The AP has a story quoting House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes as saying that he believes the House is close to a compromise with the Senate on a FISA amendment that would include telecom immunity:

The House Intelligence Committee chairman expects a compromise soon on renewal of an eavesdropping law that could provide legal protections for telecommunications companies as President Bush has insisted.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, in a television interview broadcast Sunday, did not specifically say whether the House proposal would mirror the Senate's version. ....

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has refused to refer Congressional contempt citations against Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolton to a District of Columbia grand jury.

TalkingPointsMemo has the story:

Mukasey said Bolten and Miers were right in ignoring subpoenas to provide Congress with White House documents or testify about the firings of federal prosecutors.

"The department will not bring the congressional contempt citations before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute Mr. Bolten or Ms. Miers," Mukasey wrote Pelosi.

Keith Olbermann just broke into Hardball with a breaking news story, quoting a story just up on the NYT website, in which the NYT reports that McCain advisors supposedly intervened "to protect the candidate from himself" in 2000.

The supposed danger McCain posed to himself? The relationship with a female lobbyist, which the advisors were convinced was romantic (but which McCain and the lobbyist denied).

With the WGA still on strike, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have been forced to put on their shows without "writing," since they too are members of the WGA.

In desperation, Stewart and Colbert commissioned Morton Kondracke, a/k/a "Mor-TAHN" from The McLaughlin Group, to interview President Bush. The interview, which was conducted on January 29, the day after the State of the Union, was transcribed and appears in today's Washington Post.

Kondracke and Bush both display a surprising flair for comedy writing. Especially hilarious excerpts may be found below the fold.

You already knew that Joe Liebertoad is no longer a Democrat, if he ever was.  You knew he was campaigning for John McCain, abandoning his prior assertion that he wanted to see a Democrat elected president in 2008.  Indeed, running as an independent against Ned Lamont in 2006, Lieberman said that a vote for Lamont would "defeat and frustrate" the ability of a Democrat to be elected president in 2008.  

Mah fillow Amurkins,

For seven years, Ah have boldly led you where no one has gone before.  From this universe to the Bizarro universe. From surpluses to deficits. From universal international respect and sympathy to worldwide scorn and fear. From respect fer the role of gobmint to help the least forchoonit amung us to the enthronmint of greeed.

The last time I said adios, mundo cruel I managed to stay away only for about five weeks. I thought I could come back and stay out of the candidate diaries. But that's getting harder and harder to do, because at this point nearly all of the diaries are either candidate diaries, or slash and burn attacks on another candidate. I've been a trusted user for more than three years and people are treating me like I'm a visitor from Redstate.

But much worse than that is the general atmosphere around here, which has become more and more poisonous. If the winter and spring of 2004 were anything like this, I am surprised the site survived long enough for me to join it in the fall of 2004.

My draw just dropped to the floor, and I've not been able to pick it up.  Pervez Musharref was just on 60 Minutes, being interviewed by Lara Logan.  Perv just said, in response to a question about who was responsible for Benazir Bhutto's death, "Who stood up in the car?" Logan asked, "Are you saying that Benazir Bhutto is responsible for her own death?"  And Perv said yes.  "Who else is responsible?"  Oh, and by the way, even if she hadn't stood up in the car, she shouldn't have gone to that region of Pakistan, or returned to Pakistan at all, both of which Perv had warned her were dangerous.

In hindsight, does Perv think that Bhutto should have had better security from the government?  "No.  She had more security than anyone else has ever had in Pakistan."

Rudy gets a lot of undeserved flack for mentioning 9/11 in nearly every breath:

He's sensitive to this criticism, and his latest ad is a masterpiece of subtlety, never mentioning 9/11 even once:

Every year I have the same #1 New Year's resolution: to lose those last 10 15 20 25 30 pounds from my last pregnancy 1 5 10 15 years ago.  And this year will be no exception. In fact, in the hope that accountability/fear of humiliation will keep me to the straight and narrow, I will publish periodic updates here on Daily Kos.  I'm going back to Weight Watchers, folks, the boring but effective diet that I've avoided for years because I just can't stand the cheery, chipper "group leaders" that run meetings.  So it's just going to be me, my Points Calculator, and you guys.

