The small pool of reporters that covers President Obama on some occasions for the rest of the press corps has added a foreign reporter on an experimental basis.

The first official pool report from a White House-based foreign reporter came Tuesday from Yasmeen Alamiri of the Saudi Press Agency, joining the pool invited into the Oval Office at the end of Obama’s meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

In addition to reporting what everyone else heard, Alamiri was able to add a little thanks to her understanding of Arabic. “Maliki,” she wrote, “opened his statement with `bism Allah al Rahman al Raheem,’ (in the name of god, the merciful, compassionate), a traditional Muslim opening statement.”

In an earlier test run on Oct. 12, Macarena Vidal of EFE News, a Spanish language news agency, helped cover Obama’s Oval Office visit with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

The White House–based foreign reporters are being added temporarily to the pool that covers the president in places such as the Oval Office that are too small too allow the entire press corps in.

The pool traditionally includes a TV crew, a radio crew, the wire services, and one newspaper reporter. The newspaper reporter writes a “pool report” to the rest of the press corps describing what happened, just as the TV pool crew shares the video with other TV networks, and the radio pool reporter does the same for other radio reporters.

Ed Chen, the president of the White House Correspondents Association, said the addition of a foreign reporter to the pool is an experiment, subject to approval by the association’s board.

The trial for in-town pool duty comes at a time when out-of-town travel pools have been strained by the decline of newspaper reporters traveling with the president.

At a White House Correspondents Association meeting last week, McClatchy suggested inviting White House-based foreign reporters to participate in the travel pools, particularly on foreign trips.

Howard Kurtz reveals in the Washington Post today that the paper delayed by a day its publication of Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Afghanistan assessment, at Obama administration behest. But for followers of the Post's financial fortunes, what may be most interesting is what Kurtz reveals about Woodward's current relationship with the newspaper: Woodward is now a contract writer, with a monthly retainer of $100. That's right, just 2 zeros.

The Obama administration's penchant for background briefings took a little hit at today's State Department briefing.

It began when State Department spokesman Ian Kelly noted there would be a conference call this afternoon with State and Treasury officials to talk about the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue now being held in DC.

The call, Kelly said, would be "on background" -- meaning no names, no identities. Noting that the Chinese officials who were conducting a similar briefing planned to do so on the record, a reporter asked Kelly "which country is more open and transparent?"

The spokesman said he'd take the concerns "on board and I’ll see what we can do."

"I hope you do," the reporter retorted. "Because I think you should be embarrassed, actually."

UPDATE: The actual conference call was held on the record.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OK, that's really what you would expect someone to say about a rival if they were trying to win an interview from, say, a southern state governor who's gone missing and, at the time, no one knows why.

You have to wonder, however, what Gov. Mark Sanford's press secretary, Joel Sawyer, thought as it became clear even from the media e-mails promising a sympathetic ear that Sanford's walk in the woods had become a huge problem.

Some of the media e-mails were published this morning by McClatchy's The State newspaper. The paper got them in response to an open records request. You can read a few of the e-mails here. For the story, go here.

In one, ABC's White House correspondent Jake Tapper tries to show how mean rival NBC was being to the governor when he passed along Meet the Press host David Gregory's "tweet" on Sanford: David Gregory of NBC just tweeted: Fm first read re Gov. Sanford: U should be concerned if "your wife say(s) she doesn't know where you are but isn't concerned"

Sawyer's response, if any, isn't known, but you can imagine what he was thinking, and it wasn't about calling Tapper to give him the exclusive, even if Tapper 23 minutes earlier had sent Sawyer the transcript of that morning's TODAY show, with the subject line "NBC spot was slimy."

The next day Sanford surfaced and, prompted by news The State had e-mails between Sanford and his Argentine lover, confessed. Slimy, indeed.

One of the things I and others at McClatchy do every time we post a story on the Web site is comb through our archives for related stories to link to. In the case of Sarah Palin, it's a long list — I haven't even made it back to our first stories, which, of course, pre-date her selection as McCain's VP candidate.

