With all of the focus on the president's warrantless spying program, it's hard to remember that there's other political news going on even as Washington slouches toward Christmas. There is, and here's some of what you're probably not reading on the front page of your local newspaper this week:
Plamegate: In another development from the "What's a Journalist's Job, Anyway" Department, Bob Woodward is sharing with folks up at Harvard a detail or two about the Valerie Plame case that he hasn't seen fit to mention in the Washington Post. As the Harvard Crimson reports -- no, we don't read it regularly, but somebody at Daily Kos does -- Woodward said at a Harvard dinner earlier this month that he believes Bob Novak's source in the Plame case "was not in the White House." At the same dinner, the Crimson says, Woodward got into it with his former reporting partner, Carl Bernstein. Bernstein suggested that revealing Plame's identity was a "calculated leak" by the Bush administration. Woodward shot back: "I know a lot about this, and youre wrong."
Jack Abramoff: From the "Merry Christmas, Mr. DeLay" Department comes word that Abramoff is working hard to strike a plea deal with federal prosecutors in Washington. According to the Washington Post, sources say that the GOP lobbyist "would provide testimony about numerous members of Congress and their staffs if he and the Justice Department reach an agreement."
Dick Cheney: The White House power grab never ends. As Air Force Two ferried Cheney, his staff and the press back from the vice president's trip to Iraq and Afghanistan this week, reporters discovered that the electrical outlets they usually use to keep their laptops humming on the plane were no longer working. They did what they could by sharing a couple of functioning outlets they found -- at least until Cheney's staff seized one for the purpose of charging the vice president's iPod.
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