Priorities:

In an attempt to raise the nation’s historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.

Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.

But other current and former HHS officials say the muting of the ads was not the only episode in which HHS missed a chance to try to raise the breast-feeding rate. In April, according to officials and documents, the department chose not to promote a comprehensive analysis by its own Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of multiple studies on breast-feeding, which generally found it was associated with fewer ear and gastrointestinal infections, as well as lower rates of diabetes, leukemia, obesity, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome.

Priorities:

White House officials viewed former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona as a public relations tool, pushing him to make political appearances and promote the Bush administration’s agenda while he was in office, according to a series of executive branch e-mails released yesterday by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

The 18 pages of e-mails back up Carmona’s testimony before a House committee in July that he routinely battled Bush appointees who sought to rewrite his speeches, send him on political trips, and suppress his reports on global health, prison health and other politically sensitive topics. President Bush and other administration officials rejected the accusation.

Priorities:

Six American University students agreed late yesterday to pay $100 fines to settle misdemeanor charges stemming from a raucous April 3 protest of White House counselor Karl Rove’s visit to the campus, their attorney said.

The cases were filed by the D.C. attorney general’s office last week — nearly five months after the demonstration in which one student mooned Rove’s car while some of the others allegedly lay in the street to block the vehicle. Five students were accused of crossing a police line and of disorderly conduct. The sixth was charged with crossing a police line.

Soon after the protest, the U.S. attorney’s office delivered a subpoena to the university seeking information, said David E. Taylor, chief of staff to university President-elect Cornelius M. Kerwin. The Secret Service pursued the investigation and visited the campus Friday with notice of warrants. The dean of students then relayed the news to the six.

There you go.