The inspector generals' report on Bush administration surveillance programs released Friday sheds some new light on the conflict between the White House and the Department of Justice over the legality of what was being done -- and shows just how dismissive one of former President Bush's closest aides was of the DOJ's opinion.

The battle between the Bush White House and the Bush DOJ over wiretapping was already public. In 2007, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey confirmed to the Senate that the fight had at one point become truly nasty. In March of 2004, with then Attorney General John Ashcroft severely ill and in the hospital, Comey was serving as acting attorney general. In that role, he was called upon to recertify the program, but due to concerns within DOJ about its legality, he refused.

That refusal culminated in an argument with then White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who came to Ashcroft's hospital room in an unsuccessful attempt to get him to do the recertification. The dispute continued for about a week after that, and ended only when the White House agreed to certain changes insisted upon by the DOJ -- after Ashcroft, Comey, their top deputies and FBI Director Robert Mueller had all prepared to resign.

In the meantime, the president recertified the program himself, with Gonzales' signature going where Ashcroft or Comey's would have. And Comey sent a memorandum to the White House counsel in order to provide advice to Bush. The IGs' report contains an excerpt of Gonzales' response, which appears not to have been public before this, in which he essentially told Comey and the DOJ to go do something anatomically impossible:

Your memorandum appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of the President's expectations regarding the conduct of the Department of Justice. While the President was, and remains, interested in any thoughts the Department of Justice may have on alternative ways to achieve effectively the goals of the activities authorized by the Presidential Authorization of March 11, 2004, the President has addressed definitively for the Executive Branch in the Presidential Authorization the interpretation of the law.

For what it's worth, Comey and Jack Goldsmith, then head of the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel, appear to have agreed that the president's interpretation of the law dictated the Executive Branch's interpretation generally. But Comey still believed the DOJ couldn't certify the program as it was designed at the time -- and, of course, the language of Gonzales' letter is still pretty striking.

It’s a big day for developments in 2010 Senate races at War Room. We had Sestak and Specter, Fiorina and Boxer and now, some action in Illinois. Or rather, some inaction. Rep. Mark Kirk, a moderate Republican from suburban Chicago who is by consensus the GOP’s best hope for picking up the seat currently occupied by retiring Democratic Sen. Roland Burris, is not going to run.

This must come as a nasty surprise for Republican strategists, who thought that Kirk was in, and that he gave them a real -- and rare -- shot at a seat in a blue state. According to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, Kirk was peeved that the rest of the Republican Illinois delegation wouldn’t get behind him, apparently because of his vote for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. Cillizza adds that there is now an effort underway to get Andy McKenna, the state party chair and another candidate for the seat, to drop out so that Kirk can be convinced to reenter.

The Senate seat in question, of course, is President Obama’s old spot. It was infamously opened up for Burris thanks to the president’s inauguration, with an assist from then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Since Republican Peter Fitzgerald declined to seek a second term in 2004, the seat has seen a rocky few years: Obama’s top primary opponent, millionaire Blair Hull, watched his campaign implode over domestic violence revelations. Then Obama’s original Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, had to drop out after an embarrassing story from his divorce surfaced. The Republicans scrambled to find a candidate, at one point considering Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka, and settled on a rather bizarre choice.

Obama came along and took 70 percent of the vote, thankfully putting an end to the madness for four years, but once he left for the White House, the Blagojevich-Burris weirdness broke loose, ultimately leading to where we are today. Let’s call it the curse of Alan Keyes.

Iason Athanasiadis, a British-Greek journalist who was detained in Iran for 18 days, is back in Athens and describing his experiences in prison. "There were people sitting in rows on the floor; ... there were others being interrogated at little desks in the corridor because the interrogation rooms were full," he told the Associated Press.

"I heard questions and shouts coming from the interrogation rooms and the occasional slap."

A freelancer working for the Washington Times, Athanasiadis says he was kept, alone, in a small cell that was continually lit, and was interrogated about a dozen times, most while blindfolded. He was generally treated well, he told the AP, but was slapped during one of the interrogations.

Earlier this month,  while Athanasiadis was imprisoned, Salon published a piece about him by Sandy Tolan, a friend and colleague of his. You can read it here.

When Congress passed its amendments to our surveillance laws a year ago, part of the compromise -- much-criticized among liberals -- required the inspectors general of a number of federal agencies to review the warrantless wiretapping programs. Now, a year later, the report is complete, and has been partially declassified.

