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Joe’s wife

Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, says liberals upset with his opposition to key provisions of Democratic health care plans are unfairly targeting his wife, Hadassah, and her job with a foundation that raises money for breast cancer research.

But the liberal blogger leading a campaign to have Mrs. Lieberman dismissed from her post as a paid “global ambassador” for Susan G. Komen for the Cure dismisses Mr. Lieberman’s anger as his “theatrical brand of outrage.”

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.com started the fracas last week by sending an open letter to Komen founder Nancy Brinker calling for Mrs. Lieberman’s termination, claiming “that as Hadassah travels the globe under the banner of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, decrying the inadequacies of our health care system and the desperate need to reform it, her husband is at home to kill the reform efforts we so desperately need.”

On Monday night, after Mr. Lieberman emerged from a Democratic caucus meeting on Capitol Hill, he told Kerry Pickett, an online producer for The Washington Times, that the campaign against his wife was “just deeply offensive to me.”

“This is an age in which people stop debating you on the merits and go after you or your family for personal reasons,” he said. “I can take anything people want to throw at me, and I can take it with equanimity and trade it and give it back and deal with the merits, but I’m deeply offended by anyone who would draw my wife into it, particularly when they’re not telling the truth.”

The senator said his wife “is a private citizen in a movement that is looking for a cure for breast cancer and educating women about what they should do to protect themselves from breast cancer.”

When asked for a response, Ms. Hamsher questioned Mrs. Lieberman’s qualification to work for the foundation in the first place and wondered whether Komen was employing Mrs. Lieberman to gain favor with her husband.

“Money paid to spouses is one of the primary ways that campaign finance laws are skirted, and the natural question should be, ‘Is this money being paid because of someone’s special abilities, or is it just a pass-through to avoid detection by the Federal Elections Commission?’” Ms. Hamsher said in an e-mail to The Times.

“It’s a question that has legitimately been asked about members of both parties, including John Doolittle, Evan Bayh, Tom DeLay, Chris Dodd, and Tom Daschle. If Sen. Lieberman would like to talk about the ‘merits,’ he should explain what his wife has done to merit $328,000 in speaking fees in one year rather than trying to obscure the issue with his theatrical brand of ‘outrage.’”

An objection

The Woodstock Film Festival wasn’t very happy that Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, used an earmark to help fund its operations as an example of government waste in a speech on the Senate floor.

After Senate Democrats broke a Republican filibuster last Saturday over an omnibus spending bill with $446.8 billion in discretionary money, Mr. McCain blasted the thousands of earmarks contained in it. One of them was the money for the Woodstock Film Festival.

“In order to really do a lot more research on that great cultural moment, we’re going to spend $30,000 for the Woodstock Film Festival youth initiative,” he said sarcastically.

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