Yesterday, the Washington Post reported, “Of the 12 U.S. attorneys known to have been dismissed or considered for removal last year, five were identified by Rove or other administration officials as working in districts that were trouble spots for voter fraud.”

One of those districts was Nevada. The U.S. attorney in that region, Daniel Bogden, was fired last year as part of the Bush administration’s prosecutor purge. According to Justice Department documents, part of the reason he was fired was because Karl Rove and Benton Campbell, chief of staff for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, believed that Bogden didn’t go after voter fraud aggressively enough:

[Senior counselor Matthew] Friedrich had asked Campbell for his assessment of Rove’s complaints about problems in New Mexico, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, according to a congressional aide familiar with Friedrich’s remarks.

The notes show that Campbell also identified Nevada as a problem district. Daniel G. Bogden of Las Vegas was among the nine U.S. attorneys known to have been removed from their jobs last year.

Yet as the Las Vegas Sun reports today,voter fraud wasn’t a problem in Nevada. In fact, Bogden didn’t have any cases to pursue:

Secretary of State Ross Miller, a Democrat, said he knew of no cases brought to the U.S. attorney’s office in recent years. Nevada Republicans say the same.

The biggest case Nevada had seen recently were allegations in 2004 that a Republican-financed group had shredded registration cards from Democratic voters. The FBI investigated but it appears the case was not forwarded to Bogden.

As the New York Times noted in a March 16 editorial, “In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. … There is no evidence of rampant voter fraud in this country. Rather, Republicans under Mr. Bush have used such allegations as an excuse to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning groups.”

Gonzales has admitted that when he approved of the firings in Nov. 2006, he didn’t know why Bogden was on the hit list.

As of yesterday, soldiers are banned from accessing MySpace, YouTube, and 11 other sites. Yet as IraqSlogger points out, “the weekly electronic newsletter of the US-led Multi-National Forces-Iraq (MNF-I) today makes a banner appeal for US forces and others to watch MNF-I’s new YouTube channel”:

The Pentagon’s YouTube efforts are meant “to help portray U.S. combat efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan in a favorable light.”

UPDATE: Sen. John Warner (R-VA) today said that he will investigate the Pentagon’s decision. “Believe me, I am going to jump on that like a June bug right now,” said Warner, a member of the Armed Services Committee. “I’ve got a call into the Pentagon saying, ‘Hey guys, what is the rationale?‘”

Cpl. Cloy Richards, who earlier this month attempted suicide, is listed by the military as “80-percent combat disabled,” as he previously “punched out all his windows and cut major arteries,” has knee and arm injuries, suffers from traumatic brain injury, and has pending claim for post-traumatic stress disorder. Nevertheless, Richards now “faces the possibility of a third deployment to Iraq.”

The Orlando Sentinel reports:

In what could be a congressional first, U.S. Rep. Ric Keller of Orlando quoted early hip-hop star LL Cool J on the House floor to prove he was a longstanding supporter of a police funding measure.

“Don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been here for years,” said the conservative Republican lawmaker, citing the classic hit “Mama Said Knock You Out” from the early 1990s album of the same name.

Digg It!

MoveOn has launched an online petition to gather signatures in support of Gen. Batiste. The petition will be delivered to Leslie Moonves, President and CEO of CBS Corporation and Sean McManus, President of CBS News. Sign the petition here.

UPDATE: CBS News military consultant Michael O’Hanlon thinks CBS should bring back Batiste.

With regard to some recent dust-ups, I fall into the “enormous respect for Thomas Edsall” camp, but I’ve found myself tending to disagree with a lot of his more recent work. For example, he has the current cover story in The New Republic, arguing that Giuliani can, too, win the GOP nomination as a pro-choice, pro-gay candidate largely because Republican primary voters don’t care about that stuff anymore:

Read more

In March 2004, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and then-chief of staff Andrew Card attempted to go around acting Attorney General James Comey and get John Ashcroft, who was debilitated with pancreatitis, to sign off on an extension of the administration’s warrantless domestic spying efforts from his hospital bed.

As ThinkProgress noted, Comey testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee today that “given how ill [he] knew the attorney general was,” he was “upset” and “angry,” believing he had “witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man.”

At today’s press briefing, White House spokesman Tony Snow dismissed Comey’s testimony and the seriousness of Ashcroft’s condition. When CNN’s Ed Henry asked Snow if the White House had been trying to “take advantage of a very sick man” in “an end-run” to “try to get John Ashcroft to overrule James Comey” Snow replied, “Because he had an appendectomy, his brain didn’t work?” Watch it:

The White House refuses to acknowledge that its actions were potentially illegal. At that time, Ashcroft didn’t have any power because the powers of the attorney general had been transferred to Comey.

Moreover, Snow is downplaying the seriousness of Ashcroft’s health condition at the time. Ashcroft had been in intensive care at George Washington University hospital for “over a week” before Gonzales and Card paid him a visit. Mrs. Ashcroft had banned “all visitors and all phone calls.” Comey described Ashcroft’s condition on the day of Card and Gonzales’s visit:

Mrs. Ashcroft was standing by the hospital bed, Mr. Ashcroft was lying down in the bed, the room was darkened. And I immediately began speaking to him, trying to orient him as to time and place, and try to see if he could focus on what was happening, and it wasn’t clear to me that he could. He seemed pretty bad off.

Ashcroft’s chief of staff also personally requested that Comey “not resign until Mr. Ashcroft was well enough to resign with me. He was very concerned that Mr. Ashcroft was not well enough to understand fully what was going on.”

Digg It!

Transcript: Read more

The U.S. bid to postpone discussion over Wolfowitz “for another day ran into immediate opposition from European and other governments determined to resolve the bank crisis once and for all this week. … The Group of Seven leading industrialised nations failed to agree a way forward, as European nations and Canada pushed back against US pressure to delay consideration of whether Paul Wolfowitz can any longer be effective in his job.”