News Conference

Delaware County Council Chairwoman Mary Ann Arty ejected a Democratic Council candidate from a news conference following a regular council meeting on Tuesday. Deborah A. Thomas, a Colwyn councilwoman who is one of three Democratic candidates for County Council in this year's election, accused Arty, a Republican, of "holding a closed-door meeting with the press. " "It's absolutely unconscionable on your part," Thomas told Arty in the council waiting room, where Thomas had been banished.

President Bush turned up the heat on Congress yesterday to pass his budget and tax-cut plan, using his first White House news conference to urge lawmakers to hear what he called "the message of the people. " Offering small jokes and appearing unpolished at times, Bush offered a sharp stylistic contrast to his predecessor. On substantive matters, however, he fielded a wide range of domestic and foreign-policy questions and tried to turn public attention from former President Bill Clinton's pardons to his own proposals to slash taxes and reform education.

News conferences have always been an ordeal for Ronald Reagan, and they have become increasingly unbearable for him as their frequency has diminished. Most of the President's 39 formal televised news conferences the past six years have been studies in frustration on both sides. They have frustrated Reagan by imposing demands on his conceptual understanding and command of facts he has been unable or unwilling to meet. Unlike several of his predecessors, Reagan is not hostile to reporters.

When one of the Democratic candidates for Delaware County Council called a news conference on open space yesterday, he expected the reporters to show up. He wasn't expecting the campaign manager of his opponents to be on hand with a rebuttal. David Landau, who held the news conference with State Rep. Bryan Lentz (D., Delaware), criticized the all-Republican County Council for not requesting any of the $2.7 million allocated to Delaware County from the state's Growing Greener II initiative.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.) is scheduled to hold a news conference in Philadelphia today, two days after announcing that he has Hodgkin's disease. Specter, 75, most likely will seek to dispel any doubts about his ability to continue as senator and as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The senator missed a committee meeting yesterday as he remained in Philadelphia. It is unclear when his treatment for Hodgkin's, a cancer of the lymph system, will begin. He is scheduled to undergo chemotherapy every two weeks for the next 24 to 32 weeks, according to his oncologist, John H. Glick of Penn's Abramson Cancer Center.

President Reagan had some trouble living up to his "Great Communicator" label last night at his first news conference in almost four months. Though he tossed off some sharp one-liners and made headlines with his remarks about "flaky" Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy, the President committed a series of flubs during his 35-minute session with reporters. Reagan got off to a shaky start at the podium in the East Room when he talked about the recent terrorist attack on the "Vietnam" airport.

Tiger Woods held a news conference this afternoon at Aronimink Golf Club, in preparation for the AT&T National, which begins Thursday. Woods spoke on a variety of subjects, including ... His lack of a teacher? "It is pretty simple," Woods said. "Using video, video does a lot. If you get the proper angles, it's pretty simple if the club is on plane or not. " About Aronimink : "A lot of my friends have played the golf course and the golf course is in phenominal shape," he said.

Once upon a Tuesday night in America, there was a president, a charming president, who had a news conference to offer some reassuring words about the growing chaos in Iraq. Only some. Because once upon a time Tuesday night, this leader of the free world was not the leader Americans needed him to be. It wasn't enough for President Bush to give rationales for the U.S. presence in Iraq that are grounded more on fairy-tale visions than realistic policymaking. Long before this week, Bush should have articulated to Americans a realistic picture of how the United States can quell the stepped-up fighting in Iraq and transfer sovereignty to Iraqis by his June 30 deadline.

Temple University will hold a news conference today to announce the results of its investigation into running back Paul Palmer's relationship with an agent who has admitting paying clients while they still had college eligibility. Agent Norby Walters admitted in an Atlanta Constitution article last week that he had made such payments, which are against NCAA rules, to a number of athletes. "I've talked to Paul and I've talked to the coach (Bruce Arians) and I've talked to Norby Walters," athletic director Charles Theokas said.

For George Bush, it was like opening day at the ballpark. He was loose, wise-cracking, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself. You might say his team won. Although he has a head cold and a raspy voice, Bush allowed his first news conference yesterday to go on for more than 40 minutes - twice as long as his spokesman predicted and longer than Ronald Reagan would ever allow. For Reagan, a news conference was something like a trip to the dentist - or worse. His meetings with the press were scheduled long in advance for prime- time television, restricted to 30 minutes and held in the formal confines of the White House East Room.

