Besides holiday gift shopping, which I still do too much of on foot rather than on-line, I have been digging into as much detail as possible on the so-called “Bush Bombing Memo” that recounts George Bush’s conversation with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair about bombing Al-Jazeera‘s headquarters.

I have to admit that I have not spent a lot of time thinking about the succession scenarios in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, currently headed by John Negroponte.

(photo credit: The Australian) Many analysts of President Bush’s speech on Iraq last night noted that he has stopped insisting that things could hardly be better in Iraq and that victory was around the corner. He acknowledged high costs of America’s Iraq effort and slightly flirted with realism.

Although I have yet to read a full transcript of tonight’s BBC interview with Colin Powell, a report on the former Secretary of State’s comments tracks with Lawrence Wilkerson’s impressions of a Rumsfeld-Cheney cabal at the White House.

I returned a few days ago from Israel, and it became very clear to me that both Israeli and Palestinian politics are on the verge of major tectonic shifts.

It seems like Vice President Cheney (of course his boss too) has followed, in part, a British road map in torturing one’s supposed and “possible” enemies.

I don’t care how long the list is of those people and phone numbers that have been surreptitiously monitored by the National Security Agency without court approval. This list should be made public — published in full on the Internet.

Although the New York Times cut a deal with the Bush administration a year ago to keep hidden the fact that it knew that the National Security Agency was spying on the electronic voice and data transmissions of American citizens — without court approval — the news of this which hit today resulted in the…

I just received the note below from CNN’s Director of Communications. Bob Novak is done there. “After 25 years of serving as a CNN commentator and program host, our colleague Bob Novak’s tenure on the network will come to a close (effective 12/31).

My friend Doug Bandow (note that the Cato Institute has already made him a “former senior fellow”) has recently admitted to taking payment from Jack Abramoff to write favorably about Abramoff’s clients. Doug has resigned from the Cato Institute and been forthright that this whole thing was a “lapse of judgement.” Truth in advertising.