Saturday Links

• Just hours after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales dismissed the hubbub as an "overblown personnel matter," Bush administration is beating an abrupt retreat on eight federal prosecutors it fired and then publicly pilloried. Most importantly, President Bush will not stand in the way of a Democratic-sponsored bill that would cancel the attorney general's power to appoint federal prosecutors without Senate confirmation.

• The Los Angeles Times argues that even though the new Democratic proposals for Iraq may eventually be weakened or killed, they have nevertheless successfully transformed a many-sided debate about the conflict into a sharp-edged argument about the endgame.

• Senior Republicans who knew about problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center while their party controlled Congress insist they did all they could to prod the Pentagon to fix them, but stopped short of going public with the hospital’s problems to avoid embarrassing the Army while it was fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• The Senate voted Tuesday to give 45,000 airport screeners the same union rights as border patrol, customs and immigration agents, despite a White House threat to veto it. The House passed a similar bill with the same union provision for airport screeners. Republican Senator Richard M. Burr (NC) said, “Terrorists don’t go on strike. Terrorists don’t call their union to negotiate before they attack.” In response, Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy (MA) thundered back, shaming the GOP senators for suggesting that our airport screeners would sacrifice America’s security.

• The prices for about 200 prescription drugs commonly used by seniors in the United States rose nearly twice the rate of inflation, a seniors group said Tuesday, making a case for letting the government negotiate drug prices.

• Senate Democratic leaders said Tuesday that they would add money to the $100 billion wartime supplemental funding bill in about two weeks to improve health care for military combat veterans. In the meantime, according to the Wall Street Journal, the White House is adopting such a defensive stance on the Iraq-war-funding bill that it risks further alienating the Democrats who will write the measure.