The Pennsylvania State Police suggested Monday that the Montgomery County 21-year-old Matthew R. Royer, who has been missing since leaving Rhode Island Thursday, might have decided on his own to detour from returning home to Skippack Township. "While it may be a voluntary move on Matthew's part, we are still expending all resources in this investigation to locate Matthew," said Trooper Morgan Crummy, a spokeswoman at the State Police's Skippack station. As that possibility took shape in what remains a murky situation, his mother made a tearful plea for her son to contact his parents.

WASHINGTON - Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday defended the Justice Department's secret examination of Associated Press phone records though he declared he had played no role in it, saying it was justified as part of an investigation into a grave national security leak. The government's wide-ranging information gathering from the news cooperative has created a bipartisan political headache for President Obama, with prominent Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill expressing outrage, along with press freedom groups.

When challenged, Gov. Christie sometimes yells like a Marine gunnery sergeant, calling reporters, citizens, and opponents alike stupid. Judging by his stratospheric poll ratings, voters love that shtick. He's "Jersey Strong. " And how often did former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell say something outrageous, such as opining in 2006 that many old people love casinos because they "lead very gray lives"? After a brief flare, the outrage faded, as it always did; it was just Ed being Ed. Last week, Gov. Corbett mentioned in a radio interview that he had heard some employers say they have trouble finding workers who can pass a drug test - and for that moment of candor, he caught three days of hell, both from Democrats running to replace him in 2014 and from media commentators.

It's never a good sign for a president when he feels compelled to assure the public he still has a pulse. This is the unenviable position President Obama was in Tuesday morning when he held a news conference and faced a profusion of questions about the stalled pieces of his legislative program. Asked by ABC News' Jonathan Karl whether he still had "the juice to get the rest of your agenda through," Obama paraphrased Mark Twain's response to a newspaper's report that he was near death.

TRENTON - A $40 million initiative to provide counseling to military veterans and active duty members suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological traumas hangs in the balance as Congress debates whether to pay for it once again. The funding, initiated in 2011 and pushed again by Reps. Rush Holt (D., N.J.) and Jon Runyan (R., N.J.), pays for suicide prevention and other forms of outreach to service members. A measure that would have made funding for treatment permanent was blocked in the Senate two years ago. Holt and Runyan, who held a news conference Tuesday in Trenton to call on members of the House to support the program again, said that if anything, the problem was worse than most realize.

'C LAP YOUR HANDS, everybody, for the Delaware 87ers. " On Saturday the 76ers announced the completion of the purchase of a franchise for the NBA Development League, to be called the Delaware 87ers, which will play games at the Bob Carpenter Center on the University of Delaware campus. The team nickname refers to 1787, the year Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. "The creation of the Delaware 87ers is an important milestone in our quest to ensure that the Philadelphia 76ers are viewed in all respects to be a world-class and cutting-edge NBA franchise," said managing owner Josh Harris.

THIS IS THE problem when prefight hype spirals too far out of control. Philadelphia light welterweight world champion Danny Garcia and Zab Judah have both done a lot of talking since their fight was announced in December. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that the original date of Feb. 9 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., was postponed because Garcia injured his ribs during training. That left 2 extra months for the camps to fire verbal jabs at each other leading into the fight now scheduled for Saturday.

Darryl Reynolds, a 6-foot-8 power forward who helped Lower Merion High School reach the PIAA Class AAAA state championship game in 2012, said Tuesday that he will continue his career at Villanova. Reynolds, who spent last season at Worcester (Mass.) Academy, committed to play for the Wildcats in a news conference at Lower Merion's Downs Gymnasium. He considered Seton Hall, South Carolina, and Utah. He made an official visit to Villanova this month. Reynolds is a three-star recruit, according to ESPN.

Mayor Nutter told reporters Tuesday there had been no specific threats or incidents in Philadelphia, but he said local law enforcement and emergency personnel would be at "a heightened level of security" in response to the Boston explosions. The city still expects to see about 40,000 runners compete in Philadelphia's Broad Street Run on May 5, the mayor said, but he said there would be "a more visible security presence" in place to make sure that participants and spectators are safe.

The most dangerous ground to occupy in Washington, it is said, is the space between New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer and a television camera. He's pushy, talks fast, thinks quickly - and is absolutely certain. Even by the standards of a preening profession, Schumer has been noted, since arriving as a congressman from Brooklyn in 1981, for his ability to insert himself into the frame. Last week, though, freshman Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) hip-checked him out of the way. Toomey let it be known in private that he would not attend a news conference announcing a bipartisan deal to expand background checks for firearms sales at gun shows and on the Internet if Schumer, part of the group working on the agreement, was up on the platform near him. In the end, there was no white masking tape on that platform with Schumer's name on it when Toomey and Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.)