One Hot Tamale in Mexico

You mean he acted like . . . a politician?

Andrew Sullivan, who's understandably upset about Joint Chiefs chairman Peter Pace declaring homosexuality immoral, isn't pleased by the Democratic front-runner, either:

"Senator Clinton is asked directly what her view is on the matter by Jake Tapper. Is homosexuality immoral, he asks her. Her response:

" Well I'm going to leave that to others to conclude. I'm very proud of the gays and lesbians I know who perform work that is essential to our country, who want to serve their country and I want to make sure they can.

"The woman who addressed the Human Rights Campaign and will receive as much money as they can funnel to her, won't say whether she believes homosexuality is moral or not. One word: pathetic. But how predictable."

Well, we sort of knew that liberal bloggers had dynamited the Fox presidential debate, but the Politico nails it down:

"In a 20-minute conference call, a group of bloggers told Reid an uprising was brewing over the decision by the Nevada State Democratic Party to partner with Fox for the August debate in Reno. Among the bloggers, some were national -- Matt Stoller of MyDD, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of DailyKos -- and some were local -- Hugh Jackson of the Las Vegas Gleaner.

"In the call, Reid explained that he had been focused on the Iraq war debate the past few weeks and didn't seem to have closely followed the controversy over the Fox sponsorship. (When the debate was announced last month, Reid called it 'great news for Nevada' and declared himself 'happy.')

"Stoller said the bloggers told Reid that the issue was spoiling his popularity with the party's Netroots: his DailyKos straw poll approval rating, they told him, had gone from the mid-80s to around 40 percent recently.

"Reid backed off of his support of the debate, contending that he had had nothing to do with the decision, adding, 'I don't like Fox News.'"

Finally, Slate's Jack Shafer has been rethinking his past criticism of Patrick Fitzgerald:

The popular image painted of Fitzgerald by the press (again, I'm one of the painters) is that he used subpoenas and threats of subpoenas to extract the leaker's identity from reporters. The Los Angeles Times' Tim Rutten expresses that view in a recent column that belittles Fitzgerald. Rutten writes that Fitzgerald didn't break the case with a 'meticulous FBI investigation' or 'brilliant courtroom interrogation.' Fitzgerald 'simply dragged the journalists who had written or reported on the Plame affair before a federal grand jury and threatened them with jail unless they revealed their sources of information.'

"That's not exactly true. Fitzgerald and the FBI had made serious headway in the case long before he subpoenaed journalists. Not until May 2004 did he call the first journalists, Russert and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper, to testify. Far from dragging all the reporters before the grand jury to spill the beans on their sources, Fitzgerald strove to reach what everybody--except journalists--might now call reasonable middle ground to collect the truth about the alleged crime. He took testimony from Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler, a deposition from subpoenaed Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, and a deposition from Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. How intrusive was Woodward's interrogation? Woodward, who got releases from his sources, said on Larry King Live, 'I was able to answer every question.'

"Fitzgerald subpoenaed Judith Miller in August 2004 because he needed to prove that Libby had spoken to Miller about Plame weeks before his alleged conversation about Plame with Russert. (She fought the subpoena to the legal end and ultimately spent time in jail before accepting Libby's 'waiver.') Cooper agreed to give a deposition about his Libby contacts--after which Fitzgerald famously demanded more information from Cooper with another subpoena.

"I won't defend any of these subpoenas, but if it's motives and methods we're talking about, it now seems clear that Fitzgerald used that big club solely to prove Libby's justice-obstructing lies. Those lies gave him good reason to believe the scandal might extend up the chain of command to the vice president. If Libby was lying about Russert, was he lying about Cheney's role?

"To put a finer point on it, was Libby consciously using the press as a shield, thinking no prosecutor would dare rile reporters by using subpoena power to puncture his lies? If Libby used the press consciously, he gives every reporter a paradox to consider: If journalists are in the business of finding and printing the truth, how tolerant should we be of liars, especially liars whose lies bring subpoenas down on the press?"

Now that is a tricky question: What do you do when you've promised someone anonymity and they start fibbing about having been your source?