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The whole notion there was a conversation where I tried to cajole her into a conversation with Katie [Couric] is fiction," Wallace told MSNBC. "I am not someone who throws around the word 'self-esteem.' It is a fictional description." [SNIP] "It was never made as two working gals," Wallace said. "It's either rationalization or justification or fiction." [SNIP] "She hated me from the beginning," Wallace said. "I try not to take it personally, the fact is that she wrote a book based on fabrications... This book is a bizarre fixation on things that everyone else has moved on from."

Sarah Palin says she was blindsided by Katie Couric's devastating interviews last year because John McCain's aides lulled her into thinking the CBS anchorwoman was a fan. In Palin's new book, "Going Rogue," the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee reveals that her handlers talked up Couric as a working mom - just like her - who was struggling with low self-esteem and even lower ratings. Couric liked and admired her, advised campaign media honcho Nicolle Wallace. The interviews would be a nice favor. The scouting reports were so sympathetic, Palin writes, that that she almost began to "feel sorry" for...

Levi Johnston, not content with just a GQ spread, heads to Condé Nast sibling Vanity Fair to offer a first person account: "Me and Mrs. Palin." The magazine posted a couple excerpts early this morning, including Johnston's account of how Palin considered keeping Bristol's pregnancy a secret. Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret — nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning...

The publication of a Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin appears to have opened old wounds in the McCain campaign. At issue is a question that was never resolved following McCain’s loss in November: Who in the McCain campaign was secretly trashing Sarah Palin to the press?

Last year, John R. Bolton, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, recruited Mark D. Wallace as the U.S. representative for U.N. management and reform. Given that Bolton was a longtime critic of the U.N. bureaucracy, no one expected that Wallace would go meekly about his new job. And he didn't. He has met with informants eager to spill bureaucratic secrets, scrutinized internal audits and butted heads with U.N. officials he suspects are blocking his efforts to uncover corruption in development programs in places including North Korea and Burma. (snip) The new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad,...

UNITED NATIONS — A top executive of the U.N. development arm threatened "retaliation" against a State Department official this week even though America, the top financier of the agency, pays $100 million of its annual budget. In Washington, meanwhile, a new piece of legislation introduced in Congress yesterday set reform benchmarks for the United Nations to achieve — or else risk the withdrawal of American funds. Along with growing disenchantment with the human-rights system, these developments raise the possibility of a new chill in relations between Washington and Turtle Bay. In a strongly worded letter to the administrator of the...