The Plame Game - Will the leak of a CIA agent's name be the next big political scandal?

Slate's Jack Shafer has a good analysis on this one.

The hidden good news in the Wilson-Novak-Plame melodrama is that it disproves a thesis that jaundiced readers, myself included, have about the weakness Washington reporters have for anonymous sources bearing scoops. Any of the six journalists who were offered the Plame story and declined to run with it could have gotten some sort of career-enhancing bump out of it. That they ignored the calculated leak, and the story ended up with an opinion journalist who used it to make his political point, indicates a level of discipline I didn't know existed in the press corps.

The hidden bad news is that none of them reported that the Plame information was being leaked by sources who wished to embarrass her and Wilson—which they could have legitimately done without burning their sources by name. In other words, they all protected the White House from its blunder.

EL - Robert Novak, stauch conservative Republican, is now saying that leaking the name of a CIA analyst, as opposed to secret agent, is not against the law. It is clear that she had a secret job that took her overseas looking for WMD's and precursors and that it did some harm to the agency. That argument doesn't fly, Novak.