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What do you do when your heavily hyped book plummets from number 6 on the New York Times bestseller list to a mere 299 on Amazon.com in just a matter of a few weeks? If you're Valerie Plame, you turn to discredited "journalist" Jason Leopold for self-hype help as you can see in this video. Howard Kurtz has written of Leopold's dubious background in a March 9, 2005 Washington Post article: Jason Leopold got a journalistic black eye three years ago when Salon retracted a story the freelancer had written about a Bush administration official, saying it could not authenticate...

This is a fascinating video in many ways. One way is the fact that Valerie Plame allowed herself to be interviewed with a journalist described in a Howard Kurtz Washington Post ARTICLE as engaging in "lying, cheating, and backstabbing." The article also states that Leopold was a cocaine addict who has battled mental illness his whole life. So this is the person that Valerie Plame allows to interview her which says a lot about her. One interesting thing in this 10 minute video is that at 3:45 into it, Leopold FINALLY admits to being wrong about his infamous "scoop"...

WASHINGTON - Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said Sunday he was foolish to have revealed Valerie Plame's CIA identity. Armitage's acknowledgment came in response to comments by Plame, who said the former Bush administration official had no right to talk to a reporter about where she worked. A year ago, Armitage publicly apologized to Plame and her husband. The former No. 2 State Department official remains the only principal in the leak to have done so. At least three one-time administration officials in addition to Armitage discussed Plame's CIA status with reporters. They are former White House political...

The Prince of Journalism by: Malcolm A. Kline, October 29, 2007 It contains more useful information than any journalism textbook we have seen but don’t expect legendary reporter Robert Novak’s memoirs to become required reading in communications classes anytime soon. “I was too much of a right winger for most of America’s institutions,” Novak writes in The Prince of Darkness. The title refers to a nickname that a colleague gave Novak early in his career as a comment on his trademark pessimism that has stuck for decades. When he does get on campus, Novak tells college students something they seldom...

If Valerie Plame's memoir was intended to lay to rest the conflicting accounts of how she came to be outed as a covert CIA agent, it fails. Instead, she paints herself as a naïve, whinging victim of circumstance married to an angry, obstreperous egotist who volunteered to involve himself in a vicious battle between the White House and the CIA over how President Bush came to make untrue statements in a State of the Union speech. Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (Simon and Schuster, $26) shows how mistaken her husband's judgment was....

To flip through the first third of Valerie Plame Wilson's "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House" is to confront an optical maze of gray stripes interrupting juicy anecdotes and methodical musings. CIA censors blacked out 10 percent of the text in her memoir, leaving its narrative disjointed and sometimes hard to follow. "I believe the vast majority of what is blacked out in the book has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with diminishing me and Joe," she said. Agency censors also wouldn't allow Plame Wilson to acknowledge working...

In a lame attempt to help ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame's soggy book sales (currently #33 on Amazon behind Stephen Colbert, Eric Clapton, Clarence Thomas, O.J./Goldman Family, Paul Krugman, and an umpteenth reprint of "War & Peace"), Katie Couric "conducted" an interview aimed at dummies who didn't pay much attention when the whole episode culminated in the Scooter Libby fiasco. For those of us who did pay attention, this whole episode continues to be an insult to our intelligence....

(CBS) Valerie Plame Wilson chides President Bush for not firing anyone for the leaking of her covert CIA identity, which caused a national scandal and an investigation resulting in a perjury and obstruction of justice conviction against Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff. She also tells Katie Couric that she has learned of the damage that the leaking of her identity caused agents of the clandestine service and it is serious. Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accuse the Bush administration of leaking her identity to the press as retaliation for her husband's public charge that...

Columnist Robert Novak said Saturday Ambassador Joe Wilson did not forcefully object to the naming of his CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, when Novak spoke to him prior to the publication of a column that sparked a federal investigation and sent White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to jail. “He was not terribly exercised about it,” Novak said. Instead, Wilson focused on not being portrayed as simply an opponent of the Iraq war. Wilson also stressed that his wife went by his last name, Wilson, rather than Plame, Novak said. Novak forcefully defended his handling of the column...

Valerie Wilson may be the best known former intelligence operative in recent history, but a federal judge in New York ruled Wednesday that she was not allowed to say how long she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in the memoir she plans to publish this fall. Although the fact that Ms. Wilson worked for the C.I.A. from 1985 to 2006 has been published in the Congressional Record and elsewhere, the judge, Barbara S. Jones of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said Ms. Wilson was not free to say so. “The information at issue was properly classified, was never declassified...

