Wow: With 610/610 precincts reporting, Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by just 65 votes (77,344 to 77,279).

Via Jim Geraghty, a local news station reports:

"Absentee ballots and emergency paper ballots in the 20th Congressional District special election have been impounded under a court order, said Bob Brehm, a spokesman for the state Board of Elections."

The Albany Times-Union reports: "As of Monday, 5,907 absentee ballots were received by the state Board of Elections out of around 10,000 mailed, according to spokesman Bob Brehm. Absentee ballots must be postmarked by March 30 and received within seven days for regular absentee ballots or 13 days for military and overseas ballots."

In other words, there are hundreds if not thousands of ballots that could determine the outcome of the race still sitting in the mail.

U.S. spends, lends, or commits $12.8 trillion in one year.

Byron York on the plan to set wages for all employees of bailed out companies.

Minnesota court adds 400 possible votes to the Minnesota Senate recount--almost certainly not enough for Coleman to make up his deficit.

Joseph Abrams on strange new taxes across the country.

Eli Lake on U.S. efforts to pressure Iran.

The letter (available here) is signed by all 41 GOP senators. They urge House and Senate leadership (and the Chairmen and ranking House and Senate Budget Committee members) not to use budget reconciliation in the healthcare process and that doing so would "make it difficult, if not impossible, to gain broad bipartisan support for the effort." The letter comes after Obama's latest HHS nominee (and latest tax cheat nominee) Kathleen Sebelius told a Senate committee that the administration would not take the controversial procedural tool off the table.

Carl Levin warned today that the "Pentagon budget will include large, painful cuts." At least that was the paraphrase from the AP. It's not yet clear what weapons systems may be on the chopping block, but as John McCain said at today's inaugural FPI conference, the Obama administration is going to have a very tough time fighting the war in Afghanistan and keeping its campaign pledge to increase the end strength of the Army and Marines if it makes serious cuts to the defense budget. Some excerpts from McCain's remarks today:

I think it's very tough to square the present budget proposal with the size of the military ... Afghanistan ... gradual withdrawal from Iraq. I think it's an unrealistic assessment, particularly, again, looking at the situation in the world. I do not predict any kind of conflict with China, but it should disturb us a bit when a U.S. Navy ship in international waters is surrounded by Chinese -- I don't know what you want to call them -- vessels. So there's tensions that can only be addressed, I think, both through good diplomacy and furthering good relations, but also a military capability that is one which serves as a deterrence to adventurism and misbehavior in any part of the world....

So -- and back to the budget for one second here. I don't see how you could have a reduction and still acquire some of the weapon systems we need to. Classic example of our forward thinking and yet mistakes at the same time is the Future Combat Systems, the Army's proposal which is now up to about, I believe, $130 billion and we still haven't got the first operational aspect of it, which was going to provide us with our equipment for future conflicts, and actually it's stalled out.

You could make that same argument about other weapons systems, including the Joint Strike Fighter.

So we're going to have to regain some of the balance between affordable and doable weapons systems, but at the same time not have the kinds of cost overruns. Defense procurement reform, which I share priority with the president, is an absolute requirement.

This was the only time China came up during the day's conference, which was interesting insofar as arguments about defense spending invariably come around to the looming threat from China. McCain's obsession with waste in the Pentagon budget is exceeded only by his obsession with earmarks, and yet he doesn't hesitate to urge additional spending to finance an expanded Army and Marine Corps for the war on terror and to deter future "adventurism" by the Chinese by investing in high-tech weapons systems.

Of course, with Congress spending $26.7 billion each day it has been in session this term, come 2012 it may be very hard for Obama to explain to the American people why his administration shortchanged the United States military on manpower and critical weapons systems and destroyed good union jobs in the process.

President Obama's nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, failed to pay $7,918 in taxes and interest, she writes in a letter sent today to Senators Max Baucus and Charles Grassley.

According to Sebelius, an accountant who was hired to review tax returns for 2005, 2006, and 2007 (in preparation of her confirmation hearing) discovered a number of errors. "In July of 2006, my husband and I sold our home for an amount less than the outstanding balance on our mortgage," Sebelius writes. "We continued paying off the loan, including interest we mistakenly believed continued to be deductible mortgage interest."

In addition to this error, there were three charitable contributions for which they "could not locate our acknowledgement letter." She adds she had "insufficient documentation" for some tax deductions for business expenses, though these adjustments did not affect the amount of tax owed because she paid the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Sebelius writes that she and her husband paid a total of $7,918 in back taxes and interest, but she does not say how much of that is owed due to the adjustments for charitable deductions and how much is owed because they erroneously deducted interest on their house loan.

Grassley and Baucus respond in a letter: "We would appreciate a response to this letter giving an account of the changes that were made in your amended returns."

Sy Hersh "reports" on NPR:

HERSH: I’ll make it worse. I think [Cheney's] put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence.

I'm guessing that the "minor point" up to which Cheney's "stay behinds" control U.S. policy is precisely every misstep this administration makes. The people who mistranslated the word "reset" on that big red button Hillary gave to the Russians? That had to be the stay behinds, right?

Chas Freeman last month:

"The Taliban is not a direct military threat to the United States."

The headline in today's Los Angeles Times:

Pakistan's Taliban leader threatens attacks in the U.S.

So how would a "contrarian" like Freeman assess this report if he were, as Blair still wishes, head of the NIC?

In a match-up that will determine the trajectory of both political parties of the United States from this day forward until the Republic ceases to exist, early, sketchy, probably untrustworthy reports are that Tedisco may pull this one out.

At least one predicting a 3-point win for Tedisco, who pulled an all-nighter last night looking for the few votes that will decide the political future of the entire free world at 24-hour Wal-Marts.

One of the store’s employees seemed surprised by the candidate’s appearance in the middle of the night – and Tedisco was prepared with his trademark quip.

“If you want a job, you’ve got to ask for it,” he said.

Tedisco said the late-night campaigning reminded him of his races for the state Assembly, when he brought a “clicker” around to count how many hands he shook in any given day. He didn’t have his clicker with him tonight, but he was able to chat with about 60 people over several hours.

Mike Murphy's somewhat cryptic Tweet hints at an upset for the Republican, although the race was so close, calling either win a pure "upset" is pushing it. Conventional wisdom says a Republican should win back the right-leaning district, but it's been trending Democratic for several cycles. Moderate Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand knocked off the Republican incumbent in 2006 with a 6-point margin, which she improved to 24 points by 2008.

That said, Republicans are running a well-known state assemblyman in Tedisco to the Democrats' lesser-known venture capitalist Scott Murphy. Of course, that said, Murphy saw a 16-point swing in his favor in opinion polls between February and last week, based partly on Tedisco's overly cautious and confusing approach to the stimulus package:

He took too long to explain his position on the stimulus, then put all of his chips on the AIG bonus provision in the stimulus. Yes, Murphy had put himself in the situation of saying he would have supported a bill that included the provision, and refused to say whether he had read the bill. But Tedisco's criticism may have seemed like carping, particularly in a race where spending by both sides in this race was astronomical. Residents felt deluged by ads and may be more sensitive to negative ads than usual.

When it comes to the fall-out of this contest, pick your poison, folks:

It has become a battle over the economic stimulus (Murphy supports it, while Tedisco opposes it); in some form or fashion, it has featured national figures (Obama, Michael Steele, Sarah Palin, even Pat Boone); it will be an early test of the GOP’s health in the post-Bush era (if Republicans can’t win this slightly GOP-leaning district, where else can they win?); and it will be an early test of Obama’s coattails (if the Democrats lose, Republicans will see it as a sign of the end of the president’s honeymoon).

Some voters were disappointed that, despite being inundated with ads for the Epic Battle Over Post-Obama Talking Points, they were not able to vote in the contest that will decide the fate of humanity, because they don't actually live inside the district.

Such is the experience of untold numbers of Schenectadians today who find themselves left out of the hotly contested special election to fill the seat in the 20th Congressional District which, many were surprised to learn, doesn't include them.

Their confusion could perhaps be forgiven.

Jim Tedisco, the man Schenectady residents have sent to the state Assembly for the last 27 years, is the Republican vying for a Congressional seat against Democrat Scott Murphy.

While Tedisco's Assembly district includes parts of Schenectady County, the 20th Congressional District doesn't. Schenectady residents live in the 21st Congressional District.

Oddly enough, one of those Schenectady voters who would be turned away would be Tedisco himself, who doesn't live in the district. Let's hope the Special Election for Civilization doesn't come down to one vote.

Do you think we're reading too much into it?

Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) weighs in on the fight over Chris Hill's appointment at his Foreign Intrigue blog:

Senator Sam Brownback is leading the opposition to Hill's nomination. Brownback feels that Hill misled him during congressional testimony last year about pressing North Korea on human rights, never a popular issue among State Department-types. For raising this, Brownback was ridiculed in a popular e-newsletter circulated among Washington’s Asia wonks: “He at least did not directly accuse Hill of building Auschwitz,” hisses an anonymous Senate staffer. Gimme a break. As if North Korea's gulags are a non-issue.

Brownback’s objections seem to fundamentally lie with Chris Hill’s tendency to play fast and loose with Congress. I can relate.

Royce goes on to suggest that other senators "dig into this episode before the full Senate vote."

Tomorrow, the 62-cents-per-pack tax hike on cigarettes goes into effect, in order to help fund the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

As this YouTube video from the 2007 S-Chip debate pointed out, you might want to take up smoking for the kids:

The few discussions I've had with Israeli officials, I've always been amazed at the gap between our understanding of the threat from a nuclear Iran and theirs. For instance, I've heard numerous Israeli officials describe Iran as deterrable. One Israeli nuclear official suggested that while the Iranian leadership might not fear the destruction of Tehran, targeting the holy city of Qom could achieve the desired effect. In other words, everyone is deterrable, you just need to figure out what your enemy holds most dear.

The reason for this rhetorical approach is that surveys of Israeli public have shown just how vulnerable the country is even to Iran's possession of a nuclear weapon. A not insignificant number of the country's citizens might emigrate -- and these would presumably the country's best and brightest and wealthiest. Indeed, today Jeffrey Goldberg posts an interview with Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he reports that Israel's new government believes this is one of Iran's key aims: "The first-stage Iranian goal, in the understanding of Netanyahu and his advisers, is to frighten Israel’s most talented citizens into leaving their country."

Given that, one would expect Netanyahu to try to calm the fears of his citizens in light of the very real possibility that Iran will go nuclear regardless of any action by the United States or Israel. Instead, Israel's new Prime Minister hypes the threat. He tells Goldberg:

“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”...

"...Several bad results would emanate from this single development. First, Iran’s militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella. This raises the stakes of any confrontation that they’d force on Israel. Instead of being a local event, however painful, it becomes a global one. Second, this development would embolden Islamic militants far and wide, on many continents, who would believe that this is a providential sign, that this fanaticism is on the ultimate road to triumph.

