U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales snuck into Birmingham, Alabama, with no advance notice today and with no clear mission, at least according to the way NBC Channel 13 and ABC 33/40 news reported the visit. There’s no link up yet, but from the little interviews on TV, it looked like another instance of Bush administration officials using local TV news for PR purposes.

One reporter did manage to eke out a question about U.S. Attorney Alice Martin. The predictable answer: Gonzales supports her.

As for the loss in the case of deposed HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy and the dismissal of the case against former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, he said, “These are hard cases.”

Duh.

Like Bush said during the presidential debates, “It’s hard work.”

Right. Try incompetence if not downright corruption.

Perhaps the local TV news reporters should check out WhiteHouse.Org to find out some facts about our esteemed attorney general.

And maybe someone over at the Birmingham Snooze or the AP might consider doing their jobs and letting us know this stuff is coming in advance. I had a few questions for Gonzales myself.

For starters, how does he justify his position on torture of prisoners and his oath as an attorney and attorney general?

Time magazine is now reporting that Bush’s chief political and policy advisor Karl Rove most likely learned of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame Wilson’s name from within the administration, not reporters as he testified, and prior her husband Joe Wilson’s Op/Ed piece in the New York Times saying there was no evidence of Nigerian yellow-cake being sold to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which contradicts his previous testimony.

The worm turns, as they say, on Mr. Rove, perhaps the most vicious political retributionist in American History. His problem is a thing called Karma, and as it often does, returns ten-fold the evil a person perpetrates, or the good. As a number of our readers have pointed out in the past, it is hard to find the good these people have done for their world with all their power. If you work only evil, and you get a second term in the White House, history shows that the pendulum swings and the powerful take the heat and feel the consequences.

The problem for the people, however, is that the Bush crowd has amassed more power than any leaders certainly in American History, if not World History. Would someone in the press or the blogosphere seize a historian to comment on this?

Or, dear readers, what say ye?