Tim Grieve, Salon, August 7, 2007 Robert Novak said on "The Diane Rehm Show" Monday that George W. Bush has cut him off "the list of conservative columnists" invited to the White House because he's now considered to be "a lot of trouble." Don't feel sorry for Novak yet? Well, then, consider this: The man who wrote the column that outed Valerie Plame says he's had a "very difficult time" as a result. "It really estranged relations between me and Karl Rove," Novak told Rehm Monday. "His lawyers told him not to speak to me. We're talking again now, but I don't think our relationship can ever be what it was." Still don't feel sorry for the man who calls himself "The Prince of Darkness"? There's more: "The abuse -- you can't imagine the abuse I get in e-mails. People say things in e-mails ... that are absolutely ... dreadful. [Plamegate] cost me financially, it cost me very heavy legal fees -- about $160,000. And then you have, beyond that, I wasn't on 'Meet the Press' for a number of years, and it helped poison my relationship with CNN ... They didn't want me on the air if I couldn't talk about [the Plame case] ... It was not a happy time for me ... Some people think, 'Gee, you got a lot of publicity.' Well, the last thing I need is publicity." Read More Here

Bob Deans, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 3, 2007 Washington - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday the Bush administration is waging a "phony war" on terrorism, warning that the country is losing ground against the kind of Islamic radicals who attacked the country on Sept. 11, 2001. A more effective approach, said Gingrich, would begin with a national energy strategy aimed at weaning the country from its reliance on imported oil and some of the regimes that petro-dollars support. "None of you should believe we are winning this war. There is no evidence that we are winning this war," the ex-Georgian told a group of about 300 students attending a conference for collegiate conservatives. Gingrich, who led the so-called Republican Revolution that won the GOP control of both houses of Congress in 1994 midterm elections, said more must be done to marshal national resources to combat Islamic militants at home and abroad and to prepare the country for future attack. He was unstinting in his criticism of his fellow Republicans, in the White House and on Capitol Hill. "We were in charge for six years," he said, referring to the period between 2001 and early 2007, when the GOP controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. "I don't think you can look and say that was a great success." Thursday's National Conservative Student Conference was sponsored by the Young America's Foundation, a Herndon, Va.-based group founded in the 1960s as a political counterpoint to the left-leaning activists who coalesced around the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. Read More Here

The Nation, August 3, 2007 The latest poll of Minnesota voters shows Republican Senator Norm Coleman, up for re-election in 2008, with 49 per cent, and Democratic challenger Al Franken at 42--a seven-point spread. Four months ago, Coleman was ahead by 22. The reason for Coleman's shocking collapse in the polls? He's been supporting Bush on the war. Any incumbent with less than 50 per cent in the polls a year before the election is considered to be in trouble. Coleman is in trouble, according to the SurveyUSA poll released July 30, especially with women, independents and Twin Cities voters. Defeating Norm Coleman would be a particularly sweet victory for the anti-war movement. In his college days at Hofstra, Coleman was a prominent opponent of the Vietnam war. The school suspended him in 1970 for participating in a sit-in protesting the Kent State killings. He first won office in St. Paul as a Democrat, chaired the 1996 Senate campaign of Paul Wellstone, and then switched parties and ran for the Senate in 2002 against Wellstone. Wellstone died in a plane crash a week before that election, and Norm Coleman went to the Senate. Coleman's support for the war has made him the target of both the national Democratic party and independent antiwar groups. The Democrats are already running a TV ad campaign criticizing him for opposing the troop pullout vote in the Senate on July 12. Al Franken ran a full-page newspaper ad highlighting the same vote. (He also has a terrific YouTube video, showing his mastery of the new medium--he knows he's talking to one person at a time, rather than to 200 million at once.) Read More Here