Just Politics

Rove’s release

White House advisor Carl Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin has confirmed that Rove was the source who gave information to Time reporter Matt Cooper under a pledge of confidentiality. Rove’s attorney stated that last week Cooper was released to testify about Rove’s conversation to a grand jury.

Luskin also stated that Rove "never knowingly disclosed classified information" and that "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA."

The Washington Post reports on Newsweek magazine’story:

Cooper, according to an internal Time e-mail obtained by Newsweek magazine, spoke with Rove before Novak's column was published. In the conversation, Rove gave Cooper a "big warning" that Wilson's assertions might not be entirely accurate and that it was not the director of the CIA or the vice president who sent Wilson on his trip. Rove apparently told Cooper that it was "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip," according to a story in Newsweek's July 18 issue.

Luskin has said that Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has told him that Rove is not a target of the probe. Luskin said that Rove was not actively trying to push the information into the public realm.

Bush news coverage

The Washington Times reports on a study of Bush’s news coverage:

More than two-thirds of the news stories on ABC, NBC and CBS covering the first 100 days of Mr. Bush's second term were negative, according to an analysis released today by the District-based Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA).

It's actually a slight improvement: During the first 100 days of his initial term in office, the coverage was 71 percent negative, according to a similar CMPA study conducted in 2001.

In comparison, President Clinton's first-term news coverage was 59 percent negative in 1993.

The three networks also seem to be boycotting Mr. Bush this time around. He rated 619 stories during the study period in 2001-- but just 250 stories this year, the study found.

"Presidents tend to get bad coverage during their second terms. The press is sick of them by then. The Iraq war and the weapons-of-mass-destruction question was a particular factor for Mr. Bush this time," said CMPA director Robert Lichter.

Ethics ads

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Campaign for America's Future are running print and radio ads accusing several Republicans - including Majority Leader Tom DeLay - of running afoul of House ethics rules regarding travel paid for by outside organizations, as well as other charges.

Republican Congressman Robert Ney of Ohio is also a target of a radio spot. "Texas casinos, Florida cruise ships and Washington lobbyists," says the ad, which urges people to call Ney. The ad continues "What about Ohio families? Too many of us are looking for good-paying jobs, stuck with skyrocketing health care bills and rising prices at the gas pump."

The audacity of the Democrats is not lost on the fact that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has filed three delinquent disclosure forms for three trips she took more than five years ago.

Speaking "terrorism"

The Washington Times reports on Sen. Charles Grassley’s concern about monitoring Arabic conversations in federal prisons:

The federal Bureau of Prisons is holding 119 persons with "specific ties" to international Islamist terrorist groups, yet has no full-time Arabic translators or a system to monitor their communications, The Washington Times has learned.

A congressional aide said Bureau of Prisons officials maintain an informal list of 17 employees who are proficient in Arabic. The prison officials acknowledge, however, that none of the workers had been tested to determine Arabic fluency or undergone a special screening or background check, the aide said.

Capitol Hill is starting to notice.

"It's ludicrous to think that the Bureau of Prisons doesn't have a single full-time translator to monitor their communications," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, in a statement given to The Washington Times before Thursday's multiple terror bombings in London.

NY Times’ venom

NewsMax.com offers a humorous look at the NY Times treatment of their former employee Edward Klein’s book, "The Truth About Hillary":

"'The Truth About Hillary' has united [no easy task] literary critics," Timesman Dwight Garner fumed, adding "it is easily this year's most vilified book."

Then Garner promptly joined in the vilification:

"Writing in the Book Review in 1988, Joyce Carol Oates coined the term 'pathography' to describe hatchet jobs like Klein's. Reading Oates's taxonomy of that genre today, it sounds as if she somehow had an advance copy of Klein's book rotting at her elbow."

Rotting?

Still - in what must have been a gut-wrenching admission for the paper - Garner lamented, "That hasn't stopped Klein's book from landing on beach blankets; it makes its debut at No. 2 on this week's hardcover nonfiction list."

UN: early abortion med ‘essential’

The United Nation's World Health Organization has indicated that early abortion medicine is essential according to CNS:

The United Nations' World Health Organization has added mifepristone and misoprostol, the drug combination that produces a chemical abortion, to its list of "essential medicines," thereby making them more readily available around the world.

The two drugs appear in the latest version of the WHO's essential medicines list. The list of medicines deemed to "satisfy the priority health care needs of the population" is updated every two years.

In recent months groups such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) have been lobbying hard for the decision to go ahead, after reports last April said the Bush administration was trying to block to move.

The British Medical Journal quotes Hans Hogerzeil, secretary of the WHO's essential medicines committee, as saying the inclusion of mifepristone and misoprostol on the list "is a real addition to the therapeutic alternatives for women who have to undergo abortion, especially in developing countries where surgical facilities are less easily available."