Grayson Schmitz is never at a loss for words. According to the New York-based catering chef, "Whatever is in my head I say." So I couldn't resist asking her what went through her mind during the last episode of Top Chef: Texas when the special guest judge turned out to be the one and only Pee-wee Herman (who entered the kitchen set riding his trademark red bicycle). Grayson, who trained under Fabio Trabocchi ("the man taught me how to make pasta") and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, was first amused by the spectacle. "Okay, that's fun," she thought, "but he better not be one of our f—g judges." He was.

"I'm not going to say I felt great about [Pee-wee] as one of our judges," said Grayson. But even Pee-wee seemed to recognize the awkwardness of the situation at judges' table and, as Grayson noticed, actor Paul Reubens went in and out of character. "He wasn't about to say 'Ha-ha!'" while one of us was being eliminated. The New York chef added that Reubens, who was himself off-camera, "was the sweetest, most sincere guy" and a far cry from his darker days.

Not that Pee-wee's appearance was completely random. The elimination challenge took place at the Alamo, where the actor appeared during his film Pee-wee's Big Adventure. (Still, it seems a strange locale to have dinner considering it's the site where hundreds of people were killed. Why not a Hawaiian-themed dinner at the Pearl Harbor memorial with guest judge Ben Affleck?)

As for Tom Colicchio, Grayson was relieved to clear the air with the head judge during the after-show on Bravo. (In a previous episode, Colicchio chastised the chef for not doing something more adventurous than chicken salad. "Like a meatball?" she shot back, referring to a rival's choice of dish. Colicchio seemed stunned while Grayson was horrified she had offended him—he was not offended in the least.) Prior to that incident, Grayson had also bragged to Colicchio that her dish was like "sex in the mouth," leaving all the chefs speechless. "I don't know what possessed me to say that," she now says, although she partly blames it on sleep deprivation.

In Last Chance Kitchen, Grayson competed against Beverly Kim, but the winner, who will return to the competition, will be revealed next Wednesday.

A number of news outlets reported today that the Susan G. Komen breast cancer charity reversed its decision to end funding from Planned Parenthood. "Komen apologizes for 'recent decisions,' pledges to continue funding Planned Parenthood," read the headline at the Dallas News. But the actual statement from Komen's president made it unclear that Planned Parenthood is going to get funding. Here it is in full: 

We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives.

The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.

It is our hope and we believe it is time for everyone involved to pause, slow down and reflect on how grants can most effectively and directly be administered without controversies that hurt the cause of women. We urge everyone who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics - anyone's politics.

Starting this afternoon, we will have calls with our network and key supporters to refocus our attention on our mission and get back to doing our work. We ask for the public's understanding and patience as we gather our Komen affiliates from around the country to determine how to move forward in the best interests of the women and people we serve.

We extend our deepest thanks for the outpouring of support we have received from so many in the past few days and we sincerely hope that these changes will be welcomed by those who have expressed their concern.

But Steven Ertelt reports:

Lawrence Kaplan takes the Obama administration to task for prematurely declaring that “the tide of war is receding.” Here's a taste:

“In America, and in Iraq,” Vice President Joe Biden assured an audience in Baghdad last December, “the tide of war is receding.” For its callowness, this observation was noteworthy. (The tide of war was not receding from Iraq; Joe Biden was.) President Obama, introducing his plan to cut defense expenditures a few weeks later, offered up this analysis by way of justification: “The tide of war is receding.”

Opponents of Obama’s foreign policy, unwilling to credit the president with coherence in any enterprise apart from campaigning for reelection, will get nothing from these words. In President Obama’s speeches, after all, peace ranks among several reasons to shrink the military budget. In his Pentagon address, the president added this explanation: “We have to renew our economic strength here at home.” Or, as he put it in an address last year explaining his decision to draw down American forces in Afghanistan, “It is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”

The president’s vision of a receding tide of war may be in response to various domestic policy needs. But those who trivialize it entirely do so at the cost of discounting a worldview that appears to be sincerely held. The most recent application of the “tides” metaphor—a proposal to cut, among other elements of America’s defense establishment, ground forces by 100,000—provides the clearest illustration of this view. “Now, we’re turning the page on a decade of war,” the president explained. “Even as our troops continue to fight in Afghanistan, the tide of war is receding.” As to what this means in practice, the president summarized the logic of the cuts this way: “As we look beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and the end of long-term, nation-building with large military footprints—we’ll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces.” Peace, in the president’s telling, is what permits this dividend.

