Fred Thompson’s wife has been the target of hit pieces in various news outlets. Today Fred Thompson spoke out in her defense.

“She has taken a lot of comments that should have been directed toward me,” Thompson told me. When he started looking into running for president, Thompson said, there was a lot to be done and very little time to do it, and his wife played a key role in getting things going. “We started literally from the kitchen table a few months ago,” he said. “While I did the things that I felt like I needed to do — I had a contract with NBC television, I had a contract with ABC radio, I was chairman of the advisory board on international security for the State Department, and a lot of other things — while I was disengaging from that and getting my thoughts together on issues and things of that nature, public comments I knew I would be called on to make, I asked her to do certain things for me. She did what I asked her to do.”

The former senator said his wife’s actions, however they have been interpreted in the press, have been at his behest. “She always looks out for my best interests, and when she sees something that she knows I would not approve of, or is not in my best interest, she voices that concern — in other words, just exactly the way I would want her to. Now, some people don’t like that, especially some people who have their own issue with regard to the campaign, shall we say, and they take advantage of putting out anonymous comments and so forth.”

A few moments later, Thompson addressed reports, like the one in the Post and another in Newsweek, that looked into his wife’s life before meeting Thompson. “I think the problem is that Jeri refuses to go out in public and behave like a candidate’s wife before I’m a candidate,” Thompson said. “The fact that she’s not out there promoting herself seems to greatly concern some people in the media, so they have gone back to old boyfriends, the families of old boyfriends, high-school classmates, basically anything that can be dredged up to fill this void that they perceive has been created.”

Some of the reports, Thompson said, have contained substantial factual errors. “Things that you would think could have been checked fairly readily,” he told me, “but things that are clearly erroneous — like she’s not a lawyer and she’s never been married before. I listened to a news show with an expert commentator about a week ago talking about Jeri, and in a short segment he had four totally erroneous factual errors about her.”

Thompson did not suggest that stories about his wife should be off limits. He understands the ways of politics. But he believes that now is not the right time for Jeri Thompson or the Thompson pre-campaign to address them in detail. “She’s not going to become a public commentator and personality as a candidate’s wife until there’s a candidate,” he said.

So there.

Here we go again.

Republican Rep. Bob Allen of Merritt Island, whose district includes a large swath of east Orange County, was arrested for soliciting a male undercover police officer for sex in a Titusville park restroom.

Allen was considered to be acting suspicious by police as he entered and exited the men’s room three times, according to a Titusville Police report. Moments later, he approached the plainclothes officer and offered to perform oral sex for $20, police said.

Allen faces second degree misdemeanor charges. A seven-year House veteran, the term-limited Allen had been considered a likely Senate candidate next year. He also had been named a co-chairman last spring of Arizona Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign team in Florida.

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My heart goes out to the miners and their families.

Six miners were trapped in a coal mine Monday by a cave-in so powerful that authorities initially thought it was small earthquake.

The miners were believed to be 1,500 feet below ground, about four miles from the entrance to the mine, which is 140 miles south of Salt Lake City.

University of Utah seismograph stations recorded a seismic waves of 3.9 magnitude early Monday, causing speculation that a minor earthquake had caused the cave-in. Scientists later realized the collapse at the Genwal mine had caused the disturbance.

“There is no evidence that the earthquake triggered the mine collapse,” said Walter Arabasz, director of the seismography stations.

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Mr. President my hat goes off to you if you can accomplish this.

President Bush said Monday that with the right intelligence U.S. and Pakistan governments can take out al-Qaida leaders, and wouldn’t say whether he would consult first with Pakistan before ordering U.S. forces to act on their own.

“With real actionable intelligence, we will get the job done,” Bush said.

He was asked whether he would wait on permission from Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf before committing the U.S. military to move on “actionable intelligence” on the whereabouts of terrorist leaders in Pakistan. He did not answer directly.

