Why the Democrats Caved  —  Shortly before noon last Saturday, about 20 House Democrats huddled in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office to decide what to do about a surveillance bill that had been dumped on them by the Senate before it left town.  —  Many of the Democrats were furious.

Giuliani Says He is Equal to 9/11 Recovery Workers  —  ABC News' Jan Simmonds Reports: In Ohio on Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani R-NY handed his critics new ammunition regarding his role surrounding 9/11.  —  Speaking to reporters in Cincinnati, Giuliani said …

US public sees news media as biased, inaccurate, uncaring: poll  —  More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don't care about the people they report on, a poll published Thursday showed.  —  And poll respondents who use the Internet …

Cheney urging military strikes on Iran  —  WASHINGTON — President Bush charged Thursday that Iran continues to arm and train insurgents who are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and he threatened action if that continues.  —  At a news conference Thursday, Bush said Iran had been warned …

Poll: Giuliani leads for GOP nomination  —  WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is leading the pack of Republican presidential hopefuls, supported by 29 percent of respondents in a poll released Friday.  —  Unannounced candidate former Sen. Fred Thompson is close behind with 22 percent …

Democrats quizzed at LA gay-rights forum  —  Six candidates, including the front-runners, come to Hollywood to voice support for an influential voting bloc in cable event.  —  Underscoring the importance of gays and lesbians in Democratic politics, most of the party's presidential hopefuls gathered …

The Baghdad Fabulist  —  For weeks, the veracity of the New Republic's Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the Army private who has been sending dispatches from the front in Iraq, has been in dispute.  His latest "Baghdad Diarist" (July 13) recounted three incidents of American soldiers engaged in acts of unusual callousness.

E-male  —  IT'S WORTH remembering that the blogosphere is still so new it baffles spell check.  For that matter, if I type "blogger" on my screen, my retro software offers alternatives like "loggers," "floggers," and "boggler."  —  It "boggles" my mind to realize how quickly a piece of Internet terrain has gained power in politics.

U.S. Backs Free Elections, Only to See Allies Lose  —  Lebanon's political spin masters have been trying in recent days to explain the results of last Sunday's pivotal by-election, which saw a relatively unknown candidate from the opposition narrowly beat a former president, Amin Gemayel.

Federal Effort on Web Obscenity Shows Few Results  —  Tom Rogers, a retired Indianapolis detective, toils away most days in his suburban home office reviewing sexual Web sites and other Internet traffic to see whether they qualify as obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

WILLIAM KATZ REMEMBERS: STOP THE PRESSES!  JUST KIDDING  —  William Katz has had a long and varied career, as an assistant to a U.S. senator; an officer in the CIA; an assistant to Herman Kahn, the nuclear war theorist; an editor at The New York Times Magazine; and a talent coordinator at The Tonight Show.

Programming Note: Back to Fallujah  —  I'm headed back to Iraq on August 30th, to gauge and report on the situation in Fallujah prior to Gen. Petraeus's September report.  I'm accredited with Bill Roggio's Public Multimedia, Inc., and would sincerely appreciate (tax deductible) donations through his shop.

Inside Iraq  —  I spent a week in Iraq recently, and here's what impressed me most: the Americans.  In particular, the quality and character of the American soldiers and Marines who are fighting there and trying to help rebuild the nation.  I don't mean to slight, in some ethnocentric way …

Hillary & the Right [Bruce]  —  I have an article in this morning's Los Angeles Times that elaborates on my earlier post about how Hillary is becoming more acceptable to at least a few opinionmakers on the right.  —  Let me anticipate one criticism I always get when I talk …