Television's Aging Rock Star

Besides, Hannity says, he has also offered to campaign for moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and "a lot of Republicans are angry at my opposition" to White House policies on the Dubai ports deal, immigration and Medicare drug benefits.

Phony Voice

Nick Sylvester, senior associate editor of the Village Voice, has been suspended after admitting he fabricated a scene from last week's cover story. Sylvester says he regrets the lapse into fiction, which involved a barroom meeting with other writers testing their pickup techniques.

Family Ties

MSNBC's Tucker Carlson says he's always been critical of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and the CIA leak investigation that led to the indictment of former vice presidential aide Scooter Libby. And it is "outrageous," Carlson says, for blogger Arianna Huffington to suggest that his father had anything to do with it.

Former ambassador Richard Carlson, she noted on the Huffington Post, is on the advisory committee for Libby's legal defense fund.

"What an incredibly stupid thing to say," says the younger Carlson, adding that Libby was his father's personal lawyer for years. "I was red-in-the-face mad about it." Carlson says that he has met Libby only once and that his father's role "has nothing to do with anything. It's a ridiculous standard." On his show, "The Situation," Carlson said it was a "shame" that Huffington would not come on to debate him.

Huffington says Carlson "never addressed" what she called "a simple journalistic point," which is that he should have disclosed his father's role to viewers. She says Carlson unfairly portrayed her as ducking him -- and knew she had a scheduling conflict while traveling -- because she told him in an e-mail: "Rain check, please? Anytime, any place, any subject."

Pentagon Targets Blogs

A new U.S. Central Command team, according to a news release, "contacts bloggers to inform the writers about any given topic that may have been posted on their site. . . . The team engages bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information."

While that may sound ominous, the release says the unit works with more than 250 bloggers "to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by U.S. forces in the global war on terror." This, says Army Reserve Maj. Richard Norton, has a "viral effect" that drives Web users to CentCom's Web site. The team's motto: "Engage."

Furthermore . . .

Iraq remains a big newspaper issue. Dick Polman in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

"We can't stay, and we can't go.

"As the United States nears the third anniversary of its war in Iraq, there is irrefutable evidence that our military and political options are narrowing, that President Bush's democratization dream is lethally imperiled, that we are hostage to events beyond our control, and that nobody can agree on whether our troops would be better off digging in or pulling out.

"The fog of war has frozen domestic politics. Bush's 'stay the course' stance is being soundly rebuked in the polls, yet the Democrats, still divided among themselves, haven't come up with a better idea, a consensus alternative. Meanwhile, the clock ticks. The danger of a full-blown civil war - predicted 18 months ago by the CIA, but dismissed at the time by the Bush team - grows with each passing day."