“Third, they would be able to pose a real and credible threat to the supply of oil, to the overwhelming part of the world’s oil supply. Fourth, they may threaten to use these weapons or to give them to terrorist proxies of their own, or fabricate terror proxies. Finally, you’d create a great sea change in the balance of power in our area—nearly all the Arab regimes are dead-set opposed to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. They fervently hope, even if they don’t say it, that the U.S. will act to prevent this, that it will use its political, economic, and, if necessary, military power to prevent this from happening.”

The Olmert government tried to walk a fine line between scaring the Israeli people and increasing international pressure and domestic support for tough action against Iran. Netanyahu appears determined to deal with the problem head on. It's not clear that Israel can or will strike against Iran's nuclear program, but it would be an enormous mistake to write off this type of language as mere bluster. If Netanyahu thinks a nuclear-armed Iran is really that bad, then he must do everything in his power to prevent the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Joe Klein writes in a post titled "Terror's Next Wave":

Our enemies may have increased motivation now that President Obama has focused on the Taliban safe havens in Northwest Pakistan, and has also decided to put increased pressure on Pakistan--especially its Army and intelligence services--to stop aiding the terrorists. Obama's low-key reasonableness has the extremists on the defensive and more likely to try to change the conversation with new attacks.

Who would've thought that "low-key reasonableness" could be so dangerous? This would mean that we will know how well Obama's strategy is working by how many shopping malls al Qaeda blows up here in the United States. Quite a metric for success -- or is that a benchmark? In fact, there is quite a lot of optimism about Obama's plan for Afghanistan, but mostly because observers think it will reduce the threat from al Qaeda by progressively chipping away at the group's safe-haven.

The last administration would often make the case that increased violence was a sign of success in Iraq, a claim that was met with derision. Except in Iraq, increased violence -- or at least increased U.S. casualties -- naturally followed from increased contact with the enemy. Never during the Bush administration did anyone claim that another terror attack on the United States would be a sign of progress. The point of the Bush administration's war on terror policies was to prevent precisely that. And whatever one's views of those policies, they achieved the desired result.

The U.S. Justice Department has decided to release another detainee from Guantanamo, a Yemeni named Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi. It is not entirely clear why Batarfi has been cleared for release. But we can be reasonably sure, based on Batarfi’s own freely given testimony, that he was no innocent swept up in the post-9/11 chaos of Afghanistan, as his lawyers claim.

Batarfi first traveled to Afghanistan in 1988 to fight the Soviets. The government claims he was trained at the Khalden camp, which graduated hundreds of al Qaeda members, but Batarfi denies this. Batarfi has admitted to participating in at least one nighttime raid against Soviet forces. This is important because it shows that he was willing to participate in hostilities from a young age--and was not merely a humanitarian adventure seeker in Afghanistan.

Batarfi then went to Pakistan, where he became an orthopedic surgeon. From there, things get really interesting.

There are at least three aspects of Batarfi’s testimony given before his administrative review board hearings at Gitmo that are noteworthy. Keep in mind that these hearings were not interrogations, and the detainees had the option of not participating, or simply issuing blanket denials, as some detainees did.

First, Batarfi admitted that he was an employee of al Wafa, a charity that has been designated a terrorist organization. Al Wafa is discussed in brief in the 9/11 Commission’s report as an al Qaeda front. The unclassified documents released from Guantanamo are littered with references to the organization. It is clear that al Wafa actively supported al Qaeda and the Taliban in a variety of ways--from transporting jihadists to Afghanistan (often through Iran) to purchasing sophisticated weaponry. Al Wafa was not a real charity--it was a terrorist front group, and Batarfi admitted to working for the group for several months in 2001. He says he left the organization after it was designated as a terror-supporter, but this was most likely just Batarfi’s way of trying to explain away his al Wafa ties. As we will see below, he was at Tora Bora after the designation on al Wafa came down.

Second, Batarfi admitted that he met with a “Malaysian microbiologist” and authorized the purchase of medical equipment for this individual. As I have written previously, this microbiologist is most certainly Yazid Sufaat. Batarfi denies knowing that Sufaat was working on anthrax when they met in 2001. Over and over again, Batarfi claimed that he just happened to run into and consort with terrorists without knowing who they were.

Third, the best example of this last point is Batarfi’s admitted ties to Osama bin Laden. Batarfi admitted that he met with bin Laden in the Tora Bora Mountains in November 2001. But he claimed that he sent a letter to someone (he does not say whom) asking to meet with the “head of the mountain” and, somewhat magically, he just happened to get a face-to-face sit down with the world’s most wanted terrorist…at Tora Bora…in November of 2001…you know, when the whole world was looking for him. This was the second time Batarfi claims to have accidentally met bin Laden. The first time came at a funeral in Kabul when, again, bin Laden just happened upon the scene.

TPM's Brian Beutler reports that Senate Budget Commitee Chairman Kent Conrad reaffirmed his opposition to including health-care legislation in budget reconciliation, a move that would eliminate the ability to filibuster the bill. Yesterday, Conrad told reporters:

I've been as clear as I can be publicly and privately, that I don't think reconciliation is the right way to write fundamental reform legislation. It wasn't designed for that purpose. It was designed for deficit reduction.

But he added:

if it proved absolutely essential--if there were no Republican co-operation on writing major health care reform--you could run a second budget resolution. It would only take a day on the floor and you could put reconciliation instructions there.

So, on principle, Conrad thinks health-care legislation shouldn't be included in budget reconciliation, but if Democrats can't get what they want, well, it seems he's not going to let his principles stand in the way.

Via Ben Smith, the Catholic News Agency reported Friday on a cringe-inducing gaffe Hillary Clinton committed in Mexico:

During her recent visit to Mexico, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an unexpected stop at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and left a bouquet of white flowers “on behalf of the American people,” after asking who painted the famous image.

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was miraculously imprinted by Mary on the tilma, or cloak, of St. Juan Diego in 1531. The image has numerous unexplainable phenomena, such as the appearance on Mary’s eyes of those present in the room when the tilma was opened and the image’s lack of decay.

Mrs. Clinton was received on Thursday at 8:15 a.m. by the rector of the Basilica, Msgr. Diego Monroy

Msgr. Monroy took Mrs. Clinton to the famous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which had been previously lowered from its usual altar for the occasion.

After observing it for a while, Mrs. Clinton asked “who painted it?” to which Msgr. Monroy responded “God!”

A friend points out that this makes Clinton's decision to wear a Catholic devotional bracelet during Pennsylvania primary all the more shameless.

Update: Many folks tell me that they, too, didn't know Catholic belief about the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and think it's a bit much to call Clinton's gaffe cringe-inducing. The story of Our Lady of Guadalupe may not be common knowledge among non-Catholics, but you'd think the Secretary of State would receive at least a Wikipedia-level briefing about important religious, cultural, and historic sites she sees, so as to avoid offending the local population.

I also didn't know what the Russian word for "reset" was, but when the State Department incorrectly translated it, that was pretty embarrassing.

It’s a story worthy of the Onion--or maybe Lewis Carroll. The Washington Post reports that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency charged with overseeing the fair labor practices of American employers, has been forcing its employees to accept compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay, in violation of its own regulations--and the law. This

. . . comes at a time when the agency is handling what it terms an "unprecedented" level of discrimination charges. The EEOC received more than 95,400 charges of job bias in the private sector in fiscal 2008, up 15.2 percent from 2007 and 26 percent from 2006.

EEOC officials and the union representing its employees (hey, is that the same union that represents union workers in their grievance against SEIU?) blame this sorry state of affairs on eight years of Bush administration neglect, when the agency “lost about 25 percent of its staff, including investigators and lawyers who handle the cases . . . and hiring was often at a standstill.” They’re hoping for improvements under the Obama administration. In the meantime, the president's gonna get their cars fixed.

From yesterday's press briefing at the most transparent White House in history:

Q Following up on that, when did the President decide that Wagoner had to go, and who specifically asked him to go?

MR. GIBBS: I'm not going to get into a tick-tock.

Q Why not?

MR. GIBBS: Because I'm not.

Jennifer Rubin wonders, what if Obama got as tough with Iran as he did with GM?

Marc Thiessen picks apart the Washington Post's false claim that harsh interrogation of Abu Zubaydah "foiled no plots."

The Philadelphia Bulletin reports: "A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a 'a game changer.'"

Last week Rachel Abrams linked to this report by the Center for Consumer Freedom on the Humane Society. The Humane Society responds to the allegations in that report here.

Michael Singh examines "the risks of an overemphasis on engagement in Iran policy."

Norks prepare to indict two U.S. journalists.

Is corruption better if it's transparent?

"If I'm corrupt, it's because I take care of my district," Mr. Murtha said.

Tomorrow he will be sworn in as Prime Minister of Israel -- for the second time. With that in mind, a glimpse of how, more than 30 years ago, he saw the same problems he will contend with as Prime Minister. The description from YouTube:

28-year old Benyamin Netanyahu, calling himself Ben Nitay, debates on the 1978 US TV show "The Advocate" against Palestinian self-determination and intriguingly suggests West Bank and Gaza Palestinians could have Israeli citizenship. He is debated (or rather questioned) by Fouad Ajami, now professor at Johns Hopkins University's SAIS.

The state is considering a law that would allow students to carry concealed weapons on campus. The quintessential liberal reaction from Karen Tumulty:

Nearly spit out my coffee when I saw this one down at the bottom of A21 of the New York Times.

According to the AP, there isn't a single state in the country that allows students to carry a concealed weapon on campus, which might explain why there isn't a single example of students fighting back during one of these school shootings. The report quotes one student at UT who was at Virginia Tech during the shootings there. He says, "The idea that somebody could stop a school shooting with a gun is impossible. It's reactive, not preventative." That just doesn't make any sense. When candidate Obama would talk about gun control, he would often use the same formulation: "what works in Cheyenne may not work in Chicago." Well, what didn't work at Virginia Tech isn't going to work at the University of Texas.

After a decades-long reign as the most terrifying of phrases, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" relinquished its hold on the top spot this morning, thanks to the appearance of a fresh newcomer brought up from a farm team—The Akron Creepy Statists, presumably—by President Barack Obama:

The United States government will stand behind your warrantee...

Speaking from his retirement home in Sweden about his dethroning, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" mourned the changing nature of government expansionism that makes it impossible for him to compete in the Obama era.

"Believe me, I would have loved to guarantee warranties when I was in my prime. But back then, you had to go to other countries to find government interference on that level," he said, wistfully recalling the time he spent in Latvia during much of the 1980s after being run off by the American administration of the time. "These young whippersnappers just don't know how good they've got it."

