At about 4:49pm EDT today on CNN's Inside Politics, when Bob Novak maintained that Katherine Harris could win a Florida Senate race because she's anti-establishment and candidates the establishment hates have won before, James Carville charged that Novak made that argument because he has “got to show these right wingers that he's got backbone. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is watching, show them you're tough.” Novak fired back: “I think that's bullshit and I hate that." Novak then pushed his chair back, got up and removed his microphone as he walked off the set. Transcript follows. Real and Windows Media video also available.

Political news often lacks the sizzle and spice that morning shows desire. It's hard to hold good ratings if you dwell on the meat and potatoes of public policy that is fairly complex. But everyone understands an allegedly corrupt Democratic congressman getting busted by the feds.

FBI agents raided the Washington and New Orleans homes of Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) yesterday as part of an ongoing public corruption probe, law enforcement authorities said.

Agents conducted early-morning raids at Jefferson's homes in the 1300 block of F Street in Northeast Washington and in the 1900 block of Marengo Street in New Orleans, authorities said. His car on Capitol Hill was also searched.

Typically absent from the Washington Post's coverage (and most top media's coverage) of the federal budget is whether Congress should be spending anything on certain programs. In this case, a national energy bill. Think about it: A national energy bill. Is this the U.S.S.A?

Here's part of what the Washington Post says:    

But administration officials counter that the bills could have been far worse. An energy bill worked out by House and Senate negotiators in 2003 would have cost more than twice as much as the current version.

American freelance journalist Steven Vincent has become the first American journalist to be attacked and killed in the Iraq War.

Unlike many (most?) journos covering the war in Iraq, Vincent supported the invasion, calling it part of a much larger campaign against "Islamo-fascism."

Also, unlike many big-time journalists who report from the relative security of Baghdad's "Green Zone" (without mentioning those security precautions in their filings, leaving a false impression of gritty, down-in-the-trenches reporting), Vincent walked the streets of Basra for months, with a translator and without a bodyguard, gathering material for a book, a follow-up to In the Red Zone: A Journey Into the Soul of Iraq. His reporting from Iraq appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and National Review Online.

NRO's Katherine Lopez had this to say in her tribute: " We would not know about the good that men and women do -- courageous Iraqis, Americans, and other members of the Coalition in this case -- without good men like Steven Vincent willing to find out about it in the first place, on frontlines crawling with evildoers."

Last year Times Watch linked to a Vincent story from Iraq in which he employed his art-critic expertise to show how many Iraqi artists actually favored Saddam Hussein because the dictator kept the commissions rolling: "Because of the despot’s beneficence to artists--advocates of government arts funding, take note--support for the tyrant runs deep there."

It's ironic how feminist journalists, always decrying the unfair standards of beauty for women, could turn around and attack Katherine Harris for her makeup.

TAMPA - During the presidential election recount of 2000, Florida was in a white-hot spotlight, focused on a woman not accustomed to national publicity - then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

Harris' decision against a ballot recount made her a hero to Republicans and anathema to Democrats. She also was bashed for something else: her makeup.

One Democratic commentator compared her to Cruella DeVil of the Disney movie `"101 Dalmatians.'' Comic Jay Leno said a cold snap made Florida so chilly Harris "put on a third layer of makeup.''

On Monday, on a conservative radio talk show, Harris, now a congresswoman from Longboat Key running for the U.S. Senate, hit back, blaming newspapers for the criticism and charging that some - without saying which - altered her photographs.

"I'm actually very sensitive about those things, and it's personally painful,'' Harris said when host Sean Hannity asked about her image problems from 2000.

"But they're outrageously false, No. 1, and No. 2, you know, whenever they made fun of my makeup, it was because the newspapers colorized my photograph,'' Harris said.

A story by Mike Allen and R. Jeffrey Smith in the Washington Post on 3 August, 2005, reviewed many of the background documents just released concerning Judge John Roberts, nominee for the US Supreme Court. The article’s title got the subject right, “Judges Should Have 'Limited' Role, Roberts Says.” However, once the authors got into the basis of Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade, their understanding of the subject evaporated.

The article said,

“The new documents disclosed by the archive that reflect Roberts' skeptical views regarding a ‘fundamental’ right to privacy include a lengthy article on judicial restraint that he apparently drafted for publication in a journal of the American Bar Association....

“The article approvingly quoted from a dissenting opinion by Justice Hugo Black [in Griswold] ... [which] complained that the court had used ‘a loose, flexible, uncontrolled standard for holding laws unconstitutional.’ The draft article said that ‘the broad range of rights which are now alleged to be fundamental by litigants, with only the most tenuous connection the to Constitution, bears ample witness to the dangers of this doctrine.’

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080201913.html?sub=AR

For those lucky many who are not immersed in constitutional cases, Griswold was the case about sale of contraceptives in Connecticut. It discovered and announced the “right to privacy” on which Roe v. Wade and all its progeny are based. Did everyone notice what the writers did here? They assumed that this right was found somewhere in the Constitution, without reading the document to look for it.

Senator Christopher Dodd made the same, obvious mistake on Fox News Sunday this weekend when he referred to the (non-existent) “Privacy Clause” in the Constitution.