Dr. Bushigari's Cabinet

In a candid admission of the tensions between the White House and Congress, Sen. Arlen Specter now says that Vice President Cheney cut him out of the loop in his efforts to call telecom executives on the carpet over their cooperation with the National Security Agency on its secret domestic spying program.

Specter made public a letter to the veep in which he accuses him of conspiring with conservative Republicans on the committee to block testimony from the phone companies that providing the NSA with call records.

Wrote Specter:

I was surprised, to say the least, that you sought to influence, really determine, the action of the committee without calling me first, or at least calling me at some point.

The incident occurs at a time when the White House claims it has been trying to repair its relations with Congress, which after playing lapdog for the first six years of the Bush era is pushing back at its efforts to exert executive power.

The New York Times has more here.

Meanwhile, former President George H.W. Bush waged a secret campaign over several months early this year to remove Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, according to a story by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon.

The elder Bush went so far as to recruit Rumsfeld's potential replacement after seven retired generals had called for his ouster by asking a retired four-star general if he would accept the position, but the effort failed when The Decider rebuffed The Elder.