Bush was at the presidential retreat at Camp David for two days of meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The two held talks on a rash of crises confronting Afghanistan: civilian killings, a booming drug trade and the brazen resurgence of the Taliban.

Karzai said that he and Musharraf would discuss how to tackle the problem of lawlessness and extremist hideouts along Pakistan’s border area with his country.

Afghanistan has a distrustful relationship with neighboring Pakistan, yet top tribal leaders from both countries are expected to meet this week to try to lessen tensions. Musharraf and Karzai are likely to attend, with Karzai sure to bring up his concern about the flow of foreign fighters into his country from Pakistan.

Bush and Karzai put a positive spin on Afghanistan’s progress since the 2001 defeat of the repressive Taliban, but they stressed that serious problems remain.

“There is still work to be done, don’t get me wrong,” Bush said. “But progress is being made, Mr. President, and we’re proud of you.”

Story

Mr. President you should learn something from this leakproof campaign.

The women of “Hillaryland” have constructed a carefully managed, always on-message, leakproof campaign. But is this a good thing?

Control the message. This is arguably the first rule of politics. Set the terms of the debate. Stick to your talking points. Minimize leaks. Do not let the opposition define you. Avoid process stories. Win the news cycle. Never let them see you sweat.

In the era of the YouTube election, in which every campaign stumble has the potential to become a “macaca moment,” the pressure on candidates to keep an iron grip on their image is extreme. Quirky, let-it-all-hang-out romps like John McCain’s straight-talking quest for the Republican nomination in 2000 may be charming, but tight-lipped, brutally disciplined efforts like George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 runs are the stuff of which legends—and presidents—are made.

Among the 2008 field, no one recognizes this reality more than Hillary Clinton, whose every word, deed, and hairdo of the past fifteen years has sparked bitter national debate. Not coincidentally, she has spent this time assembling a network of advisers who share her views on loyalty and discretion. “Hillaryland,” as the members of this mostly female clique call themselves, is less a campaign entity than an extended sisterhood defined by its devotion to its namesake. Even so, the group’s protective ethos dominates her presidential campaign, where loyalty is demanded, self-promotion frowned upon, and talking out of school, especially to the press, punishable by death. (Just kidding—though staffers point out that the campaign’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters is in a former INS detention facility that still has cells in the basement.) If any campaign has a shot at Total Message Control in ’08, it is Team Hillary.

But is this a good thing? Hillary is, after all, a candidate with very particular, personality-driven challenges. Unlike Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, she lacks the natural ability to make voters feel as though they have a personal sense of her in a 30-second sound bite. Polls indicate that even people who like Hillary don’t necessarily trust her; she is seen as too cautious, scripted, and opportunistic—in short, too much the slick pol. Dispelling such concerns is no small challenge for a political team dominated by loyalists who for years now have shared, and even enabled, the candidate’s obsession with privacy and control.

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South Carolina must see something that Iowa doesn’t.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney holds a clear lead over his GOP rivals in Iowa and New Hampshire. But for some reason, Romney hasn’t been able to connect with S.C. voters — a key primary state in Romney’s bid to gain his party’s nomination.

Romney should be more competitive in the Palmetto State. He has spent more than $1 million for television ads, staff and organization, and get-out-the-vote efforts.

But he has little to show for it.

“I don’t think people are comfortable with him yet,” said former U.S. Rep. Tommy Hartnett of Charleston, a Romney supporter.

Romney remains stuck in fourth or fifth position in statewide polls.

A new survey released this week showed S.C. support for Romney dropped to 7 percent in July from 8 percent in June.

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Now that is a slap in the face.

There’s one vote that Rudy Giuliani definitely can’t count on in his 2008 presidential bid: his own daughter’s. According to the 17-year-old Caroline Giuliani’s Facebook profile, she’s supporting Barack Obama.

