Raw Story has an exclusive interview with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. She praises blogs, and says of the MSM:

The House Democratic leader made striking comments about the mainstream media, even asserting that reporters had told her journalists couldn’t tell the Democrats’ story because they feared losing access.

“I’ve had reporters say to me, I have orthodontia, I have tuition, I have mortgage, I need access, I’m not writing your story,” Pelosi remarked.

Unlike Mark Felt, I didn't get a chuckle out of this taped conversation between Felt and then President Nixon over the arrest of the shooting suspect of former Gov. George Wallace:

The May 15, 1972, phone call is believed to be the only tape-recorded conversation between Nixon and Felt, the No. 2 FBI official. Nixon expressed satisfaction when Felt told him the suspect had some cuts and bruises.

"I hope they worked him over a little bit more than that," Nixon said.

"I think they did pretty well," Felt, who now lives in Santa Rosa, responded with a chuckle.

by TChris

Scandalous stories about the Bush administration appear with regularity. If a presidential lie about a private moment deserves impeachment, what does this story merit?

The Bush administration's offer in 2002 to overpay a prominent Florida family for oil and gas rights on Everglades land by as much as $80 million was "at best, foolish and, at worst, complicit," the Interior Department's inspector general said today.

Foolish or complicit; incompetent or crooked. Here's the evidence of the latter:

Members of the Collier family contributed more than $121,000 to Republican candidates in the last election cycle, including at least $5,000 to Jeb Bush, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign donations.

The administration touted the deal as proof that it wanted to protect the Everglades. Two weeks later, the president's brother announced his bid for reelection, "leading critics to suggest he was seeking to burnish his environmental credentials through the Collier land transaction."

The Washington Post reports that while Bush's approval rating this month remains at 48% (disapproval is at 52%):

A clear majority of Americans say President Bush is ignoring the public's concerns and instead has become distracted by issues that most people say they care little about, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey found that 58 percent of those interviewed said Bush is mainly concentrating in his second term on problems and partisan squabbles that these respondents said were unimportant to them. Four in 10--41 percent--said the president was focused on important problems--a double-digit drop from three years ago.

In a bad sign for Republicans,

... a strong majority of self-described political independents--68 percent--say they disagreed with the president's priorities.

Update: Never mind, the assault had no connection to his whistle-blowing activities.

This is scary.

Los Alamos whistleblower "Tommy Hook is still hospitalized today after being brutally assaulted over the weekend," the Project on Government Oversight is saying. "A group of three to four assailants threatened Hook to keep silent, in apparent reference to his upcoming Congressional testimony on fraud at Los Alamos."

Crooks and Liars has the video to yesterday's segment featuring a debate between Richard Ben-Veniste (former Watergate special prosecutor) and G. Gordon Liddy (convicted Watergate burglar.) Ben-Veniste won by miles.

Democrats need to remember that the enemy is not in here with us, it is outside the room. Dissing the Chair of the DNC is not the way for Dems to unify and take back the country.

Joe Biden today:

Dean “doesn't speak for me with that kind of rhetoric and I don't think he speaks for the majority of Democrats.”

What Howard Dean said:

While discussing the hardship of working Americans standing in long lines to vote, Dean said Thursday, “Republicans, I guess, can do that because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives.” Dean said later his comments did not refer to hard-working Americans, but rather to the failure of Republican leadership to address working-class concerns.

John Edwards on Dean:

Dean “is not the spokesman for the party.”

by TChris

Ohio GOP Chairman Robert Bennett realizes that Republicans need a refresher course in ethics. His solution:

With an eye toward next year's election, Bennett said last week he will require any candidate seeking the party's support to have ethics training.

Bennett made the decision in the wake of a political scandal triggered by the loss of $12 to $13 million from the state's workers compensation fund. The fund inexplicably decided to invest in rare coins at the suggestion of Thomas Noe, a Toledo coin collector who was chairman of President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign in northwest Ohio. About 120 of the coins, supposedly in Noe's care, are missing.

Noe is described as "a lawn sprinkler of campaign cash to major Republican candidates in the state." Noe sprinkled money on a variety of Republican candidates, including President Bush, who is returning $4,000 in campaign contributions he received from Noe. The Bush campaign received more than $100,000 raised by Noe.

Other Republican candidates are also emptying their pockets of Noe's money.

At the Take Back America conference Thursday, Howard Dean and John Edwards gave speeches. But neither mentioned Iraq. Who did? Arianna Huffington.

David Corn and John Nichols report . And Arianna speaks for herself, here.

You can watch all the major speeches at the TBA website.

Via Raw Story, the following exchange is contained in an upcoming Rolling Stone interview with Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid:

RS: You've called Bush a loser.

HR: And a liar.

RS: You apologized for the loser comment.

HR: But never for the liar, have I?

Sen. Reid is getting back in our good graces, although we still dislike the oligarchic nuclear compromise that gave away the store and predict it won't last.

The Wall St. Journal ( free online here) profiles John O'Connor, lawyer for Mark Felt and the author of the Vanity Fair piece. He's described as "defense lawyer." (Also see Romanesko.) Just to be clear, he is not a criminal defense lawyer. He's a civil litigator who defends corporations against individuals who sue them.

Mr. O'Connor, for his part, is known as an ambitious defense lawyer, a fierce cross-examiner and a charming raconteur. .... As a director at the law firm of Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin, Mr. O'Connor has focused on corporate-liability defense cases. He has represented not just Reynolds against cancer patients but won favorable verdicts for a brakes maker in an auto accident case, and an insurance company sued by a paraplegic.

A top Washington lawyer, who is a former Clinton Adminstration Justice Department official and someone whose integrity and opinion I value highly, sent me this e-mail on the disclosure that Mark Felt is Deep Throat:

As one who lived through the Clinton wars at the Department of Justice I have a someone different take on the revelation that Deep Throat was the Deputy Director of the FBI. Throughout Louis Freeh's tenure as FBI Director we were plagued with leaks, many of them coming from high levels of the FBI, about sensitive investigations, which had the effect of politicizing them. These leaks included facts revealed during criminal investigations and the content of internal deliberations at the Department of Justice. In my view they were extremely damaging both to the Administration in a political sense and to the Justice Department institutionally.