Whole thing here.

It's noteworthy, also, that the president is tried this approach in his State of the Union Address. "The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe," President Obama told the joint session of Congress last month. "From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we’ve led against hunger and disease; from the blows we’ve dealt to our enemies; to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back. Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about."

Yet, the president's policies--cutting defense spending, "leading from behind"--do not support his sudden denial of American declinism. 

Newt Gingrich was hardly a perfect speaker of the House, but he did not resign in “disgrace” as has been repeatedly claimed by Mitt Romney. I say this as a former member of Congress who was part of both the “coup attempt” against him and the subsequent successful effort to remove him as speaker after the 1998 election. There is a distinct difference between removing someone from a position because of ineffective management, as, say, Bain Capital regularly does, and resigning in “disgrace.”

The word “disgrace” implies a moral failing. I know this better than most because I failed not legally, electorally, or in doing my job: I failed at a personal moral level, so I resigned. I am thankful for God’s limitless grace. Newt was not a candidate for sainthood, but he wasn't removed because of the ethics report. Rather, his leadership had become indecisive and confused, his anger flared too often, and operationally we House Republicans could no longer function. The proof is that we first sought Bob Livingston as his replacement, and then Dennis Hastert. They were not especially known as idea men or even electoral leaders of our party, but as skilled at management.

Newt Gingrich was certainly the point man in leading us to victory in 1994, the first House Republican majority in 40 years. He is a visionary, about that there is no doubt. We freshmen were the “Newt, Newt” chanters of media fame. The first sign that it wasn’t all worship, however was the victory of Tom DeLay as whip over Bob Walker in December 1994. Bob was an outstanding conservative and wonderful man. When he learned that I was voting for DeLay, though my background and district might have dictated that I would back him, Bob basically hollered into the phone: “Don’t you understand that I am Speaker Gingrich’s choice for whip?” My answer was that yes, I and many others did understand exactly that point, which is why we were voting for DeLay (or Bill McCollum)—because we wanted some independent leadership. The election wasn’t about Bob and Tom.

The first two years our our new majority were rather tumultuous, with the government shutdown and other setbacks, but we managed to hold the majority. The Democrats, thirsting for revenge because Newt wasn’t always the nicest to them (he had led the successful effort to force out former Speaker Jim Wright), went after Gingrich with a vengeance, lodging multiple complaints with the House Ethics Committee. Newt, not exactly a perfectionist for details, certainly left them some openings. As Byron York explained last week in the Washington Examiner, "the center of the controversy was a course Gingrich taught from 1993 to 1995 at two small Georgia colleges. The wide-ranging class, called 'Renewing American Civilization,' was conceived by Gingrich and financed by a tax-exempt organization called the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Gingrich maintained that the course was a legitimate educational enterprise; his critics contended that it had little to do with learning and was in fact a political exercise in which Gingrich abused a tax-exempt foundation to spread his own partisan message."

At the Herzliya security conference outside Tel Aviv yesterday, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy suggested that we "Look at Syria and see it as the Achilles heel of Iran." There is "enormous opportunity" in Syria, said Levy. "We should have a main interest in ensuring that the Iranian interest is booted out of Syria."

"In facing Iran, like facing any other threat, we should look at where there is vulnerability and where can we gain maximum effects… not only regionally but internationally," Halevy said.

Today, writing at the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer makes a similar argument:

The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria could be ... ominous for Iran. The alliance with Syria is the centerpiece of Iran’s expanding sphere of influence, a mini-Comintern that includes such clients as Iranian-armed and directed Hezbollah, now the dominant power in Lebanon; and Hamas, which controls Gaza and threatens to take the rest of Palestine (the West Bank) from a feeble Fatah.

Additionally, Iran exerts growing pressure on Afghanistan to the east and growing influence in Iraq to the west. Tehran has even extended its horizon to Latin America, as symbolized by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s solidarity tour through Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Cuba.

Of all these clients, Syria is the most important...

Whole thing here.