Though we can’t get anything like a complete picture because so much is still classified, the report says that the program exceeded the warrantless wiretapping we already knew about. The IGs use the term “President’s Surveillance Program” to encompass the full monitoring effort.

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder has a good run-down of key nuggets from the report. Most notably, at the urging of Vice President Cheney, President Bush recertified the program without the consent of the Department of Justice, outraging Deputy Attorney General James Comey. In fact, for two years, no one in the DOJ who ranked below deputy attorney general even knew about the program, with one exception: John Yoo, who was somewhat mysteriously tasked with writing legal opinions in defense of the operation. (Indeed, Ambinder says, it's not even clear that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft knew that Yoo was providing the department's legal opinions on the program.)

The surveillance operation appears to have been quite large, because random sampling was used, rather than case-by-case examination, to make sure that it was monitoring appropriately suspicious targets. Senior intelligence officials were unsure whether the surveillance had led to any arrests, but the IGs seem to believe it did.

President Obama probably isn’t thrilled that the compromise, for which he caught so much flak, hasn’t put the issue to bed. Judging by his performance thus far on sensitive constitutional and national security issues, we can probably expect him to try to avoid getting too involved in the impact of this report, though it may affect some terrorism prosecutions.

We've all heard the jokes about mothers-in-law. Still, at least most people don't have to fight with theirs through the press. Not Levi Johnston, however: Though he's split from Bristol Palin, the mother of his child and the daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, he's still battling with the governor in public, and getting heat from her spokeswoman as a result.

It was Johnston who set off the latest kerfuffle. He did it by saying, during a press conference, that he believes his ex-fiance's mother decided to resign her post for financial reasons. Back when he was living with the Palin family, in December and January, Johnston said, the governor lamented her inability to take the lucrative offers that were pouring in.

"She had talked about how nice it would be to take some of this money people had been offering us and you know just run with it, say 'forget everything else,'" he said. "I think the big deal was the book. That was millions of dollars."

Johnston is pursuing book and movie deal of his own, though. That provided fodder for Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton, who shot back: "It is interesting to learn Levi is working on a piece of fiction while honing his acting skills."

If you want to know where America will be in ten years, they say, look at California. But today it seems like the Golden State is showing us where we were ten years ago.

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Carly Fiorina, the CEO-celebrity who ran Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, is likely to run for Senate against incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer. Fiorina ran HP during the burst of the dot-com bubble, and, as one of the country’s most prominent corporate chieftains, attracted a lot of national attention for her drawn-out war with the company’s board. The dispute ultimately ended in her dismissal as CEO.

Fiorina waded into politics during the 2008 campaign as one of John McCain’s favored surrogates on the economy, and her name was periodically floated as a potential running mate. However, she was sidelined after saying she didn’t think John McCain or Sarah Palin (or Barack Obama or Joe Biden) was qualified to run a major corporation. “It is a fallacy to suggest that the country is like a company,” Fiorina said.

Most likely, the former HP chief won’t be the only Silicon Valley veteran on the ticket. The frontrunner for the GOP’s gubernatorial nomination is Meg Whitman, the former head of eBay, and another prominent 2008 Republican surrogate.

Though it’s probably a good strategy for the Republicans to emphasize the Silicon Valley wing of their party, which is generally more moderate and successful in statewide elections, there’s still something a bit funny about a Hewlett-Packard/eBay slate. We probably won’t be hearing many more lines like the one that got Fiorina in trouble, that's for sure.

One final word of advice to these two Golden State warriors: Try not to wax too nostalgic for the good old days. Dwell too much on 1999, and you’re going to end up sounding like you’re a shill for Pets.com.

Say this for Sen. Arlen Specter: When the guy falls for a new party, he falls hard. Specter, the erstwhile Republican seeking reelection as a Democrat in Pennsylvania, is going after likely Democratic primary rival Rep. Joe Sestak for, of all sins, insufficient party loyalty.

“Congressman Sestak is a flagrant hypocrite in challenging my being a real Democrat when he did not register as a Democrat until 2006 just in time to run for Congress," Specter said in a statement. "His lame excuse for avoiding party affiliation, because he was in the service, is undercut by his documented disinterest in the political process.” In a tweet sent Thursday, Specter asked of his rival's voting record, "Is this the record of a 'true Democrat,' @JoeSestak?"

