Trial began today in London in the libel case fugitive Roman Polanski brought against Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair's lawyers are pulling out all stops. They called him a "fugitive from morality" today.

Polanski is suing Vanity Fair for libel over an article published in July 2002 in which it claimed he made sexual advances to a Swedish woman in Elaine's, a fashionable New York restaurant bar, on the way to his wife's funeral.

He denies that he went to the bar on his way to Tate's funeral, and although he admits he went there shortly afterwards, he denies the incident ever took place.

Mia Farrow will testify tomorrow.

She was with Polanski at Elaine's on the night in August 1969 on which the incident is alleged to have taken place.

It's no picnic for Judith Miller in the Alexandria Detention Center, reports Bill Keller of the New York Times in an interview.

She's not eating due to stomach problems from the food. For more on the conditions, check out this former prisoner's diary.

It doesn't sound like Miller is about to change her mind, though.

Via AmericaBlog and Billmon, Bloomberg News is reporting that Ari read the State Department memo on Air Force One during Bush's July 7 to 12 trip to Africa.

The memo, prepared by the State Department on July 7, 2003, informed top administration officials that the wife of ex- diplomat and Bush critic Joseph Wilson was a CIA agent. Seven days later, Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was publicly identified as a CIA operative by syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

On the same day the memo was prepared, White House phone logs show Novak placed a call to White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, according to lawyers familiar with the case and a witness who has testified before the grand jury. Those people say it isn't clear whether Fleischer returned the call, and Fleischer has refused to comment.

The Novak call may loom large in the investigation because Fleischer was among a group of administration officials who left Washington later that day on a presidential trip to Africa. On the flight to Africa, Fleischer was seen perusing the State Department memo on Wilson and his wife, according to a former administration official who was also on the trip.

Abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolf got two life terms today, and was defiant as ever.

When it was his turn to speak Monday, Rudolph angrily lashed out at abortion and the Birmingham clinic. "What they did was participate in the murder of 50 children a week," he said, shackled at the ankles and wearing a red jail uniform. "Abortion is murder and because it is murder I believe deadly force is needed to stop it."

Crooks and Liars has more.

Rudolf will be serving his sentence on "bomber's row" at Supermax, Alcatraz of the Rockies, in Florence, Colorado.

Check out this hilarious column by the Minneapolis Star Tribune's conservative writer Katherine Kersten about how a spike in gang crime can be attributed to "the debilitating attitudes of the '60s," which were brought to us by liberal "intellectuals, lawyers, and entertainment executives."

In particular, she blames sexual freedom and social welfare programs.

The '60s revolution was about personal "liberation." Recreational sex? "Make love, not war." Drugs? "Whatever turns you on." Teachers, parents and police? "Challenge authority."

The '60s also launched the War on Poverty. Though well-intentioned, it created incentives for self-destructive behavior such as out-of-wedlock childbearing and welfare dependence. Its mantra was that the poor are victims without responsibilities, whose behavior has nothing to do with their plight.

[Via Paul at Eye Teeth]

President Bush breaks his silence today. He says he'll fire anyone in his administration "who committed a crime." [Via HuffPost.]

Is he saying an indictment won't be enough, he'll insist on a conviction? That would be the American way, after all, a charge is not proof of guilt.

Prediction: Bush will announce his Supreme Court pick earlier than scheduled - within the next few days - to deflect attention from this scandal. Will the furor erupting over RoveGate make him play nice and give us a mainstream moderate to placate us?

Update: Buzzflash Editorial today.

Update: Arianna weighs in here.

I'm working today, so here's a theory I received by e-mail from a criminal defense attorney in Florida on why Judith Miller has chosen jail. What do you all think of it?

I'm totally convinced that Judy Miller is in jail not because of her assertion of the 1st Amendment privilege, but because she wants to avoid asserting her 5th Amendment privilege. The reporter’s privilege arguments are convenient cover for her right now.

I believe the NYT is loudly supporting her fiction that she is a 1st Amendment heroine to try to cover for their horrendous mistake (mistake or cover up?) of not “throwing her under the bus” when it was revealed that she was nothing but a propagandist for the administration on WMD in the run up to war when they were forced to apologize for their coverage of Iraq.

Now, while I believe they (NYT) do know or suspect that she has some substantive criminal liability to hide (recall the split in the joint defense with Time when Time decided to accept the waivers but Judy did not and Time got new counsel), the NYT is still stuck with having to explain publicly Judy’s refusal to testify, even with waivers, to preserve their “reputation” as a credible newspaper, rather than the house organ of the Cheney Administration in the march to war.

Just for fun...forget the made-for-tv movie, I see a rock opera in this. A possible working title (subject to change as events unfold or better suggestions from readers): "Scooter, Can You Hear Me?"

For those of you on summer vacation, or just needing a creative outlet, we need music for the opera, so here's a place for appropriate lyrics. My first suggestion (from this post yesterday): REM's Losing My Religion:

"I've said too much,
I haven't said enough,
...I've said too much,
I set it up"

Your turn.

