All roads back to Rove……..

Several high-ranking White House officials were closely involved in crafting a public response to the uproar over the firing of a group of U.S. attorneys, according to documents released late yesterday.

Then-White House counsel Harriet E. Miers and aides to presidential adviser Karl Rove were deeply enmeshed in debates over how to respond to the controversy as early as mid-January, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) questioned the spate of prosecutor departures in a Senate floor speech, according to e-mails that the Justice Department turned over to the House and Senate judiciary committees.

The e-mails are the latest documents to surface among the thousands of pages provided to Congress in last year’s firing of nine U.S. attorneys. Their ouster has prompted a series of investigations and led to a failed effort Monday by Senate Democrats to stage a vote of no confidence in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

The new records provide a peek at the actions of the White House, which has repeatedly refused Democratic demands for records and sworn testimony related to the issue.

More at the Washington Post

By CHRIS KAHN, Associated Press Writer

PHOENIX - The mother of one of two sets of sextuplets born within 10 hours of each other suffered acute heart failure shortly after the delivery but is now stable, doctors said Tuesday.

The heart problems were due to the huge volume of blood that Jenny Masche, 32, was carrying in her body while pregnant, Dr. John Elliott said at a news conference at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center. When the babies were delivered Monday, some of the extra blood was lost and “stretched her heart and blood vessels to a very, very critical level,” Elliott said.

“So for a while she was very sick.”

The babies, three girls and three boys, are in stable condition. Five had been put on ventilators after birth, but now all but one are breathing on their own, doctors said.

Doctors put Masche in the intensive care unit and gave her medication. Elliott said he expects her to be out of the ICU by Wednesday.

The sextuplets were born 10 hours after Brianna Morrison, 24, gave birth in Minnesota to another set. The Masches used artificial insemination, and Morrison used fertility drugs.

The Morrison sextuplets remained critical Tuesday, a normal condition for such small babies.

New father Bryan Masche joined doctors at the Arizona news conference to talk about his wife’s health and to gush over the six tiny additions to his family.

“They’re amazing: 10 fingers, 10 toes,” he said. “They have little fingernails and perfectly shaped little ears.”

The sextuplets were almost 10 weeks premature and weighed between 2 pounds, 1 ounce and 3 pounds.

After getting six kids in one day, Bryan Masche said, he and his wife are happy with the size of their family.

“This is it,” he said. “I don’t want any more kids.”

By Daniel Schulman
Mother Jones Online

The right-wing lawyers’ group is the casting couch for the federal judiciary-and may have been, newly released documents indicate, for the Justice Department too.

Before midnight on March 7, 2005, Leonard Leo (pictured at left)tapped out an email on his BlackBerry to Mary Beth Buchanan, then the director of the Executive Office of United States Attorneys, suggesting a candidate to replace Carol Lam, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California. “You guys need a good candidate?” Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, wrote to Buchanan, herself a member of the influential conservative lawyers’ group. “I’d strongly recommend the current GC [general counsel] of the Air Force, Mary Walker.”

At the time, White House and Justice Department officials were in preliminary talks about replacing an unspecified number of “underperforming” federal prosecutors, a plan that would culminate almost two years later in the forced resignations of nine U.S. Attorneys, including Lam, and ignite a scandal that has claimed the jobs of at least four high-ranking Justice Department officials. Leo’s email, written so early in the process, speaks to the close relationship that has developed between the Federalist Society-an organization whose aims include “reordering priorities” within the judicial system to fit its conservative agenda-and key Justice Department decision makers, many of whom are members of the group.

While perhaps not a prerequisite for employment at the highest echelons of Justice, membership in the society has become a standard by which political appointees at the agency identify candidates who share their agenda. Some officials at the agency view it as such an indicator of conservative virtue that membership in the society was included as a category-along with Hill and campaign experience-on a spreadsheet that was used to rank the qualifications of the 93 sitting U.S. Attorneys, a document included in the reams of Justice Department memoranda released by the House Judiciary Committee this spring.

read more at MOTHER JONES

By Jonathan Darman and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek

Some grudges just don’t die. In the 1990s, David Bossie worked tirelessly as an investigator for Rep. Dan Burton’s government-reform committee. Burton was a top-echelon antagonist to Bill and Hillary Clinton, leading wide-ranging investigations of Whitewater and campaign finance. All the digging didn’t amount to much: six years after the Clintons left the White House, Burton is a little-heard-from member of the minority party and Hillary Clinton is the front runner to be the Democrats’ nominee for president in 2008.

But Bossie is still working away. In recent months, he has returned to investigating the Clintons, this time for a tough documentary scheduled for release in theaters this fall. One of the documentary’s key potential audiences: a new generation of voters who don’t remember the old Clinton wars. He points out that someone who is 18 today was “4 years old when the travel-office scandal broke.” These young voters, he predicts, will be hungry for Hillary dirt, new and old. “There’s an enormous market for Hillary Clinton information,” he tells NEWSWEEK. Other inveterate Hillary hounders agree. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the editor of The American Spectator who has authored multiple books on what he sees as the Clintons’ sins, says there are “active research teams” looking into the New York senator. “They’re out there,” Tyrrell tells NEWSWEEK. “I get calls all the time.”

If Clinton is worried about the new dirt-digging efforts, she isn’t showing it. When two much-anticipated biographies dropped into bookstores last week, her campaign dismissed them as “old news” and “cash for rehash.” Indeed, while the books provide detailed, often harsh, accounts of Clinton’s White House and Senate career, they lack sexy details about Hillary, her husband and their marriage.

For all the charges through the years, none has ever stuck. Arguably the most-investigated woman in contemporary American life moved from tabloid target in the White House to winning a Senate seat in one of the nation’s most contentious states. It’s her resilience and capacity to survive and thrive against all comers that partly fuels the haters’ fury.

read more at MSNBC.COM

from the Editorial staff of
The New York Times

Darfur is not the only place where people are dying in staggering numbers. Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has taken more than three million lives in the last nine years. Since damping down a civil war in 2003, the outside world has largely focused on the struggle for power in the capital, Kinshasa, culminating in elections last year that were mostly free and fair.

Fine, but thousands of people are still dying as violence once again flares in the east of this huge country where government troops and rebels continue their ruthless war of attrition. Meanwhile, throughout the country, government security forces terrorize and rape civilians and pillage their goods in lieu of the wages they fail to receive. To escape the violence, tens of thousands of civilians have been driven into the forest, where far too many die from preventable disease and malnutrition.

A large United Nations peacekeeping force - the largest in the world - has been present in the region for years. It deserves credit for reducing the fighting. But peacekeepers have also been accused of smuggling gold, sexually abusing minors and deliberately killing militia members in their custody. The U.N. is investigating these killings, but the organization has a poor record of seeing that the guilty are appropriately punished. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon needs to insist on full disclosure and accountability when peacekeepers commit crimes under the U.N. flag.

The Congo’s biggest need, however, is for better governance, including a healthy, independent judiciary and better disciplined security forces. The international community needs to do a lot more to help the government on these fronts. Until that happens, the death toll will continue to rise.