In a 280-142 vote, the House passed a $120-billion Iraq war funding bill that contains no timeline to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. The bill is now sent to the Senate for final passage, “expected later Thursday night.”

UPDATE: This bill also includes a $2.10 increase in the minimum wage, the first raise in a decade.

UPDATE II: Roll call on the Iraq vote is HERE. Eighty-six Democrats joined 194 Republicans and voted for the bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was the only member of House leadership of either party to vote against the war funding.

When GSA administrator Lurita Doan appeared before the House oversight committee in March, she could remember there were “cookies on the table” during one of her meetings, and that she was seated next to a “young perky looking” woman. And that was about it.

She repeatedly claimed ignorance about the partisan PowerPoint presentation that was delivered to her agency’s employees, and her statement afterwards asking fellow GSA officials how they could “help ‘our candidates‘ in the next elections.”

Now she has to explain herself again. In a letter today, oversight chairman Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) called on Doan to testify on June 7 about a new Office of Special Counsel (OSC) report stating that her partisan activities violated federal law.

Waxman specifically wants to know why, during interviews with the OSC, Doan tried to tar the GSA officials who spoke out about her partisan activities. Doan told investigators:

[T]here’s not a single one of those who did not have somewhere in between a poor to totally inferior performance … . [S]ome of the most vocal proponents or the most articulate speaking out against me are also the people who are people I’ve either moved on or they are, I don’t want to say permanently demoted but they’re kind of, until extensive rehabilitation of their performance occurs, they will not be getting promoted and they will not be getting bonuses or special awards or anything of that nature.’

But according to the OSC investigation, the performance reviews of all these employees were positive. Waxman now wants question Doan about whether she is retaliating against these people for cooperating with the investigation. Waxman writes:

Your allegations are also a matter of grave concern to me. Government employees who cooperate with congressional and federal investigations perform a vital service to the nation. It would be a serious abuse if your statements were part of an effort to retaliate against these witnesses for cooperating with the Oversight Committee’s investigation.

More on the OSC report on Doan HERE. Relive the many “I don’t recall” moments from Doan’s first hearing HERE.

Steve Benen at the The Carpetbagger Report catches the right-wing news outlet Newsmax editing out embarrassing references to Ann Romney as “an outdoors woman bred to be an equestrian” who has a “good carriage, rosy complexion, square jaw, and blond mane” — without informing its readers. The Newsmax reporter is the same person who recently raved about Mitt Romney’s “sensational good looks”: “Women – who will play a critical role in this coming election – have a word for him: hot.”

Early last month, Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) released a declassified version of a Pentagon Inspector General report that found that in Sept. 2002, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith gave a briefing entitled “Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al-Qaida” to Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff.

In this “alternative” intelligence assessment, Feith asserted that Osama Bin Laden’s al-Hijra Company had business “contacts” with a Dutch company, Vlemmo N.V. and that Vlemmo was a “front for Iraqi military procurement“:

Dick Cheney “publicly praised” the Feith assessment as “the best source of information on the topic.”

Yesterday, however, the Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen explained that Feith had apparently invented the company, saying “Vlemmo is unknown to the Netherlands“:

The company has never been registered with the Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands and is also not known to the tax service. That the company may have served as a front for illegal arms trade with Iraq is equally unknown to me.

The Inspector General report concluded that Feith inappropriately “developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship,’” which included “conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.”

Juan Cole has more.

– Ryan Powers

During Senate debate on immigration on Tuesday, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) warned against allowing too many immigrants into the country. He stated that “the numbers cannot be too great or it takes jobs from Americans and can, in fact, create cultural problems that wouldn’t occur if it was a little slower.” Conservative columnist Bob Novak responds:

That recalls the 1911 report of the U.S. Immigration Commission asserting that the “proportion of the more serious crimes of homicide, blackmail and robbery . . . is greater among the foreign born,” who also refuse to learn the English language.

In reading part of that report into the Senate record, Graham declared that these immigrants who were “ruining America” fathered the “greatest generation.” That immigrant wave included my grandfather, a Russian Imperial army veteran working on the John Deere tractor assembly line in Moline, Ill., as an unskilled, undocumented alien who could not speak English. He was an American patriot proud of a son who fought with the U.S. infantry through Africa and Italy in World War II.

“An outdoor news conference in perfect spring weather, with birds chirping loudly in the magnolia trees, is not without its hazards. As President Bush took a question Thursday in the White House Rose Garden about scandals involving his Attorney General, he remarked, ‘I’ve got confidence in Al Gonzales doin’ the job.’ Simultaneously, a sparrow flew overhead and left a splash on the President’s sleeve, which Bush tried several times to wipe off.”

Watch the video (and yes, the birds in the background were really that loud):

See ABC’s video.

(Title HT: Juan C.)

UPDATE: Keith Olbermann: “Must’ve been a dove.”

Rick Perlstein quotes Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”

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