Weight loss is not my only, or even primary, resolution for this year, however. In this, an election year and the year my older daughter goes off to college, I have several others.  Join me below the fold to see what they are.

The Giuliani campaign has refused to explain the exact nature of the illness that caused Giuliani to turn around a campaign airplane so that he could go to a St. Louis hospital for emergency treatement. All that has been revealed thus far is that Giuliani was suffering from a really bad headache.

But isn't it obvious?  Clearly, the stress of campaigning has brought on relapse of what Jon Stewart has famously called 9/11 Tourette's.

It's 14 hours after the offending segment, but it's been bothering me all day, through my boring deposition and into the evening.  I hate to blast Meredith Veiera, because she's so much better than Katie Couric. She's a Latina and she's my age and comfortable with it, strikingly attractive in a mature way, and she's warm without suffering from Perky's Disease.  Despite her current early morning gig, and her past gig on "The View," she has hard news experience, on the grande dame of hard news no less, "Sixty Minutes."

But geez, Mere, did you have to let them do that lobotomy on you when you took the Today Show job?

You remember Douglas Feith.  Number three guy in Rummy's Department of Defense, head of the "Office of Stupid Special Plans," described by Tommy Franks as the fucking stupidest guy on the planet. Surely someone who is now destined to be tossed onto the scrap heap of history and forgotten.

But nooooooooo.  As Maureen Dowd reports in today's NYT column, Feith is baaaaaaaack.  He gave a speech Monday night at that that shelter for homeless neocons otherwise known as the American Enterprise Institute, preparing the faithful for the publication of his upcoming book, "War and Decision."  

Are you throwing up in your mouth yet?

Sorry for the short diary.  I am preparing for a trial, and my dad is in the hospital, and I checked the New York Times online to distract myself momentarily, and what did I see but this headline:

Rice Plans to Name Wolfowitz to Advisory Panel      

What does it take to keep these people dead?  

Well, you might ask, how bad could it be?  Is he going to be just one of many on some obscure advisory panel that no one listens to anyway?

Okay, maybe it is partly due to sleep deprivation. I was supposed to have a big hearing tomorrow and have been working almost 24/7 for two weeks before the hearing was postponed late this afternoon.  I could have come home and just gone to sleep, but live-blogging the Rethug debate with the DKos crew seemed like a fun thing to do after so much hard slogging in the office.

But something tells me its not just the sleep deprivation.  What I am hearing is not just the lunacy of the Rethug candidates, the hapless fli-flopping of Romney, Rudy's breast-beating, McCain's faux integrity, Tancredo and Hunter's unspeakable racism and homophobia, and the discovery that Ron Paul wants to criminalize abortion.

LEAHY: Welcome, Judge Mukasey, to your first appearance here as Attorney General to report on the state of the Justice Department.

MUKASEY: Thank you, Senator Leahy.  It is a pleasure and an honor to be here.  I am pleased to report that the number of Regent Law School graduates in the Department has decreased from 561 to 533.

SCHUMER: That's great!  See, see, I told you he'd clean the department up!

FEINGOLD: Judge Mukasey, can you tell us, now that you are Attorney General, whether the United States is torturing any detainees in its custody?

I saw Keith Olbermann commment on this ABC story on Countdown about fifteen minutes ago. At almost the same moment that Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein were folding like lawn chairs, ABC reported that Daniel Levin, Jack Goldsmith's successor, troubled about the practice of waterboarding, decided to undergo the "enhanced interrogation" technique himself.

I discovered Daily Kos just a few weeks before the 2004 general election, and found it a sanity saver in the dark days following the election.  But I had missed the contentious period during the primaries and before, when Kerry, Edwards and Dean supporters had duked it out in the diaries and comments.  I saw references, from time to time, to that period, but I didn't experience it.

I'm beginning to get a sense of what I missed.  And I'm not sure, if I had first found Daily Kos during that period, that I would have stayed.