Rudy, Play Like a Champion Today: His Republican opponents seem not to have noticed, but Rudy Giuliani is winning the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, says The Weekly Standard’s Matthew Continetti in a cover story on the state of Giuliani’s presidential bid.
“The conventional wisdom holds that as grassroots conservatives wake up to Giuliani’s [...]

Fredo, you’re my attorney general and I love you. But don’t ever potentially commit perjury while testifying before Congress again: Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus finds herself in “an unaccustomed and unexpected position: defending Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.” Marcus thinks Gonzales chose his language carefully enough to avoid committing perjury when he misled Congress about [...]

If it’s good enough for Scooter Libby, it’s good enough for the American Talib: The Los Angeles Times editorial page wants President Bush to commute the prison sentence of John Walker Lindh. The editorial states:

John Walker Lindh broke the law. He pleaded guilty to the one crime of which he was guilty — aiding [...]

Time political columnist Joe Klein isn’t persuaded by the optimistic take in today’s New York Times Op-Ed by Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack, in which O’Hanlon and Pollack suggest that the surge has “the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.” [...]

Don’t get cocky, Dems: History suggests that there are plenty of ways for the Democrats to lose the 2008 presidential election, says Rutgers historian David Greenberg in an essay published in The Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section. “The Republicans possess certain advantages that are too often overlooked, including a built-in edge in the electoral college, Bush’s [...]

So much for the slow dog days of summer. From YouTube’s laughs to Obama’s gaffes, from Alberto Gonzales’s stonewall to Robert Mueller’s tell-all, it was a huge week for the blogosphere. But among all the mayhem, one story that readers outside New York may not have followed closely was the travails of our governor, Eliot [...]

While many political junkies feel that foreign policy is perhaps Hillary Clinton’s Achilles heel with Democratic primary voters, she seems to have decided to make it the centerpiece of her attacks on Barack Obama. The Times reports that the latest salvoes “stemmed from their answers at a debate Monday involving the circumstances under which each [...]

Rudolph Giuliani has laid out his energy proposals at Real Clear Politics, and while he gives lip service to solar and wind, he’s really keen on corn and fission:

Just like Brazil is ahead of us in ethanol, France is ahead of us in nuclear power. Eighty percent of the electricity in France comes from [...]

An obscure federal trial in Pennsylvania may have a big impact on the Immigration Reform debate. Reuters reports that “a U.S. judge on Thursday struck down as unconstitutional a local law designed to crack down on illegal immigration, dealing a blow to similar laws passed by dozens of towns and cities across the country. U.S. [...]

“Scott Thomas,” the pseudonymous soldier-writer who’s been publishing postcards from the Iraq front at The New Republic, has shed his cover: “I am Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a member of Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division.”
Good to know, but it’s hardly the end of the story. TNR’s editors say they [...]

University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill, he of “little Eichmanns” fame, was fired yesterday by the university’s Board of Regents “on the ground that he had committed academic misconduct by plagiarizing and falsifying parts of his scholarly research.”
While the case will now go to the courts, the court of online opinion [...]

So the other, or at least next, shoe has dropped in the Alberto Gonzales hearings, with the House Judiciary Committee voting “to seek contempt of Congress citations against … Joshua B. Bolten, the president’s chief of staff, and Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel.” A former committee chairman, James Sensenbrenner, Republican [...]

Did Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lie during his Congressional testimony yesterday? Spencer Ackerman at TPM Muckraker thinks so, and counts the ways:

He tripped himself up repeatedly during his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee — quite possibly entering perjury territory. Gonzales’s big problem is that he told the Senate on February 6, 2006 that [...]

Remember immigration reform? Most of Congress seems to have conveniently forgotten the issue. And now, according to The Washington Times, Rep. Rahm Emanuel is actively putting it out of mind:
“Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, an architect of the Democratic campaign that regained control of the House last year, says his party will not attempt [...]

So, other than YouTube, who won the debate last night? Scanning the blogosphere, it seems that if not everyone found something to like about everyone, at least someone found something to like about each one. “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s dominating CNN/YouTube debate performance tonight flipped the script on America. Or it should have,” says Douglas Burns [...]