Apparently one of the movie roles that Alec Baldwin won't be playing in the future is that of Sherlock Holmes. Baldwin writes an entire Huffington Post blog, Prosecuting Those Responsible For Outing Valerie Plame, without once mentioning the name of the leaker---Richard Armitage. Baldwin starts out with a fantasy about the things he would do if he were play-acting as president: The fifth thing that I would do is to prosecute whoever is responsible for outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. At this point you would think that Baldwin would lash out at the leaker, Richard Armitage, or at...

It is amazing to me how many times in the course of our history, serious issues have taken a back seat to trivial and often foolish diversions that were politics-driven. Does anyone remember Quemoy and Matsu – nondescript islands off the coast of China whose status probably enabled John Kennedy to defeat Richard Nixon in 1960? Does anyone remember the “brainwashing” of George Romney or the pubic hair in the Coke can? How about the videos that someone in Judge Bork’s family viewed – videos that were gleaned from receipts fished out of the Bork family garbage by people who...

The hypocritical braying that has greeted George W. Bush's commutation of White House aide "Scooter" Libby's (pictured) prison sentence continues. "The president's critics are contrasting his leniency for Libby with his overall advocacy of stiff sentences," writes the San Francisco Chronicle this week. I think the scandal isn't the President's lenience for Libby, but that Libby was prosecuted in the first place. Here are the facts. A former ambassador named Joseph Wilson wrote an article in 2003, suggesting that the President had played fast and loose with intelligence to justify his invasion of Iraq. The piece appeared in The New...

Link references article which can't be posted here. ~~~~~ As always in the liberal Beltway, no one's ever questioned Fitzgerald's unsupervised free ride and tenure as Special Prosecutor in the Plame/Libby case by his college summer roommate, James Comey, now legal counsel for the giant, Lockheed Martin.

Merry Fitzmas, DUmmies!!! Yes, it's Fitzmas in July as a judge tosses OUT a lawsuit by Valerie Plame against the EVIL Bush Regime. Of course, this action has stirred up the residents of my DUmmie Ant Farm as you can see in this THREAD titled, "Valerie Plame's lawsuit dismissed." Freudenschade, baby! So let us now watch the DUmmies gloomily assess yet another DEFEAT in Bolshevik Red while the commentary of your humble correspondent, eagerly waiting for the DUmmie reaction when Libby wins his appeal, is in the [brackets]: WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday dismissed former CIA operative...

Earlier today, NewsBuster Noel Sheppard posted an item wondering how the media would cover the dismissal of Valerie Plame's civil lawsuit against V.P. Cheney and Scooter Libby. We now have the answer from the New York Times: an article that miraculously manages to omit Plame's name from the headline! That's right. The Times article is cryptically entitled: "Judge Dismisses Suit by Former C.I.A. Operative". For the casual reader, it could have been any old former spook. Move along; nuthin to see here. Nice undercover work there by the Grey Lady. Do you think if Plame had won her case the...

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson signed on with Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign yesterday, saying "it's entirely possible" his ex-spy wife will hit the trail with her, too. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a covert CIA operations officer by President Bush's advisers in 2003 as they sought to discredit her Iraq war critic husband. She's writing a memoir due in the fall. "I would expect her to be engaged [politically] probably after the book tour," Wilson told the Daily News after Clinton announced his endorsement. Wilson said his wife shunned politics during her two decades as a covert spy. But...

Editorial Cartoonist for Investor's Business Daily Get a unique perspective on today's issues with the political cartoons of IBD's Pulitzer Prize Winner, Michael Ramirez.

When I went to my office Monday, July 7, 2003, Joe Wilson was not in the forefront of my mind. Frances Fragos Townsend was. She had just been named deputy national security adviser at the White House though her background was in liberal Democratic politics, including Attorney General Janet Reno's inner circle during the Clinton administration. Her appointment was a political mystery of the kind I had been exploring for forty years in my column. I wrote the Townsend column Tuesday morning because I had a busy schedule the rest of the day, including a 3 p.m. appointment with Richard...

Scooter Libby Roundup FACE THE FACTS: The reason Bush commuted Scooter Libby's sentence was SO LIBBY WOULDN'T TALK. Bush “guaranteed not only that Libby wouldn’t talk, but retaining Libby’s right to invoke the Fifth. This amounts to nothing less than obstruction of justice.” Now, the Bush administration is legally protected from having to answer questions. If Libby had been in prison, anyone could have gotten to him. Now, no one can get Libby to say a word about the real culprits, which are obviously Rove and Cheney/Bush. **First of all, it's vitally important to understand what Valerie Plame was actually...