On her profile, she designates her political views as “liberal” and—until this morning—proclaimed her membership in the Facebook group “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack).” According to her profile, she withdrew from the Obama group at 6 a.m. Monday, after Slate sent her an inquiry about it.

In what may be an effort to avoid public connection to her famous father, the future Harvard freshman and recent graduate of Trinity School in Manhattan uses a slight variation of her name on the Facebook site. But she didn’t lock her profile, allowing any Facebook user with access to the Harvard or Trinity School networks (more than 42,000 people) to view her detailed profile. (As a Harvard student, I was able to see it.)

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Sue has already gone to visit family in another state, and I’ll be doing the same thing on Monday if my back and stomach cooperate.

That leaves Guss, who will be manning the fort for the most part but has promised to put up conservative or at least neutral posts as well as his regular liberal posts.

There won’t be much political news for a month anyway, since Congress has gone on its undeserved vacation. At least they won’t be passing any laws, stupid or otherwise, so we should be grateful.

I will have my trusty laptop with me, but the home where I’m going to be staying doesn’t have high speed internet service available, so I envision myself going to a coffee shop or something to do a couple of posts a day. I remember seeing a sign saying free wireless internet service on one of the restaurants that wouldn’t normally be one of my stops, but it will be now.

Big Mo, if you do another Presidents series post, please email it to me and I’ll post it as soon as I can. It sometimes takes me two hours to post it with all the photos in it, but I’ll get it posted as soon as possible.

With that I bid you a happy week and ask you to keep visiting us.

If you’re looking for a story that isn’t about corruption or pork here is one to warm your heart.

Sitting on a stool in the center of a TV studio stuffed with anchor desks, fake brick walls and wires hanging from the ceiling, the Rev. Peter Panagore closed his eyes and meditated.

For several minutes he sat there, his head bowed, as a technician prepared the TelePrompTer and camera monitors flickered.

“I was getting my act together,” Panagore said later.

Such is life at the head of Maine’s only media ministry: the First Radio Parish Church of America. “A lot of the stuff I do happens inside my head,” he said of his quiet moments, which include plenty of prayer and quiet thought around his East Boothbay home.

Though the ministry is known by Mainers for its contemplative “Daily Devotions” - a fixture on TV for more than five decades on WCSH-TV in Portland and WLBZ-TV in Bangor - Panagore’s voice is becoming even better known.

Since taking over four years ago, he has aimed to broaden the ministry’s place among increasingly varied media.

“We’ve always been at the cutting edge,” he said.

In part, that’s a reference to the age of the church, which began in 1923 on radio and moved to TV in 1954.

“We are the oldest, continuously running, non-sectarian broadcast in the country,” Panagore said. “As far as we know, we are unique.” When the church went online in 1995, it was ahead of the curve, he said.

These days, Panagore creates those morning TV spots, radio programs and online mailings.

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I don’t know what to say. Read it and decide for yourself.

Fatah officials in Ramallah claimed over the weekend that Professor Sana al-Sayegh, who teaches at Palestine University in Gaza City, was kidnapped by Hamas militiamen who forced her to convert to Islam against her will.

The officials said the president of the university, Dr. Zaher Khail, had assisted Hamas in kidnapping the professor.

They added that senior officials in the office of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh played a major role in forcing her to convert to Islam.

“She was forced to convert to Islam against her will,” the Fatah officials said. “She was kidnapped and held for two weeks during which time she was not allowed to contact her family.” Sayegh is the dean of the Science and Technology Faculty at Palestine University. She has represented the university at numerous conferences around the world over the past few years and is considered one of the most prominent experts in her field.

According to the Fatah officials, she went missing in late June. When her family’s attempts to find her failed, they sought the help of Haniyeh’s office.

Two weeks later the family was summoned to a meeting with some of Haniyeh’s aides, who were accompanied by the professor.

At the meeting, which was held at the home of Hamas official Rafik Makki, the family was told that the professor had converted to Islam and married a Muslim man.

