Death Wish

The point is that liberal bloggers have been kicking the stuffing out of Lieberman, and readers ought to know who you're working for if you're kicking back.

TPM Muckraker finds new evidence of politically motivated U.S. attorney firings:

"As both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reported, a number of the federal prosecutors who were fired in December had initially decided to go quietly... until, that is, the Justice Department declared publicly that they had been fired for performance issues. They didn't like that one bit.

"One of those angry prosecutors, apparently, is David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney for New Mexico. According to Joe Monohan, a political consultant and blogger, Iglesias wrote in an email to a friend that his firing was a "political fragging." From the email, excerpted on Monohan's blog:

"' This is a political fragging, pure and simple. I'm OK with being asked to move on for political reasons, I'm NOT OK with the Department of Justice wrongfully testifying under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee that I had performance issues...'"

Is the NYT carrying all the news that's fit to print? Nation Editor Katrina van den Heuvel notes that the paper "reports that it was 'asked to withhold any mention of [Cheney's] trip until he had left Pakistan.' What conceivable national security purpose was served by swearing the press pool to secrecy about this trip? And doesn't accepting these ground rules play into the hands of a hyper-secretive Vice-President whose signature contribution to our security has been misleading us into a disastrous war and carpet bombing our constitutional system? The secrecy does expose a national security problem: the 'war' on terror is a rank failure and Pakistan is not the stable country that White House talking points try to sell us."

I think the bombing underscored why that's not an unreasonable request.

"Here's another instance of White House pressure. A front page article in Monday's New York Times --providing conditional evidence of Iranian weapons in Iraq--acknowledges that the paper acceded to Bush Administration requests that it withhold specific details about the weapons. As the Times reported: 'In the course of the detailed briefing on the Hilla discovery, Maj. Marty Weber, an explosives expert, said that most of the E.F.P.s in Iraq use C-4 plastic explosive manufactured in Iran. At the request of the Bush administration, The Times is withholding some specific details about the weapons to protect intelligence sources and methods.'

"Hours after the story appeared, Congressman Dennis Kucinich issued a statement -- 'The New York Times Plays into Bush Administration's Hand.' 'The White House,' Kucinich says, 'is up to its old scams again: Providing information by anonymous sources ..... This time, however, they added another trick to their bag: providing the information and prohibiting the Times from publishing it.....The New York Times should not print unsourced, unattributed assertions and then voluntarily hide the details from the American public...'"

But shouldn't news organizations at least weigh the question of protecting intelligene sources and methods? Would Van den Heuvel and Kucinich have had the same reaction to such a story published during the Clinton administration?

Roger Simon blows the whistle on the great debate scam:

"Last week, I traveled from Washington, D.C., to Carson City, Nev., a distance of more than 2,600 miles, to watch a political debate on TV.

"I could have watched the debate live in Washington. There are TV sets in Washington -- I own one -- but watching the debate here would not have been the same.

"It would not have been the same as sitting in a gymnasium at a folding table watching the debate with 100 other reporters on a dim TV with bad color."

Among the reasons why reporters absolutely, positively must attend:

"If you don't go to the debate, you can't put a dateline on your story indicating you have traveled thousands of miles. And if you don't have a dateline, people will know you watched the debate on a TV at home or work instead of on a TV at the debate site. And that would be bad."

Oops. The Post just put out a memo about cracking down on story lengths, so I've got to end it h---