The FBI has been collecting files on civil liberties groups and anti-war protesters.

"I'm still somewhat shocked by the size of the file on us," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U. "Why would the F.B.I. collect almost 1,200 pages on a civil rights organization engaged in lawful activity? What justification could there be, other than political surveillance of lawful First Amendment activities?"

The Government's excuse?

...they stressed that as a matter of both policy and practice, they have not sought to monitor the political activities of any activist groups and that any intelligence-gathering activities related to political protests are intended to prevent disruptive and criminal activity at demonstrations, not to quell free speech. They said there might be an innocuous explanation for the large volume of files on the A.C.L.U. and Greenpeace, like preserving requests from or complaints about the groups in agency files.

We'll be waiting for that innocuous explanation. WaPo has more on groups that were monitored during the Republican and Democratic conventions:

Update: Thanks to Mark Hatch-Miller of Majority Report at Air America Radio for pointing this out:

This is Wilson on Democracy Now! from September 2003:

“Well, first of all the Vice President is right, we've never met. He was Secretary of Defense when I was in charge of our agency in Baghdad and as one of the principals of the National Security Council, he was certainly in National Security Council meetings chaired by President Bush when discussions were being held on reports that I was submitting on a regular basis from Baghdad. While we've never met he certainly knows who I am and should know unless his memory is flawed and faulty.”

Joseph Wilson will be on their show tonight.

Update: Thanks to Bob Harris for providing this shorter version:

Shorter version: during the first Gulf War, Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense. And America's man in Baghdad passing along White House demands to Saddam was... Joe Wilson. Dick Cheney doesn't know who this guy is?

**************
In September, 2003, on Meet the Press, Dick Cheney that said he did not know Joseph Wilson and had never met him.

MR. RUSSERT: Now, Ambassador Joe Wilson, a year before that, was sent over by the CIA because you raised the question about uranium from Africa. He says he came back from Niger and said that, in fact, he could not find any documentation that, in fact, Niger had sent uranium to Iraq or engaged in that activity and reported it back to the proper channels. Were you briefed on his findings in February, March of 2002?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I don’t know Joe Wilson. I’ve never met Joe Wilson. A question had arisen. I’d heard a report that the Iraqis had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa, Niger in particular. I get a daily brief on my own each day before I meet with the president to go through the intel. And I ask lots of question. One of the questions I asked at that particular time about this, I said, “What do we know about this?” They take the question. He came back within a day or two and said, “This is all we know. There’s a lot we don’t know,” end of statement. And Joe Wilson—I don’t who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back.

...like I say, I don’t know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn’t judge him. I have no idea who hired him and it never came...

Dick Cheney was Defense Secretary under former President Bush during Gulf War I. Joseph Wilson was charge d'affaires in Baghdad.

The Vanity Fair article on Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson is available online here. It's worth re-reading yet again, not for anything new, but to put some of things we've all learned and confirmed in the past few weeks into sharper focus. A couple of paragraphs that stand out to me:

After Wilson returned to America, a C.I.A. reports officer visited him at home and later debriefed him. Since Wilson's trip had been made because of Cheney's office's request, he assumed that the vice president had received at least a phone call about his findings. "There would have been a very specific answer provided ... to the very specific question that he asked," Wilson says. (The vice president's office denies that Cheney heard back from the C.I.A. or knew about Wilson's trip until he read about it in the newspaper many months later. Tenet confirmed the trip was made on the C.I.A.'s "own initiative." )

Remember the other day when a lawyer-source said Rove learned about Valerie Plame Wilson's identity from a reporter? That's changed a bit today.

A lawyer familiar with Rove's grand jury testimony said Sunday that Rove learned about the CIA officer either from the media or from someone in government who said the information came from a journalist. The lawyer spoke on condition of anonymity because the federal investigation is continuing. (my emphasis.)

Shorter version: Rove heard it from Libby or someone else on Cheney's staff who heard it from Judith Miller.

I think this is consistent with what Libby told Fitzgerald....that he heard it from Judith Miller, maybe on July 8 when they met in D.C. But, is that really true, or did it happen the other way around? [See this Newsday article mentioning Miller's DC meeting with an "unnamed government official, it's my speculation it was Libby.]

And, if Miller told Libby, where did she learn it? Did someone leak a classified document to her that contained the information?

Libby is not only Cheney's Chief of Staff, but his advisor on national security issues as well. It's a little hard to believe he wouldn't have seen a classified document with the Plame information in it. Maybe everyone in the White House Iraq Group saw it. And where's John Hannah been lately?

[Note: Since this source says he's familiar with Rove's testimony, not that he's reviewed Rove's grand jury transcript, I assume this is someone associated with Rove's criminal defense lawyer, Robert Luskin, as opposed to a Government lawyer source.]