Last August, I wrote a long post on imprisoned video blogger Josh Wolf, sent to jail for refusing to turn over footage of an anti-war demonstration to a grand jury. TChris followed up here. He was held in contempt and jailed. He has been incarcerated longer than any other journalist in U.S. history.

Attytood has the latest, and says it's time to set Wolf free. I heartily concur. As TChris noted in his post,

Journalists should inform the public; they aren't informants for the police.

Today David Broder reveals the silliness of his bipartisanship fetish for all the world to see:

It was not nostalgia or a desire for companionship that brought four former Senate leaders together in a meeting room on Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning, but rather a sense of alarm at the breakdown in civility and at the fierce partisanship that has infected Congress and blocked action on national priorities. . . . Tom Daschle of South Dakota said, "Our goal is not to find common ground among the four of us on every single issue but to find those areas on which common ground can be found, and then see if we can become the catalyst for bringing that common ground to Congress."

Um, thanks Tom. You did a fine job of rolling over finding common ground when you and Senate Dems voted for the Iraq Debacle in 2002. A little too much bipartisanship then don't you think?

The She-Pundit with long blond hair was just on Hannity and Colmes. (Crooks and Liars has video.) She was pretty defensive, not surprisingly, but also very insistent that she was joking in calling John Edwards a "faggot", insisting she was talking about Gray's Anatomy co-star Isaiah Washington going to rehab for using the same word against a co-star.

She insisted she wasn't using the word in the "gay" sense, only in the "wuss, pansey" "schoolyard taunt" sense. She said everyone knows John Edwards, who is married with kids, isn't gay. She said this happens every six months that liberals attack her for something she said and every time it's supposed to be the end of her career and it never is.

She claimed every conservative news junkie knew about Isaiah Washington going to rehab for using the word. Really? They all watch Gray's anatomy?

Isaiah went to rehab for criticizing a gay member of the cast. He didn't use the word in the schoolyard sense. Her excuse doesn't make sense.

NBC is pouring a lot of advertising dollars into its new series, The Black Donnellys. If you missed the pilot, you can watch it for free at the NBC link or even download it for free from iTunes. It's by the writers of Crash.

It's about four Irish brothers in New York City whose loyalty to each other knows no bounds, particularly when it comes to the Mob. There's lots of violence.

Some compare it to the Sopranos. I don't think it has the depth. The characters are much younger -- so young, I had trouble taking them seriously. But, in the end, I did, although I kept thinking Boston would be the more appropriate setting. However, that may be because of The Departed.

More....

The She-Pundit with long blond hair is back in the news. Think Progress reports she called John Edwards "a faggot" at a conservative gathering. Crooks and Liars has the video. Think Progress also notes that Ms. C. has used sexual slurs in the past:

Previously, Coulter has put “even money” on Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) “coming out of the closet,” said Bill Clinton shows “some level of latent homosexuality,” and called Vice President Al Gore a “total fag.”

Human Rights Campaign issued this statement:

“To interject this word into American political discourse is a vile and disgusting way to sink the debate to a new, all-time low,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. “Make no doubt about it, these remarks go directly against what our Founding Fathers intended and have no place on the schoolyard, much less our country’s political arena.”

More...

Atrios (who I am not calling stupid here), wonders about the fixation on the Clenis:

Bill Clinton is an incredibly popular person and only our Beltway press could imagine that he would somehow be a "liability" to his wife. Though, to be fair, the subtext of the "concerns" of the Beltway chatterers is that they're really talking not about Bill Clinton, but about the Clenis . . . Why Bill Clinton's past infidelity is more relevant to his wife's candidacy than Rudy Giuliani's own infidelity is to his own candidacy is an exercise left to the reader.

I think that Atrios misses the point here, it is about potential SPOUSAL embarrassment, not about the character of the candidates themselves. I think the press figures as long as we really are going to be counterproductive and trivial in this campaign, why not go whole hog.

So the question is what skeletons are there in Mrs. Rudy Giuliani's closet? Hmmm. Here's one:

The mayor said he and Ms. Hanover would be seeking a legal separation, not a divorce, and that she would not be moving out of Gracie Mansion, the mayor's official residence. Giuliani added that Judith Nathan, a woman he has publicly been seen with, is a good friend. Recent tabloid reports have linked the mayor and Nathan, raising some eyebrows in the New York GOP. "We're very good friends and she and her family are entitled to privacy," Giuliani said last week to reporters who began writing about Giuliani-Nathan sightings around Manhattan. Neither he nor Nathan have elaborated further on their relationship.

So Giuliani's spouse has her own history. Wonder if the Media will speculate about that?

