The House Committee investigating the Bush-era U.S. attorney firings released 5,400 pages of interviews with Karl Rove and Harriet Miers as well as RNC and White House e-mails that reveal "White House officials were deeply involved in the U.S. attorney firings and the administration made a concerted effort to hide that fact from the American people," according to the press release from the committee, headed by John Conyers (D-Mich). The documents make it clear that Rove was directly linked to firing U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, while earlier Rove had claimed his aide was " freelancing" in his bid to get the lawyer fired in 2005. "Under the Bush regime, honest and well-performing U.S. attorneys were fired for petty patronage, political horsetrading and, in the most egregious case of political abuse of the U.S. attorney corps--that of U.S. Attorney Iglesias—because he refused to use his office to help Republicans win elections," Conyers said. Rove pressed Miers to "do something" about Iglesias just weeks before his name turned up on the fire list, and was also aware of his aide's efforts to fire Iglesias. In another shady revelation, U.S. Attorney Todd Graves "was removed as part of a White House-brokered deal with U.S. Senator Kit Bond." Bond agreed "to lift his hold on an Arkansas judge nominated to the Eighth Circuit federal appeals court" in exchange for Graves' firing.

Rick Santorum, the former Republican senator who infamously likened homosexuality to bestiality, is heading to Iowa this fall, signaling an interest in a 2012 presidential bid, Politico reports. Santorum said that the series of speaking engagements will help him make his voice be heard on "the state of affairs in this country and how Republicans are dealing with [issues]." Santorum—whose last name is used by some as extremely vulgar slang—will be following in the footsteps of numerous other potential presidential hopefuls in the GOP who have traveled to the campaign staging ground. Politico reports that "Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, House Minority Conference Chair Mike Pence (R-Ind.), former New York Gov. George Pataki and, before admitting his adulterous affair, Nevada Sen. John Ensign," have all visited Iowa. Ready for another campaign epic?

Is Obama going to euthanize your grandmother? Ezra Klein poses the question to Johnny Isakson, a Republican Senator from Georgia who is “one of the foremost advocates of expanding Medicare end-of-life planning coverage.” Isakson’s answer is a definitive NO. The measure that Sarah Palin said would create “death panels” would actually allow you to “instruct at a time of sound mind and body what you want to happen in an event where you were in difficult circumstances where you're unable to make those decisions. … It empowers you to be able to make decisions at a difficult time rather than having the government making them for you.” How did this become a question of euthanasia? Isakson says, “I have no idea.”

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of President John F. Kennedy, died today in a Massachusetts hospital. The 88-year-old was the mother of Maria Shriver—TV personality and wife of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—and was best known for founding the Special Olympics. A life-long crusader for the intellectually disabled, Shriver was inspired by the struggles of her sister, Rosemary, who was mildly retarded and underwent a lobotomy. In 1984, President Reagan awarded Shriver the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work, and last year, Sports Illustrated honored her with its first-ever Sportsman of the Year Legacy Award. "She always strived to be the best, and she in many respects has made such an extraordinary difference in the lives of so many people around the world," said her brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, who lived next door to Shriver in Hyannis Port. The pair could be seen taking rides in a golf cart when the senator felt well. Shriver's health had declined over the past few years after a series of strokes.

Frank DiPascali, Bernie Madoff's finance chief, pleaded guilty Tuesday to numerous charges related to helping facilitate one of the largest financial swindles in history. Speaking before the judge, DiPascali said he "was loyal to a terrible, terrible fault." DiPascali worked on the infamous 17th floor where Madoff's Ponzi scheme was orchestrated, and admitted to "using a stock program to look up the historical prices of stocks to create false statements" CNN reports. "I don't know how I went from an 18-year-old kid who happened to have a job to standing in front of you today," DiPascali said. He faces up to 125 years in prison.

