from today’s e-mails:

We’re suffering through a horrible and prolonged war; we’ve neglected critically important domestic issues (education, health care, jobs) for eight years; we’re screwing up the environment at warp speed and are about to have our global economic lunch eaten by China and India.

I guess that about sums it up, huh? But that doesn’t mean I’m going to join something just because they pay Mother Jones to get an e-mail past my spam filter. No time, no time. It came from here, in case you’re interested.

Mmmm, my coffee’s good this morning. When you get something just right, even something simple like a little pot of coffee, it’s a good feeling. I wish it was raining; that would be the perfect accompaniment to this cupa joe.

We can’t rightly say that, in his entire tenure as AG, Alberto Gonzales has gotten anything right. He might have a better record if he’d been making the coffee at the D.O.J., but I doubt it. Instead, he has undermined civil liberties and pushed the Home of the Brave toward being an unconscionable Police State. Now, maybe there’s a flicker of light at the end of his tunnel, with a Republican Senator from NH by the name of John Sununu calling for Gonzales to be fired.

Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire called for Gonzales’s ouster Wednesday, just hours after Bush expressed confidence in the attorney general. … “I think the president should replace him,” Sununu said in an interview. “I think the attorney general should be fired.”

Of course, it’s not over illegal surveillance, habeas corpus, or torture. It’s not over the fact that Alberto Gonzales was never qualified for his job. That’s SOP for the Bush administration. It’s over the firing of 8 US attorneys; an issue which, in the scheme of things, doesn’t really kick up my blood-caffeine level. But ought to. There’s a strong back-of-the-fridge stink to those firings, an allegation that government lawyers were fired to stop them from pursuing investigations of political corruption.

Gonzales’ testimony on the Hill should be good theater. When you think about it, this whole administration has been much better TV than the last one. Everything they’ve done has been a failure; illegal, amoral, unethical, and deadly on a Shakespearian scale. How pale seems a mere Oval Office trist, compared with wars and rumors of wars, the sacking of the Constitution, and the faltering of a superpower in the face of a storm? Bush has been so preoccupied, frenetically scrambling to shore up his White House against implosions of his own making, that he’s all but forgotten that he’s president of this country. When was the last time you saw him at work our economy? He has been manifestly absent from domestic politics – notwithstanding the war on terr’r and last fall’s elections – since 9/11/2001.

[Sigh] I’m loosing steam. That first cup is wearing off. … Hey, Alberto, you’re doin’ a heckuva job. But for goodness sakes, stop by Starbucks and try to wake up.

There’s always a few in every crowd. Every election season, a handful of political pipsqeaks will stand up, try to run, and fall over. It’s pitiful. Here’s Fred Thompson, thinking he can pee in the tall grass with the big dogs. Oh spare us.

Fitzgerald asked to testify before Congress.

A couple of hours ago, I logged on to see that John McCain had decried the waste of American lives in Iraq. He said it yesterday on Letterman, so of course I picked last night to go to bed early.

WASHINGTON – Republican presidential contender John McCain (news, bio, voting record), a staunch backer of the Iraq war but critic of how President Bush has waged it, said U.S. lives had been “wasted” in the four-year-old conflict. Democrats demand the Arizona senator apologize for the comment as Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) did when the Democratic White House hopeful recently made the same observation.

“Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be,” McCain said Wednesday on CBS’ “Late Show With David Letterman.” “We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives.” [Link]

Now I see that he regrets it. How sad that politics requires regret for telling it like it is. They’re doin’ the hokey pokey with the truth.