In his last column, Frank Rich did something remarkable, he called someone a liar:

All of this was already going on when Mr. Bush said just before the election that “absolutely, we’re winning” and that “Al Qaeda is on the run.” What’s changed in the few months since his lie is that even more American troops are tied down in Iraq, that even more lethal weapons are being used against them, that even more of the coalition of the unwilling are fleeing, and that even more Americans are tuning out both the administration and the war they voted down in November to savor a referendum that at least offers tangible results, “American Idol.”

In today's semi-mea culpa from John Harris of Politico, he is afraid to say the L word about Republicans on the "slow bleed," while explaining that is precisely what happened:

With a mixture of pride and remorse, I have a confession: I am the author of the Democratic Party's "slow-bleed strategy" for ending the war in Iraq. . . . "Slow bleed" is my phrase. Murtha had nothing to do with it. . . . Republicans['] . . . willingness to wrest words from context -- and to attribute the phrase to Democrats even though it was not theirs -- was demagogic on the part of Republican operatives.

No Mr. Harris, it was lies on the part of Republican operatives. And your refusal to correctly report them as lies is another bit of bad journalism from you. That it is done by every other reporter in Washington does not make it right.

You are "dissembling" when you refuse to accurately describe lies as lies. Shame on you.

Glenn Greenwald does a nice writeup on NYT Times Public Editor Barney Calame's review of the paper's recent Iran coverage. I differ with Glenn in this respect, I think Calame's piece a standard for how the work should be done. If Deborah Howell were actually a capable person, she might learn something from it. Glenn sees some significant deficiencies that I don't. In any event, as Glenn points out, the most significant part of Calame's piece is this:

Editing vigilance on intelligence and national security coverage means dealing with the anonymous sourcing that many deem essential to bringing vital issues to light in that murky area. So editors need to ensure that unnamed sources are in a position to know and that any biases are clear to the reporter. The Times’s most important requirement for anonymous sources — that an editor must know their identity — was followed for Mr. Gordon’s Feb. 10 story. Douglas Jehl, a deputy chief of the Washington bureau and his editor, told me he knew the name of each anonymous source in the article. The story also attempted a generalized explanation of why the officials were willing to talk. I do wish, however, that the article had found a way to comply with the paper’s policy of explaining why sources are allowed to remain unnamed.

Great editorial today in the Miami Herald on how we've turned into the United States of Entertainment. It begins:

Jose Padilla is not a dead buxom blonde, which may help explain why a hearing to determine his fitness to stand trial was no contest for the animated proceedings taking place one county to the north.

Anna Nicole Smith, dead two weeks, drew the cameras, the curious and the commentators. Thursday, a weepy Broward judge ruled on the fate of Smith's corpse as thousands followed the show on national television.

Down in Miami, the still-living Jose Padilla attracted just a couple of earnest reporters, some legal geeks and two cameramen who were stranded outside the federal courthouse because filming was banned inside. So it goes in these United States of Entertainment. Four years into the war in Iraq, torture has become the stuff of TV dramas while justice serves the cause of celebrity.

After a discussion of Padilla's case, it concludes:

Congrats to Melissa Etheridge and Al Gore for winning best song for "I Need to Wake Up" from An Inconvenient Truth."

If you're watching the Oscars, let us know what you think.

From the red carpet: Al Gore was funny -- saying his favorite singer was William Hung.

Nicole Kidman's dress is elegant but a miss (unusual for her) with one of those huge bows off one shoulder. Meryl Streep looks matronly once again.

I'm not a huge Celine Dion fan, but she looks great from the front. (From the side, it's not quite so great.) So does Gwynyth Paltrow, Rachel Weisz (changed my mind on them), Jada Pinkett, and Cate Blanchett.

Cameron Diaz, Reese Witherspoon and Beyonce are stunning. I wasn't crazy about Penelope Cruz' dress or hairstyle -- way too severe and her ears stick out. The bottom half of her dress is all feathers.

Rinko Kikuchi from Babel looked so much more grown up and really pretty.

Best dressed guy so far: Leonardo di Caprio. Jack Nicholson has a shaved head. (Update: It's for a part he's now filming.)

I'll be live blogging on and off, please join in.

Updates below the fold:

Steve Gilliard of The News Blog is in the hospital. Go on over and send him some good wishes. Thanks to one of his guest posters, here are the Oscar nominees:

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Leonardo DiCaprio – BLOOD DIAMOND
Ryan Gosling – HALF NELSON
Peter O'Toole – VENUS
Will Smith – THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS
Forest Whitaker – THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Alan Arkin – LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Jackie Earle Haley – LITTLE CHILDREN
Djimon Hounsou – BLOOD DIAMOND
Eddie Murphy – DREAMGIRLS
Mark Wahlberg – THE DEPARTED

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Penélope Cruz – VOLVER
Judi Dench – NOTES ON A SCANDAL
Helen Mirren – THE QUEEN
Meryl Streep – THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA
Kate Winslet – LITTLE CHILDREN