Call girl laments use of exotic photos  —  NEW YORK - The lawyer for the call girl linked to the downfall of Gov. Eliot Spitzer lashed out at the media on Friday for thrusting the 22-year-old woman into the “public glare” without her consent and publishing revealing photos.

Writers Strike at DailyKos  —  This is an open letter to the progressive blogosphere...  I've been posting at DailyKos for nearly 4 years now and started writing diaries in support of Hillary Clinton back in June of last year.  Over the past few months I've noticed that things …

More Rezko dough found  —  For the first time, Sen. Barack Obama put a figure Friday to the amount of campaign contributions that indicted political fund-raiser Tony Rezko raised for the senator's campaigns, and the number — about $250,000 — was far more than he previously acknowledged.

Muslims nations: Defame Islam, get sued?  —  DAKAR, Senegal - The Muslim world has created a battle plan to defend its religion from political cartoonists and bigots.  —  Concerned about what they see as a rise in the defamation of Islam, leaders of the world's Muslim nations …

Saddam's Dangerous Friends  —  What a Pentagon review of 600,000 Iraqi documents tells us.  —  This ought to be big news.  Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an influential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda's second-in-command …

Hard-Won Progress In Baghdad  —  BAGHDAD — Since I arrived here last August, I have been struck by four things: the financial commitment we have made to reconstruction; the precipitous decline in violence; the inklings of representative government; and the small yet significant progress …

George Speaks, Badly  —  Watching George W. Bush address the New York financial community Friday brought back many memories.  Unfortunately, they were about his speech right after Hurricane Katrina, the one when he said: “America will be a stronger place for it.”

The AP Style Guide on Defending Barack Obama  —  The Associated Press editors tasked in-house “writer” Phillip Elliott to write an article that dispels the “rumors and outright lies” concerning Barack Obama and the perception that Mr. Obama's support of Israel is questionable.

The cloud over the Enron prosecution  —  I noted a couple of days ago that there was a big problem brewing in the Enron trial, with the specter of possible prosecutorial misconduct regarding the prosecution's destruction of exculpatory evidence in Andy Fastow's government interviews.

Robert Rubin Still Doesn't Know that People Warned About the Bubble  —  Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was at a session at the Brookings Institution this morning at which said that “few, if any” people anticipated the sort of meltdown that we are seeing in the credit markets at present.

Fed Races to Rescue Bear Stearns In Bid to Steady Financial System  —  Storied Firm Sees  —  Stock Plunge 47%;  —  J.P. Morgan Steps In  —  Credit turmoil spread to the heart of the U.S. financial system as Bear Stearns Cos., an 85-year-old institution that has survived the Depression and World War II …

Obama Denounces Statements of His Pastor as ‘Inflammatory’  —  In the handful of years Senator Barack Obama has spent in the national spotlight, his stance toward his pastor has gone from glowing praise to growing distance to — as of Friday — strong criticism.