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When you’re a rich, famous Washington journalist, what should you do when government officials tell giant whopping lies to your face? Yesterday on ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos demonstrated the correct response: politely change the subject and pretend it never happened.

(You can read about the U.S. attempt to use a faction of Fatah to stage a coup and overthrow the elected Hamas government in Vanity Fair.)

STEPHEN HADLEY, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: One thing people need to recognize, he [Abbas] has called for Hamas to renounce terror. He has called for Hamas to reverse the coup where they essentially seized power in Gaza. And one of the things one has to recognize is President Abbas is doing something very difficult now. He’s trying to negotiate a Palestinian state with Israel. The Palestinian administration still represents the people of Gaza. There are Gazans who are in the government of Prime Minister Fayad. Over 50% of the budget of the Palestinian administration goes for salaries and other things in Gaza. So one of the things when you’re talking to Hamas, it really undermines President Abbas and the government of Prime Minister Fayad at a very critical time.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let’s talk about the Olympics…

Now might be a good time to donate to the Real News.

Robert Jensen did a long interview in 2005 with activist/philosopher/weirdo Abe Osheroff, who was then ninety. Osheroff died last week, and Jensen has written this kind obituary:

As Abe Osheroff’s body slowly began to betray him in his 80s and 90s, one of his favorite lines was, “I have one foot in the grave but the other keeps dancing.”

That dance ended on Sunday, April 6, when the 92-year-old Osheroff died of a heart attack at his Seattle home.

Osheroff is remembered most for his rich life of political activism. From the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War to streets all across the United States, he was a master strategist, energetic organizer, and courageous fighter.

But when I think about a world without Abe, it’s Osheroff-the-philosopher I will miss the most. Conversations with Osheroff typically turned into wide-ranging philosophy seminars — inquiry into the maddening complexity of being human in an inhuman world, focused on the difficult moral and political questions that he always pursued with intellectual rigor and a demand for accountability expected from himself and others. And at the same time that Osheroff was in this relentless pursuit of more knowledge and a deeper understanding, he squeezed all the joy possible out of this life. He taught and he told stories, he learned and he loved, with incredible passion.

The rest.

As we know, we are in Iraq merely to support the elected Iraqi government, and in all matters are following their lead. That’s why we had to help Prime Minister Maliki with his attack on the Sadrist forces. So let’s ask Maliki what we should do now:

ROBERTSON: This week is an important week in the United States. Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker, General [David] Petraeus giving their reports on the state of the surge — looking ahead on what U.S. troops should do — U.S. surge drawdown will end in the summer. They are considering a pause, maybe weeks or months to examine when they should pull all American troops out. What do you want the U.S. to do? Should there be a pause in the drawdown? Do you want it to be weeks? Do you want it to be months?

AL-MALIKI: […] I believe the American forces can draw down. I don’t believe the decision for a drawdown should be paused as long as Iraqi security forces — based on the first agreement the more Iraqi forces move forward, the more U.S. forces move back until all security responsibilities are handed over and coalition forces remain in a support role. And in a support role, you don’t need such a big number.

Here’s today’s top story in the Washington Post:

Bush Backs Petraeus on Indefinite Suspension of Troop Pullout in Iraq

President Bush ordered an indefinite suspension yesterday of troop withdrawals from Iraq this summer…

Fortunately Karen DeYoung and Peter Baker, the authors of the Post article, managed to write 1440 words on the subject without mentioning the views of Iraq’s prime minister. Otherwise Americans might have grown confused about how much Iraq is sovereign and all that freedom is reigning.

(The only large news outlet that seems to have quoted Maliki’s views when reporting on the “pause” is AP.)

This is a great new story by James Ridgeway in Mother Jones:

A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

The rest.

Dean Baker, the hardest working man in progressive politics, is writing a new weekly column for the American Prospect.