[Daily Brief]

If You Brief It, They Will Click.

So my grand scheme to post the news of the day seems to have fallen on hard times. I'm lucky to get one round-up a week done. Perhaps this represents me turning over a new leaf. Time will tell.

Let's start with the headline that's screaming from every website this morning: Miers Backed Abortion Ban in 1989. And by that they mean a constitutional amendment. So that's that, expect the left to be enraged, the right to be mollified (sort of), and the natural order to be restored. And in case liberals are still waffling, here's her judgment in action: "Time and time again, it seemed, the president was able to zero in on the most difficult aspect of an issue and provide exactly the direction needed.... He works so constantly."

Let's next move on to more interesting news: is Dick Cheney gonna get indicted? What did he know, and what does Patrick Fitzgerald think he knew? These are the topics circling like buzzards around the Veep's office. (So many of you were chagrined to see me curtail my Judy Miers analysis that I'll tuck in this Howie Kurtz link. Happy? No wait, here's one more!)

Tom DeLay was offered a misdemeanor plea on his fraud charges, it turns out. This would have allowed him to keep his leadership position and pretty much shoots down DeLay's unhinged rant about partisan persecution. He turned them down.

I'll close with a twofer of Republican dischord. In the first, Bruce Bartlett gets the ax from the National Center for Policy Analysis for penning the forthcoming The Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Oh dissent! Conservatives don't know how to handle ye. Meanwhile, Andy Card faces the ax for different misdemeanors.

Around the Blogosphere
Billmon points us to a new poll about Bush (same as the old polls). David Corn is blogging madly about the Fitgerald probe. Will Bunch on Judy's embeddation. Jesse Taylor, one of the boy-wonders of blogging, is leaving Pandagon. Barbara on the Times. Some suggest that Fitzgerald has a secret source inside the White House. Laura Rozen names him. Finally, a good one from Josh.