Stepping back a tad, the bottom line from todays Edwards and Obama speeches is that they were both really, really good qua rhetoric. If either of those guys is the nominee, Democrats can at least sleep soundly at night knowing that their party’s general election speeches are going to be delivered by people who can deliver speeches very, very well and who have good speechwriters.

I’m not sure I’d really agree with Brian Beutler that Edwards’ speech was “more substantive” — what it was was more policy-oriented. The point of Edwards’ speech was “I have these seven policy ideas that you’ll think are really great and therefore you should infer that I’m a good guy.” Obama’s speech, by contrast, is aimed at convincing you that “I’m a really good guy who has a good approach to politics and legislating and therefore you should infer that I’ll implement good policies.” Thus, Obama spends less time on the details of his program and more time on his theory of political change.

All of which, I think, is fine, but it does make his campaign the much more conventional one, which is slightly ironic in light of his greater pretense to be running a different kind of campaign which is, itself, a very conventional kind of claim to make. All that said, they’re both very impressive, and I wish both of them (or, indeed, Hillary Clinton who I suppose is most likely to win) — or at least one — would adopt my view of Iraq and the residual forces issue.

UPDATE:

Here’s Obama’s speech:

And here’s Edwards’ speech:

Enjoy.

Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee held a confirmation hearing for John Rizzo, President Bush’s nominee to become the C.I.A.’s general counsel.

Rizzo has served as an acting general counsel “off and on for the past six years, serving without Senate confirmation.” During his tenure, the CIA has engaged in a wide variety of highly questionable and potentially illegal interrogation practices.

In 2002, Rizzo approved of a memo drafted by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that stretched the definition of torture in order to make torture permissible in the course of an interrogation. To be torture, the Bybee memo concluded, physical pain must be “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

Sen. Ron Wyden asked Rizzo at the hearing, “Do you think you should have objected at the time?” to the Bybee definition of torture. Rizzo answered, “I honestly — I can’t say I should have objected at the time.” To which Wyden replied, “I think that’s unfortunate because it seems to me that language on a very straightforward reading is over the line. And that’s what I think all of us wanted to hear — is that you wish you had objected.” Watch it:

Also during the hearing, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) asked Rizzo “whether we’ve ever rendered detainees to countries which use torture.” Rizzo said “it’s difficult to give a yes or no answer” in a public hearing and asked that he provide an answer in closed session. Levin noted that in Dec. 2005, Bush said “we do not render to countries that use torture.”

During a recent legal conference, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia defended television character Jack Bauer, the “maverick federal agent” who “routinely tortures terrorists.”

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.

“So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes.”

Steve Benen picks apart Scalia’s comments.

who have been forced from their homes by worsening violence are obtaining illegal abortions because they are unable to get medical care for themselves and their unborn, according to a new report by a national humanitarian group. … Rape, theft and drug addiction have also become ‘commonplace’ among the displaced.”

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee yesterday released a report documenting how White House officials have regularly used RNC and Bush-Cheney ’04 e-mail accounts for official government business, in apparent violation of the Hatch Act. The report also found that the RNC has overseen “extensive destruction” of these e-mails, which would likely violate the Presidential Records Act.

During yesterday’s press briefing, White House spokesman Tony Snow brushed aside this direct evidence of potential illegality. His response: Clinton did it too. “Those email accounts were set up on a model based on the prior administration, which had done it the same way, in order to try to avoid Hatch Act violations.” Watch it:

Snow’s statement is false. In 1993, President Clinton’s then-Assistant to the President John Podesta issued a staff memo clearly stating that all administration e-mails dealing with official business had to be “incorporated into an official recordkeeping system,” stressing that no “e-mail document that is a Presidential record should be deleted.”

The Clinton administration’s policy also made clear that personal and political e-mail accounts — which are generally exempt from the Presidential Records Act — could not be used for official business. Indeed, the Bush administration has seemingly implemented a policy opposite of the Clinton administration’s.

Read the full memo HERE.

Transcript: Read more

Militants fired mortar rounds at the U.S.-guarded Green Zone this morning, “with five of them striking near the office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and one crashing adjacent to the American post exchange store.” No casualties were reported. In a report released on June 5, the U.N. said that “insurgents had bombarded the Green Zone with rockets and mortar fire more than 80 times since March, reportedly killing at least 26 people.”