The poster looks innocuous enough: A young girl with a thought bubble over her head asks, "President Obama's daughters get healthy lunches. Why don't I?" However, the White House did not approve of the new campaign by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and asked them to take the posters down from Washington D.C. subways—the Physicians Committee respectfully declined. "They're very nice people. I like them a lot. But they called and said: Please take those down, you can't mention the kids and so forth," the president of the nonprofit told the Washington Post, apparently unaware that turning down the White House is serious business. For the moment, the Physicians Committee, which advocates nutrition-policy reform, may be getting good publicity—but the long-term consequences could be dire. One political consultant said, "the White House will hate the organization for it. And I assure you they will be punished. You don't mess with the president's children. It's an unwritten rule."

Swine flu is not only without borders—it's without political distinction. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias announced on Tuesday, via his brother and chief of staff Rodrigo Arias, that he had contracted H1N1, the dreaded swine flu. Agence France-Presse reports that the Nobel Peace Prize winner "had flu-like symptoms for some days, prompting medical tests." Arias, who is in his late sixties, suffers from chronic asthma. He plans to work from home, where he is now quarantined. His recent work includes diplomatic work on Honduras to resolve the conflict related to the military's ouster of former President Manuel Zelaya.

Still reeling from the recession? Why not relive the crisis day by day and see if you can sort it all out the second time around: A Twitter feed by SmartMoney magazine is posting the dire economic headlines from one year ago. A recent tweet: "Oil Skids; Bad News at Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan." Ah, the good old days.

Finally, some good news out of Detroit: “General Motors announced today that its forthcoming electric vehicle, the Chevrolet Volt, will achieve city fuel economy of 230 miles per gallon,” reports The Washington Post. That will make the Volt the first-ever mass-produced vehicle to earn a triple-digit MPG rating. Initial prices for the car may be as much as $40,000, though the company says it will come down over time. “Assuming the average cost of electricity is approximately 11 cents per kilowatt-hour in the United States, a typical Volt driver would pay about $2.75 for electricity to travel 100 miles, or less than 3 cents per mile.”

This is straight out of a Philip Dick novel. An alleged member of the Juarez drug cartel has been arrested and accused of taking out a hit on another member of the same cartel—and here’s the kicker: both of the men were government informants, the Associated Press reports. An 18-year-old U.S. soldier and another 17-year-old stand accused of carrying out the contract killing on the Juarez lieutenant, who was also feeding information to the DEA. The Associated Press reports that the informant who was murdered lived in an upscale neighborhood in El Paso, Texas, where his neighbors included the local police chief and district attorney. It is not yet clear why one informant took out a killing on another.

President Obama survived his first town hall. "For all the scare tactics out there, what is truly scary is if we do nothing,” Obama told the audience in Portsmouth, which was mostly friendly. He addressed his critics directly, accusing them of creating “boogeymen." “Where we disagree, let's disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that don't bear any resemblance to anything that's actually being proposed,” he said. He directly addressed Sarah Palin’s allegation that the bill would create “death panels,” saying that his bill would offer counseling about end-of-life care, living wills, and hospice care, if patients wanted it. It would not, he said “basically pull the plug on grandma because we decided that it's too expensive to let her live anymore.”

Jennifer Hudson has something new to sing about. The 27-year-old Oscar and Grammy winner gave birth to a healthy baby boy Monday, and named him David Daniel Otunga Jr., after her fianc é. The new child is good news for Hudson, who was struck with tragedy last year when her mother, brother, and nephew were murdered in Chicago. Hudson's career skyrocketed after her success on the 2007 season of American Idol. From there she won big at the Academy Awards for her performance in Dreamgirls, and just this year won a Grammy for a self-titled album.

Radiohead has no plans to release another album and instead wants to focus on downloadable singles and quick EPs. Thom Yorke told Believer magazine that the album format has "just become a real drag" and said that doing another long-play record would be too much of a "creative hoo-ha" for them to bother with it. Previously, Radiohead was a stalwart advocate of the album format, spurning iTunes, which wanted to sell its albums as individual tracks. The band now wants to focus on small projects that it can dip into, like writing songs for orchestra. "Do you want to do a whole record like that? Or do you just want to get stuck into it for a bit and see how it feels?" said Yorke.

