News of the day (not including bugboy doing the perp walk):
"Rove Fingers Libby
Karl Rove told the grand jury in the CIA leak case that Scooter Libby "may have told him that CIA operative Valerie Plame worked for the intelligence agency before her identity was revealed," the Washington Post reports. "Rove has also testified that he also heard about Plame from someone else outside the White House, but could not recall who."
"The account is the first time a person familiar with Rove's testimony has provided clues about where the deputy chief of staff learned about Plame, and confirmed that Rove and Libby were involved in a conversation about her before her identity became public. The disclosure seemed to further undermine the White House's contention early in the case that neither man was in any way involved in unmasking Plame."
"But it leaves unanswered the central question of the more than two-year-old case: Did anyone commit a crime in leaking information about Plame to the media?"
However, the AP reports "some evidence prosecutors have gathered conflicts with Libby's account of dealings with reporters."
How Bush Fumbled Social Security
Front page of today's Wall Street Journal: "Through two campaigns, George W. Bush vowed to fix and partially privatize Social Security, the nation's most popular government program. This year, claiming a re-election mandate and enjoying a Congress controlled by his party, the president finally made his move."
"Yet now even the president has acknowledged Social Security is dead for this year, his biggest domestic defeat to date. How could it have gone so wrong?"
Quote of the Day
“What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”
-- Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, quoted by the Financial Times. A complete transcript is available.
Miers Asked to Redo Answers
The Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers "suffered another setback on Wednesday when the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked her to resubmit parts of her judicial questionnaire, saying various members had found her responses 'inadequate,' 'insufficient' and 'insulting.'" the New York Times reports.
Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) held a press conference on the matter."
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