Once again, Pakistan is the origin of another military-styled assault on civilian or government installations in South Asia. Today's terror assault on a police academy in Lahore, Pakistan, is the latest in a string of such attacks, which include the strike on the city of Mumbai, the storming of government offices in Kabul, and the ambush of the Sri Lankan Cricket team.

All of these attacks have been traced back to Pakistan-based and backed terrorist groups. Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s minister of the interior, admitted today's attack was likely carried out by Pakistani groups, but implied the terrorists are being armed by outside countries:

Interior ministry chief Rehman Malik suggested homegrown terror movements were responsible.

"The nation knows these terrorist organizations," he told Geo news, adding: "The question is -- from where they are getting grenades, guns and rocket launchers in such a large number?"

Pakistan has buried its head in the sand after each such attack and has attempted to blame other countries, mainly arch-rival India, for the terrorism emanating from Pakistani soil.

Malik is correct; these groups are well known to the Pakistani nation. To this day, many are still being supported by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency and elements within the military. The problem has gotten so bad that over the past several days that President Obama, Secretary of Defense Gate, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen have all gone on the record stating this.

And to answer Malik's question: Lashkar-e-Taiba, the likely culprit in this attack, operates in both Pakistan and in Pakistan-held Kashmir. The group is still supported, armed, and funded by the Pakistanis, despite claims otherwise. Just the other day, Lashkar's spokesman said the group is preparing for a fresh offensive in India after major clashes with Indian forces. And the Taliban and a host of allied terror groups freely operate in northwestern Pakistan and carry out attacks against the government and security forces. They have all the weapons needed to pull off such attack.

The video below is the subject of some controversy. It appears to show Chinese police beating Tibetan prisoners during last year's protests. The Chinese government claims the video is a fake, and shut down access to YouTube for some time last week in order to prevent access to the tape. The tape has now been removed by YouTube, presumably at the behest of the ChiCom government, which means Google is complicit in the crimes of an authoritarian regime in exchange for the chance to make an extra buck. The beating starts at about 3 minutes in. Indispensable China blogger Tim Johnson has the background here. And James Fallows will presumably have nothing to say on this because he "decline[s] to be drawn into the exhausting and irreconcilable historiographical controversies on this topic and will post no further retorts or elaborations on it." Perhaps Fallows can provide us with the Party's perspective on all this at his convenience.

Update: Ben Smith does the legwork and finds the video is still available on YouTube. So my apologies to the folks at Google who, unlike James Fallows, are apparently willing to stand up to the Red Chinese.

HT: Josh Rogin

THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported on March 12--three months after news broke of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme--that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had not returned or donated $100,000 Madoff had given the group. "We haven't returned the money, and there are no immediate plans to do so," DSCC spokesman Eric Schultz told TWS.

On Friday, Schultz told CNN that $100,000 in Madoff donations will be given to a fund set up for Madoff's victims. "It was under review. Now that the review is completed, we've decided to give the money to the trustee for distribution to the victims," Schultz said.

While most recipients of Madoff's political contributions have donated the money to charity, the offices of Hillary Clinton, Rep. David Obey, and NARAL have not responded to inquiries about what they have done with the contributions they received from Madoff.

Bill Ayers' lecture plans at Boston College gets, err, blown up.

"We are living through a similar time. An activist President is desperate to show he cares and is on top of things, working tirelessly to save the country."

Twitter is everywhere. You will be assimilated.

Tough crowd: "A regimented and eternally forgiving global command economy with no moral hazard will destroy us all."

Gore lit it up for Earth Hour.

PETA's after the Easter Bunny.

The frightening specter of Gov. McAuliffe rises.

Obama's paying for own White House renovations.

Labor <3s Likud.

Do the scandals matter yet?

A serious Reagan flashback.

Welcome to the Fox Nation.

Chris Hitchens vs. Mr. Definitely:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has rejected demands by Cardinal Joachim Meissner, the Catholic Archbishop of Cologne, that she apologize for her sharp criticism of Pope Benedict XVI’s handling of the Bishop Williamson scandal in early February. In essence, Cardinal Meissner argued that Merkel’s unprecedented and ill-conceived attacks on the pope were totally unjustified as the Vatican had already publicly called on the Holocaust-denying Bishop to retract his statements, making it clear that they were completely unacceptable. Also, prior to Merkel’s attacks, Pope Benedict XVI had also declared his “full and indisputable solidarity” with Jews and warned against the dangers of denying the Holocaust.

Chancellor Merkel did not even feel compelled to directly address the cardinal’s personal appeal for an apology but preferred to have her spokesman issue a short statement: “Everything that needed to be said has been said.” Rather than making even a conciliatory gesture short of an apology--i.e., issuing a statement indicating that the chancellor deeply respects the pope, that she did not mean to attack him personally and that she regrets any misunderstandings that may have occurred over the Williamson controversy--the leader of Germany’s ruling center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party seems to believe that she can afford to ignore if not antagonize important parts of her conservative CDU/CSU member and voter base.

He’s announced his intention to pursue peace with the “Palestinians,” whatever kind of peace there is to be had with the worthless Fatah on the one hand and the rocket-lobbing Hamas on the other; he’s handing the Israeli defense ministry (back) over to the same Ehud Barak who was prevented from giving away the store at Camp David nine years ago only by the intransigence of Yasser Arafat; and, newsflash to the EU: he hasn't ruled out a two-state solution!

So maybe the Euroweenies can can it with the threats for a little while--or at least until Tuesday when he actually takes over, and faces the true threat just an Iranian missile strike away.

Gates says "a flourishing democracy in Afghanistan" remains the long-term goal, but in the short-term the administration will focus on "making headway and reversing the Taliban's momentum and strengthening the Afghan army and police, and really going after Al Qaeda as the President said."

Holbrooke says Afghanistan is not Vietnam:

“I served in Vietnam for three and a half years and I’m aware of certain structural similarities,” Holbrooke said on CNN’s "State of the Union with John King."

“But there’s a fundamental difference — the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese never posed any direct threat to the United States and its homeland. The people we are fighting in Afghanistan and the people they are sheltering in Western Pakistan, pose a direct threat. Those are the men of 9-11, the people who killed Benazir Bhutto and you can be sure that as we sit here today, they are planning further attacks on the United States and our allies.”

Keep in mind that in February "contrarian" Chas Freeman was calling for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan because "The Taliban is not a direct military threat to the United States." That was the man Blair wanted to head the National Intelligence Council, and in his infinite wisdom Blair still thinks "he would have made a great National Intelligence Council Chairman."

Also, Gates talked about North Korea's imminent missile test, saying "The reality is that the six-party talks really have not made any headway anytime recently... Launching a missile like this and threatening to have a nuclear test, I think it says a lot about the imperviousness of this regime in North Korea to any kind of diplomatic overtures."

Is that a shot at Chris Hill?

Over at NRO, Andy McCarthy points to this piece in Friday's New York Times. The piece reports on the unification of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban factions, which have always been (in reality) allied in various ways, to fight American forces in Afghanistan. Some Taliban fighters cited in the piece say that Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban delegation was led by Mullah Zakir, a former detainee imprisoned at Guantánamo for several years.

The Times reports:

A front-line commander during the Taliban government, Mullah Zakir was captured in 2001 in northern Afghanistan and was detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, until his release in 2007, Afghan Taliban members contacted by telephone said.

The Pakistani fighters described Mullah Zakir as an impressive speaker and a trainer, and one said he was particularly energetic in working to unite the different Taliban groups. Beyond bolstering Taliban forces in Afghanistan, both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban leaders had other reasons to unite, Pakistani officials said.

As has been previously reported, Mullah Zakir, aka Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, is indeed an important Taliban commander. He has been described as one of the Taliban’s chief anti-American surge commanders. The British started raising concerns about his lethality and prominence in the Taliban several months ago. Zakir is responsible for increasingly sophisticated attacks using IED’s and other weaponry, British officials said. And now, the Times’s reporting adds intriguing new details about the scope of Zakir’s role.

Zakir’s story contains important lessons for those who simply repeat the detainees’ claims of innocence without any real inspection. Note that Taliban officials and fighters cited in press accounts have explained that Zakir was always a high-level Taliban leader. It was not his time at Guantánamo that pushed him into the Taliban’s arms. But you wouldn’t know this if you accepted Zakir’s testimony at Guantánamo at face value.

During his hearings, Zakir claimed that he was nothing more than a conscript who was “forcefully” armed by the Taliban and sold for a bounty by corrupt Northern Alliance forces. Zakir’s testimony fed into two prominent narratives that are often repeated: many of the detainees have been low-level conscripts unworthy of prolonged detention, and the only reason they were detained is because we paid for them to be turned over. This was probably true in some cases, but not many, and certainly not in Zakir’s case.

Zakir was clearly lying. As the Taliban members cited in the press have made clear, Zakir was a top-level commander close to Mullah Omar prior to his detention at Guantánamo. If U.S. forces paid a bounty for him it was for good reasons.

During one of his hearings at Guantánamo, Zakir was asked: “Do you like what the United States is doing in Afghanistan now?” Zakir responded: “Yes, I am very happy. I am very pleased like I told you before. They are [re]building my country.”

“I [have] never been America’s enemy and I never intend to be,” Zakir insisted.

He was lying.

On a day when President Obama announced his administration’s strategy (which has many merits) for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Admiral Mike Mullen reminds us of one of America’s most daunting challenges: the Pakistani intelligence services’ relationship with al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In an interview on CNN, the nation’s top military officer said there are “indications” that some within the ISI are supporting the Taliban and al Qaeda. “There are certainly indications that's the case,” Admiral Mullen said. “Fundamentally that's one of the things that has to change.”

Indeed, it does. But the question has always been how and why will it change? For example, the publicly-released version of CENTCOM’s new plan says much about Pakistan and the importance of turning back the jihadists’ advances, but it is short on details when it comes to how, specifically, this can be accomplished. There is no explicit mention of the ISI’s duplicitous role in all of this: The intelligence agency is tenuously allied with America in what was previously known as the “war on terror” and yet deeply involved with the Taliban and al Qaeda, as well as many other Pakistani-based extremist/terrorist organizations. The Bush administration did not make much of this in its public statements either, taking whatever help it could get from the troubled Pakistani nation in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. So, the Obama administration’s reticence to include this fundamental fact in CENTCOM’s new Af/Pak White Paper and its public comments is certainly not surprising.

Yet, Mullen’s comments hit on one of the central fault lines in this war. One of America’s most important allies is also allied with America’s enemies. This split personality is one of the fundamental dilemmas U.S. policymakers face. And there is no easy or obvious way to solve it. Still, it is refreshing to see Mullen state the obvious –- something that many of America’s leaders rarely say publicly: Pakistan’s intelligence service is sleeping with the enemy.

