Much of Washington has been consumed with the coverage of the Samuel Alito Supreme Court nomination hearings, and I suppose that I should have been glued to C-Span as well — but I wasn’t.

Sorry for being AWOL folks. I’ve been lining up some interesting stuff to share with you shortly. But the trial of two British bureaucrats, David Keogh and Leo O’Connor — charged with leaking the contents of a secret document to the media — has resumed today.

I may get the full page scanned later, but the JOBS page (Section K, page 1) of the Washington Post had me choking on and spitting up my coffee this morning. The above-the-fold page has multi-colored job ads from the FBI and the National Security Agency.

Tom DeLay has finally been knocked out of Congressional Republican leadership — and he is accepting that reality. This is excellent news. From the New York Times: In letters sent Saturday to fellow House Republicans and to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Mr.

President Bush: Why does Donald Rumsfeld STILL have his job? If Abu Ghraib wasn’t enough — why isn’t negligence on the job that has resulted in many deaths? The New York Times has acquired a secret Pentagon study showing that had appropriate body armor been distributed to military personnel, 80% of Marines who died from…

The wedge strategy is in play. The White House has now denounced Pat Robertson calling his comments about Ariel Sharon “wholly inappropriate and offensive.” Now let’s see if we can get the Israeli government to strip from Pat Robertson and his allies the right to build a “biblical theme park by the Sea of Gallilee”….

Who and what will be blamed when Pat Robertson is finally “struck down”? Today on CBN’s The 700 Club, Robertson said that God struck down Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin for dividing his land: ROBERTSON: I have said last year that Israel was entering into the most dangerous period of its entire existence as a…

Howard Fineman has a punchy, interesting piece on who loses and wins in the wake of the Abramoff guilty plea. He notes that one of the big losers is Abramoff’s best buddy Tom DeLay.

The “powers” of Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office have transferred to Ariel Sharon’s Deputy Ehud Olmert after hospital officials announced that Sharon has suffered a “significant stroke.” More here.

Doug Bandow offers a realistic picture of the shoddy state of think tank and public intellectual punditry in Washington in this confessionary op-ed today in the Los Angeles Times.