What rings true from that review is her complaint that she and Todd have found her time in the political spotlight to be personally costly. (Her allegations that Alaska has spent $2 million reviewing ethics complaints Friday seems exaggerated; this story from just a few days ago says the total is much less — and most of it was due to the "troopergate" investigation into whether she tried to have her ex brother-in-law fired. That probe was underway well before she was on the national stage.)

From a personal standpoint, she said she and Todd have rung up $500,000 in legal bills "setting the record straight." That's money enough. But it comes on top of a series of financial setbacks, all smaller, but still. . .

There were the back federal taxes she had to pay on the per diem she claimed while living in her Wasilla house, away from the governor's mansion in Juneau; the money she had to reimburse for her children's travel expenses, improperly billed to the state; the state car she gave up when it was determined she'd have to pay taxes on that, too.

Add the psychic blows she took over Bristol's pregnancy, Levi's joblessness and the efforts to get him employed, the various problems with future and current in-laws, the slams over what she wears, both on the campaign trail and at snow machine races, and you can see why it might become overwhelming. To say nothing of the Vanity Fair piece, in which all the allegations of her lack of preparation for high office are revisited.

If you're a hockey mom with a toddler, an unmarried daughter with an infant and now no fiance, another daughter entering the long slog through the teen years, how much combat do you want to do with David Letterman? Especially if your husband works as a commercial fisherman in the summers and rides the snow machine circuit in the winters.

It's way too early to write Sarah Palin's political obituary, of course. We'll soon know how her PAC did raising money, and as someone noted on TV last night, presidential candidates are often in their 60s; Palin's only 45.

And there's the book deal; out of office, perhaps she'll return fire, as she's done before. Can't wait. Because as everyone in the online world knows, nothing draws readers like a story with "Palin" in the headline.

Todd Purdam's Vanity Fair article about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is out in the August issue
of the magazine.

The article begins with a description of Palin's triumphant return to campaign-style politics, with her April appearance at the Vanderburgh County Right to Life dinner, but there also are some new campaign trail tidbits from 2008, like this from McCain-Palin aides:

"In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. They quietly ponder the nightmare they lived through. Do they ever ask, What were we thinking? "Oh, yeah, oh, yeah," one longtime McCain friend told me with a rueful chuckle. "You nailed it."

And this:

"At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed. This sort of slipperiness -- about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered -- persisted on questions great and small."

A group of Republicans have decided it’s time for the government to keep an eye on the news media.

The Republican members of the House have formed a Media Fairness Caucus to protest liberal bias in news media coverage of the government. They’re holding a news conference Wednesday afternoon to slam the ABC television network for “slanted all-day coverage of the ‘President’s health care agenda.’’’

ABC was granted behind the scenes access to the Obama White House for a day’s worth of coverage Wednesday, culminating in a town hall meeting on health care from the White House.

The group will complain that the network refused to accept a paid ad from a group critical of the Obama health care agenda, and that it will refuse to include opposing viewpoints in its coverage.

“By refusing to include the opposing view point and rejecting paid advertising that would present an alternative, ABC is taking on the appearance of a White House-run television network,” the group said.

One of the leaders of the group is Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., who last year urged the news media to investigate members of Congress to check their loyalty.

“The news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look. I wish they would,” she said. “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out if they are pro-America or anti-America.”

Other members include Reps. Lamar Smith of Texas, Jack Kingston of Georgia, Phil Gingrey of Maryland, Trent Franks of Arizona, Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Ted Poe of Texas.
      
Conservatives have complained for several days about the ABC access. The practice is not new: Bush White House granted exclusive access to Fox News, which that network described at the time as “unprecedented.”
 
ABC News president David Westin said the Republican group was prematurely judging “a program that has not yet aired."

"Contrary to your assertions,” he said in a letter, “this will not be 'slanted' in any way – much less a 'day-long infomercial' or 'in-kind free advertising' as you allege. It will be a thoughtful, respectful, and probing discussion of some of the issues raised by the calls for health-care reform. We will include a variety of perspectives coming from private individuals asking the President questions and taking issue with him, as they see fit."