Story

This is an editorial by MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY of the Wall Street Journal.
She has an interesting view.

Congressional Democrats out to quash the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement argue that the terror-torn South American country doesn’t adequately protect human rights and thus doesn’t deserve FTA status. In the Democrats’ book, the way to make Colombia more just is to deny it the chance to deepen its commercial relations with the U.S.

This is curious thinking, and all the more so coming from a party that also argues that the U.S. ought to lift its trade embargo on the Cuban dictatorship as a way to help the Cuban people. Given Cuba’s dismal track record on human rights and the hard work Colombia has done over the past six years to defend human life, it is hard to square that circle.

Americas columnist Mary O’Grady discusses opposition to a free-trade agreement with Colombia.
Classical liberals might argue that open trade with all countries is an individual right. Human-rights advocates might counter that doing business with a dictatorship props up the tyrant. Isolationists may want to cut everyone off. But it is hard to understand just what rational belief system could support expanding commercial exchanges with a dictator while denying deeper trade relations to a democracy, especially one that has shed so much blood for America’s war on drugs.

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy is one of many in the Democratic Party who seem conflicted on this subject. Mr. Leahy says he hasn’t decided how he will vote on the U.S.-Colombia FTA. But just last month, in a letter published in this newspaper, he accused me of viewing “the assassinations of hundreds of trade unionists” in Colombia as “irrelevant” because I am in favor of boosting trade as a way to consolidate democratic capitalism and increase economic opportunities for all Colombians. I’m still trying to figure out the connection.

Funny enough, Mr. Leahy, like many of his colleagues — including New York Rep. Charles Rangel in the House — has no such qualms about trade with the despotic regime in Havana. The senator has said that the U.S. should seek engagement with Cuba by “lifting the embargo” and increasing “contact between Americans and Cubans — in other words, we should be tearing down the barriers between our countries not building them ever higher.”

The Cuba Mr. Leahy wants to get closer to isn’t simply accused of failing to prosecute human-rights violators, as is the case of Colombia. It is a human-rights violator. It is regrettable that the senator apparently believes that the murder of thousands of Cubans, the torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands of others, the exile of millions and the denial of all human rights, including the right to organize unions, is irrelevant.

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When President Clinton was contemplating running for president he was a member of the moderate Democrat Leadership Council and that’s what put him ahead of the pack. He ran as a moderate and not as a liberal. Or at least not as liberal as he turned out to be.

Now the candidates are shunning the DLC in favor of the Kos Convention.

From Greg Pierce’s Inside Politics column in the Washington Times is this quote:

“There’s no obvious way to measure such a thing, but as a matter of intuition, you’d have to say that the most hated people in America today are sensible Democrats,” Tod Lindberg writes in the Weekly Standard.

“The hard-core partisans of the Democratic left have never had a bigger megaphone than they now have on the Internet, and while they are united in the view that George W. Bush is public enemy No. 1, with Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove alternating in the No. 2 slot, what really pumps up the volume is any sign of deviationism on their own side,” Mr. Lindberg said.

“When Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution travel to Iraq and report on the New York Times op-ed page that conditions there are improving, they aren’t doing so in order to give aid and comfort to the Bush administration, but because as a defense expert and regional expert respectively, that’s what they are seeing. Nevertheless, they were flayed alive by angry left-wing bloggers, who challenged everything from their qualifications to their competence to their honesty to their eyesight.

“The policy and political headquarters for sensible Democrats has long been the Democratic Leadership Council, which was founded in response to Walter Mondale’s massive defeat running as an orthodox liberal against Ronald Reagan in 1984. …

“The DLC had its annual ‘National Conversation’ late last month in Nashville, and the headline was who didn’t show: namely, any of the candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination. Why not? Maybe because, as Noam Scheiber put it in another New York Times op-ed, the DLC is now ‘radioactive’ for the Democratic mainstream and especially its netroots agitators.”

