In May, former Justice Department staffer Monica Goodling admitted to the House Judiciary Committee that she had “taken inappropriate political considerations into account” while hiring career employees at the Department. “I don’t believe I intended to commit a crime,” said Goodling. But today on NPR, Michael Battle — former director of the U.S. Attorneys — cast doubts on Goodling’s claims of innocence:

She thought of politics probably 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Listen to Battle’s remarks here:

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service yesterday released a report challenging President Bush’s Middle East counterterrorism strategy, noting that “[d]emocratization…may actually undermine U.S. security interests and exacerbate the terrorism problem”:

[T]here may be potential threats from groups or individuals aligned with other extremist causes or ideologies. Some wonder whether the emphasis on a single front in the war on terror might leave the country vulnerable to surprise attacks from groups that have been overlooked. [...]

The Strategy does not include a discussion and contingency plan for a scenario in which one does not “win.” [...]

There is heavy emphasis in the 2006 Strategy on democratization as a means of countering terrorism. Viewed in the context of the mixed success of fledgling democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan and the persistence of autocratic regimes among U.S. allies in the Middle East, the credibility and effectiveness of this strategic thrustmay merit scrutiny.

In a speech in Dallas today, Vice President Cheney confidently declared that “a free democratic Iraq will be a strategic partner in the heart of the Middle East, helping us fight and win the war on terror.”

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In a radio interview with “The Big Picture on the Radio Show” on South Carolina’s ETV Radio, Rudy Giuliani talked about how he plans to choose his vice president:

I would want a vice president who was a partner. Someone who was in on everything that was going on, so that that person could take over if, God forbid, something happened. [...]

How do you pick a vice president? … I think Vice President Cheney and President Bush’s pick of Vice President Cheney is a good example of picking someone who is qualified to be president of the United States. That is number one — it’s paramount.

(HT: Rumproast)

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I’ve long been sympathetic to the argument, advanced over the years in various forms by members of the Greeberg Quinlan Rosner team, that the “marriage gap” is an under-recognized feature of American politics and that one of liberalism’s most promising growth areas is simply in finding better ways to engage and mobilize unmarried women who are a large and quite progressive bloc of the population with low voter turnout rates. You can see the latest form of the argument in this report and, as I say, I find it convincing.

I do, however, keep being disappointed by the relative lack of statistical sophistication you see here. After all, unmarried people are demographically quite different from married people in a number of ways including age, race, sexual orientation and religious affiliation — all characteristics that are plausibly big driver’s of voting behavior. They do a decent job of showing that the “marriage gap” holds up even when you look at the major sub-samples of the population (it’s not, in short, just driven by the different marriage rates of blacks, whites, and Latinos) but this is still a pretty crude way of looking at the interplay of factors. What would really be nice would be some regression analysis that could help us try to estimate the impact of marriage independent of other demographic factors.

Relatedly, it’s always worth saying that proposals to “target” this or that slice of the electorate sometimes seem to me to involve underestimating the heterogeneity of the group. It’s true, for example, that one would expect a 25 year-old unmarried white woman who graduated from Wellesley, took an entry-level job at a DC think tank, and is now enrolled at Georgetown Law School and a 25 year-old unmarried African-American mother of two who dropped out of high school to both be loyal Democrats but it’s not at all clear that there’s a common “single woman” or even “single 25 year-old woman” characteristic that’s driving this common voting behavior, even though they’re both common archetypes in major American cities. A Republican strategist looking to make inroads with these voters, for example, would probably adopt different strategies depending on which woman they were trying to court.

The AP reports:

Sens. Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein say they will vote for Attorney General-nominee Michael Mukasey, which likely gives him enough support to pass the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Their decision came shortly after the chairman of the committee, Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., announced he would vote against Mukasey, a former federal judge.

”This is an extremely difficult decision,” Schumer said in a statement, adding that Mukasey ”is not my ideal choice.”

So far, five Democrats on the committee have announced their opposition.

On ABC World News with Charles Gibson last night, ABC National Security Correspondent Jonathan Karl filed a report about the recent decline in American troop casualties in Iraq. In the report, Karl noted that “violence in Iraq is down,” but added that “there has been almost no political progress on the national level”:

In fact, there’s been almost no political progress on the national level, and U.S. officials know military gains won’t mean much if the Iraqi government doesn’t get its act together, which is one reason the Pentagon doesn’t even want to use the word “winning.”

Watch it:

After the report aired, the White House sent the piece out in an official White House publication called “White House Iraq Update.” But, as Karl writes today, the White House edited his report before sending it out, making it look “like an unqualified declaration of success in Iraq.”

In the version sent out by the White House, all references to a lack of political progress were removed. Here is full segment that the White House did not want reporters to see:

O’HANLON: … and it doesn’t answer the questions about political progress.

KARL: In fact, there’s been almost no political progress on the national level, and U.S. officials know military gains won’t mean much if the Iraqi government doesn’t get its act together, which is one reason the Pentagon doesn’t even want to use the word “winning.”

[To Defense Secretary] You’re not ready to say we’re winning, that the surge is working –

ROBERT GATES [Defense Secretary]: (From tape.) I think — I think that those end up being loaded words. I think we have been very successful. We need to continue being successful.

KARL: Today, Defense Secretary Gates said that the reduction in violence would not have been possible without the surge of 30,000 additional troops into Iraq, but, Charlie, those troops are going home in the coming months, raising the question of whether the violence will go up when they leave.

GIBSON: Jonathan Karl tonight reporting from the Pentagon, thanks.

Contacted by ABC, the White House admitted to editing the negative aspects of the report and acknowledged that it was “inappropriate.”

“The White House understands your concern,” White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told ABC. “And the full text of your report will be released to the same distribution list so that recipients have a chance to see what the entire report was about.”

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This morning in a speech in Dallas, a reporter asked Vice President Cheney about his views on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Cheney responded that the people of Peru “deserve better” leadership:

MODERATOR: Our attention is focused on Iraq, Iran and the wider Middle East. However, much of the world is watching closely Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. How concerned are you about his influence?

CHENEY: We have — I’m trying to think how to state this diplomatically.

(LAUGHTER)

Diplomacy is hard sometimes.

(LAUGHTER)

We have refrained from making public pronouncements about Mr. Chavez — I think, for good and legitimate reasons. He’s a — obviously, an individual with his own agenda. And he spends a great deal of his time worrying about us and criticizing the United States.

My own personal view is that he does not represent the future of Latin America. And the people of Peru (sic), I think, deserve better in their leadership. But that’s obviously a matter they’ve got to resolve for themselves.

For the record, Peru’s current president is Alan Garc­a. (At least Cheney didn’t call Africa a “nation.”)

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A federal judge ruled today that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior intelligence officials “will be subpoenaed to discuss their conversations with pro-Israel lobbyists” who “are accused of receiving classified information from a now-convicted Pentagon official and relaying it to an Israeli official and the press.” If Rice ultimately testifies in court, the case “could offer a behind-the-scenes look at the way U.S. foreign policy is crafted.”