Bob Harris tries to read between the lines of Bush's recent "revision" of the policy about when White House personnel get turfed:

What I find intriguing is Bush's insistence that "I don't know all the facts. I want to know all the facts." Maybe I'm making too much of this, but this is way more than the "no comment" position feigning respect for the investigation. This is a positive statement of ignorance. And this also has an immediate political cost: he looks like he's a) covering up, b) spectacularly careless and incompetent, or c) all of the above. The only other times I've seen presidents personally assert their own ignorance this way: Nixon during Watergate and Reagan during Iran-Contra. Probably why my spidey sense went all tingly.

He also has some interesting background on Patrick Fitzgerald, the special investigator heading the case:

The full damage caused by the leak isn't yet knowable (at least without the clearance). But Valerie Wilson's CIA front, Brewster-Jennings, was reportedly tasked with tracking the smuggling of explosive materials in the Middle East, so that crap like the 1993 WTC attack, the embassy bombings in Africa, and 9-11 wouldn't be even worse next time. (That's the operation apparently shit-canned by this White House for their own political gain. So you can see why the CIA lifers pushed the case for criminal investigation, and why people are throwing the word "treason" around so much.) The 1993 WTC attack was prosecuted by... Patrick Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was then assigned to prosecute, yes, the Al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa. Fitzgerald was building a case against Osama Bin Laden five years before 9-11. This job, one concludes, involved a certain appreciation for intelligence people studying the illicit movement of explosives by terrorists. If there's a single prosecutor in America who fully understands what the Plame case is about -- a reckless compromise of national security for political interest -- it's this guy. If there's a prosecutor in this country who groks the background and context of the specific operations destroyed by this crime, it's this guy. And if there's a single prosecutor capable of pursuing a conspiracy case no matter where it reaches, it sure seems like it's this guy.

Hopefully that helps some of you understand why the rest of us are watching this thing develop with the intensity that we are.

Suresh say "SPF useless against spam. Port 25 blocks good." You listen.

(Suresh is the anti-spam guy for a sizable chunk of the email accounts on the internet. Possibly even yours. When he has a strong opinion about something relating to email, it's worth listening to.)

Yesterday's "Republicans say the stuuuuuupidest things" moment was brought to you by Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo (all you Rocky Mountain State readers tuck that name into the back of your head for the next time you're in a voting booth...), who had this to say about possible responses to a large-scale terrorist attack in the US:

"Well, what if you said something like -- if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites," Tancredo answered. "You're talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell [the DJ interviewing Tancredo for Orlando's WFLA-AM] said. "Yeah," Tancredo responded.

This garnered the expected responses from Left Blogsvania and Tancredo dispatched a spokesweasel to put some "ah, that was all hypothetical" counterspin on his initial comments. All of that pretty much went according to the standard playbook -- some "red meat" for the base, and then a wink-wink-nudge-nudge "oh I wasn't serious" backpedal towards civility.

But the one point I didn't see anybody make -- and it's entirely possible that I just missed it; I was flat on my back getting over a cold for a lot of yesterday -- is that Mecca is in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is one of our allies in the Middle East. Ostensibly, at least, they're on our side. Ignoring all the other issues Tancredo's statements raise -- the morality of retaliatory attacks against civilian populations, the wisdom of attacking one of the primary suppliers of your country's primary energy source, how destroying the most holy point of a religion is going to make followers of that religion less inclined to attack you, et cetera, et cetera -- ignoring all that, we're still left with the fact that Tancredo is advocating bombing -- and in the context of the comments, it's pretty clear he meant nuking -- an ally, in response to an enemy attack. In WWII terms, this is like saying, "Hey, you Japanese better lay off the kamikaze attacks, or we're gonna level Melbourne!"

Ladies and gentlemen, your majority party. Enjoy.