In a statement of his own, Sestak reiterated that he had remained registered as an independent because he believed that partisan registration was inappropriate for a military officer, and said his apparent record of political non-participation is a result of uncounted absentee ballots.

There’s no way of really telling if Sestak is telling the truth here, but is this really a fight Specter wants to pick? He’s pretty much inviting responses like the one Sestak made:

We've learned today that Arlen Specter can abandon his party, but he just cant quit making Republican swift-boat attacks on the integrity of Democrats who served in our military. My question to Arlen Specter is this: do you regret voting for George Bush and John McCain? Why should Democrats support someone like you who actively campaigned as recently as last year for politicians with values like George W. Bush?

Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill., won't run for a full term in 2010, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. The paper says he'll officially announce his decision on Friday.

Burris was appointed to his seat by former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich; he was filling a vacancy created by Barack Obama's election to the presidency. Blagojevich made the announcement that he was appointing Burris after he was arrested by federal authorities who charged he'd tried to sell the seat -- that led to a battle between Burris and Senate Democrats, who didn't want to seat him.

In another situation, it might be surprising that Burris is now going to give up the seat he fought so hard to get. But the taint of the former governor has remained on him, and it's been clear for some time he would not be able to win in 2010, or even muster any real support for a campaign.

Reuters/Jason Reed

U.S. President Barack Obama (C) and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy (R) take their places with junior G8 delegates for a family photo at the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, July 9, 2009.

Drudge is leading with this picture right now, with a banner headline that reads "Mr. President!" Gotta give it to him, though he's probably just trying to drum up some controversy, that's a pretty funny headline. The look on French President Nicolas Sarkozy's face may be even funnier.

I've been waiting for some conservatives to work themselves up into a lather over this photo, but so far, except for the occasional comparison to President Clinton, everyone just appears to be laughing, and giving President Obama a little well-deserved ribbing. Which is good -- because hey, let's face it, we all have that occasional impulse to stop and appreciate certain features of our fellow men. And women. Obama just has the misfortune of being on camera for the better part of his day. Let's just hope, for his sake, that the first lady is willing to buy that excuse.

Plus, Obama has clearly gotten in that European spirit. Turns out this is only one of at least three photos from the G-8 summit currently underway in which he, Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi apparently got caught in flagrante gluteus. (The other two are here and here.)

And yes, you're allowed to laugh at this: I checked with Broadsheet.

Update: ABC News found video of the moment captured in the photo. You can watch it below -- it's potentially exculpatory, and seems to suggest Obama's attention was actually elsewhere, as he was about to help the woman above him walk down, but it could go either way. Sarkozy, however, doesn't even try to be discreet. Gotta love the French.

Either way? It's funny. And it's summer. And we can all use a laugh sometimes.

For some time now, it's seemed that Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., was able to successfully weather the disclosure of his affair with a staffer and could continue his political career, albeit with his reputation tarnished and any hopes for higher office dashed for now. But this week, attention was back on the senator, and people are raising new questions about payments made to his mistress and her husband, a longtime friend. Now, a new revelation from Ensign's lawyer is likely to open the floodgates.

In a statement released Thursday, Ensign attorney Paul Coggins said that the senator's parents had given $96,000 to their son's former staffer, Cindy Hampton, and her family. The full statement:

In April 2008, Senator John Ensign’s parents each made gifts to Doug Hampton, Cindy Hampton, and two of their children in the form of a check totaling $96,000. Each gift was limited to $12,000. The payments were made as gifts, accepted as gifts and complied with tax rules governing gifts.

After the Senator told his parents about the affair, his parents decided to make the gifts out of concern for the well-being of long-time family friends during a difficult time. The gifts are consistent with a pattern of generosity by the Ensign family to the Hamptons and others.

None of the gifts came from campaign or official funds nor were they related to any campaign or official duties. Senator Ensign has complied with all applicable laws and Senate ethics rules.

Even before this news broke, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, announced that it had asked the Justice Department to investigate an allegation that Ensign had paid $25,000 in severance to Cindy Hampton without reporting it.

That allegation came from an interview Doug Hampton gave to a Las Vegas reporter. In that interview, Hampton also said a group that includes Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., encouraged Ensign to pay millions of dollars to help the Hampton family pay off their mortgage and move to a new home away from him.