent interview with Harvard’s alumni magazine, former Vice President Al Gore confirmed that the Vice President is indeed part of the executive:

You were often referred to as the most powerful vice president.

GORE: That was before Dick Cheney.

Point taken. Cheney has made the argument that the vice presidency is not part of the executive branch. Is he right?

GORE: (Laughs) Of course the vice presidency is part of the executive branch! But I fear that I’m losing my objectivity where President Bush and Cheney are concerned. Not much surprises me anymore. I have a lot of friends who share the following problem with me: Our sense of outrage is so saturated that when a new outrage occurs, we have to download some existing outrage into an external hard drive in order to make room for a new outrage.

Gen. David Petraeus has claimed that there has been a 75 percent reduction in sectarian violence. In testimony today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, GAO Comptroller General David Walker said those statistics cannot be independently verified.

The GAO’s statistics, which extend through the end of July, demonstrate that the number of daily attacks against Iraqis remains unchanged. Walker said the Pentagon has refused to provide him with the latest statistics. “We asked for but did not receive the information through the end of August.” he said. “They haven’t given us the data.”

While Walker wasn’t privy to the Pentagon’s information, Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) said he recently met with Gen. Petraeus and was shown “the data in August.” Coleman said the data is “very clear about a reduction in violence. General Petraeus has those charts,” Coleman explained. Walker responded by hinting that a classified version of the GAO report contains more explanation of the administration’s claims about reductions in sectarian violence. He said:

Without getting into detail, let’s just say there are several different sources within the administration on violence. And those sources do not agree. So I don’t know what Gen. Petraeus is giving you. I don’t know which source he’s using. But part of the problem we had in reaching a conclusion about sectarian violence is there are multiple sources showing different levels of violence with different trends.

Watch it:

Ilan Goldenberg writes that one explanation for the contrary reports is because the military is not counting deaths from car bombs. The National Security Network notes that Petraeus has made a number of statements about the results of escalation that have been contradicted by Iraqi government data, independent media reports, and other U.S. agencies.

NSN writes, “The numbers have raised such alarm bells that a member of the Iraq Study Group, former ambassadors and leading academics have written to Congress asking them to look into the validity of U.S. government claims.”

This summer, a group of California lawyers filed a ballot initiative that would apportion the state’s presidential electors on a district-by-district, rather than statewide, basis. The ballot initiative “would rig elections in a way that would make it difficult for a Democrat to be elected president, no matter how the popular vote comes out.” The New York Times notes:

The net result of the California initiative would be that if the Democratic candidate wins in that state next year, which is very likely, the Republican candidate might still walk away with 20 or more of the state’s electoral votes. The initiative, backed by a shadowy group called Californians for Equal Representation, is being promoted as an effort to more accurately reflect the choices of the state’s voters, and to force candidates to pay more attention to California, which is usually not in play in presidential elections. It is actually a power grab on behalf of Republicans. [...]

If California abandons its winner-take-all rule while red states like Texas do not, it will be hard for a Democratic nominee to assemble an Electoral College majority, even if he or she wins a sizable majority of the popular vote. That appears to be just what the backers of the California idea have in mind.

As more evidence of the initiative’s partisan motives, today the AP reports that the law firm behind the ballot initiative, Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, LLP, has strong ties to a major donor of the 2004 PAC, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth:

Charles H. Bell and Thomas Hiltachk’s law firm banked nearly $65,000 in fees from a California-based political committee funded almost solely by Bob J. Perry that targeted Democrats in 2006. Perry, a major Republican donor, contributed nearly $4.5 million to the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that made unsubstantiated but damaging attacks on Kerry three years ago.

Bell is also the General Counsel for the California Republican Party and the Vice President of the Federalist Society’s free speech and election law practice group. Thomas Hiltachk serves as legal counsel to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA), who has so far given the proposal “a chilly reception.”

There’s no doubt that the Electoral College needs reform. But as Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) put it: “We are all for reforming the Electoral College but that must be done in ALL of the states, not just California.”

(The Carpetbagger Report and Digby have more. Find out the facts about the ballot initiative at Californians for Fair Election Reform.)

UPDATE: Calitics points out that “Bell keeps a life-sized cardboard image of President Bush in his office.”