At a briefing with reporters this morning, Harry Reid said that Republicans attempted to "ruin our country" when some tried to change Senate rules so that only a simple majority would be needed to confirm judges, a legislative maneuver dubbed the "nuclear option." But yesterday Reid said that it would be okay for Democrats to pass nationalized health care and massive cap-and-trade energy tax with a simple majority through a slightly-less-scary-sounding maneuver known as "budget reconciliation". Reid said today of the GOP's toying with the so-called "nuclear option":

The nuclear option is only one of the things that the Republicans in power at the time did or tried to do to ruin our country. As I said at the time, the nuclear option is the most important issue that I had worked on in my entire career because if that had gone through it would have destroyed the Senate as we know it. I said at the time that if I became a majority leader and the nuclear option were part of the Senate's [rules], I would change them. There is no way that I would be part of using the nuclear option. And I want every Republican to hear that.

So what are we going to do to lower the rhetoric? I think I've done a pretty good job. Let's just move forward. If Republicans want to filibuster a judge, that's directly contrary to what they said their political philosophy is. But I guess it's all subject to change. I think that what they did to President Clinton's judges was a dark point in the history of our country, and I would hope we would not have to go through that again. It's going to be a little different now because we have a lot more numbers than we did then.

Reid then took a shot at Chief Justice John Roberts.

It's not entirely clear why Reid thinks the right to filibuster judges is so much more important than the right to filibuster nationalized health care. Democrats often point out that Bush and Republicans used budget reconciliation to pass tax cuts. GOP Senator Judd Gregg has defended this use of budget reconciliation, saying: "It has always been on issues on policies which already exist -- adjusting tax laws, adjusting tax rates, affecting this program that already exists or that program."

A GOP aide objects to the Democrats' budget reconciliation plans because they would entail "not only a massive tax of more than a trillion dollars, but fundamentally change" the American health-care and energy sectors and fund a new entitlement program. Perhaps more important than GOP objections, it seems like Reid will have a difficult time persuading some Democrats to deploy their own "nuclear option" on health care and cap-and-trade. Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad says he opposes the tactic, as does Sen. Max Baucus.

Some Democrats opposed to cap-and-trade but in favor of health care reform are scared of allowing budget reconciliation. "We've checked with the parliamentarian, and we've confirmed that the rules don't allow you to limit the scope of" budget reconciliation to health care but not cap-and-trade, a GOP aide said. "You can swear it's only going to be health care, but it's not binding. If you type in health care [in the bill], that's non-binding."

Some conservatives have been cheered by the announcement of Obama's Afghanistan policy (see Kristol and Kagan) but Tom Donnelly criticizes the counternarcotics component of the strategy in a post below, John McCain told the Washington Times that Obama's plan was "not enough," and a Republican emails THE WEEKLY STANDARD with this broadside:

The speech was classic Obama -- all show no substance. He announces 17,000 combat troops in a press release but announces 4,000 traniers in a big ceremony. He accepts the Bush level for the ANA [Afghan National Army] when McCain called for at least doubling it last summer. [General David] McKiernan has called for 30,000 troops and candidate Obama said he would get them. President Obama shortchanges the commander he said he would support.

Obama spoke about defeating AQ but not about defeating the Taliban. Obama may have rejected the Biden-Steinberg minimalist path to defeat but he chose a Holbrookian keep options open NOT a Petreaus security first counterinsurgecy strategy. He spoke in platitudes about Afghan governance, counternarcotics, and Pakistan's need to do more on counterterror but offerred not a single specific on how to get there. Instead he uses Afghanistan to push his opening to Iran -- as if Iran wants to see the us succeed in Afghanistan so a pro-American, democratic ally is on Tehran'ss eastern border. This is lowest common denominator consensus policy that will not lead to success in Afghanistan.

The NRCC came out with a heavy web ad today, keying off NY-20 Democratic candidate Scott Murphy's assertion that he opposes the death penalty for terrorists:

The race, seen as increasingly important as an indicator of Republican fortunes, has also become increasingly close in the closing weeks of the contest. A Siena Research Institute poll showed Murphy up four points on Republican Jim Tedisco today— a 16-point swing from Tedisco's commanding February lead. A loss in this right-leaning, rural district where Republicans outnumber Democrats would be bad news for embattled RNC chair Michael Steele in particular, and a revamping party that needs a win under its belt.

The Tedisco team claims its internal polling still shows him leading the race, and Republicans have outspent Murphy, but Dems are bringing out the big guns to take a shot at the seat vacated by moderate Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand. An Obama fund raising e-mail went out to citizens of the district, and he headlined two fund raisers for the DNC in Washington this week.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs yesterday defended Obama's political fund-raising in tough economic times, saying, "We haven't seen politics by either party stop in this period, though I think the president fully understands the situation the American people face."

Over the past week, Obama has also activated his grassroots campaign apparatus, Organizing for America, to put pressure on Congress to support his budget proposal.

The group, now housed within the DNC, announced yesterday that Saturday's door-to-door canvassing by more than 10,000 volunteers in all 50 states collected more than 100,000 pledges.

"It is the most wasteful and ineffective program I have seen in 40 years."

That is how Richard Holbrooke once described the Bush administration’s counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan. And even if one allows for the Holbrookian propensity to exaggeration and bombast, the ambassador had a good point. The addiction to eradication -- the president had declared himself to be "a spray man" -- confounded efforts to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign.

And so it was slightly jarring to hear President Obama, in outlining his broader Afghanistan strategy this morning, mention the need for an expanded counternarcotics program. The drug trade "undermines the economy" and "fuels the insurgency," he said.

While the full details and costs of the revitalized counternarcotics program are not yet clear, Yochi Dreazen reported in this morning’s Wall Street Journal the effort will be ambitious. The "counternarcotics offensive" will be focused in the Helmand River valley -- not just the main source of the opium trade but a hotbed of the insurgency -- and on providing "alternative livelihoods" to poppy cultivation. Under this plan, reports Dreazen,

U.S. or Afghan forces will first offer Afghan farmers free wheat see to replace their crops that produce opium. If farmers refuse, U.S. or Afghan personnel will burn their fields, then again offer them free replacement seeds. A senior U.S. military official described the approach as a "carrot, stick, carrot" effort.

This is an anodyne description of what promises to be a genuinely bold stroke. Helmand province, along with Kandahar just to the east, is by far the highest incidence of insurgent attacks in Afghanistan. The British forces who have been fighting intensely there since 2006 will also be increased from 8,000 to about 10,000, and Helmand will be a focus of many of the additional U.S. troops to be deployed under the Obama plan. Tackling the drug trade problem simultaneously -- and Helmand accounts for about half the total Afghan poppy crop -- surely means that the levels of violence will skyrocket.

The tactic of providing alternative livelihoods, particularly substituting wheat for poppies, is hardly a guarantee of counterinsurgency success, as Holbrooke himself once made plain:

Everyone talks about "alternative livelihoods" and alternative crops as the solution to the drug problem. This is true in theory -- but this theory has been tried elsewhere with almost no success. Poppies are an easy crop to grow and are far more valuable than any other product that can be grown in the rocky, remote soil of most of Afghanistan. Without roads, it is hard to get heavier (and less valuable) crops to market -- and what market is there, anyway? It will take years to create the networks of roads, markets and lucrative crops that would induce farmers to switch, especially when government officials, including some with close ties to the presidency, are protecting the drug trade and profiting from it.

And finally, the drug trade is a very flexible and fungible one -- it is the prurest form of capitalism. Again, Holbrooke knows the problems. "It hasn't hurt the Taliban one iota," he once said in criticizing the Bush anti-drug plan, "because whatever money they're getting from the drugs trade, they get whatever they need whether we reduce the acreage or not."

To charges that her scheduled appearance at a Justice Department Women’s History Month event (“Supervisors are encouraged to grant official time to employees to attend”) may be “politicizing” the department, Democratic political hack Donna Brazile responds:

I am going in my capacity as an Adjunct Professor in the Women and Gender Studies at Georgetown University — not as a CNN contributor, ABC news consultant or Vice Chair of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. Perhaps, I am going as a woman of valor — a woman of courage to pay tribute to women who work at the DOJ and elsewhere.

This is very reassuring. So, too, is her promise to “pay tribute to women who dare, women of courage and the many milestones we have achieved and the path ahead.” Of course she will be mentioning Condoleezza Rice, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin . . .

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for poor old Gordon Brown. First there was the slight of the Obami; next, those crappy (pirated?) DVDs they gave him didn't work; then the smackdown by Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan went viral.

Seeking a little hiatus from public humiliation maybe, Brown schlepped his wounded self off to Latin America this week. But rude awakening came yesterday in a tirade delivered by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Reports Sky News:

During a press conference, da Silva, a socialist who told Brown poor countries should not have to suffer because of the mistakes of the rich, suddenly pointed his finger at Brown and said, "This is a crisis that was caused by white people with blue eyes. And before the crisis, they looked as if they knew everything about economics."

Won’t someone give this guy a break?

The video from the Huffington Post:

But buried within the hours of debate in the Senate on Thursday is an exchange you'd be more likely to hear in a locker room than a congressional hearing.

Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) was on the receiving end of this one, after telling Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), "Oh, you are good."

"Well, your wife said the same thing," Grassley responded.

Via Ben Smith

Unconfirmed reports from Britain and Iraq indicate that a deal may have been struck to free five British hostages who were kidnapped almost two years ago in an Iraqi ministry in the heart of Baghdad. According to the Telegraph, the group that kidnapped the Britons said U.S. has agreed to turn over 10 senior "Special Groups" operatives to free the men. The Special Groups are what the United States calls the Iranian-backed Shia terror groups.

The group claimed that it had secured the freedom of 10 prominent Shia Muslim militants from US custody in Iraq. One of the men, Qais al Khazali, the group's leader, had been accused of murdering five US soldiers in a raid on an army base near the city of Karbala in 2007. His brother Laith and Ali Mussa Daqduq, a Lebanese Hezbollah figure, were also reportedly included in the phased release agreement.

Qais al Khazali was the leader of the Asib al Haq, the violent breakaway faction of the Mahdi Army that conducts attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians with the deadly explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs. His group was behind the raid on the Karbala Joint Provincial Coordination Center, which resulted in the kidnapping and murder of five U.S. officers and soldiers. Qazali's men attempted to move the U.S. soldiers into Iran before they abandoned the mission.

Ali Mussa Daqduq is not just an average Hezbollah operative. Daqduq is a 24-year veteran of Hezbollah and has commanded both a Hezbollah special operations unit and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s security detail. He was sent to Iraq with the explicit purpose to aid in transforming the Mahdi Army into a movement like Hezbollah.

While the other Special Groups operatives who may be released have not been named, candidates would include Azhar al Dulaimi, one of Qazali's senior tactical commanders; Mahmud Farhadi, one of the three Iranian regional commanders in the Ramazan Corps, the command set up by Iran's Qods Force to direct operations in Iraq; and the "Irbil Five," the five Qods Force agents detained in northern Iraq at the end of 2006.

