I guess the speech from Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) wasn’t persuasive; the long knives are out.

Idaho Sen. Larry Craig’s political support eroded significantly Wednesday when three fellow Republicans in Congress called for his resignation and party leaders pushed him from senior committee posts in the Senate.

Hoekstra was the first to make the call, issuing a statement two hours ago that said Craig’s “conduct throughout this matter has been inappropriate for a U.S. senator.” Then Coleman said in a written statement, “Senator Craig pled guilty to a crime involving conduct unbecoming a senator.” Not satisfied with a press release, McCain went on CNN to announce his belief that Craig “should resign” and explain why.

And what about Craig? What’s he said today? Not too much, but a) legal experts seem to believe he’s going to have a very tough time reversing his guilty plea; and b) he’s already losing his grip on power in the Senate.

It looks like Craig may soon have to decide to spend more time with his family.

Hat tip to Media Matters who first picked up on this. While discussing the Senator Craig scandal last night on MSNBC, macho right-wing tough guy Tucker Carlson tells Joe Scarborough and Dan Abrams about his own high school era run-in with an over-aggressive male in a public bathroom. According to Tucker, upon being "bothered" by this man:

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“I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the — you know, and grabbed him, and … hit him against the stall with his head, actually.”

Tucker released this statement to MM earlier:

Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men’s room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men’s room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.

Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That’s absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn’t angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.

So the story goes from Tucker fetching his buddy and hitting this guys head against a stall, to him running away screaming, only to later come back and hold him down. Which one is it, Tucker? Either way you're a weenie.

UPDATE: Media Matters wants MSNBC to account for Carlson's statements

The Washington Note: The US Afghan opium strategy: Eradicating any chance of stability

Danger Room: Experts wonder if experts can be trusted

Blue Girl, Red State: Lt. Colonel Steven Jordan, the highest ranking member of the armed services to stand trial for the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib. He was not convicted of prisoner abuse, or of being a derelict officer. He was convicted of talking about what happened at the prison. BGRS also informs me that a group of progressive bloggers in Missouri have have recently launched a new site,  showmeprogress.com

The Opinion Mill: Why so glum, chum? It's Bushtemberfest!

Mad Kane's Political Madness: Limericks for GOP hypocrite, Senator Larry Craig

(Nicole: Our apologies for the delay in getting the Round Up published.  We've been experiencing technical difficulties.)

National Security budget priorities. Chart from The National Priorities Project.

David Stephenson's Homeland Security Blog:

It’s hard to get an accurate estimate because the [cost of occupying Iraq] mounts so rapidly every minute. Can’t help wondering how much farther along the [Gulf Coast] rebuilding would be, how much more could be spent to improve public education, insure the 43 million Americans without health insurance, ad nauseum. Great legacy you’re leaving, George.

In May, the president signed legislation that funded the war in Iraq, and included a mandate that the administration report by Sept. 15 on whether Iraq is “achieving progress” toward 16 specific benchmarks. It was about establishing some measurable standards of success — meeting the benchmarks would reflect actual progress, falling short would reflect failure.

In July, the White House, after fudging its facts a bit, concluded it was on track on eight of the 18 benchmarks, none of them dealing with political progress, which is the point of the “surge” policy. Today, the non-partisan Government Accountability Office will offer a far more discouraging, far more accurate, and a “strikingly negative” assessment.

Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration. […]

“Overall,” the report concludes, “key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds,” as promised. While it makes no policy recommendations, the draft suggests that future administration assessments “would be more useful” if they backed up their judgments with more details and “provided data on broader measures of violence from all relevant U.S. agencies.”

That last point is particularly noteworthy — the GAO is effectively conceding in a government report that the White House intends to deceive the Congress and the public. We may have come to expect stunning dishonesty from the Bush administration, but for the GAO to call the White House out like reflects just how reckless and mendacious the Bush gang has become.

As for the policy, it's not working. To support the status quo is to support failure. It's that simple.

Larry Craig and friends Trent Lott and John Ashcroft let "the eagle" soar. Photo seen at The Alaska Report.

John Swift (satire): "Thank goodness we live in a country where everyone is straight until proven gay beyond a shadow of a doubt... In fact, the more one looks at the evidence that Craig seems to be gay, the more one can see that it is really just evidence of being conservative....When conservatives gush about how macho Fred Thompson and President Bush are, we do sound a little bit like Village People fans."

If you were listening to KCBS in San Francisco around noon today, and stuck around after the traffic report, you might have heard me talking about the death of Hilly Kristal (at 75), the founder of NY's legendary punk rock club, CBGB's.

My first visit to the club, to see a very early Ramones show, changed my life entirely and led to decades of punk rock evangelism in the press, on the radio and in the record industry. It also led to a friendship with Hilly which worked out especially well later when I was running Sire Records and he was managing Cleveland's Dead Boys. Here's a classic performance of their biggest song, "Sonic Reducer," at CB's. (I would have rather posted "Caught With The Meat in Your Mouth" as a dedication to our friends in the GOP but I couldn't find a great version.)

What was your best CBGB's experience ever?

Sticking directly to the script (police report) of Senator Craig's public restroom encounter with an undercover police officer, Keith re-enacts (in classic "Dragnet" style) what transpired that fateful day back in June.

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Let this clip go down in comedy/news history.

And it's only Wednesday.

Today on Hardball, David Shuster gave a scathing rundown of what has been a horrific week for President Bush and the Republican Party. Starting with the president's awkward visit to New Orleans to mark the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the "Brownie" moment, Shuster then moves to the resignation of Bush's disgraced Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales and of course, yesterday's revelation that Idaho Republican, Larry Craig, had been arrested for seeking sex with an undercover officer in a bathroom stall at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport.

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Shuster: "The White House did offer a statement today on the Larry Craig sex scandal. A presidential spokesman expressed disappointment, but refused to say whether Craig should keep his job. That means the White House is trying to stay detached from Senator Craig in much the same way the White House has tried to stay removed from the lingering Gulf Coast problems since Hurricane Katrina."

The NYT’s headline makes it sound like the latest data is encouraging: “Census Shows a Modest Rise in U.S. Income.” The article reflects a more dispiriting reality.

The nation’s median household income grew modestly in 2006, the Census Bureau reported yesterday, even as the percentage of people without health insurance hit a high.

Experts said the rise in income was mainly a reflection of an increase in the number of family members entering the workplace or working longer hours. Average wages for men and women actually declined for the third consecutive year.

The NYT then added this gem:

Some Republicans seized on the new data as evidence that Bush administration policies had been good for people’s pocketbooks.

Seriously, it’s as if Republicans are trying to appear foolish and out of touch. People are working more for less and the GOP responds to the news by saying, “See? I told you we knew what we were doing.”