This morning, a high school student challenged Sen. John McCain about his age, causing McCain to jokingly refer to the student as “a little jerk.” The troubles for McCain didn’t end there. Another student pressed him with regards to his stance on gay marriage. Here’s the exchange:

Student: “Do you support civil unions or gay marriage?”

McCain: “I do not. I think that they impinge on the status and the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.”

Student: “So you believe in taking away someone’s rights because you believe it’s wrong?”

McCain: “I wouldn’t put that interpretation on my position, but I understand yours.” [...]

Student: “I came here looking to see a leader. I don’t.”

Rep. John Doolittle’s (R-CA) chief of staff and deputy chief of staff “have been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in a federal probe into ties between Doolittle, his wife and jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff.” FBI agents raided Doolittle’s Virginia home in April “looking for information about a fund-raising business his wife ran that did work for Abramoff.”

Former Sen. Fred Thompson has regularly fearmongered about terrorist threats. In June, he warned that undocumented immigration could lead to “suitcase bombs” from Cuba and alleged that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) call to redeploy from Iraq was “encouraging our enemies.”

Taking his fearmongering to new heights, yesterday on Hannity and Colmes, Thompson claimed that withdrawal from Iraq would lead to “the whole” Middle East going “nuclear”:

If we leave [Iraq] under bad circumstances, we’re going to have a haven down there for terrorists. The whole area, I’m afraid, will become nuclearized. The Sunni countries are looking at what Iran is doing. And if we can’t help with stability in that part of the world, they’re going to help themselves, and they’re going to go nuclear.

Watch it:

Thompson added al Qaeda was actively seeking nuclear weapons as reason to stay in Iraq. “We have al Qaeda out there we know trying to get nuclear weapons,” he claimed. “We have 40 countries that have fissile material that could make a bomb.”

Thompson’s fearmongering is reminiscent of the Bush administration’s pre-war attempts to conflate weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein, and al Qaeda into one. In his State of the Union address in 2003, two months prior to the invasion, President Bush declared:

Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.

In reality, al Qaeda never chased the nuclear weapons that Hussein didn’t have. The U.S. presence in Iraq is fueling al Qaeda’s growth, not preventing it.

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Newsweek reports that although a former colleague urged outgoing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to quit months ago, he hung on “believing the president wanted him to stay.” But the turning point came when an internal review by chief of staff Josh Bolten “concluded that Gonzales was so politically weak he had become an obstacle to Bush’s agenda, especially on the passage of an updated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance law.” No word on whether Bush asked for a raise of hands.

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Tom Schaller ponders John Edwards:

Edwards, IMHO, enters a crucial period between now and Halloween. He somehow needs to shake things up. He should take some chances — —perhaps a junket to Afghanistan to remind Americans about our abandoned efforts there and that what’s-his-name who masterminded the September 11 attacks, or he might pair up now with a vice presidential running mate to earn some free media. There’’s not room in the Democratic primary for two Hillary-alternative candidates, and if Edwards wants to steal that mantle from the far better funded Barack Obama, now’’s the time for him bust some moves.

Honestly, this doesn’t seem like brain surgery to me — the chance-taking, things-shaking-upping position to take would be to join Bill Richardson in calling for a real withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. The fact that none of the main three candidates have engaged with each other on the Iraq issue and, instead, all seem to have combined to prevent efforts by Biden (from the right) and Richardson (from the left) to make this a big deal seems pretty weird to me.

A new book by Jack Goldsmith — one of the “brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament,” good friend of John Yoo, visiting scholar at AEI, and former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — has published a book detailing the administration’s extraordinary efforts to expand its wiretapping program.

While Goldsmith “shared the White House’s concern that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act might prevent wiretaps on international calls involving terrorists,” he disagreed with the White House’s unwarranted grab for power. “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Goldsmith recalls Cheney chief of staff David Addington telling him in Feb. 2004, indicating that the White House always intended to do away with the FISA court.

Goldsmith also witnessed Alberto Gonzales’s and Andrew Card’s confrontation of John Ashcroft in his hospital bed on March 10, 2004, when they demanded that the sick Ashcroft approve the administration’s secret spying program, over the objections of Goldsmith and James Comey, then acting Attorney General:

Suddenly, Gonzales and Card came in the room and announced that they were there in connection with the classified program. “Ashcroft, who looked like he was near death, sort of puffed up his chest,” Goldsmith recalls. “All of a sudden, energy and color came into his face, and he said that he didn’t appreciate them coming to visit him under those circumstances, that he had concerns about the matter they were asking about and that, in any event, he wasn’t the attorney general at the moment; Jim Comey was. He actually gave a two-minute speech, and I was sure at the end of it he was going to die. It was the most amazing scene I’ve ever witnessed.”

After a bit of silence, Goldsmith told me, Gonzales thanked Ashcroft, and he and Card walked out of the room. “At that moment,” Goldsmith recalled, “Mrs. Ashcroft, who obviously couldn’t believe what she saw happening to her sick husband, looked at Gonzales and Card as they walked out of the room and stuck her tongue out at them. She had no idea what we were discussing, but this sweet-looking woman sticking out her tongue was the ultimate expression of disapproval. It captured the feeling in the room perfectly.”

As Glenn Greenwald notes, Goldsmith is “no hero.” He “is a hard-core right-wing ideologue who continues to support many of the administration’s most radical positions, including his view that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions does not apply to terrorist suspects (the position rejected by Hamdan).” Yet even Goldsmith couldn’t stomach the extraordinary measures to which the administration went to push its spying programs.

UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman has more on Goldsmith’s book.