Administration Withheld E-Mails About Rove  —  The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove's …

Bush Told War Is Harming The GOP  —  House Republican moderates, in a remarkably blunt White House meeting, warned President Bush this week that his pursuit of the war in Iraq is risking the future of the Republican Party and that he cannot count on GOP support for many more months.

Blair quits as prime minister  —  Matthew Tempest and agencies  —  Tony Blair today announced he was stepping down after 10 years as prime minister and 13 as Labour leader.  —  The prime minister told a crowd of supporters in Trimdon Labour club he would stand down as PM on June 27.

Hamas TV refuses to axe contested kids cartoon  —  RAMALLAH, West Bank — A Hamas-run television channel has defied a Palestinian government request to axe a controversial children's cartoon in which a Mickey Mouse look-alike urges resistance against Israel.

Pentagon Breaks Pledge To Troops, Sends Them Back To Iraq After Just Nine Months At Home  —  On April 11, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that tours of duty for the Army would be extended from 12 months to 15 months, effective immediately.  In exchange for the extensions …

A Baghdad plea: U.S. should stay and fight  —  Be Our Guest  —  I wasn't surprised when I saw Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, appear on Al Jazeera to announce America's defeat last week, not long after U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did.

OxyContin: The Giuliani Connection  —  Brian Ross, Richard Esposito & R. Schwartz Report:  —  Rudolph Giuliani and his consulting company, Giuliani Partners, have served as key advisors for the last five years to the pharmaceutical company that pled guilty today to charges it misled doctors …

Did Rudy Giuliani's campaign snub an Iowa farmer couple because they weren't millionaires and hence wouldn't be a suitable prop for Rudy's anti-"death tax" campaigning?  And will the haircut-obsessed political media cover it?  —  Check out this unbelievable story from the Anamosa Journal-Eureka …

Film Review: "Islam vs. Islamism"  —  Martyn Burke's documentary "Islam vs. Islamism" (produced with Frank Gaffney and Alex Alexiev) was commissioned by PBS for its "American Crossroads" series, but never shown by the network.  Quality control or censorship?

The Sheer Stupidity of Newspapers These Days  —  The Silicon Insider Looks at Mainstream Media's Follies  —  The most heated topic in the blogosphere this week was the announcement by James Lileks, one of the world's most popular bloggers, that his longtime employer, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune …

Answers for Joe Klein  —  In response to this post from last night, Time's Joe Klein asks: … It ought to go without saying that I argued nothing of the kind.  My point was that Beltway pundits are far too insulated and detached from the people whom they baselessly claim to represent, not that leaving the Beltway is bad.

Internet vulnerable to free speech issues  —  Forget television executives and the FEC.  The new regulators of political speech are Sergey Brin, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg -the chieftains of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, respectively.  —  Those sites are where you'll find …