She may be the Secretary of State, but is Hillary Clinton living in her husband’s shadow? “My husband is not the Secretary of State—I am,” she seethed to a questioner in Congo Monday. “If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.” (The translator actually misspoke, and the questioner was asking for President Obama’s opinion.) Nevertheless, the comment was a momentary glimpse of anger, but it may reveal the way Hillary is handling what’s been a rough few months. Clinton fractured her elbow in a fall this spring and later complained publicly about the White House's slow vetting process for candidates she supports. She was also passed over to accompany Obama on his trip to Moscow, and Joe Biden has all but taken the reins in foreign policy in Afghanistan. And now, though Clinton has spent a grueling few months traveling from Thailand to India to Africa to negotiate with world leaders, it’s her husband’s recent humanitarian mission to North Korea to free Laura Ling and Euna Lee that’s getting all the attention.

Is filming childbirth on the family camcorder passé? The wife of Twitter's CEO, Sara Williams, tweeted through labor Tuesday morning. At 4:30 AM, she tweeted, "Epidural, yes please," and in another noted that she was timing her contractions with an iPhone app. Over 14,000 people are following her through the process, which she describes as therapeutic. Another woman who tweeted through childbirth told CNN, "I would literally be coming down from a really painful contraction and I'd be saying, 'Give me my iPhone!' and [my husband] would be saying, 'You are weird. Why are you doing this?'"

"It's the Garden of Eden," said one judge. "But the law is the same as in San Francisco or Boise or Manhattan." According to The New York Times, "one of the most scenic jobs in American law" is up for grabs: the magistrate judge position presiding over the petty offenses that take place in the 750,000-acre Yosemite National park in California. The courthouse sits beneath Yosemite Falls and offers a $160,000-a-year salary. Occasionally a bear shows up at the courthouse steps. Winters can be tough in the park: it sometimes take five hours to travel 100 miles, so the judge oversees some proceedings by video. The search for the next judge begins this month.

It may officially be the end of an era: Those devoted fans still mourning the week after director John Hughes died can spring for the house he made famous in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The Ben Rose Home in Highland Park, IL, designed by A. James Speyer and David Haid, belonged to Cameron, Ferris Bueller's best friend in the movie, and has been up for sale for months. It is a modern structure of glass and steel, and cantilevers over a ravine: A ravine made famous during a final scene of the movie, when Cameron accidentally pushes his father's prized sports car through the garage's glass wall and down into the woods. The current owners, The Vancouver Sun reports, are also avid car collectors, and use the space for Ferrari club meetings. They're asking $2,300,000 for the home. Anyone...anyone?

Results are in from Michael Jackson’s autopsy—but that doesn’t mean they’ll be public. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office has finished its investigation into Jackson’s death, but won’t release its findings until the police have wrapped up their investigation. “The investigation was thorough and comprehensive,” coroner’s officials said, adding that they would honor the LAPD’s “security hold” on documents related to the case.

She’s still got it: Her former colleagues may not know it, but Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has been filling in as a substitute judge for federal appellate courts across the country. She’s moved from the marble palace of the Supreme Court to dreary local courtrooms. But she doesn’t mind: “It’s nice to keep your hand in a bit,” she told The Wall Street Journal. She’s heard almost 80 cases as a substitute judge—including a case on whether a drug dealer can escape punishment, and one on whether a wolf named Dutchess was rightly impounded. “Some fact-bound criminal case is not of special interest to me, I have to confess,” she says, adding that many of her cases are “not particularly demanding, intellectually.”

Seven men have been responsible for preserving the taste of Jack Daniel's Old No. 7 Tennessee Whiskey in the whiskey company's 143-year-old history. The sixth, master distiller Jimmy Bedford, died Friday of a heart attack. He was 69. After working 20 years at the Lynchburg, Tennessee distillery, Bedford was charged with sipping new batches of No. 7 to make sure they tasted the same as the old ones. He sipped, but never swallowed. "People tell me I have more willpower than anyone they've ever known," said Bedford, who retired from the position last year. Bourbon swillers have Bedford to thank for the introduction of the first new brands to Jack Daniel's in over one hundred years—Jack Daniel's Single Barrel and Gentleman Jack.

