Cursor's Media Patrol - 01/20/06

"This is almost as good as being an Oprah book," said William Blum, after Osama bin Laden pimped his book, "Rogue State," rocketing it onto Amazon.com's top-seller list. Last week the U.S. government denied Blum a travel visa to Cuba to appear at the Havana Book Fair.

Kerry added that "If the administration had done the job right in Tora Bora we might not be having discussions on 'Hardball' about a new Bin Laden tape." Plus: Kerry does Kos.

Terrorism analyst and author Peter Bergen, who was just interviewed by the American Prospect about "The Osama bin Laden I Know,' spoke at a forum earlier this week with "Ghost Wars" author Steve Coll, who characterized Iraq as the training ground for "the Osama bin Laden of the 2030s."

Former U.S. diplomat John H. Brown, who resigned in protest over the invasion of Iraq and recently predicted that the American public will eventually reject what he calls "Bushprop," suggests viewing the War on Terror "as a twenty-first century continuation of ... the American Indian wars, on a global scale."

Reps. Louise Slaughter and Brian Baird air allegations of day-trading inside the offices of Sen. Bill Frist and Rep. Tom DeLay. Baird has sent a letter to the House Ethics Committee, which is said to have been all but "defunct for the past year."

A church secretary who wrote freelance articles praising former HealthSouth Corp. CEO, Richard Scrushy, during his trial, claims that Scrushy secretly paid her $11,000, with the payments funneled through a PR firm that is run by the founder of the Birmingham Times, where the articles appeared. Plus: Scrushy's "Amen Corner."