Confusion reigned in the minutes and hours following Monday's Metro system accident in Washington that left several dead and scores injured, and it may be days, weeks or even months before we know why it happened.

At around 5 p.m., in the thick of rush hour, a train bound for downtown Washington stopped short of the Fort Totten station on Metro's Red Line to wait for another train ahead of it to leave the station. For reasons we don't know, another train, traveling the same direction on the same track, plowed into the stopped train, killing the operator and several passengers and injuring dozens more.

Local television stations almost immediately broadcast live footage from the scene of the crash, and they should get credit for letting local commuters and residents know what was happening quickly. However, they immediately began speculating on what they saw.

They said it could be a head-on collision. It wasn't. The stations, and some newspapers, erroneously called it a collision. For it to be a collision, both trains would have had to be in motion at the time of impact. They weren't, and local media shouldn't have assumed.

They said it could be operator error. We don't know that, and we might never know: The operator of the second train was killed. And again, why assume? The operator, until we know otherwise, should be given the benefit of a doubt.

The 33-year-old, 106-mile Metro system is governed by an automatic system that controls most train movements without an operator's intervention. Under normal circumstances, all that train operators must do is open and close the doors at station stops and announce what the line the train is on, the direction it's traveling, and what station comes next.

At first glance, the system, as designed, should've prevented the crash. Operating properly, it should automatically stop a train when there's another train a certain distance ahead. If that somehow fails, the operator should see a red signal and stop the train in time. In most cases, these systems work. However, they're not completely fail-safe.

It's somewhat ironic that for all the technological and safety improvements made in railroad operations over the transportation mode's 175-year history in the U.S., Monday's accident calls fresh attention to a problem that's bedviled railroad operators since the 1830s: how to keep two trains sharing the same track from coming into conflict.

Monday's crash bears at least some similarity to perhaps the most famous train wreck in American history: On April 30, 1900, an Illinois Central passenger train came barreling around a curve at Vaughn, Miss., too late to stop for a freight train in front of it. The engineer of the passenger train was killed. His name is forever etched in national folklore: Casey Jones.

Fatal accidents have been rare in Metro's history. Until Monday's crash, the only crash that involved passenger fatalities was more than 27 years ago, on Jan. 13, 1982, when a train derailed underground in downtown Washington as it crossed over from one track to another, killing three. The cause of that accident: An improperly aligned track switch.

In 2004, an out-of-service train lost its brakes and rolled down a slope into an in-service train stopped at a station. Though no one was killed, the incident eerily resembled Monday's, as the first car of the train that smashed into the stopped train actually wound up on top of it.

Unlike the 1982 and 2004 accidents, Monday's has no immediately obvious cause, and we won't know what it is until the investigation reveals more. Meanwhile, the worst thing Metro riders could do is abandon the trains and hop in their cars. According to the Federal Highway Administration, fatal transit accidents are rare, with 0.55 deaths per 100 million passenger miles traveled in 2004, compared with 1.4 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled on highways.

The New York Times, whose reporting on detainee recidivism rates, merited an Editor's Note skinback (here's Planet Washington's summary) two weeks late, is once again being accused of carrying Bush administration water on detainee policy -- in a leaky bucket.

The latest offense, says Glenn Greenwald, writing at Salon, is the Times's assertion that, whatever the ongoing controversy, all the Justice Department lawyers agreed the harsh interrogation techniques were legal. Greenwald asserts that the Times again is guilty at least of sloppy reporting. He notes that if you read the e-mails on which the Times piece is built, it's clear that 1) not everyone agreed with the conclusions that were about to be set forth in one of the Stephen Bradbury memos approving of harsh interrogation and 2) that in any case, all the pressure to do so was coming from the White House.

I'll let you decide for yourself if you agree with Greenwald's conclusions. The debate, if nothing else, seems to provide one more reason for the Obama administration to get on board the calls in Congress for an independent investigation of what took place.

Meanwhile, Seton Hall has released a fairly thorough debunking of the detainee recidivism report that came out of the Pentagon and led to the Editor's Note above. You can read it here.