The report has yet to be confirmed, but if it is true, the release of these Iranian agents would be a blow to the improved security situation in Iraq and provide an unneeded morale boost to the Shia terror groups which have been beaten back over the past two years.

At a breakfast meeting with reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor this morning, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that he could vote for a health care bill that included insurance coverage for abortion.

TWS: Senator, progressive Rev. Jim Wallis recently said that including abortion provisions in health care reform would kill health care reform. One, do you agree with that assessment? And, two, will you vote for a health care bill that covers abortion?

Senator Reid: Does what with abortion?

TWS: Covered it--provided insurance coverage for abortion.

Senator Reid: Well, first of all abortion is an important issue, very emotional issue, but we have to recognize that unintended pregnancies is where we should focus our attention. Unintended pregnancies wind up--half of them wind up in abortions, so everything we can do to limit the number of unintended pregnancies helps with the number of abortions. I think that it's very obvious we don't do enough in that regard. I've worked--I don't want to boast, but I think I've been the leader if not one of the leaders in promoting legislation dealing with contraceptives. Hillary Clinton was a tremendous asset in that regard, and it's kind of unusual with someone with my standing about abortion to be awarded in Nevada a legislator of the year award by Planned Parenthood. So I think I'm heading in the right direction.

Reid didn't answer the question directly, so after the meeting concluded, THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked him again if he could support a national health care bill that provided coverage for abortion. "I could," Reid replied.

During his tenure in the Senate, Reid has cast a number of anti-abortion votes. In 2003, Reid voted against an amendment to express the sense of the Senate that Roe v. Wade was rightly decided. As late as February 2008, Reid voted, along with eight other Senate Democrats, in favor of an amendment to prohibit federal funds from paying for abortions.

In 1998, Reid filled out a questionnaire stating that he opposes taxpayer-funding of abortion and thinks abortion should only be legal in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is at stake. So does Reid still believe that abortion should be illegal?

Reid spokesman Jim Manley told me during a phone interview that Senator Reid has not changed his position on abortion since 1998. Senator Reid "is strongly pro-life," Manley said, "and I resent any suggestion to the contrary, and his voting record speaks for himself."

The letter is signed by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Chairman of Armed Services, and the Chairman of the House Intel Committee. It's a serious group of people, and they warn Obama:

Engagement must be serious and credible, but it cannot be open-ended. Our goal should be to bring about Iran's near-term suspension of uranium enrichment, and we should offer Iran meaningful incentives in order to achieve this goal. But we cannot allow Iran to use diplomatic discussions as a cover for continuing to work on its nuclear program....

We urge that the talks begin as soon as possible, so that we will have the earliest possible indication of whether they will succeed in halting Iran's nuclear program. American action on this matter cannot be deferred...until after the Iranian presidential elections...

The Congressmen lay out a series of steps -- sanctions -- that should be implemented if the talks fail to "yield the desired results." They go on, "In short, Mr. President, if we truly mean that Iran cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, urgent action is required today."

This strikes me as one half CYA and one half genuine. Clearly there is a real concern that Obama does not mean that an Iranian nuke is unacceptable -- that he may be willing to live with such an outcome despite his statements to the contrary on the campaign trail. Democrats will pay a political price if Iran goes nuclear on their watch and these folks want it on record that they urged vigorous action while the president dithered. On the other hand, this letter strengthens Obama's hand in any negotiation with the Iranians and provides him with a credible threat of sanctions at the first sign that engagement is going nowhere.

The full letter can be read here.

Bob Kagan weighs in on Obama's speech:

Hats off to President Obama for making a gutsy and correct decision on Afghanistan....

It is also evidence that the president is pragmatic in the best sense of the word. He and his key advisers, such as Richard Holbrooke, understand that better and more effective government in Afghanistan is a key to the successful defense of American security. Self-proclaimed “realists” argue, as always, that the pragmatic course is to pull back in Afghanistan. But President Obama recognizes in Afghanistan what the previous administration only belatedly recognized in Iraq: that the only way out is forward.

Kagan has some criticism for the president, too, but today the overwhelming sense is one of relief -- that Obama has stepped into the breach and claimed this fight as his own, and that he's set U.S. forces on the path to victory.

Read the whole thing here.

I asked the boss for a reaction to the Afghan speech. He said he would have framed a few things differently, but his basic response was: "All hail Obama!"

About that middle-class tax cut...

NY Post endorses Tedisco.

Party like it's 2008, with a disproportionate number of Sarah Palin stories!

The world supply of irony is not in danger.

The populist formerly known as Prince.

With apologies to Allahpundit: Dude.

My thoughts exactly.

Obama's aunt's deportation hearing set for April 1.

Obama's tax task force includes an AIG board member.

Ahhh, California.

Just because:

Last week Politico's Michael Calderone wrote a piece about the left-wing "Journo-list" listserv set up by the American Prospect's Ezra Klein. There are several hundred members, including left-wing bloggers, mainstream reporters, members of the administration, and their hangers-on. The communications are all off the record, but Klein assured Calderone that the forum is nothing more than a place "where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely."

Mickey Kaus got his hands on one of the discussions inside what he calls the "secret liberal media email cabal." The issue: Whether or not the New Republic editor and owner Marty Peretz is an inveterate "crazy-ass" racist. The participants include Chris Hayes, Eric Alterman and Katha Pollitt from the Nation magazine, Matthew Yglesias from the Center for American Progress, and New Republic writers Jonathan Chait, Issac Chotiner, and Clay Risen. Alyssa Rosenberg, a correspondent for Government Executive and occasional contributor to the New Republic, also pops up in the discussion. The emails are all dated March 24, 2009.

Chait defends his boss and chides the other members of the group for the "junior high quality" tone of the conversation. He also questions whether the others have the courage to make their charges in public. Hayes says he'd be "more than happy to call Marty Peretz a racist to his (electronic) face." Hayes has written for the New Republic several times in the last year.

Chait says in his email that Peretz is attacked on the list "2 or 3 times a week," and another New Republic staffer, Jamie Kirchick, seems to be attacked so frequently that Alterman casually uses his name as an epithet.

This has all the makings of a boffo reality show. Call it High School Musical IV: Journalism Class.

Did Christopher Hill, Barack Obama's nominee to serve as Ambassador to Iraq, lie under oath during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday? One exchange he had with Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, deserves considerable scrutiny.

Wicker read Hill a passage from the piece I wrote about Hill for this week's TWS. That article focused on two incidents in which Hill disregarded George W. Bush's policy of refusing to conduct bilateral negotiations with North Korea.

Wicker first read this paragraph: "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had given Hill permission to meet face-to-face with the North Koreans but only on the condition that diplomats from China were also in the room. Although the Chinese participated in the early moments of the discussions, they soon left. Hill did not leave with them."

And then he read this passage, a direct quote from Meltdown, an exhaustively reported book on the North Korean nuclear crisis written by CNN reporter Mike Chinoy. "Although Rice remained supportive of reviving the diplomatic process, Hill had held the bilateral discussion with North Korean negotiator Kim Gye Gwan in defiance of her instructions."

Hill's response is incredible -- literally:

Well, thank you. Thank you very much.

Actually, what this was was the start of the -- this was in the summer of 2005, and this was an effort to get the six-party process going because the North Koreans had boycotted. And so what Secretary Rice agreed to do was to have bilateral -- a bilateral meeting with the understanding that the North Koreans would then announce at the end of the bilateral meeting their participation in the six-party process. But she wanted the Chinese to be there.

So which is it? Did Rice agree to "a bilateral meeting" with the North Koreans or did she want the Chinese to be there? They are mutually exclusive. Did Rice tell Hill he could simply disregard Bush administration policy? Unlikely. Chinoy, who interviewed Hill for his book and offers a sympathetic account of Hill's diplomatic work, explains it this way on page 239 of his book. "The North Koreans made clear that, while they were open to returning to the talks, they wanted a bilateral meeting with Hill before making any announcement. Hill's problem was that Rice and other senior officials, while willing to sanction a meeting, insisted that it be trilateral, with China participating as well." [Emphasis added]

They "insisted" that China participate as well. If that's right -- and it's consistent with my reporting, administration policy and at least part of Hill's answer -- then Rice did not "agreed to a bilateral meeting" with North Korea in the summer of 2005.

Hill continued his response to Wicker at the hearing:

The Chinese came, but the North Koreans were not willing to carry on the meeting with the Chinese. So I was there in the meeting room. The North Koreans were arriving, and the Chinese were disappearing. So the question I had -- and Secretary Rice was in the air in between Anchorage, where she had a refueling stop, and coming into Beijing. So the audible I had to call at that point was, do I continue the meeting or do I walk out?

That is, do I adhere to the stated policy of the president or do I freelance? Hill decided to freelance. And, as Chinoy points out, he did not have to call an audible at all. "He could have called Rice on her plane to ask for guidance. Instead, displaying the willingness to take risks and to stretch -- if not ignore -- his instructions that would characterize his modus operandi in the coming months, Hill decided to go ahead on his own and present her with a fait accompli."

More Hill, from the hearing:

Secretary Rice arrived that night in Beijing, and in the morning -- and I remember this very clearly -- she was quite angry, but quite angry with the Chinese for not having remained through the process. And she expressed that directly to the Chinese foreign minister in a meeting that I attended -- that is, the next morning. So that was the incident with respect to the meeting with the North Koreans.

This presents a question. If Secretary Rice had "agreed" to "have a bilateral meeting" with the North Koreans, as Hill testified under oath, why would she have been "quite angry" that the Chinese did not attend the meeting? On its face, Hill's testimony makes no sense.

Wicker concluded by asking HIll whether he and Rice had a confrontation about the "audible" Hill called. "Never," Hill responded.

If Hill "remembers this quite clearly," he seemed to remember it a different way shortly after the incident took place. Again to Chinoy:

When Rice arrived in Beijing later that night, Hill went to her hotel suite. "The bad news," he told her, "is that the Chinese didn't show up. But the good news is that the North Koreans announced they would come back to the talks." Rice was not amused, although Hill felt that, since getting the talks under way again was one of her goals, her anger would pass.

There are two possibilities: HIll told the truth in his testimony and Chinoy's account is wrong. Or Hill lied under oath.

If I had to bet, I'd bet on the latter. Why? Chinoy quotes Hill directly from his conversation with Rice and goes on to describe how Hill "felt" about their confrontation -- two facts that strongly suggest Hill was Chinoy's source.

And on pp. 368-369, Chinoy lists the people he interviewed for his book. Rice is not among them.

Hill's rogue diplomacy was not a one-time thing. He did the same thing in the fall of 2006. Three weeks after President Bush declared at a press conference that the U.S. would not meet bilaterally with the North Koreans, Hill sat down with Kim Gye Gwan, his North Korean counterpart.

