This ain't a primary diary and I apologize for interrupting the frenzy, but it's important...

The AP is reporting that John Yoo, former AG John Ashcroft and former Assistant AG Daniel Levin have all agreed to testify before Congress about military interrogations. Tenet is still in negotiations and David Addington (Darth Cheney's Chief of Staff) is supposedly still considering whether to appear. It looks, though, like a subpoena has been authorized for him already, probably anticipating a refusal to appear.

This will be short, I just saw that the Supreme Court just declined to review the DC Court of Appeals ruling on part of the William Jefferson brouhaha.

From the NYT:

The ruling that the Supreme Court declined to review held that the F.B.I.’s use of a "filter team" to examine the evidence from the Congressman’s office to determine what was clearly legislative, and therefore out of bounds, was not adequate to protect Congress’s constitutional right to operate without interference from the executive branch.

It only applied to the paper searching, as far as I can tell, so Jefferson is not cleared. My interest in this is not in Jefferson, however, but what this might mean for the unitary executive theory.

Things are still in a bit of a lull right now. On the one hand, that's good, the longer we stall things and the intelligence community keeps doing its thing and preventing terrist attacks, the more people will hopefully grow tired of Bush's wolf-crying.

On the other hand, some of us are worried about a lack of information about a plan on the dems side. It's good that dem leaders in both the House and Senate are speaking out and responding to Bush's scare tactics, but I'm not confident that this is more than talk. Here are some of my specific concerns and questions. I'm hoping someone less ignorant than i will be able to address some of these and better inform us all.

UPDATE: It has been reported (by lgcap - ht) that the House is going to be taking up this issue next week. If so this is potentially bad news, see below...

Whether you know it or not. I'm not sure about the etiquette of calling a poster by name in a diary title, but i'm hoping this will be forgiven. We all owe a debt to mcjoan.

Appropriately for Valentine's Day, i have a valentine for mcjoan. Since we seem to have a brief lull in the FISA storm, now seems as good a time as any for a little recognition. How do i love thee? Let me count the ways...

When i logged on and brought up a CSPAN2 feed friday morning I was greeted with something no one should have to see or hear in the a.m. without sufficient girding of the loins. Kit Bond.

So this is what got my bile up on my way to work this morning. I was listening to NPR, here. There was a story on the Chukchi oil lease sale yesterday, and how there were record bids yesterday.

There's also a NYT story, here, which summarizes the big bidders, topped by Shell with bids totaling about $2.1 billion.

But i guess i'll play one on tv for now.

I'm still new to the diary process and i don't have the knowledge or time today to actually do what looks like the hard work of a mothership or liveblog wrangling today. But i'm hoping that by posting this people can start commenting on FISA goings on today.

Not sure if the Senate is going to be doing FISA intermittently with the stimulus package or not, but they at least seem to be going back and forth to it.

So Huckabee won the first repub contest today.

Is it okay for me to laugh deviously at this information? It is a little unclear to me whether or not this is in the end a good thing - Huckabee's potential sticking around in the repub race. It would take votes away from Romney, i suppose, making McCain that much more dangerous...

But on the other hand,

For those of you that didn't catch it. Here's Keith Olbermann last night on a nice "little" (a full 9 mins and 41 secs) rant about the telcom immunity/amnesty.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...

I love a hot cup of righteous KO indignation, for sure, but it's worth paying attention to this rant not just for what it validates in our own rantings here.

Not sure if this falls into the "interesting" file or the "useful" file. A Scientific American article looks briefly into a couple of common logical fallacies that are used in political discourse and repeated by the media. One has an old name - the straw man argument, and the other has a new name - the weak man argument.
http://www.sciam.com/...

This gave me a good chortle this afternoon while trying to make it to the weekend.

http://www.npr.org/...

Nothing new or, sadly, suprising here. Just a quick story about how ingrained certain smear tactics are in South Carolina (and really, by inference, throughout the country). The focus of the story is on how nasty repub candidate hopefuls are to each other this year, especially via the use of push polling: