The New York Times has its piece out this morning on the end-of-year departure of CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin. (Mine from yesterday is here.) Holtz-Eakin spoke truth about fiscal matters and often irritated weak-minded Congressional leaders who wanted political rather than empirical responses from the CBO Director and his team.

Actually, my headline is misleading. CBO Director Doulas Holtz-Eakin has been offered a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” according to him, to serve as the Paul A. Volcker Fellow in International Economics and the Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He assumes his post on December 30th.

TWN has previously argued that Libby has probably been covering up Cheney’s role in outing Valerie Plame Wilson.

What is America if it doesn’t believe that all citizens have the rights of habeus corpus? What will America’s message to the world be? Most of you are ok — but some of you evil ones will be tossed into prisons with no recourse, none.

I thought Bill Frist still had a chance to eke out a decent performance in the Republican presidential primary, even though the White House has been jacking him around like a raggedy-Andy doll — but no more. He admits that his priority is secret-keeping, not legal behavior behind that shroud of secrecy.

Just got word that Congressman George Miller and Senator Richard Durbin, in a joint news conference later TODAY, will be calling for Ahmad Chalabi to be subpoenaed. Good call.

Democrats won big in the New Jersey and Virginia Governor’s races — and a pragmatist who happens to be Republican won big in New York City. Lots of folks don’t like Bloomberg, but in my mind, he’s an old-line Republican centrist, and we need those back in bigger numbers.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the time to greet Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi at 1150 17th Street, NW in Washington, D.C.

Arianna Huffington reports that Judy Miller is doing a gig in New York tomorrow evening (Wednesday) that will run guests $375.00 a head.

Iraq Deputy Prime Minister and Chief of Duplicity and Deceit before America’s Iraq Invasion Ahmad Chalabi has arrived in Washington. He is going to speak at the American Enterprise Institute at 2:30 p.m. tomorrow. The event is so full that several of my New America Foundation colleagues have been uninvited.