All things considered, I still don’t expect this whole Karl Rove/Valerie Plame business to go anywhere, unless by “going somewhere,” you mean “stir up a lot of froth among the punditocracy, but remain entirely ignored by the majority of the American public.” Having said that, my question for the day is this: If, as Republicans and their assorted proxies and stooges are claiming, there was no crime because Valerie Plame was not a covert agent for the CIA, why did that CIA make a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding the leaking of her name/identity?

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I think it was nearly two years ago, following all the fooferah about those 16 words in the President’s State of the Union address, that I said something along the lines of “Jesus! One of these days, some of this stuff has got to start sticking!” The general source of my frustration, at the time, was that one potential scandal after another surrounding the Bush administration just kept sliding off of them.

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A few days ago, Craig and I were discussing the various woes facing Senate Democrats as a result of the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. While I may write about the actual content of that conversation, what I actually want to talk about here is of a more tangential nature. Part of what we were discussing is what would constitute the Democrats’ best strategic response to the President’s nominee to replace O’Connor, and how such strategies might be received by liberals and progressives at large.

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So O’Connor has resigned. I’m betting Rehnquist will stick around as long as he can. Either way, I think it’s still too early in the game to start making specific predictions. However, I see no reason to expect that the Bush administration would nominate anyone approaching a moderate, centrist candidate. They’ll either go with someone close to the administration who they think will put Senate Democrats in a tough spot, or a hard-line cultural conservative as a pay-off to their Christian Conservative constituency.

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I suppose we should find it surprising neither that moderate Senators from both sides of the aisle managed to forge a compromise on President Bush’s current slate of judicial nominees, nor that special interest groups on both sides of the debate are decrying the deal as a sell-out. I’ll admit to being somewhat disappointed when I first read news of the compromise; like many following this debate, I was looking forward to a big showdown.

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There is an interesting article in today’s Salon in which the author (Farhad Manjoo) argues that it is not in Democrats’ long-term interests to oppose Republican efforts to ban the filibuster. In theory, I think I agree, but in practice, it’s a bit trickier. The main element of Manjoo’s argument is that the filibuster is esssentially a tool for maintaining the status quo. Democrats, being the more liberal of the two major parties, tend to have policy objectives that involve governmental change, reform, and activism; in order to execute these objectives, they must pass large pieces of legislation.

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Today’s Salon has an excellent summary of the issues behind the escalating ruckus in the Senate over judicial nominations, the Democrats’ probably filibustering thereof, and the Republicans’ threatened changes to Senate rules and procedures. If you’re not a Salon subscriber, you’ll have to sit through the ad to get your day pass, but today’s is a short, relatively non-intrusive one that is well worth it for the subsequent content.

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It never ceases to amaze me that the President and Congressional Republicans continue to get away with their laughable claims that the permanent repeal of the estate tax is a means of giving Hard-Working Americans® the money that they have earned. Of course, the politically brilliant strategy of calling it “the death tax” has gone a long way toward promoting this claptrap. Having an army of on-message pundits and other stooges flood the media with the agreed-upon phraseology doesn’t hurt either.

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“It causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions. And no one, including those judges, including the judges on the United States Supreme Court, should be surprised if one of us stands up and objects. I believe this increasing politicalization of the judicial decision-making process at the highest levels of our judiciary have bred a lack of respect for some of the people that wear the robe.

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It seems the Department of Health and Human Services has put up a new website. According to the homepage, “4Parents.gov is a guide to help you and your teen discuss important, yet difficult, issues about healthy choices, sex and relationships.” The page of conversation-starters is rather amusing, but once I was finished laughing, I re-read their suggestions, and found a couple of them somewhat disturbing, particularly: I heard a commercial on the radio about always being prepared by having condoms.

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