I wrote earlier that I was supporting Waxman for the Chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee. This is good news.

Congress Daily:

By a three-vote margin, the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee today recommended that Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman be given the chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

UPDATE: Matt adds...

If it's true that the freshmen are breaking heavily for Waxman, and older baron committee chairs are going for Dingell, this adds a lot of firepower to Waxman's case. Dingell is a vindictive guy, so his case rests on the notion that if you don't vote for him you're going to have problems with the person who will naturally be the Chair of Energy and Commerce. Cracking the image of inevitability is key to letting members know it's safe to go against Dingell.

(h/t Scarce)

This is video from last year when Rep. Henry Waxman asked Doan to resign.

The Politico:

Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Administration, was forced to offer her resignation tonight, according to an e-mail she sent out this evening.

Doan was appointed in late May, 2006, becoming the first woman to serve as GSA Administrator. With 12,000 empioyees and a $20 billion annual budget, GSA has responsibilty for overseeing the thousands of building and properties owned by the federal government.

Doan became the subject of congressional scrutiny last year for allegedly using GSA to help Republican lawmakers win re-election. Doan denied the allegation, but her appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was disastrous. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the panel, called on Doan to resign over the allegations, but Doan refused to do so. Read on...

Doan was forced to go kicking and screaming, like most Bushies do. The corruption became so ingrained into the fabric of the Bush administration to the point where, I believe, these people actually didn't think they were doing anything wrong, or they just didn't care because everyone was getting in on the act. Either way, it really makes no difference -- it's just another GOP operative rat swept off the deck of the Titanic. More from TPM...

Following up on an item from yesterday, the White House officially made a ridiculous argument about officials' missing emails.

The White House is currently under fire for allegations that it violated the Presidential Records Act by failing to archive official e-mails. Facing a court order, the White House yesterday acknowledged that it recycled its “backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003,” raising the possibility that many messages “have been taped over and are gone forever.”

Yet when asked about the missing e-mails in today’s White House press briefing, spokesman Tony Fratto inexplicably tried to claim that the White House has “absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing.” He argued that these scurrilous charges of missing e-mails “came from outside the White House.”

Fortunately, we have Henry Waxman to set the record straight.

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Did Fratto not realize he'd be called on such a blatant falsehood? Or does the Bush White House simply no longer care?

The Gavel:

As noted on Friday, Chairman Henry Waxman and Ranking Republican Tom Davis of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee wrote letters to White House Counsel Fred Fielding, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and RNC Chairman Mike Duncan requesting further documents regarding the handling of information surrouding the death of Army Ranger Specialist Patrick Tillman.[..]

On Wednesday, August 1, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. in 2154 Rayburn House Office Building, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a hearing entitled "The Tillman Fratricide: What the Leadership of the Defense Department Knew." The hearing will examine what senior Defense Department officials knew about U.S. Army Corporal Patrick Tillman's death by fratricide.

On Friday, July 13, Chairman Waxman and Ranking Minority Member Tom Davis sent letters to the White House and the Department of Defense objecting to the withholding of documents related to the death of Corporal Tillman, who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004. Chairman Waxman also wrote the Republican National Committee to request communications about Corporal Tillman's death by White House officials using e-mail accounts controlled by the RNC. (See also here)

WHO: The following witnesses are invited to testify:

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