Swampland

Dahlia Lithwick has a great run down on Sara Taylor’s non-testimony, and reminds us all that our Comp 101 professors were right when they preached the evils of the passive voice:

The problem I’m having in mustering any sympathy for poor Sara Taylor today is that she was no more “put” in this uncomfortable position than Kyle Sampson was

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The McCain campaign has entered that phase when any small piece of negative speculation will stick and every misstep will be magnified. For instance, the NYT reports that yesterday’s conference call with donors by McCain was done from the Senate cloakroom. This is itself is not illegal, but it edges into the gray area of the law that …

The NYT’s politics blog with photographic evidence of “joke” deleted from the remarks the President delivered today upon the reopening of the press briefing room:

Ha, ha.

Of course it’s a joke. Why eject when you can just ignore?

Please click through to learn more about this “Confucian sex symbol”:

From the moment he landed in Nanjing, a fawning press covered his every move, marveling repeatedly at how spry he remains at age 84. When [he] lands elsewhere, he has to worry he’ll be summoned to testify about knowledge of war crimes…During the event at Nanjing

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Lengthy behind-the-scenes analysis here. Sorry for the lack of David Vitter. For what it’s worth, more than one McCain aide I talked to yesterday mentioned him, usually in the context of, “The only person happy with us today is David Vitter.”

The charge that McCain had become a “panderer” irked Weaver and other aides to distraction —

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Over at the LA Times, Paul Richter (full disclosure: he’s my spouse, or as we think of him around here, Mr. Swamp) and Peter Nicholas notice that the Republican Senators are not the only GOP politicians who are getting more and more uncomfortable being aligned with President Bush on the surge:

As President Bush struggles to maintain

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Marc Ambinder continues his almost wall-to-wall McCain coverage:

MANCHESTER, NH — On the eve of yesterday’s campaign shake-up, McCain aides and volunteers retired to the Strange Brew taverns to try and forget, just for a moment, the day when their world collapsed. One McCain aide said he was “physically there” but “mentally gone.”

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Given his passionate biases, it’s not often I find myself persuaded by a Dick Morris column. But in The Hill today he writes a fairly cogent and sober piece arguing that President Bush’s only hope of saving the GOP from devastating losses in 2008 is to begin withdrawing troops now. Despite Morris’ intemperate loathing of Sen. Clinton, …

My corporate overlords graciously lent me out this week. Here are the results:

Jamie Malanowski’s debut novel about a palace coup in the White House has some sizable flaws, but for all the preposterousness of the plot—which pivots around a bachelor tech genius lothario Vice President, Gordon Pope, who can only exist in the

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As a presidential candidate, George Bush promised over and over again that he would be guided by “sound science.” But almost from the outset, his Administration has come under repeated accusations that it has distorted or quashed science in favor of political or ideological considerations. Now comes this testimony from the man who served …

Before today’s staff massacre, a frequent complaint one heard from the McCain campaign in recent months was that the national press had turned against them, that the coverage of their guy had become hostile, unfair and unbalanced. Putting aside the irony of that charge (in 2000 McCain and his aides used to say, only half in jest, that …

Our colleague Adam Zagorin has new details on the scandal, including an interview with the alleged “DC Madam,” Deborah Jeane Palfrey:

“Why am I the only person being prosecuted?” she told TIME over the phone. “Sen. Vitter should be prosecuted [if he broke the law]”