Jason Leopold:
"Just as the news broke Wednesday about Scott McClellan resigning as White House press secretary and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove shedding some of his policy duties, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald met with the grand jury hearing evidence in the CIA leak case and introduced additional evidence against Rove, attorneys and other US officials close to the investigation said."

Matt Stoller: "We have a man frightened to be President clinging desperately to the comforting adults who tell him what to do.  These 'adults' happen to be vicious ideologues bent showing the world their manliness no matter how weak they transparently are.  In other words, this isn't a real shake-up, because at this point Bush can't shake up the White House staff."

Kevin Drum: "Quit letting Cheney's crackpots run foreign policy and talk to Iran. After all, the administration's ideologues killed an opportunity to ratchet down tensions three years ago, and since then things have only gotten worse: Iran has elected a wingnut president, they've made progress on nuclear enrichment, gained considerable influence in Iraq, and increased their global economic leverage as oil supplies have gotten tighter. So why blow another chance? If the talks fail, then they fail. But what possible reason can there be to refuse to even discuss things with Iran — unless you're trying to leave no alternative to war?"

Daniel Ellsberg: "It is a quagmire. It's not a question of our being driven out, but of it being impossible for us to eliminate the insurgents. As was true in Vietnam. We got into Vietnam with our eyes open internally as to how bad it would be. In this case, the military could see that there would be a terrible occupation problem. General Shinseki, of course, was strongly rebuked as chief of staff of the Army for saying that it would take several hundred thousand troops to occupy instead of the 130,000 that they were sending over. Wolfowitz said that's wildly off the mark. And Shinseki's replacement was announced."

Sean Wilentz: THE WORST PRESIDENT IN HISTORY ... Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.

Josh Marshall: "In all seriousness, I think the real story here continues to be that things are so bad at the White House, the level of denial and secrets to be kept, the self-bamboozlement and bad-faith so profound, that they just can't manage to bring in any new blood."

Steve Clemons: "The President should dust off his MBA work and realize that if he wants to send a signal of change, he must dump at least three of five people: his chief of staff, his vice president, his closest political advisor, his national security advisor, and his defense secretary ... I'm guessing that "the decider" changes his mind soon. If I'm wrong, Democrats running in 2006 are getting a huge gift."

Studs Terkel:
"Tom Paine was saying ... a commoner can tell the  royalty to bugger off ... the fact, is I can tell the president to bugger off - and that, by the way, that is being an American."

Steve Clemons: "Will someone remind our government elders that America is NOT China -- and we don't like Orwellian half-truths and big lies here."

Robert Dreyfuss: "The vice president’s staff could read the statutory NSC’s e-mail, but the NSC couldn’t read their e-mail. So, once someone on the statutory NSC figured it out, they used various work-arounds. Like, for example, they would walk to someone’s office, rather than send an e-mail, if what they were going to talk about they didn’t want to reveal to the vice president’s very powerful staff.” But that was difficult because of Cheney “spies” within the bureaucracy..."

Digby: "Therefore, I blame the Republican Party more than little Junior. He's just a pathetic loser who believed his own hype --- responsible for his actions, of course, but not the mastermind.
From his little tirade today, it appears that he's feeling like his authority is being questioned. That's just funny. It took his this long to figure out that he's not really in charge?"

BBC News: "Veteran singer Neil Young has recorded an anti-war protest album on which he reportedly lashes out at George W Bush in a song called Impeach the President."

Kevin Drum: "Just how many reports did Cheney hastily "declassify" in order to get back at Wilson? Perhaps President Bush should direct his vice president to give us a full tally."

Digby: "The most polarizing president in US history, who assumed office through one vote on the Supreme court the first time and won the second time because of a dubious swing of about 70,000 votes in Ohio says it's his style to spend the political capital he "earned" when "the people" endorsed all his views.
That's the kind of guy who thinks he can start secret wars to transform the middle east through sheer force. A megalomaniac child in the hands of manipulative men."

Jonathan Singer: "Isn't it about time that President Bush finally admitted that his policies towards Iraq just don't work, that responsible adults who know what they're doing should be in charge of American operations in the country rather than think tank ideologues who still wrongly believe in prewar claims about WMD, Saddam's Al Qaeda connection and that Americans would be treated as liberators?"

Glenn Greenwald: "As Bush followers gear up for another election year campaign to start a war, they are using exactly the same rhetorical tactics and are revealing precisely the same mindset to which we were subjected during the 2002 campaign for the Iraq War. What is starkly apparent from this repetition is that their awareness of history and knowledge of the world is sadly confined to one singular event, which is all they know and which, rather bizarrely, they have a need to live over and over and over again."

Dave Lindorff: "If treason is defined as "consciously acting in a way to harm one's country or to benefit the enemy of one's country," then the Bush administration has lately been engaged in an act of treason by openly planning for the first use of nuclear weapons against Iran, a non-nuclear nation. "