Steve Hayes, with A.B. Stoddard and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News:

Yuval Levin & Ramesh Ponnuru: "Romney vs. Obamacare"

Time: "What Is a Conservative?"

CNN: "Panetta believes Israel could strike Iran this spring"

Politico: "Obama: Jesus would tax the rich"

Daily Caller: "After cutting ties with Planned Parenthood, Komen donations up 100 percent"

If you weren't able to watch today's congressional hearings with Attorney General Eric Holder on the Fast and Furious scandal, here's a taste of what it was like. Two American law enforcement agents are dead, and despite bearing a significant measure of responsibility, the Justice Department has been stonewalling for months and several pieces of evidence suggest the DOJ has not told the truth about what it knows. When members of Congress voice their frustration with this, Holder is defensive and says he deserves "credit":

Here's a transcript, via the Washington Examiner's Joel Gehrke, who did yeoman's work covering the hearing live today:

"I should be held accountable for, certainly, my role -- whatever I did or didn't do in connection to the supervision of Operation Fast and Furious," Holder said during the hearing today. "But, yeah, I'm Attorney General of the United States and I should be held accountable, perhaps even given some credit -- imagine that, given some credit -- for the things that this Department has done under my leadership." Holder cited his role in "revitalizing" the civil rights division as an example of his good leadership, among other things.

In response to Mitt Romney's remarks about the poor yesterday, Senator Jim DeMint told Roll Call's David Drucker that Romney needs to change his message: 

“He needs to address it,” DeMint told Roll Call. “Because I know he does care about the poor. But I think he was trying to make a case that they’re taken care of. But, in fact, I would say I’m worried about the poor because many are trapped in dependency, they need a good job; they don’t need to be on social welfare programs. I think he needs to turn that around because — the middle class is key, and we have to focus on that. And, really, the problem with the middle class is not successful people, it’s politicians — but the key to making our country successful it to get everyone on that economic ladder.

“I think all of this is a teachable moment for America,” DeMint continued. “I think Bain Capital was, and I think he finally turned that around and showed some confidence in his success, and we need to do that here. We do worry about the poor when they’re trapped in government dependency programs and the education system’s not producing the skills [and] character for them to succeed, and I think it is an important thing for him to backtrack on that. I don’t think anyone thinks he doesn’t care about the poor, but I think he’s trying to say they’re taken care of right now with these programs. Those are the programs that are hurting, not just the poor, but our country. We need to address it at every level.”

Via GOP12, Charles Krauthammer explained last night on Special Report why Romney's remarks were so bad:

"This is bad .... It's not just that it strengthens the stereotypes Romney as the patrician who's only aware of the poor as people who clean the streets and wash his car.

The real problem here is that it shows he doesn't have a fluency with conservative ideas. Conservatives are not the ones who either engage in the war of the classes or the division of America into classes.

Obama and the Democrats will win that kind of argument every day. The moral case for conservative economics is that our policies are going to help everybody, including the poor.

.... The idea that somehow we consign the poor to the safety net or we patch it and dependency is a liberal idea. It's not our idea.

And Romney is a guy who came late to his new ideology, and he still can't speak it very well."

Over at Commentary, Peter Wehner delivers a stinging rebuke: 

Romney’s answer is also a tip off that he’s simply unfamiliar with the intellectual/policy work done by conservatives over the years whose explicit purpose has been to help the poor, including reforms in welfare, crime, and education. (Many of those reforms have been terrifically successful.)

Eric Holder is currently getting grilled on Capitol Hill over the Fast and Furious gun running scandal. But the family of slain border patrol agent Brian Terry isn't waiting around for the Attorney General to come clean about the role the government played in Terry's death:

The family of murdered Border Patrol agent Brian Terry has filed a $25 million wrongful death claim against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives claiming Terry was killed with AK-47s that were knowingly sold under the Fast and Furious gunrunning probe to a straw purchaser for drug cartels.

In a 65-page complaint, served on the government on Wednesday, attorneys for the family claim ATF "wrongdoing" in Operation Fast and Furious.

“ATF's failures were not only negligent but in violation of ATF's own policies and procedures," the complaint claims.

It is very hard to imagine that Terry's family does not have very good legal standing to go after the government. It's also another richly-deserved headache for Holder and the Justice Department who have mishandled and downplayed this scandal from the beginning.