In doing so, Hill overruled the president to engage a rogue state, included on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terror. And he did so, we now know, at a time when North Korea was proliferating nuclear technology to Syria, another state sponsor of terror, in a facility that was financed, at least in part, by Iran, another state sponsor of terror.

And for this he is rewarded with the country's most important diplomatic post?

It seems clear that Hill twice disregarded presidential policy and ignored instructions that expressly forbade him from a bilateral meeting with North Korea.

Did he lie about it, too?

Barack Obama will unveil his plan for Afghanistan Friday. Mike Allen reports that the new plan will include 4200 more troops, as well as civilian reinforcements. (See Goldfarb on the politics of the plan here.)

Allen writes:

The plan is at the heavier end of the spectrum of possibilities the White House considered, according to several top officials briefed on the plan.

A minimalist approach would have focused on counterterrorism and providing security past national elections later this year. An even more robust approach would have included a broader counterinsurgency campaign and an even longer and more idealistic commitment to the central government.

John McCain warned against such a "minimalist" approach in a thoughtful speech at the Brussels Forum last weekend. And he laid out his vision -- a compelling one, in my view -- for a more aggressive counterinsurgency strategy.

A narrow short-term focus on counterterrorism, by contrast, would repeat precisely the mistakes we the United States made for years in Iraq prior to the surge, with the same catastrophic consequences. Before 2007 in Iraq, American Special Forces had complete freedom of action to strike at terrorist leaders, backed by more than 120,000 conventional American forces and overwhelming airpower. Although we succeeded in killing countless terrorists – including the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq – the insurgency continued to grow in strength and violence. It was not until we changed course and applied a new approach – a counterinsurgency strategy focused on providing basic security for the people and improving their lives – that the cycle of violence was at last broken.

One indication of the extraordinary success of that strategy in Iraq is this fact: "Iraq didn't come up once," reports someone who traveled with McCain. "Amazing what a year and a surge will do."

Indeed.

Mike Allen quotes an administration official on Obama's new Afghanistan policy to be announced tomorrow:

President Barack Obama plans to announce an escalation in Afghanistan in a speech at the White House on Friday morning, committing 4,200 more troops and hundreds more civilians, and embracing a new system of benchmarks to measure progress.

“He’s gone all in,” said an official briefed on the plan. “This is Obama’s war. He’s pushed all the chips to the center of the table.”

Some progressives will try and claim that this approach is exactly what they've counseled. The more honest among them will attack the president for escalating the war. But it's clear that the "all in" approach is not what they wanted. Earlier this week Ilan Goldenberg, the policy director at the progressive National Security Network, offered this analysis at the Huffington Post:

The "all in" approach, best exemplified by John McCain and Joe Lieberman's op-ed in the Washington Post, argues for "victory" through a full scale commitment of undetermined length at an undetermined cost. It is supported by hawks like McCain and Lieberman who generally believe that America must "win" any war no matter the cost.

Goldenberg conceded that most progressives and realists favored a "minimalist approach," though he predicted that the administration would pursue a "middle approach" that involves "doing what we can to help the people of Afghanistan, while limiting our military commitment and recognizing that America's ability to influence events in far off unstable states such as Afghanistan is incredibly limited."

I'm struck by a couple of things, but none more so than the fact that the administration's left-wing supporters don't seem to have any real insight into what's going on inside the administration--because the progressives have no real relationship with the "realists" who are making policy. Otherwise Goldenberg wouldn't have offered speculation that was so clearly off-base. Neither would Joe Klein have written just last week:

The Obama plan, I am told, will not immediately add to the 17,000 additional U.S. troops that the President has already approved. And this is the fight that McCain, Lieberman and the neocons are itching for...

The president is going "all in" and adding more troops to the fight. His most vocal supporters on the left had no idea this was coming and if you'd asked them yesterday what they thought of such a plan they would have said it was neocon fanaticism. Now watch how they fall into line. But this policy announcement shows just how little influence, and how little insight, the progressives have right now on this administration.

Marc Ambinder previews Obama's new Afghan policy.

Obama to speak in Prague.

Paul Ryan regrets his vote in favor of taxing AIG bonuses at 90 percent.

Will Rahm Emanuel give back the $320,000 he took from Freddie Mac?

Debunking the latest libel against the IDF.

Rich Lowry on the war in Afghanistan.

Speaker of Iran's parliament to Obama: "Our problem with America is not an emotional problem that could be solved by sending congratulations."

Berkeley to open a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements.

Via Abe Greenwald, anti-semitic propaganda now appearing in the Washington Post...

Ash Carter, Barack Obama's nominee for Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, was on the Hill today answering questions about his qualifications to serve as the Pentagon's top weapons buyer. Carter has no real experience in this field, as John McCain kindly pointed out for the committee. But that doesn't necessarily mean he isn't up to the task. What is clear is that Carter has recently taken at least one controversial position that is quite relevant given reports that North Korea is preparing for a major test next month of a Taepodong missile capable of hitting the United States.

In 2006, amid similar reports, Carter co-bylined a piece in the Washington Post with former Secretary of Defense William Perry calling on the Bush administration to "immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched." The authors asked:

Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to U.S. soil? We believe not.

Carter and Perry were very specific about what needed to be done, how the United States might proceed, and what the consequences might be -- a full-scale war on the Korean peninsula. Still, they urged a strike:

This is a hard measure for President Bush to take. It undoubtedly carries risk. But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North Korea's race to threaten this country would be greater. Creative diplomacy might have avoided the need to choose between these two unattractive alternatives. Indeed, in earlier years the two of us were directly involved in negotiations with North Korea, coupled with military planning, to prevent just such an outcome. We believe diplomacy might have precluded the current situation. But diplomacy has failed, and we cannot sit by and let this deadly threat mature. A successful Taepodong launch, unopposed by the United States, its intended victim, would only embolden North Korea even further. The result would be more nuclear warheads atop more and more missiles.

Today the United States faces precisely the same threat, and Carter is on the verge of joining the Obama administration as a senior defense official. Does he still support a strike against North Korea? How do his views on this issue shape his views of the military's procurement needs, particularly with regard to missile defense and the F-22?

While the rest of the media obsesses over Obama's latest campaign event and its implications for marijuana legalization, some reporter might want to ask Ash Carter whether a quick confirmation would leave him lobbying the Obama administration for a first-strike against North Korea's missile program.

You know, it is an appalling indictment of our society that a public figure can still look at the first black President of the United States of America and see only a basketball star. When Eugene Robinson observes the intellectual dexterity of an Ivy-League educated intellectual and sees only a "reverse 360-degree windmill tomahawk jam." When he has the nerve—or, should I say, audacity?— to equate the leader of the free world on national TV to a stereotypically imposing felon with a prison girlfriend, while an approving host laughs along.

And, why? All because Barack Obama is black? Are we so steeped, as a people, in our country's institutional, inherent (and, let's throw in imperial for good measure, because it's an America-bashing word that starts with "i"), and imperial racism that we cannot see the man beyond his skin color? That we must weigh down this lofty leader with the hegemonic chains of our historic shame, just when he's trying to soar? I am so outrageously outraged by this man's comments, but not just this man's comments. I am outraged for our country, and its sad bequeathal to a man who not only inherited Bush's deficit, but our ignorance.

I weep along with Obama and our better angels, as they try—perhaps in vain— to lift us from the sexist, patriarchal muck of American oppressi...wait, what? Oh, Eugene Robinson's a liberal? Dude, why didn't you tell me? Outrage canceled. Everything's cool. Move along with the hope and change:

Here, from the Associated Press, is a partial account of DNI Dennis Blair’s first press conference today (emphasis mine):

During his news conference, Blair also said the Obama administration is still wrestling with what to do with the remaining 240 detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which the president has ordered closed.

Some of the detainees, deemed non-threatening, may be released into the United States as free men, Blair confirmed.

That would happen when they can't be returned to their home countries, because the governments either won't take them or the U.S. fears they will be abused or tortured. That is the case with 17 Uighurs (WEE'-gurz), Chinese Muslim separatists who were cleared for release from the jail long ago. The U.S. can't find a country willing to take them, and it will not turn them over to China.

Blair said the former prisoners would have [to] get some sort of assistance to start their new lives in the United States.

“We can't put them out on the street,” he said.

Four short questions/comments:

(1) Does this mean that the Obama administration is planning on giving some freed Guantanamo detainees a stipend? It sure appears that way. So, not only is the Obama administration planning on freeing some detainees on U.S. soil, it is also going to pay them to live here. Amazing. Who would have thought that we would see the day when detainees who were once labeled enemy combatants would be receiving welfare?

(2) The Uighur detainees are cited, over and over again, as the types of detainees who can be safely released into the U.S. This conclusion has been reached through a combination of specious reasoning and ignorance.

None of the 17 Uighurs are master terrorists on par with the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They were mostly new recruits at the time of their capture. However, as I have argued before, they are all affiliated with and/or members of a designated terrorist organization, received training at a training camp in the al Qaeda/Taliban stronghold of Tora Bora, and have admitted that they were trained by two known terrorists. And, on top of that, the group that trained them threatened to attack the Olympic Games in China last year.

Even if you don’t think that we should lock them up and throw away the key, do we really want to pay them to live on U.S. soil?

(3) The AP says the United States can’t find a country to take the Uighurs, other than China, which may treat them harshly. But that really remains to be seen. Ireland, for example, has apparently offered to take some Guantanamo detainees. Other European nations have been somewhat more reticent.

(4) Is the Obama administration considering paying other Guantanamo detainees to live in the U.S. as well?

Update: AFP has Blair's full quote:

"If we are to release them in the United States, we need some sort of assistance for them to start a new life," said National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair at his first press conference.

"You can't just put them on the street," he added. "All that is work in progress."

In other words, the DNI's principal concern seems to be the well being of the Gitmo detainees on American soil, and not the security of the American people.

Just in time for Obama's Afghanistan speech, a new report has been released on the war in Afghanistan:

The addition of 17,000 U.S. combat troops and military support personnel by summer 2009—bringing U.S. troops to 55,000, their highest level to date—may be sufficient to freeze the security situation in Afghanistan for a while, but it is surely not enough to turn the tide. The United States must fulfill the request of General David McKiernan, the commander of the allied International Security Assistance Force, for an additional 15,000 U.S. troops, bringing the number of U.S. forces to 70,000, or about half the level in Iraq. This increase must include troops for combat as well as mentor teams for the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police to fill critical gaps in the training effort.

Together with the 32,000 coalition troops already there, this increase will bring international forces to about 100,000—a nearly 300 percent increase over the average force level for the period from 2002 to 2007. This force level will most probably need to be sustained in the short term to intermediate term as Afghanistan’s army and police forces become more capable and ready.

