[On March 7, 2003], the head of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei, reported that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any nuclear weapons or was in the process of acquiring them. Mr Blix said: "By then, Mohamed ElBaradei revealed that Niger was not authentic." British intelligence falsely claimed Iraq had been trying to acquire uranium from Niger. [4/28/05]

So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they’ve been getting as "garbage after garbage after garbage." The inspectors find themselves caught between the Iraqis, who are masters at the weapons-hiding shell game, and the United States, whose intelligence they've found to be circumstantial, outdated or just plain wrong. [2/20/03]

Chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix told the U.N. Security Council that his inspection teams had not found any "smoking guns" after visiting some 125 Iraqi sites. [1/9/03]

The White House called Rep. John Boozman (R-Ark.) "and pretty much told him what they are doing with this appointment and how they are going about it," according to a July 6 e-mail from Bud Cummins, then the U.S. attorney in Little Rock.

The message indicates that Bush administration officials told Boozman about their plans to fire Cummins at the same time that Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and other Democrats say they were being stonewalled.

"This is the most incompetent White House I've seen since I came to Washington," said one GOP senator. "The White House legislative liaison team is incompetent, pitiful, embarrassing. My colleagues can't even tell you who the White House Senate liaison is. There is rank incompetence throughout the government. It's the weakest Cabinet I've seen."

We are, in some parts of the country, I'm afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it's a real problem, and I appreciate all that you're doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot-the integrity of the ballot-is protected, because it's important to our democracy.

He alleged Fitzgerald told him: "You've got two choices, either fill in the blanks and cooperate, or possibly face charges and lose your job." Ambrose claims he talked because he felt he "had no choice."

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda - which is very different from simply being people of faith - is one of the most important stories of the last six years.

The official platform of the Texas Republican Party pledges to "dispel the myth of the separation of church and state." And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill that pledge.

But they acknowledged that they took action to prevent Rove -- and Rove alone among the two dozen or so White House officials with RNC accounts -- from deleting his e-mails from the RNC server. Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was told the RNC made that move in 2005.

SCHUMER: Did you or did you not have in mind specific replacements for the dismissed U.S. Attorneys before they were asked to resign on December 7th, 2006.

SAMPSON: I personally did not. On December 7th, I did not have in mind any replacements for any of the seven who were asked to resign.

Right now the coverage will be dominated by how qualified these folks were and their theories for their dismissals. We are trying to muddy the coverage up a bit by trying to put the focus on the process in which they were told - I suspect we are going to get to the point where DOJ has to say this anyway. First, it is true. Second, we are having morale problems with our other U.S. attorneys who understand the decision but think that these folks were not treated well in the process.

When a soldier gets killed, it hardly makes the newspaper, and if it does, it goes to the back pages. There are from one to eight soldiers killed each day, or there are the ones who have their faces blown off or lose one or more of their limbs, shot off by people trying to protect what is theirs. There have been thousands of Iraqis killed by one big mistake that was made by George W. Bush.

It's clear that the White House has been willfully violating the law, the only question now is to what extent? The ever changing excuses offered by the administration – that they didn't want to violate the Hatch Act, that staff wasn't clear on the law – are patently ridiculous. Very convenient that embarrassing – and potentially incriminating – emails have gone missing. It's the Nixon White House all over again.

"the Judiciary Committee intends to obtain the relevant emails directly from the RNC. The White House position seems to be that executive privilege not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the RNC as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, for one, isn't buying it. "That's like saying the dog ate my homework,'' Leahy (D-Vt.) said on the Senate floor today, pledging to subpoena records the White House won't produce. "Now we're learning that off-book communications are being used by these people in the White House by using Republican political email addresses, and they say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that! I don't believe that! You can't erase emails, not today.''

"The president is using a primitive, inarticulate argument that leaves him open to criticism and caricature," said James Jay Carafano, a homeland security and counterterrorism expert for the Heritage Foundation. "It's a poor choice of words that doesn't convey the essence of the problem - that walking away from a problem doesn't solve anything."

"We got rid of a tyrant and tyranny. But we were surprised that after one thief had left, another 40 replaced him," said Jubouri, who is a Shiite Muslim. "Now, we regret that Saddam Hussein is gone, no matter how much we hated him."

The "war on terror" has always been a fraud. Terror is a tactic, not an enemy. And we were never fighting all of the terrorists in the world. I don't remember our offensives against the IRA or the Tamil Tigers. And we eventually started labeling almost all of our enemies as terrorists, whether they fit the definition or not.