Dishing Dean's Defenses

Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:

Durbin's Diss

Sen. Dick Durbin (search), D-Ill., seems to be flying in the face of public opinion when he likens American forces at Guantanamo Bay (search) to Nazis and other murderous regimes.

A brand new FOX News poll shows that a plurality of Americans think conditions at Gitmo meet accepted standards for treatment of detainees. What's more, 59 percent of those polled say they believe prisoners are living better at Guantanamo than they were at home. And another 59 percent say the prison camp should remain open.

As for the question of the treatment of the Koran: 75 percent of those polled say they believe Americans held by Muslims would not even be provided with copies of the Bible under similar circumstances.

Dishing Dean's Defenses

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean (search) has said he hates Republicans, called them "evil" and "brain dead," and said that House Republican leader Tom DeLay should be in jail. But you wouldn't know any of that from reading The New York Times.

The paper has never once reported any of Dean's Republican-bashing rhetoric. The National Review's Byron York writes that even after Dean's appearance on "Meet the Press" last month, the Times ignored Dean's past diatribes — reporting only what he said in his own defense.

What's more, the conservative Media Research Center's records show that before last week, none of the broadcast networks had reported on Dean's controversial comments in their evening newscasts.

'Deep Throat' Cashes In

Mark Felt (search), the former FBI official who recently outed himself as Watergate (search) informant "Deep Throat," has signed a deal to turn his story into a major motion picture — a move that could net Felt and his family nearly $1 million.

Hollywood actor Tom Hanks is set to develop the movie for Universal pictures.

In addition, Felt will release a book — tentatively titled "A G-Man's Life: The FBI, Being 'Deep Throat' and the Struggle for Honor in Washington." While Felt recently told reporters he planned to "write a book or something, and collect all the money I can," a lawyer for the family says their decision "was not based on money."

'Suppression of Black History'?

A landmark new museum exhibit on King Tut (search) has opened to protests in Los Angeles after the city refused to remove a statue of the Egyptian pharaoh that black activists call "too white."

Scientists for the exhibit reconstructed a bust of Tut's face using CAT scans of his mummy. But activist Legrand Clegg (search) says the statue is a "distortion of reality" because ancient Egyptians were black. Clegg, who has enlisted the support of the local NAACP, calls the exhibit a "suppression of Black history."

Egypt's chief archaeologist, however, insists Tut looks Egyptian.

— FOX News' Michael Levine contributed to this report