White House reporters were not thrown completely off the Plame scent by the Alito nomination today. David Gregory and Terry Moran led the charge against Scott McClellan, landing some hard-hitting nibbles in the course of challenging the White House’s credibility.

BTC News has launched a new weblog to provide updates on news and events we think will be of interest to our readers and that we don’t have the time to cover in depth as we do here. Bad Crow was officially launched today, and we encourage our readers to visit the new site and let us know what you think of it and what issues you would like us to cover on it.

If you’re looking for an argument in favor of overthrowing the Democartic party old guard, you won’t do better than the one Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis advances in his bizarre New York Times op-ed piece today.

Bush is feeling a bit like Napoleon after Waterloo and needs to be cheered up by Turdblossom about as much (Sure, it hurts to be defeated by a guy with a first name like “Beef”, but now you can take that vacation on a nice secluded island, now you won’t have to listen to any more short jokes, now you can stop wearing that ridiculous hat, NOW comes Miller time).

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is expected to reveal tomorrow whether he has handed up indictments arising from his investigation into the July, 2003, outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. With the prosecutor’s office hermetically sealed against leaks — a circumstance that has official Washington fuming — most of what we know, or are told we know, comes from anonymous grand jury witnesses and leaks from lawyers and other interested parties associated with Fitzgerald’s subjects. During the past week, and especially the past 48 hours, the leak machine has gone nuts.

Laura Rozen reports today that the head of Italian intelligence met quietly with Stephen Hadley, then the deputy National Security Advisor, shortly before the forged Iraq-Niger-uranium documents that played such a prominent role in the administration’s wars against Iraq and former ambassador Joe Wilson made their way from an Italian information broker to an Italian reporter and thence to the US embassy in Rome and on to the CIA.

Indictments arising from the invesitgation into the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame seem inevitable. Although news reports in recent days have focused upon the escalating troubles of senior White House official Lewis Libby and his boss, Dick Cheney, the two are far from the only White House nobility whose names have surfaced in connection with the investigation. Periodic bursts of leaks from lawyers and other sources, most of which seemed to be either warning shots from one subject of the investigation across the bows of others or responses to those shots, have introduced a whole raft of White House and other administration heavyweights into the mix. Here’s a look at some of those names and how they became connected with the investigation, along with a look at what we can expect from Republicans and the chattering class following the indictments.

The oldest piece of advice in political science is to move to the center. If you’re losing elections, take a more moderate position (or highlight the issue areas where you are already moderate) and your fortunes will improve. But what happens when you move to the center and you still lose?
This is precisely what […]

First, the big news: special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has, according to the New York Daily News, acquired what an anonymous source who has testified to the Plame grand jury described as “a senior cooperating witness.” The implication is that this is a recent development; if true, it would indicate that someone involved in the case has arrived at the point where Fitzgerald seems scarier than the Bush White House, which is saying quite something. Much to be hoped for and taken with a large grain of salt, but that’s not why we’ve gathered here tonight.

The New York Times published two long-awaited stories on reporter Judith Miller’s involvement in special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of a White House leak outing CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson, wife of former US amabassador Joseph Wilson. As was widely predicted the stories, one from Times staff writers and the other from Miller, did not fail to disappoint.