Giuliani faces questions about Sept. 11  —  NEW YORK - Rudy Giuliani's White House aspirations are inescapably tied to Sept. 11, 2001 — for better and for worse.  —  While the former mayor of the nation's largest city was widely lionized for his post-9/11 leadership — "Churchillian" …

Bush Loyalist Rose Quickly at Justice  —  When a college intern in the Justice Department whined that all he was doing was filing and answering phones, Monica M. Goodling took him aside.  If he wanted to do "substantive work," she told him, he was going to have to prove himself first.

Rush Limbaugh:  —  Don't fire Gonzales even though he's incompetent because winning elections is much more important: … More Rush: "USA Today's got a poll: 'Do you think something's wrong about the firing of eight US attorneys?'  72% said yes. 72% of the American people …

Thanks for nothing  —  Left in the humiliating position of having nothing in the locker with which to take on the Iranians after their abduction of our service personnel, our esteemed government has been running, cap in hand, to the United Nations Security Council for a resolution condemning Iran's action.

Policy Aide's Departure Continues Transformation of Bush's Staff  —  Over the past several years, Peter H. Wehner has sent a blizzard of e-mails around the White House and the rest of Washington, offering strategy and policy ideas to President Bush and making the case for those policies to outsiders.

Report Faults Interior Appointee  —  Landowner Issues Trumped Animal Protections, IG Says  —  A senior Bush political appointee at the Interior Department has repeatedly altered scientific field reports to minimize protections for imperiled species and disclosed confidential information …

Which Is 'The Real War'?  —  "Our bill calls for the redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq so that we can focus more fully on the real war on terror, which is in Afghanistan."  —  The Senate and the House have both passed bills for ending the Iraq war, or at least liquidating the American involvement in it.

It's Universal  —  For Democrats, health care has long been a merciless minefield.  Hillary Clinton's disastrous effort to transform the system in her husband's first term nearly cost him the presidency.  After that, politicians pretty much stopped talking about the subject except …

Iraq: It may be a rough road to a Senate-House compromise  —  WASHINGTON — Fresh from passing the first timelines to bring home U.S. troops from Iraq, congressional Democrats now face the daunting task of reconciling critical differences between a Senate withdrawal plan passed Thursday and one approved by the House last week.

15 Britons In a Sea Of Intrigue  —  BERLIN — We are in a season of skulduggery in the Middle East, with a strange series of events that all involve the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.  The murky saga is a reminder that the real power in Iran may lie with this secretive organization …

Turkey, Iraq and the PKK  —  ANKARA, TURKEY.  —  When Iraq's vice president came to Turkey's capital on Tuesday to plead with the Turks not to invade northern Iraq to kill Kurdish terrorists, he spoke to the press in code.  —  The PKK is a Kurdish terrorist group that has killed some 30,000 Turks …

Those prissy, puritanical lefty bloggers.  —  There's been a lot of talk about me lately in the left-o-sphere.  And, sorry, but I'm not going to link to it.  You know how to find things.  Anyway, for the most part, I don't answer back.  As my mother used to say: You'll only encourage them.

Observations about John Harris' replies  —  The Politico's Editor-in-Chief, John Harris, has responded via e-mail to the posts I wrote earlier this week, as well as to questions I sent to Poliico reporter Mike Allen about the Politico/Drudge relationship (posted in the first link).

Iraqi Widow Saves Her Home, but Victory Is Brief  —  The two men showed up on Tuesday afternoon to evict Suaada Saadoun's family.  One was carrying a shiny black pistol.  —  Ms. Saadoun was a Sunni Arab living in a Shiite enclave of western Baghdad.  A widowed mother of seven, she and her family had been chased out once before.