As Christian Brose says, "This is brought to you by none other than those war-mongering neo-cons from the Center for American Progress." This report only confirms my suspicion that nobody takes progressives very seriously on foreign policy -- not Obama, certainly not Clinton, and not even Podesta, who employs a good number of them. Podesta is obviously committed to implementing a progressive domestic policy, and he saw to it that some of the top people at CAP working on those issues ended up inside the administration (Melody Barnes comes to mind). But on foreign policy, the progressives have been completely shut out in favor of a realists with roots on the center-right.

And now CAP is putting out documents calling for a huge increase in troop levels in Afghanistan and a long-term commitment to bringing democracy and stability to that country through force of arms. That's a great idea, but it's not progressive.

The gun-grabbers are at it again, or at least they were until Eric Holder's call for a new assault weapons ban ran into a wall of bipartisan opposition in Congress. The administration told him to pipe down and talk of an assault weapons ban has died with it. But the coverage of all this is amusing. Take Newsweek, which describes Holder's misstep as a "self-inflicted gun wound." Isikoff and Hosenball open their report:

After fierce resistance from the gun lobby and its allies in Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder has dialed back talk about reimposing a federal assault weapons ban to help curb the spiraling violence in Mexico.

As much as 90 percent of the assault weapons and other guns used by Mexican drug cartels are coming from the United States, fueling drug-related violence that is believed to have killed more than 7,000 people since January 2008, according to estimates by Mexican and U.S. law enforcement officials. But the political obstacles to addressing the U.S.-to-Mexico weapons flow are dramatically underscored by Holder's experience in just the last few weeks.

Liberals have been trying to limit Second Amendment rights for decades now. The argument has always rested on the damage that American guns do to American communities. Every time there's another school shooting -- a Virginia Tech or a Columbine -- editorial boards across the country demand some new firearms regulations. But Americans have rejected those arguments. They want their guns. They've weighed the costs and benefits and decided in favor of gun rights. The Supreme Court has come down in favor of an individual right to bear arms. The matter has been settled.

But for some reason Eric Holder, and apparently many in the press, have some absurd idea that the violence in Mexico will make Americans change their minds. Columbine didn't do it, but a Mexican drug war will finally convince law-abiding Americans that their tradition of gun-ownership simply comes with too high a price. Right. Because American gun-owners lose a lot of sleep worrying about drug-fueled violence in Nuevo Laredo.

It's been more than ten years since Bill Clinton order strikes against the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in response to the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Then the United States was acting on information that tied Sudan to both al Qaeda, which was said to be using the facility to manufacture chemical weapons, and Iraq (which was believed to have provided funding and expertise to the project).

Now the Israelis are reported to have bombed a weapons convoy traveling from Sudan toward the Egyptian border with Gaza. The attack happened in January, and the weapons allegedly originated in Iran. But it's hard to imagine that the Israelis would have gone to such trouble over a few crates of arms and ammunition. Haaretz speculates that the trucks may have been carrying long-rang Fajr rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv, and that the secondary goal of the raid was to send a message to the Iranians: Israel can strike at long distances and with precise intelligence.

But the operation also highlights the still festering problems of Sudan. In the last decade the Sudanese have collaborated with terrorist groups like Hamas and al Qaeda and with terror supporting states like Iran and pre-war Iraq, all while waging a genocide against its own citizens in Darfur. Likewise the statements from the Sudanese government are indistinguishable from the statements made by al Qaeda and its ilk. The New York Times quotes a Sudanese government spokesman pushing back against reports that it was the Israelis, and not U.S. jets, that carried out the raid:

“We don’t differentiate between the U.S. and Israel. They are all one.”

If the weapons were bound for Gaza, the Israelis were well within their rights to destroy them. If the weapons were bound for Darfur or somewhere else, then the strike was a mitzvah. Either way, if this administration is serious about reining in Khartoum, it's obviously going to take a lot more than the appointment of Scott Gration as special envoy to Sudan.

Don't question their priorities. Sure, the economy's bad and the budget's out of control, but they're just making an "investment" in devising a fair collegiate competition system that will ensure that American football stays competitive in the long term.

At Obama's first online town hall meeting, he didn't field a lot of tough questions, but one small businessman from Arlington gave the president a close-up look at the kind of person who can be lumped in with the "richest" in the federal tax code.

Describing himself as a veteran and a small business owner who provides online educational content to schools, the questioner didn't look the part of the suspendered, pin-striped fat cats of the fevered dreams of liberals. He explained to Obama that he is one of the job creators on whom the president is counting to "create or save" all the jobs his stimulus promises.

"I'm still making money. I'm still hiring," he said. "And, I'm plowing all that money back into the company...All of that counts as income to me before I ever see a penny of it."

He then asked if there were changes that could be made to the tax code that would prevent people like him from being caught up in the "richest" brackets "before we ever see a dime," so they wouldn't be punished for building businesses and investing in the economy.

Obama's answer was telling, as he assured the man that he was committed to lowering the "tax burden on small businesses and start-ups," but "as they grow, their tax burden is gonna grow accordingly." Small businesses, of course, being virtuous and politically palatable until they create a product good enough to make them big, at which point they should be flogged with the populist whip and taken for all they're worth, despite the fact that doing so prevents them from creating more jobs. The jab at larger businesses was unnecessary to answer the question, but you could tell he wanted to reassure the audience that he wasn't veering into tax-cut-friendly territory.

He went on to tell the businessman about the cut in capital gains taxes for small businesses, but "you won't see an immediate benefit on that. It will kick in five years from now," Obama said. I'm sure his current and prospective employees are thrilled to know, during these hard times, that help is just five short years away.

I don't know this businessman's particular economic situation, but it sounded awfully like he was dealing with a more immediate problem— perhaps the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2010, which would allow the tax rates of the "richest" to rise. Swept up in the "richest" brackets, as President Bush often noted, are some small business owners whose business income counts toward their personal income bracket.

Obama's liberalism and populism repeatedly put him at odds with the very business owners, investors, and even Wall Street denizens he's relying on to deliver his promises. He needs Americans like this Arlington businessman to "create or save" three million jobs, and he needs hedge fund managers to invest to save the failing banks. Yet he attacks both, with policies and purple prose.

Good thing no one can measure whether he actually creates jobs, so he's in the clear.

Also of note at the White House's first online town hall:

The Stats: WhiteHouse.gov says it received more than 104,000 questions from more than 90,000 people, for which people cast more than 3 million votes.

The Buzz, Literally: The question most often voted to the top of the pile was about marijuana legalization.

In this moment of national economic crisis, the top four questions under the heading of “Financial security” concerned marijuana; on the budget, people voted up questions about marijuana to positions 1-4; marijuana was in the first and third positions under “jobs”; people boosted a plug for legalizing marijuana to number two under “health care reform.” And questions about decriminalizing pot occupied spots 1 and two under “green jobs and engery.”

It seems part of the popularity of marijuana questions was fueled by NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which was urging it’s members to vote for questions supporting the legalization of cannabis.

Obama's against it, for the record.

The Cringe: I'm all for open government, but the sing-songy, unison introduction of "our question" by three sweatshirt-clad female Kent State students in a dorm room makes me think there should be some way of screening out groups of David Archuleta fans.

The Shoulda-Been-Bill-Clinton Soundbite: "I'm biased toward nurses. I just like nurses." Oh, yeah.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that some in the Obama administration are now referring to the "war on terror" as an "Overseas Contingency Operation." There's been some confusion as to whether or not the "war on terror" has been officially abolished.

Via Ben Smith, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell says the preferred term is "a campaign against extremists who wish to do us harm."

It might take a while for CAEWWTDUH to replace GWOT in the lexicon, but the bigger concern, really, is that the word "extremists" seems a bit bellicose for the Obama administration. Perhaps a 'campaign against undocumented freedom fighters who just might need a really big hug' would be more fitting.

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) just awarded its Humane Senator of the Year award to Dick Durbin, on account of all he’s done to give little puppies the opportunity to avoid the miseries of puppy mills. Awwww, sweet, and humane indeed. If only D.C. schoolchildren could feel the Durbin love, as well.

On the other hand, unless that award comes with an earmark, Mr. Durbin might want to rethink it. According to the Center for Consumer Freedom,

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is a “humane society” in name only, since it doesn’t operate a single pet shelter or pet adoption facility anywhere in the United States. During 2006, HSUS contributed only 4.2 percent of its budget to organizations that operate hands-on dog and cat shelters. In reality, HSUS is a wealthy animal-rights lobbying organization (the largest and richest on earth) that agitates for the same goals as PETA and other radical groups.

More here.

Yesterday, Congressman Paul Ryan, the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee, laid out the problems with the House Democrats' budget resolution:

Simply put, President Obama has promised so much that it's impossible to deliver it all. What's worse, it's impossible to even come close to delivering it all.

Obama has promised to reduce the federal deficit, but the CBO says that his 10-year budget plan increases the debt by more than $9 trillion. He's also promised health care reform, but his plan doesn't even pay for that. If he intends to provide tax cuts, that will increase the deficit further. And if Obama intends to rescue the nation's banking system, it will cost more money (his budget resolution does not provide for any more spending).

Further, since the deficit balloons so dramatically in the second half of Obama's 10-year budget plan, the House and Senate budget resolutions ignore the last 5 years. (Freshman senator Mark Begich of Alaska says that's a good thing, because "it's harder to predict what happens" that far down the road, anyway.)

But for political opportunism, it's tough to beat the transparent move by Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) to try to wash his hands of Obamacare and cap-and-trade. Conrad has loudly and proudly proclaimed that his budget provides no special protection for those two presidential priorities; he would force them to face filibusters, rather than be included in the reconciliation process. Yet the resolution advanced in the House does include them in reconciliation -- and House Republicans hear that Democratic leaders have already decided that the House position will ultimately be adopted.

Why is this so egregious? Because the House does not have a filibuster, or a rule that protects reconciliation bills from a filibuster. Those rules apply in the Senate alone. So when the Senate draws up the portion of the budget resolution that affects only itself, they'll be politically 'brave,' and stand up to Obama on his biggest priorities. But they'll ultimately cave to the House, and grease the skids for another massive expansion of government. Some of the Senate's red-state Democrats will undoubtedly lament the fact that the conferees rejected the Senate language, but vote for it anyway. Then people like Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, and Blanche Lincoln will then try to convince their local press to give them political cover, rather than call them out for their opportunism.

An honest budget would be much simpler, but there's little chance it would pass either the House or the Senate.