Just as the far right nut roots are trying to take over the Republican Party, the far left nut roots are taking over the Democratic Party, and neither party is well-served by either group.

I wonder if Nixon’s “Silent Majority” still exists and will show both groups who really decides the elections come November ‘08.

It’s all about politics and it’s always been about politics. It doesn’t matter who is in power. When are the Democrats and the Republicans going to do something for the people who put them in power? Probably never. At least that’s my opinion.

As House Democrats prepare for a floor fight over government-subsidized children’s health insurance, they are spotlighting the role of freshman Jason Altmire.

The career hospital association executive has been working behind the scenes with his leadership on legislation that would expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). When the bill (HR 3162) goes to the floor Wednesday, the newcomer has secured floor time to help make a case for its passage.

Altmire, who upset three-term incumbent Melissa A. Hart, R-Pa., is one of the freshmen that Democratic leaders have identified as rising stars among the 42 who helped the party gain control of the House last fall.

House leaders are offering the freshmen unusual opportunities to quickly burnish their legislative credentials: allowing them to serve on important committees, headline news conferences, offer popular amendments on the floor and meet weekly with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Just days into the 110th Congress, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., baptized the Democratic freshmen as “majority makers.” To stay in the majority, he and other leaders are doing all they can to ensure that the ones who only narrowly won their seats will survive their first re-election challenges in 2008.

“We’ve had a lot of help in a very coordinated way from the leadership in . . . focusing both on the broad agenda and also on the needs of our particular districts,” said Paul W. Hodes, D-N.H., who was chosen to head the freshmen class during its early weeks on Capitol Hill.

“If we identify an opportunity that we know aligns with an area of interest, then of course we present it to them,” said a House leadership aide.

Military veterans Patrick J. Murphy of Pennsylvania and Tim Walz of Minnesota have been standard-bearers on Iraq policy. In February and again in March, Pelosi shared the stage with the two freshmen during news conferences highlighting Democratic victories.

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I guess some things will never change.

The House Defense Appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2008 allocates the Department of Defense $459.6 billion, $3.5 billion less than the president’s request but nearly $40 billion more than last year’s appropriations. The bill does not provide the $141 million requested by the White House for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is slated to appear in an emergency supplemental in September.

The committee disclosed 1,337 earmarks worth $3 billion. This year is the first in which earmarks were disclosed under new House rules mandating that representatives identify their earmarks in letters to the committee certifying they have no financial interest in the project. The report accompanying the bill contained a chart listing projects and sponsors, but not the amounts of the earmark: TCS searched the report and added the value of the earmarks to our accompanying database. TCS will soon release an updated version of the earmark database listing undisclosed earmarks, earmark beneficiaries and scanned images of the letters, which are not available on the committee’s web site.

The lion’s share of the earmarks can be found in the research, development, test and evaluation (RDTE) budget account. The largest of these include $21.8 million for “electronic combat and counterterrorism training” by FATS Inc. of Georgia, sponsored by Jack Kingston (R-GA), and $19 million for an “affordable weapons system,” sponsored by Duncan Hunter (R-CA). Hunter also added $1.5 million to the drug interdiction account for a southwest border fence—much less than the $8 million he requested in the defense authorization bill for the same project. The committee disclosed 26 intelligence-related earmarks, though the cost was not revealed in the bill’s report. These included the National Drug Intelligence Center, a project long supported by appropriations chairman John Murtha which Senator Tom Coburn recently sought to eliminate in an amendment to the Senate Defense Authorization bill. Murtha disclosed $150.5 million worth of earmarks, while Defense Subcommittee Ranking Member C.W. Bill Young (R-FL) piled on $117 million in earmarks.

Pork

I don’t usually write anything in e-mails that I’m going to be ashamed of. This is an issue that rubs people in different ways. I personally don’t care if they read my e-mails or listen in on my phone calls.

President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is