Wonkette

* Bush admin: J/K everyone, FISA can totally have jurisdiction over the illegal secret wiretapping program. Please don’t yell at Alberto Gonzales too much today, Senate Judiciary Committee. [NYT, WP]
* The Bush legacy would’ve probably been something about creeping executive power, but lately he’s been conceding it to everyone. [NYT, WP]
* A “bipartisan” (read: involving Chuck Hagel) group of Senators prepared a useless symbolic resolution opposing THE SURGE in Iraq. Clinton wants to get tougher, withhold funds, give John Edwards a wedgie. [WP, WP]
* NYT prints dumbest lede this week: “The climate here has definitely changed.” [NYT]
* Condi Rice is in Berlin chatting about Israel and Palestine with German chancellor Angela Merkel. What Rice learned out there: people be sick of getting blown up. [CNN]
* Barack Obama will need to be careful about staying fresh, beloved over these next two years. [NYT]
* Everyone’s got an “exploratory committee.” Except Clinton, who might see her fundraising ability sonned by the early adapters. [WP]
* Ethics reform legislation stalls in Senate. Pig to have to find alternate source of lipstick. [NYT]

Former President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter is more or less a doddering old man who means well. But when he accidentally mentioned the nearly unmatched influence of AIPAC on American politicians and gave his new book a vaguely controversial title and kinda sympathized with Palestinians, he made a lot more enemies than just dudes who hate houses for poor people. Specifically, he angered the Jews, who control the media. MORE »

• Wolf Blitzer closes his eyes, counts to three, and wishes that when he opens them all the dead Palestinians will be gone. [HuffPo]

• Small Pennsylvania town increases illegality of illegal immigrants, sick birds. [AP]
• Sign Katherine Harris’s online get well card! Then feign shock when her robot voice won’t stop calling you for campaign donations. [Elect Harris]
• Capitol Historical Society to host reception for “departing” members of Congress, most honorees to arrive by paddy wagon. [Copley News Service]
• Young America’s Foundation staffed by assholes really into IM. [Campus Progress]
• Soon to be the most compressive source for photos of politicians eating babies in the world! [Flickr]

• It’s time to break out the good drugs - DJ Ted Stevens is on the ones and twos. [Bold Headed]

• All of DJ Ted’s 25 friends will be there. [MySpace]
• Dick Cheney can’t share a bed with a woman who doesn’t know what its like to shoot someone in the face. [Rock Creek Rambler]
• Iraqi security forces are now in complete control of a whole lot of sand, some scorpions, and maybe also tumbleweeds. [1115.org]
• A Fox News reporter gets shot at in Gaza by an Israeli robot. Luckily, his “fox friends” remind him to “skeedattle,” and the audience that, “bad guys shoot at anything.” [Raw Story]
• Both readers of the Cedar Rapids Gazette fail to notice Ann Coulter’s column has been dropped. [E&P]

Henry the Intern is on sabbatical. The Daily Briefing isn’t, though it is a bit later than usual.

• President George W. Bush makes a surprise visit to Iraq to visit with new Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has just announced a new security plan for Baghdad. [NYT, WP]

• Karl Rove’s attorney announces to the media that his client will not be indicted in Patrick Fitzgerald’s Valerie Plame leak case. Rove is “delighted, obviously….” [WP, NYT]
• Israeli airstrikes kill 10 people in Gaza, hours after “hundreds of Palestinian police loyal to Abbas went on a rampage against the Hamas government.” [NYT]
• The FBI released the 2005 crime statistics, showing an overall nationwide rise in violent crime of 2.5 percent, fueled by a “a surge of killings and other attacks in many Midwestern cities.” Robbery was up 14.6 percent in DC, though rapes and murders were down. [WP]
• David H. Safavian becomes the first person to go to trial on charges related to the Jack Abramoff scandal, with prosecutors accusing him of “doing Jack Abramoff’s bidding” as a federal procurement officer. [WP]
• The EPA loosened a rule designed to keep groundwater near oil drilling sites clean after a well-connected Texas oilman wrote a letter to Karl Rove. Environmentalists are accusing the administration of “political payoff,” due to Rove’s forwarding of the letter to White House environmental advisors with a note reading “get a response ASAP.” [LAT]

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, greets Palestinian Foreign Minister, Mahmoud Zahar, right, in Tehran, Iran. Sunday, June 11, 2006. (AP Photo) MORE »

Oh man, Olmert, we were going to ask you! Best we can come up with is a big-ass wall, but you’re well ahead of us on that one. MORE »

The major question facing our nation today is not immigration or war or abortion or how those motherfucking snakes got on that motherfucking plane — no, it’s whether political cartoonists will ever stop making jokes about Dick Cheney shooting a guy in the face. Though, uh, it’s not much of a question, as our resident cartoon expert The Comics Curmudgeon learns this week — the answer is pretty plainly “no.”

Still, though, Today’s Cartoons just really want you to like them. All the cross-hatched bloodshed, after the jump.

MORE »

OMG BEST WEBSITE EVER
It’s Hamas’ kids’ site. The best proof yet that they’re willing to act as a legitimate Governing body — just like ours! Obviously, we can’t read a word of this, but who needs to? There’s the cute li’l cowboy/mujahideen riding through an inexplicably American Western landscape to do battle with Infidels/Injuns, there’s big-eyed manga Palestinian girl with slinghot, there’s vintage animated gifs (’90s web design is back!), everything about this site is brilliant. We want to join the intifada right now! Maybe we can be in their Top 8! MORE »

• Senators, by vote of 79 to 19, pass a resolution marking next year as “a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty. . . thereby creating the conditions for the phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq.” Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.): “Staying the course will not do.” Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.): “It’s a continuation of the oversight we’ve been conducting for years in the United States Senate.” WP, NYT, WSJ, USAT]
• Senators from both parties “are demanding that the administration show that it has a strategy to turn the conflict over to the Iraqis and eventually bring U.S. troops home.” [WP]
• Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) defends critics of the war: “[T]he Bush administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them. . . to not question your government is unpatriotic.” [WP]
• Oil executives did meet with Cheney’s energy task force in 2001. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.): “The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force.” [WP]
• Alito tries to downplay conservative remarks from 1985. [WP, NYT, LAT]
• Rice reaches deal on access to the Gaza Strip. [WP, NYT, NYT, USAT]
• Lewis Libby plans to “seek testimony from journalists beyond those cited in the indictment and will probably challenge government agreements limiting their grand jury testimony.” [NYT]

MORE »