The US Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) is scheduled to vote tomorrow on the nomination of Republican voter-suppression guru Hans Von Spakovsky to a state-level body that advises the commission.

Lenore Ostrowsky, a spokeswoman for the USCCR -- whose mission is to defend voting rights -- confirmed to TPMmuckraker that commissioners will vote at a Friday morning meeting on Spakovsky's nomination to the State Advisory Committee for Virginia, where he lives. According to a source, it is likely that Spakovsky's nomination will be approved.

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It looks like John Ensign's sexual dignity -- which hasn't been high lately -- has plunged to new depths. His lawyer has just released a remarkable statement saying that Ensign's parents paid the Hamptons $96,000 after the 51-year-old senator told his Mom and Dad about the affair.

The senator's father, Mike Ensign, is a casino mogul who sold his shares in the Mandalay Group for around $300 million earlier this decade.

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It looks like when Tom Coburn denied today that he urged his friend John Ensign to pay restitution to the family of the woman he had an affair with, the Oklahoma senator wasn't speaking just to Roll Call (sub. req.). Rather, in a sign of the potential trouble the story could represent for Coburn, he appears to have given an impromptu press conference, in what's likely to be a failed effort to nip it in the bud.

Politico reports that, along with his denial, Coburn had some choice words for Doug Hampton.

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We just told you about Doug Hampton's allegation that Sen. Tom Coburn urged his friend Sen. John Ensign to pay "restitution" money to the Hamptons on account of Ensign's affair with Hampton's wife. And now Coburn is denying the claim.

Roll Call reports:

Coburn repeatedly denied allegations that he urged Ensign to pay Doug Hampton, the husband of his mistress Cynthia, millions in hush money following a confrontation with Hampton. "I categorically deny everything he said," Coburn said.

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Doug Hampton's TV interview about his wife's affair with Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) is hardly a model of clarity. Hampton meanders away from some questions, jumps forwards and back in time, and seems, perhaps understandably, still to have trouble viewing the situation dispassionately.

But there's one point on which Hampton is particularly lucid. He clearly says that when Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) confronted Ensign over the affair in February 2008, the Oklahoma senator urged Ensign to pay "restitution" to the Hamptons, including helping them to pay the mortgage on their $1.2 million house and to move out of state. And Coburn isn't denying it.

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Doug Hampton has spoken publicly for the first time about his wife Cindy's affair with Sen. John Ensign. And it's good...

The highlights from Hampton's interview with Las Vegas Sun political columnist Jon Ralston:

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If you had to pick out a coherent explanation given by Sarah Palin for her decision to quit as Alaska governor, you'd probably have to settle on the notion that she felt her agenda was being paralyzed by frivolous ethics complaints, and that she only foresaw additional ones. So she stepped down so as not to continue to drag Alaskans through the process.

"Palin Says Ethics Complaints Were Paralyzing" reported the Anchorage Daily News after the governor's round of beachside interviews Monday. And Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell, who'll soon replace Palin as governor, had given that line over the weekend, saying on Fox News that Palin had talked to him about the toll the complaints had taken.

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Texas Tech has officially announced the hiring of Alberto Gonzales.

The press release, which says Gonzales will work as both a recruiter and teach a junior-level course on "contemporary issues in the executive branch," makes no mention of Gonzo's involvement in the U.S. attorneys scandal (among other things) or his subsequent resignation. Instead, it ends with, "...and later was appointed Attorney General."

Nice.

Specifically, Gonzales will be responsible for "recruiting and retaining first generation and underrepresented students," and will help plan a leadership training program for minority and first generation students at both Texas Tech and Angelo State University. In addition to his class, he'll also guest lecture for other courses.

"His own upbringing in Houston as part of a migrant family with eight children makes him qualified to tell underrepresented Texas students that college is possible," said Kent Hance, chancellor of Texas Tech. "He will help Texas Tech and ASU prepare our students for success and to be future leaders in the State of Texas and beyond."

The news that Karl Rove has finally testified before lawyers for the House Judiciary committee about his role in the US Attorney firings and the prosecution of Don Siegelman represents, in one sense, the culmination of years-long battle. That fight has pitted Congress, determined to get to the bottom of the firings, against the Bush White House, which has dragged its feet at virtually every stage. And yet, the path from here to a full public accounting of what happened remains unclear at best.

Rove's deposition put a cap on a protracted legal standoff between the committee, chaired by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and the Bush White House. Conyers, investigating the late 2006 firing of nine US Attorneys, had first subpoenaed Rove in 2007. Citing executive privilege, the White House refused to let Rove testify. That eventually prompted Congress to hold Rove in contempt, and ultimately to file a lawsuit seeking to compel Rove to testify. A district court ruled in Congress's favor last year, but the White House appealed that ruling, and Rove continued to be a no-show at several committee hearings to which he had been called to testify. Eventually, in March, lawyers for President Bush reached an agreement with the committee, securing Rove's and Harriet Miers' testimony. Even since then, though, it's taken over four months to arrange for Rove's sit-down. (Miers had hers last month.)

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When a leaked flier last week revealed the Washington Post's plan to organize a corporate-sponsored "salon" on health care, the paper portrayed the flier as the hastily-created product of an over-zealous business department which misrepresented the Post's genuine vision for the event.

But now Politico -- which broke the original story -- has obtained a copy of a word document, sent out over two weeks ago, for the planned July 21 event. The document's existence will intensify questions about how, as the Post has claimed, the business and news sides of the paper could have been on such different pages over the event.

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Atlantic Media publisher David Bradley is defending the corporate-sponsored, off-the-record "salon" dinners that his company has been organizing since 2003, in response to TPMmuckraker's report yesterday on the dinners.

In a 1500-word "letter" posted on The Hotline, Bradley refers to "concerns I'm reading now on the web" (no attribution, naturally), before explaining why he thinks the salons -- which, as we wrote yesterday, are very similar to the Washington Post's planned event that ignited a furor last week -- "are full of good purpose." (He adds that they're also "part of my best thinking on how we carry forward (read fund) modern journalism.")

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It looks like it's not just us and the local press asking questions about what Rep. John Conyers knew of the bribery scheme to which his wife pleaded guilty last week.

The Washington Post got in on the game yesterday -- but it also offered a bit of detail about John and Monica Conyers' marriage which may support the House Judiciary chair's claim that he was in the dark.

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We can't blame you if you'd almost forgotten about John Ensign. Since the GOP senator confessed last month to an affair, he's been unceremoniously knocked out of the headlines by the successive implosions of two other Republican 2012 hopefuls.

But the philandering Nevadan doesn't deserve to go gently into that good night just yet. And yesterday the Las Vegas Sun had a report on the relationship between Ensign and Doug and Cynthia Hampton -- the latter was Ensign's paramour from December 2007 until August 2008 -- which jibes in places with what we reported several weeks ago.

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Last week, Politico reported that the Washington Post had planned to put on an exclusive off-the-record "salon" at the home of its publisher, where corporate lobbyists would pay as much as $250,000 to gain access to Post reporters and editors, as well as Obama administration officials and members of Congress. The news provoked an outcry in DC journalism circles -- the Post's own ombudsman called it "pretty close to a public relations disaster" -- and the the event was quickly canceled.

But the notion that the Post's gambit represents some sort of new and uniquely outrageous collapsing of the wall between the editorial and business sides of a news publication is badly off the mark. In fact, it would be closer to the truth to say that the paper got caught pushing the envelope on a money-making and influence-building strategy that other outlets had been quietly deploying for years.

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Donald Rumsfeld has finally said he's sorry. Sort of.

In an interview with biographer Bradley Graham, the former secretary of defense says he has regrets about the administration's controversial detainee policy.

The twist is that Rumsfeld doesn't regret the policy itself -- specifically the abandoning of the Geneva Conventions for detainees picked up in Afghanistan. Rather, he regrets how the policy was formulated.

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