I guess it all makes sense. If you have your head totally up your butt. But the journamalists are already wet:

Politician-turned-actor Fred Thompson has been coy with audiences as he flirts with a bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

In an interview with USA TODAY, however, the former Tennessee senator not only makes it clear that he plans to run, he describes how he aims to do it. He’s planning an unconventional campaign using blogs, video posts and other Internet innovations to reach voters repelled by politics-as-usual in both parties.

“I can’t remember exactly the point that I said, ’I’m going to do this,’ ” Thompson says, his 6-foot, 6-inch frame sprawled comfortably across a couch in a hotel suite. “But when I did, the thing that occurred to me: ’I’m going to tell people that I am thinking about it and see what kind of reaction I get to it.’ ”

Not a dry seat in the house.

I know what my reaction is:  Read more 

No, we hadn’t forgotten about this. We just laid low to wait for some more promising game to come up the trail to the waterhole. Huntmaster Josh Marshall is doing the drive, and a fellow hunter found this in the new Department of Justice document dump very quietly released last night:

From: Jennings, Jeffee S.
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 10:17 AM
To: ~KR@georgewbush,com’; Fielding, Fred F.; Sullivan, Kevin F.; Perino, Dana M.;
tkyle.sampson@usdoj.gov’
Cc: ’Sara Taylor’
Subject: NM USATTY - urgent issue
Importance: High -
I just received a telephone call from Steve Bell, Sen. Domenici’s CoS, who urgently reported the following:
1. Outgoing USATTY David 1glesias.i~h olding a press conference at 11:30 Eastern this
morning. I
2 . He is allegedly going to say that he was contacted by’ two Members of Congress last Fa11  Read more 

Via Gizmodo (“Japanese Bra Also Carries Your Melons”), this candidate for bra of the week:

 Read more 

Oh, Monica, Monica, Monica. I shake my head in sorrow. You should have skipped Regent and the law degree and gone someplace where they taught history. Recent American history for example. Like the Watergate story.

You, dear reader, or I may delete a hundred emails a day. Employees of the Justice Department operate under somewhat different rules. So when one Monica wrote (we don’t know at this point if it was on her .gov email or that nasty gwb43.com one) looked suspicious to several people scanning the Friday Document Dump, including our own scarshapedstar, it was because he noted her use of the word “friendlies.” Now it turns out there were other words of interest in this same mail as well.

These were found, and Monica got busted, by a party with the excellent name of Anonymous Liberal, who happens to be a lawyer too. She/he makes clear just why Monica is now well and truly screwed, blued and tattooed: the words, in bold even, on her email of Feb. 12 2007, Please delete prior versions.  Read more 

Our magic word for today is “imaged.” For some reason that made me think of the old Star Trek ep where they transport into the Bizarro Universe and meet the Spock with the Beard and Uhura is dressed even hotter than usual, complete with dagger in a leg holster. From, as usual, Your Daily Froom:

In a letter to the House oversight committee, the Republican National Committee turned over a heavily caveated list with 37 names on it. It was described as a “current list of users who we believe are or were White House employees using RNC accounts for whom we have been able to identify active e-mail data on operational RNC servers.” The RNC said more names may well show up later.

The RNC says it is “working diligently to identify and preserve all potentially relevant data that may exist” and has already gathered 25.5 million kilobytes of e-mail from the 37. It has also hired a computer forensics firm that has “imaged” several RNC computers and blackberries that are currently being used by White House employees.

The Associated Press has an annotated version of the list. The most prominent name on it, other than Karl Rove of course: Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett.

Are there any contests currently running for “greatest number of weasle words that can be squeezed into one sentence”? If so I have a nominee.  Read more 

From the invaluable ThinkProgress today, the latest “offer” from the RNC as to just how much Congressional oversight they will ever so graciously allow Rep. Waxman to perform:

In a new letter to the Republican National Committee, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman writes that the RNC has provided only minimal information regarding White House officials’ use of RNC e-mail accounts. The purpose of Waxman’s inquiry was in part to determine the extent that White House staff used “non-governmental e-mail accounts to conduct official government business.”

In the new letter, Waxman reveals that the RNC’s response thus far has been to propose that any Congressional requests for emails be filtered through “eight search terms, such as ‘political briefing,’ ‘Hatch Act,’ and ‘2008.’”

Is this cute or what? You think the FBI would have caught Al Capone if they were only allowed to use evidence of him speaking or writing the words “bootlegging” and “criminal conspiracy” and “tax evasion”? Set phasers on “hit ’em with the chair,” Henry.

And just to do our part I think we, all of us here—that means you too readers!— should come up with our own list of “eight search terms” that would be most productive in this search.  Read more 

Greg Palast has an interesting item up which relates to the “gwb43.com” and “RNCHQ.com” etc. emails. This is in the “etc.com” file, specifically the address “GeorgeWBush.com”.

Remember a wee kerfluffle in the runup to the ’04 elections, specifically Florida which we were keeping an eye on for some reason? Some nobody on the RNC hit team got caught making the boneheaded mistake of sending his mail to “GeorgeWBush.org” instead of “.com.” Well as it happens “GeorgeWBush.org” was a spoof site set up by a fellow named John Wooden for purposes of various rudenesses.

The story at the time was that the RNC was trying to suppress the votes of various groups of people, notably including the homeless as well as members of the military who might happen to be Soldiering While Black. That story ran its course, the nobody who made the slipup was quickly forgotten, and we Got Over It.

Ya know who that nobody turns out to be? Then—Timothy Griffin, Karl Rove’s assistant. Now- United States Attorney Timothy Griffin, the President’s Karl Rove’s personal pick as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.  Read more 

If you wonder who exactly is this Jeffrey Price, see Lambert’s post here.

Dear Jeffrey:

In general, here at Corrente we don’t make invidious assumptions about the personal qualities of individuals we don‘t know, so no, we don’t think you are soulless. Speaking for myself, I welcome your explanation, late though it was, and I appreciate its friendly tone.

Somewhere it would have been nice if you had acknowledged the possibility that there was some wrongness on the part of you and your fun-loving conspirators, with the same frankness that Lambert acknowledged and apologized for the fact that we were had. .

On the other hand, the notion that one of your objectives was “retribution” for Lambert and this blog having been “apparently… more interested in digging up a scandal than finding the truth,” is truly angering.  Read more