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to watch executions. Staged or not!

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Senator Schumer did a kind of postmortem with reporters after the hearing which was shown on CSPAN3. (Before that, you could hear a woman say, "He said he did not recall 75 times. How did he get through law school?")

Schumer said that there are two things. (1) Gonzales today himself made the case that he should resign, and the White House, "intransigent" as it is, will ask for his resignation. (2) We still don't have an explanation for why each of the eight US attorneys was put on the list. We have testimony from the AG, from the Deputy AG, and the AG's Chief of Staff. When asked who put the names on the list, each of them points his finger at the others. Thus, the Justice Department still has not provided the Committee with an explanation for why those attorneys were fired.

According to Schumer, this can mean only one thing. The names had to come from the White House. That is why the Committee wants to get Rove's and Harriet Miers' testimony, with a transcript at the very least.

When a reporter asked Schumer about the White House's claim of executive privilege, Schumer said that if you look at the history, the Court usually doesn't uphold claims of executive privilege, and it decides in a matter of a couple of months.

Schumer is really sharp, and doesn't show a hint of the stuffiness that many senators exude.

Let me see, now.  The AG, the DAG, the AG's COS cannot tell us who made the list of names of attorneys to be fired.  Yet, the AG can assure us that none of them were fired for political or improper reasons.  How would he know that to be true?  If he doesn't even know where the list came from or who made it.  BTW, just for the record,  a Texas governor cannot commute a death sentence.  As I understand it, it's either a full pardon or the needle.  State law, and all.  

President Bush was pleased with the Attorney General's testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senators' questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. He admitted the matter could have been handled much better, and he apologized for the disruption to the lives of the U.S. Attorneys involved, as well as for the lack of clarity in his initial responses.

The Attorney General has the full confidence of the President, and he appreciates the work he is doing at the Department of Justice to help keep our citizens safe from terrorists, our children safe from predators, our government safe from corruption, and our streets free from gang violence.

(WH press release via TPMmuckracker)

So it looks like they're going to keep him on at least a week or two, to save face. Doing it otherwise would be an admission that Bush has been forced to give some recognition to Congress.

This is kind of analogous to when the Republicans lost both houses in 2006. Bush is going to have to respond in some way. But simply letting Gonzales go would be to humiliating—for Bush. They're going to have to find some other place to put him, and one that wouldn't look like a demotion. Appointment to a judgeship in a federal appeals court, perhaps?

From a comment at TPMmuckraker:

"The best way to put this behind us is your resignation," Sen. Tom Coburn bluntly told Gonzales -- one GOP conservative to another -- at a daylong Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

Gonzales disagreed and told the Oklahoma senator he didn't know that his departure would put the controversy to rest. "I am committed to working with you in trying to restore the faith and confidence you need to work with me," he said.

That reminds me of what HAL said in 2001 as he was about to be disconnected:

I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.

He's Hispanic.  Bush doesn't want to fire a Hispanic, because of his big outreach to hispanics.

That total moron Reuben Navarette has said about as much.  He has said that the effort to get Gonzales is due to his hispanicity.  I think that's all that protects him at this time.

Lindsey Graham didn't ask Gonzales to resign but he did basically call him a liar.

    "Most of this is a stretch. I think it's clear to me that some of these people just had personality conflicts with people in your office or at the White House and, you know, we made up reasons to fire them. Some of it sounds good. Some of it doesn't," Graham said.

Actually what struck me about Graham's comment is that he also alluded to impropriety coming from the White House.

"If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me." -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth