Tuesday Links

• This week, the St. Paul, MN City Council may ask the state legislature to approve a bill that would let the city offer health coverage and other benefits to domestic partners of city employees — both gay and straight. Mayor Chris Coleman backs the move and has written letters to top state officials, including Governor Tim Pawlenty, supporting the change in state law.

• During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. "I'm a Marine," Pace told them, "and Marines don't talk about failure. They talk about victory."

• Democratic Governor Jim Doyle of Wisconsin has directed the state to turn down about $600,000 in federal abstinence education money because new rules would have required the state to teach abstinence-only sex education.

• There are nearly 47 million people in America with no health insurance, and the problem is increasingly affecting the middle-class.

• More and more former federal prosecutors are accusing the GOP of purging them for political reasons. The former federal prosecutor in Maryland said Monday that he was forced out in early 2005 because of political pressure stemming from public corruption investigations involving associates of the state’s Republican governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. And today, John McKay, the former U.S. attorney in Washington, revealed to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Republican Congressman Doc Hastings’s (WA) office contacted him and attempted to pressure him in an ongoing investigation. Also today, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias publicly detailed how Republican Senator Pete Domenici (NM) and Republican Congresswoman Heather Wilson (NM) pressured him in an investigation.

• Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (NE) has suggested that Congress may consider the impeachment of President Bush in an article in the new Esquire magazine.