Michelle Obama recently kicked up a mild fuss by discussing her children while talking about childhood obesity. Wrote ABC News of her appearance at an event kicking off her childhood obesity awareness campaign: "I didn't see the changes. And that's also part of the problem, or part of the challenge. It's often hard to see changes in your own kids when you're living with them day in and day out ...

Iran's Supreme Leader raised some eyebrows yesterday, claiming that Tehran would deliver a "punch" that would leave Western powers "stunned."

Unlikely. Here's why:

In a White House briefing where the president showed up because Howard Kurtz wrote a column to talk about his bipartisan health-care summit and getting beyond politics to solve problems, the White House press secretary used the dumbest political story of the week to take a shot at a former governor and Fox News Contributor from the podium.

As if there isn't enough for the French to worry about these days: climate change, the global financial crisis, the World Cup, farm subsidies, Cannes, terrorism. But now they are facing a threat to that which is most sacred—their language. According to the Financial Times, "Senior French officials are mounting a rearguard action to defend the use of French at the UN and other international institutions as a language of diplomacy, in the face of the inexorable rise of English." It seems the reaction was "partly prompted by the appointment of Britain’s Lady Ashton to head the European Union’s foreign policy in November."

It was not too long ago that Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer took to the USA Today op-ed page to accuse Obamacare opponents of being "un-American," and today President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan lashes out on that same page at critics of the White House: "too many in Washington are now misrepresenting the facts to score political points, instead of coming to

As Republican leaders and the White House haggle over the details of the February 25 health care summit, conservatives have an opportunity to highlight the ideas they think could improve the health care marketplace while lowering costs, increasing the number of insured, and protecting what Americans like best about their health care system. Many of those ideas are included in Jeffrey Anderson's "small bill" proposal for health care reform. Read it!

The Obama White House is apparently very serious about learning absolutely nothing from Massachusetts or the public's rapidly dwindling faith in Washington to solve any problem.

When Republican leaders Eric Cantor and John Boehner sent a letter looking for assurances that they and their ideas might be considered at Obama's proposed bipartisan health-care forum, they got this response:

Two recent polls show former U.S. Representative Tom Campbell, who recently entered the California Republican primary for a U.S. Senate nomination, with a lead over his Republican opponents Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore. While the resume on his website shows a very impressive candidate, Campbell has a long troubling record as an anti-Israel public official. Here are some examples from the record that Campbell built up over a decade in the House (Jennifer Rubin helps chronicle it here): 

Andrew Malcolm writes:

Many political observers are coming to see that the ex-state senator from the South Side is running his federal administration in Washington much the way they run things back home: with a small....

...claque of clout-laden people from the same school who learned their political trade back in the nation's No. 3 city, named for an Indian word for a smelly wild onion.

That style is tough, focused, immune to any distractions but cosmetic niceties. And did we mention tough. A portly, veteran Chicago alderman once confided only about 40% jokingly, that he had taken up jogging to lose weight but quickly gave it up as boring because "you can't knock anyone down." That's politics the Chicago way.

Obama and his top advisers Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, and David Axelrod all hail from the Chicago school. Press secretary Robert Gibbs is an Alabaman who worked for North Carolinian Democrats, but he's adapted to the Chicago method with ease. Together, this band of operatives has not deviated from the themes and goals of Obama's 2008 campaign. They do not admit errors of substance. Faced with a troublesome midterm election, Obama did not search out new figures and guides for his party. He reached back to his 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe.

Check out this nifty time-lapse movie of a teddy bear being buried under Snowpocalypse, round one:

Here's hoping the bear is rescued before round two begins later today.

A tip of the hat to DCist, incidentally.

Mark Halperin says David Brooks's column today "cracks the code of the Obama White House."

What does the decrypt reveal? Here's what:

The atmosphere in the White House appears surprisingly tranquil. Emanuel is serving as a lighting rod for the president but remains crisply confident in his role as chief of staff. It’s true that several top administration officials did not want to attempt comprehensive health care reform this year. But they are not opening recrimination campaigns. It’s no secret that many think the president needs to be more assertive with Congress, yet administration officials still talk about Obama in awestruck tones, even in private.

Some would say the administration is underreacting to the incredible shift in the public mood. Some would say they need more voices from the great unwashed. But no one could accuse them of panicking, or of scrambling about incoherently. In their first winter of discontent, they are offering continuity and comity. Whatever their relations with the country might be, inside they seem unruffled. The bonds of association, from the top down, seem healthy — especially for a bunch of Democrats.

Hence Obama's decision to re-litigate health care reform even though public opposition brought his plan to a standstill in Congress; even though he said in the State of the Union that his "number one focus" was jobs; even though his approval ratings began falling precipitously at the moment when health care took center stage in the national debate. His post-State of the Union bounce is gone: Marist pegs Obama's job approval at 47 percent. Rasmussen also has it at 47 percent.

The future of journalism? Laid-off Washington Times sports reporter asks for cash to cover Nats.

While everyone seems to be all atwitter (quite literally) about Sarah Palin's hinting that she will run in 2012 "if I believe that that is the right thing to do for our country," it is worth noting the only actual name she mentioned in her Fox News Sunday interview last Sunday—Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. As she told Chris Wallace,

Last week was a big one for nuclear news.  First, the Obama administration submitted its proposed budget for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (that’s the agency that, among other things, maintains our warheads).  Second, an unnamed administration official announced an “agreement in principle” with the Russians for the START follow-on treaty. 

These two things are connected beyond the obvious point of contact.  The former is meant to be a down payment on the latter.  The administration has been put on notice that it faces substantial opposition in the Senate, not only to the ratification of this new treaty (whatever it ends up being called), but to its other arms control priorities as well.  The price, say a coalition of 41 mostly (but not entirely) Republican senators, is a serious commitment to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t claim to have developed an economic stimulus plan of his own. But he does favor a cluster of proposals that, when packaged together, are a simple, sensible program for rejuvenating the economy.

