Well phew now everybody can just go back to mocking this guy for being a torture-lovin’ Bush sellout, because that scary incident where Michael Mukasey conked out in the middle of a speech did not signify a stroke or a heart attack or anything serious. He just had what a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice called “a fainting spell,” which is Republican code for “collapse due to oldness.” MORE »

Ugh. Why do we even post such things? Breaking News, etc., that’s why! So do us a favor, commenters, and try to control yourselves, show some class, &c., unless Mukasey has specifically done something personally horrible to you. We have no useful update, to this old dude just falling over and people shouting OH MY GOD JESUS CHRIST CALL SOMEBODY. He is in the hospital somewhere in/around Washington.

• RUH ROH: “Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed Thursday night while giving a speech to the Federalist Society in Washington, according to three senior administration officials… At 10:30 p.m. Eastern, medical officials were still working on him on the stage, administration witnesses said.” [Politico]

• THEY’RE MORE LIKE ‘GUIDELINES’: Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced today that former Justice Department officials like Monica Goodling will not face prosecution for hiring D.O.J. staffers based explicitly on their political views — i.e. how many awesome things they could say about Alberto Gonzalez in 20-second lightning round interviews. Mukasey’s statement came replete with a classic Bush Administration sound bite: “not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.” Ha ha, the top legal official in the country just said that “violation of the law” and “crime” are different. [AP]

An emotionally fragile Attorney General Michael Mukasey addressed audiences at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco yesterday and nearly wept at the thought of the American government having its precious spying freedoms taken away. He also observed that Muslims, and not followers of a strict Protestant religious sect, deserve the government’s hairy eyeball. MORE »

Nuh uh. You’re shitting me. The Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into the destruction of those CIA interrogation tapes? That means either (a) Michael Mukasey will be fired immediately for not living up to the Bush standards set by Alberto Gonzales or (b) he will conclude that the tapes were fine, a little waterboarding here and there, but that’s only torture when performed by Megan Carpentier. (Shudder). [Bloomberg]

• Hillary’s numbers are dropping the closer voting gets. That obviously means she’s doomed. [Wizbang Politics]

• Don’t like your new adopted child? Send it back! [Michelle Malkin]
• Iowa likes underdogs, because, you know, who the fuck wants to live in Iowa. [Political Wire]
• Kansas AG aborted his way right out of a job. [WorldNet Daily]
• Fred Thompson either has highly postmodern feminist views or, you know, just appreciates a hot piece of ass. [Election Central]
• Everybody’s jumping on the Hey-We-Can-Let-One-Silly-Rape-Slide bandwagon. [Blotter]
• Hey Congress, remember that time you just went ahead and confirmed Bush’s AG pick all willy-nilly even though you could have easily demanded someone else? Nicely done. [Raw Story]
  

There’s nothing we can add to this: “A magazine published by the American Bar Association on Wednesday named former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales its Lawyer of the Year for 2007 — mostly for creating so much controversial news.The ABA Journal also picked Attorney General Michael Mukasey — Gonzales’ successor — to be its lawyer of the year for 2008 because he has to deal with the problems left when Gonzales resigned under fire last fall.” [AP]

So you know how the CIA destroyed tapes of [fun and happy!] interrogations of al Qaeda operatives in 2005? Well some Demrats like Ted Kennedy and Dick Durbin having already called for Michael Mukasey to lead an investigation, which will obviously never happen. There’s a war going on, people! Anyway, the would-be scandal’s served White House Press Secretary Dana Perino another heaping pile of shit to eat in an already dense week, and she was the antithesis of informative today. The count for her most commonly used phrases today was: “I don’t know” — seven times; “decline to comment/not commenting” — 10 times; and “still gathering facts/gather the facts” — 11 times. So this little deletey situation should get cleared up right quick. [White House, NYT] MORE »

Suddenly-more-brilliant scary book author Stephen King is suggesting that a fellow member of the literati, Jenna Bush, undergo some “personal investigation” of waterboarding to determine for her father whether it’s torture or not. He mentioned this in a segment for Nightline, which he recounts in Time: “Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn’t think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture.” Oh Stephen, it’s not as easy as that! Waterboarding is torture some days, happy play time others. Our Attorney General can’t even decide if it’s torture, for Christ’s sake. [Time]

This week, Michael Mukasey, Larry Craig, Tim Russert, Jerry Rice, Marion Barry, and David Gregory were all spotted being various degrees of famous at various places by our spies and operatives. Voyeuristic fun, as always, is after the jump. MORE »