The Arrested Development team is getting back together: According to The Hollywood Reporter, Arrested Development creator and executive producer Mitch Hurwitz is teaming up with his former co-producer Jim Vallely and costar Will Arnett to create a new sitcom for Fox. THR writes that the show “stars Arnett as a rich Beverly Hills jackass who falls in love with a charitable tree-hugging woman who can't stand his lifestyle or values." We're so in.

This stinks: “Cuba, in the grip of a serious economic crisis, is running short of toilet paper and may not get sufficient supplies until the end of the year,” according to the Associated Press. Battered by the financial crisis and three hurricanes, Cuba has had to cut its imports by 20 percent. Though Cuba makes some of its own toilet paper, it also must import some. “The corporation has taken all the steps so that at the end of the year there will be an important importation of toilet paper," said a state official. The shipment will allow Cuba "to supply this demand that today is presenting problems.”

Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient who has been in detention for 14 years, will now serve even more time. An American has been convicted of violating the terms of Suu Kyi's house arrest—and has been sentenced to seven years in prison, including four at hard labor. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has demanded her release, saying, "She should not have been tried, and she should not have been convicted." John Yettaw, 53, from Falcon, Mo. came to Suu Kyi by the water: He swam up to her lakeside home and, though he was uninvited, stayed for two days. In addition to the years he’ll serve for violating the house arrest and for an immigration violation, he’s been charged with an extra year for swimming in a restricted zone. Suu Kyi’s sentence, meanwhile, has been extended by a year and a half for the house-arrest violation.

And you thought the days of bailouts were over: As the Treasury Department prepares to scale down its troubled-asset program, the Congressional Oversight Panel says that toxic loans and troubled assets still threaten the financial system and need to be cleansed from banks' balance sheets—or things might get worse. The panel is advocating for more stress tests—particularly for smaller banks—and says the Treasury should consider additional capital for those institutions. But according to Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), the five-person panel’s dissenting vote, the Fed shouldn’t necessarily act on the panel’s recommendations. “It is possible that the toxic asset market is already beginning to heal itself and that the intervention proposed by the Panel could be inappropriate—if not counterproductive,” he said. He went on to suggest simply “that the Treasury and the Fed continue to monitor the toxic asset market.”

Guess our politicians ought to get used to coach: The Wall Street Journal reports that “House leaders late Monday dropped plans to spend $550 million on Air Force passenger planes for use by senior government officials, a sum that more than doubled the Pentagon's official request and had drawn strong public criticism.” Instead, “The House will seek only $220 million to purchase one Gulfstream plane and three Boeing Co. aircraft, which was the original request by Department of Defense officials.” After the intended purchase became public, the Pentagon said it did not want that many planes. "If the Department of Defense does not want these aircraft, they will be eliminated from the bill," said John Murtha (D-PA), the congressman who heads the committee that requested the fleet.

The father of Sarah Palin’s grandchild has a theory on why she resigned as governor of Alaska: “Sarah Palin skipped out as Alaska's governor due to marital problems she and hubby Todd have had ‘from day one,’ Levi Johnston said Monday,” according to the New York Daily News. Johnston stressed, however, that he did not think infidelity was involved. When asked if he thought that Sarah and Todd Palin’s alleged issues were strong enough to force her to step down, Johnston replied, “Yeah, I do.”

Ah, the eternal geek rivalries: Superman vs. the Hulk, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, and now, Apple vs. Google. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple’s board, Steve Jobs sent out a pointed statement about Google “entering more of Apple’s core businesses.” Apple has been clamping down on the applications it allows on its ubiquitous iPhone. The company recently prohibited the Google Voice app, much to the horror of techies, who are eager to take advantage of the service that offers one phone number for all your phones, along with free text messaging and cheap international calls. The blogs were alight with outrage. Tech Crunch’s founder, Michael Arrington, wrote "I am no longer a member of the cult of iPhone," after making the switch to Google Voice. Former Netscape GM Jason Calacanis took the time to lay out "The Case Against Apple in Five Parts," a lengthy treatise on everything wrong with iLife. Even the SEC has gotten in on the action, sending letters to Apple, Google, and AT&T regarding illegal collusion.