I take the liberty of dubbing it the McConnell Plan (without asking the Republican leader’s approval). If enacted, the plan would do a great deal more to boost the economy and increase employment than the “jobs bill” that President Obama and congressional Democrats are cooking up.

Arnold Kling:

My point here is not to champion Republicans. It is not to champion democracy. My point is that the ones throwing the temper tantrum right now are the Progressives. They think that the 2008 election gave them the right to operate like China's autocracy, and they are lashing out hysterically at those they perceive as preventing them from doing so. On the one hand, the villains are a small minority in the Senate. Or maybe the villains are the incoherent majority of the people.

The important point is that Progressives are never wrong. Top-down reform is the only way to fix the health care system. Anthropogenic global warming is scientifically proven, and its solution requires strenuous exercise of political control over individual behavior. Deficit spending is necessary and sufficient to create jobs. Technocrats can make banks too regulated to fail. Markets without technocratic control are like adolescents without adult supervision. Individual happiness can be improved by political authorities using scientific knowledge. Concentrated political power is the wave of the future, and it is good.

I am not a populist. I fear the mob. But how can I fear the Progressives any less?

Also read Gerard Alexander on liberal condescension. It occurs to me that American liberals are re-learning the lesson of the old left-wing chant: The people united can never be defeated. And it's driving them up a wall.

Is NOW's president similarly outraged by Snickers' 'celebration' of 'violence against women'?

Rachel Abrams launches a must-read blog (Don't worry! She'll still be contributing here too.)

Via Geraghty, the St. Pete Times reports: "Marco Rubio says his  Stimulus Fundraising Bomb (www.StimulusBomb.com) has raised $411,000, just one week after launching with the goal of raising $787,000 by February 10."

The Wall Street Journal's Mark Lasswell has a rave review of Matt Labash's new book, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader (which Jeffrey Goldberg dubbed "The Funniest Book of the Year"). From the Journal:

In a just world, Matt Labash would be celebrated as the heir to Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and other writers in the 1960s and 1970s who were corralled under the rubric of "new journalism," but, well, the world just isn't just. Like the best of the new-journalism practitioners, Mr. Labash inhabits a story so thoroughly that readers feel as if they're at his side, seeing events with his sharp eye, privy to his wisecracks, savoring moments when he reels in what feels like the truth. Sure, executing long-form journalism at this high level has about it a whiff of the Civil War re-enactment—an almost perfect evocation of a bygone era!—but there is also a certain thrilling defiance, displayed by both the writer and the magazine that lets him plow ahead, page after page.

Fly Fishing with Darth Vader hits stores tomorrow. You can buy a copy at Amazon.com today.

Politico is reporting that Vice President Biden will be delivering a key address on the future of America's nuclear arsenal this Wednesday. Here's what to expect:

--It's likely that Biden will channel Secretary Gates' Oct 2008 speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In that address, the SECDEF spelled out precisely why America needed to modernize and maintain its nuclear arsenal. Gates did so in a most unusual forum, an institution dedicated to ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Obama faces a similar problem, in that he has to explain why he's pumping $11 billion into nuclear upgrades two months after receiving a Nobel Peace Prize for advocating nuclear disarmament.

From the AP: "Spokesman for Rep. John Murtha says the Pennsylvania Democrat has died at 77."

Yesterday on Meet the Press, Obama's counterterrorism adviser John Brennan claimed that Republicans should have known, based on his Christmas Day conversation with them, that terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would be Mirandized:

This week in Tehran, it's déjà vu all over again:

Iran has formally informed the UN nuclear agency that it will start on February 9 to further enrich uranium stockpiles to a level of 20 percent, further fueling Western concerns that Tehran is secretly seeking a nuclear bomb-making capacity.

"We wrote a letter to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] that we shall start making 20-percent enriched fuel," the head of the Iranian Atomic Organization, Ali-Akbar Salehi, told Iran's Arabic-language state television channel, Al-Alam late on February 7. "We will hand over this official letter to the IAEA on [February 8] and shall start enrichment on [February 9] in the presence of IAEA monitors."

President Obama will host a bipartisan health-care summit, to be televised on C-SPAN, on February 25. Reaction to the event has been divided. Liberals mostly think it's a good idea, while conservatives are not sure. Michelle Malkin says Republicans shouldn't attend. Philip Klein notes that the event will be "pure theatre."

In my opinion, there's no harm in a televised discussion of health care reform. If Obama hasn't been able to convince the public his way is the right way by now, one more event won't make a difference. Nor will a single C-SPAN broadcast alter the political dynamic that is preventing Democrats from passing a final bill. What's more, Republicans will have an opportunity to present their ideas to lower the cost of individual health insurance and increase consumer choice. So let's say Republicans accept Obama's invitation, which they seem inclined to do anyway.

Sarah Palin's February 6 address to the Tea Party convention in Nashville opened the 2010 campaign season. It's arguable that it opened the 2012 campaign season, as well. Amazingly, however, the left has decided that the most important takeaway from Palin's speech was the fact that she scribbled some notes on her hand. Say what you will, Palin responded to the criticism in her own inimitable way.

Here is my off-the-cuff reaction to Palin's speech. NBC's First Read has a roundup of media reactions here. On February 7, Fox News Sunday broadcast Palin's first interview with a Sunday talk show. During her conversation with Chris Wallace, Palin clearly hinted that she will run for president in 2012. No real surprise there; former vice presidential candidates have recently campaigned in the next cycle: Lieberman in 2004; Edwards in 2008. Of course, neither was particularly successful -- political dynamics change massively within four years!