Anand Gopal of the Christian Science Monitor kindly responded to last week's post on the so-called negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban and the Haqqanis. Anand notes that last year's "negotiations" in Saudi Arabia clarified that what really is going on here is simply contact and one-sided peace plans destined to go nowhere, and not meaningful negotiations:

I came across your Weekly Standard piece and I think it raises a really important question. You are right--in October I wrote that there were no negotiations. This is because the meeting in Mecca was between former Taliban and the government, and there were no actual Taliban present. Without the two antagonistic sides, we can't really call it negotiations in any way. What happened over the next months is that this group of former Taliban reached out to the current group. They did so by putting forth a set of terms that the Taliban would accept but that we in the west would never agree to (such as stopping key counter-insurgency methods like house raids). So then the Quetta Shura (Mullah Bradar specifically) and the Haqqanis came around.

But the fundamental point is that as long as extremely slanted deals like this one get proposed, groups like the Haqqanis will be open to talking. Absurdly, the deals don't even ask for the insurgents to stop fighting or planting bombs.

The way I see it is that neither side has really publicly offered anything to the other side except surrender, disguised as "negotiations". The government has said that the Taliban should respect the constitution and drop their arms, which would amount to a surrender. The Taliban has said that the foreign troops should leave, which would basically amount to a surrender on our part. So these mediators tried to come up with something more amenable to an actual agreement. Hence the "roadmap" I mentioned. But the problem, as I see it, is that it is basically designed to be favorable to the Taliban, not the US/Kabul. I guess this is because the Taliban are in a favorable position. Anyway, I'm guessing this isn't really going to get anywhere, as long as we in the West have the will to keep fighting.

So in sum, I agree that it's really "contact", more than real, sit-at-the-table negotiations. That's why I tried to qualify it in my story as "preliminary negotiations", although I can see how that might be a muddy term.

Ten members of the President’s Council on Bioethics have issued a statement raising concerns about Obama’s policy to liberalize federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. They point out that, contrary to Obama’s remarks, President Bush never banned embryonic stem cell research; alternative methods of deriving pluripotent stem cells have eclipsed embryonic research; and Obama has now opened the door to cloning human embryos that must, by law, be destroyed.

The entire statement is an important contribution to the stem cell debate. If Obama truly believes it’s “very important for us to have strong moral guidelines, ethical guidelines when it comes to stem cell research,” then why didn't he establish his own bioethics council to help draw those lines, instead of outsourcing ethical decisions to the National Institutes of Health?

This new poll released by Zogby showing President Obama’s approval rating dropping to around 50 percent has caused quite a stir in the last day or so. The Boston Herald’s Joe Dwinell caught wind of the new survey and wrote before it was released:

The honeymoon is over, a national poll will signal today as President Obama’s job approval stumbles to about 50 percent over the lack of improvement with the crippled economy.

The sobering numbers come as the president backpedals from two prime-time gaffes - one comparing his bowling score to a Special Olympian and another awkwardly laughing about the economy, which prompted Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” to ask “are you punch-drunk?”

News of the low approval number in the Zogby poll spread quickly among bloggers. But Nate Silver over at Fivethirtyeight.com was not impressed with the new survey: “The Worst Pollster in the World Strikes Again,” he wrote. Silver penned his piece before the poll was released, but raises some questions about the methodology and Zogby’s track record with internet polls here.

Charles Franklin, writing at Pollster.com, puts the Zogby poll into a little more context. Franklin notes –- correctly I would add –- that the Zogby poll needs to be compared with daily tracking surveys like Gallup, Rasmussen and other non-daily national polls to get a fuller perspective. Looking at the chart Franklin constructs, Zogby is clearly an outlier compared to other polls.

Franklin writes:

Poll results are far more meaningful when we look at them with a bit of perspective. The chart also makes clear how the Gallup and Rasmussen daily tracking polls differ from one another as well. Gallup's daily tracker consistently results in higher approval ratings than do non-daily national polls. Rasmussen consistently results in lower approval ratings than do non-daily national polls. But put them all together and we get a trend estimate based on all the polls that matches the trend for conventional non-daily polls quite well. If we pick only Gallup or only Rasmussen, we may have a biased understanding of the state of public opinion. Not by a huge amount, but by a persistent two-or-three points up or down compared to the overall trend or to the non-daily polls. This is no surprise. House effects, the tendency of polling organizations to produce modest differences from one another, are well known and much written about. By putting all the data in the chart for everyone to see we let these house effects stand out in an obvious way.

Franklin's chart displays a nice visual context for the Zogby poll.

The bottom line is the Zogby poll seems out of sync with other recent surveys measuring presidential approval.

One final point. It’s also important to remember that the Zogby poll asks the presidential evaluation question slightly differently. Instead of asking if respondents “approve or disapprove” of the job the president is doing, it asks if the president’s job performance is "excellent, good, only fair, or poor.” In Zogby’s surveys “fair” and “poor” both equate to “disapprove.” That’s debatable in my view.

Read the Herald story here.

Rove: Obama points the way to GOP's future.

Dems double-dog dare Republicans to deliver an alternative budget.

What could go wrong? Biden's cutting radio ads in NY-20, God love 'im.

The President's unannounced Medal of Honor Day trip.

Meet the First Hairstylist.

"The government would have the power to peer into the inner workings of companies that currently escape most federal supervision"

Slow start for Congressional Office of Oxymoronics.

Death of a sales pitch?

Culture of corruption: DSCC will keep Madoff money.

U.S. and Israel should really "stop being hung up on prior Hamas recognition of Israel."

"If the United States follows the norm of recent crises, as it has until now, output may take four years to return to its pre-crisis level."

Grading WhiteHouse.gov.

"The idea of “private sector price discovery” is therefore flim-flam."

Dear AIG, I quit! (From yesterday, but worth a read if you missed it.)

Quinnipiac: Toomey leads Specter 41 to 27 in GOP primary.

Michigan Rep. Hoekstra for governor?

Mitt Romney has a cautionary tale on card-check.

AP analysis: Teleprompter telegraphs Obama caution

Kudlow won't run for Senate in Connecticut.

Senator Brownback took to the floor of the Senate today to tell his colleagues, and the president, "I do not acquiesce to this nomination." That would be the nomination of Chris Hill to serve as Ambassador to Iraq. This is likely to catch some on the left by surprise, as both Petraeus and Odierno weighed into the debate to offer their support to the embattled nominee, and Brownback has few allies in this fight other than Senators Lieberman and Graham. Brownback doesn't seem to care about the politics or the optics, neither of which are in his favor.

Brownback insists -- quite rightly -- that Hill lied to him during committee meetings in July of last year (the substance of this charge is contained in this letter, which Brownback read into the record today) and subsequently failed to make the issue of human rights a priority during negotations with the North Koreans. In Brownback's own words:

Taken all together, this is an unfortunate legacy for Ambassador Hill. Broken commitments to Congress, free-lancing diplomacy, disregarding human rights, and giving up key leverage to the DPRK in exchange for insubstantial gestures.

Such things have harmed our national security and ignored our moral obligations, a legacy ill-suited for the next Chief of Mission to Iraq.

Mr. President, I will conclude not with my own words, but with the words of Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who wrote a piece for the Korea Times last month, which I ask to be included in the record.

“By exclusively pursuing the nuclear tail around the six-party table, we have contributed to the horrible suffering of the people of North Korea and degraded the United States’ long-standing commitment to fundamental human rights.

“Like the inmates of the Soviet Gulag or the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s, about 200,000 to 300,000 hapless victims in North Korean camps wait for help. Our silence to these and other outrages is perhaps Pyongyang’s greatest victory to date. We want them to dispose of fearsome weapons ― they want our silence. And too often, we have acquiesced.”

Mr. President, I do not acquiesce to this nomination."

Harry Reid will have to shut down the Senate in order to get Hill confirmed, and with everything yet to be done before the recess, that seems unlikely. Chris Hill may not make it to Baghdad anytime soon, if ever -- which is almost certainly for the best.

The full statement after the jump...

Eric Fingerhut reports:

Seventeen Jewish organizations are among 32 faith-based groups which have signed a letter to Congress opposing "in the strongest terms" any amendment to the Washington, D.C. voting rights bill that would "undermine the District's ability to regulate firearms." The letter, organized by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, states that "we believe duly-elected District officials should have a fair and reasonable opportunity to develop and implement new locally specific regulations. It would be unconscionable of the House of Representatives to approve such an amendment and impose its will on the residents of the District of Columbia." Many of the same groups -- which include the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Commitee and Hadassah, among others -- signed an almost identical letter to the Senate last month, which attached an amendement to the final legislation repealing most of D.C.'s gun control laws.

Why are the Jews picking a fight with the Gun Lobby and the law abiding citizens of the District whose Second Amendment rights have been violated for some three decades? Are there not enough real problems confronting the Jewish community? A nuclear armed Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Bernie Madoff, and these people are inserting themselves into the issue of DC voting rights? The Jewish Lobby is completely out of control.

Gordon Brown's green adviser Jonathon Porritt is sounding the alarm on the devastating effects of British population growth on the environment: This week the Optimum Population Trust “will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably.”

One question, though: Who's going to tell Mohammad Naseem’s flock?

He salutes the Obami in Requiem For a Lightweight. Really, is there anyone more brilliant?

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Ed Henry's question for the President last night, and the subsequent snippiness it inspired in President Obama, but I think the column-length play-by-play on "the exchange," as CNN is calling it, is a bit much:

The pressure was on now because the president had called on me. Someone handed me a microphone, millions were watching, and it's scary to think about changing topic in a split second because you might get flustered and screw up.

But it's fun to gamble and like any good quarterback (though I was never athletic enough to actually play the position), I decided to call an audible.

Ed Henry, the Peyton Manning of the East Room. Or, is he more of a Randall Cunningham, 'cause this guy can move:

The president, like any good politician, decided to pick and choose what to answer. So he swatted away the budget question and ignored the AIG stuff.

So I waited patiently and then decided to pounce with a sharp follow-up. From just a few feet away, I could see in his body language that the normally calm and cool president was perturbed.

There are parts of the story that are interesting, as a process story, but it also crystallizes the limitless capacity of the web and the 24-hour news cycle to encourage self-absorption. (This, from a girl who competes in Twitter tourneys, so I know of what I speak.)

Elsewhere, the major news dailies are navel-gazing over the fact that they were passed over last night. Only time will tell if Obama's presser picks are a calculated nod to the emergence of New Media that will continue to diminish the power of the flailing newspaper industry. Or, will the Messiah inscribe their names in the Book of Life once again in front of the American people:

Added Washington Post Political Editor Tim Curran: "The president is certainly entitled to call on whomever he chooses, and we take no offense if he does not call on us on any given day."

But at a time of economic calamity for the newspaper business, not everyone is so blasé.

Haynes Johnson – the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post reporter who’s now a professor at the University of Maryland – said it was “extraordinary and telling” that “for the first time in the history of the presidential press conference, an American president declined to call on any representatives of the major U.S. newspapers.”

Well, after "the exchange," as it will ever be known, things may never be the same between Obama and TV reporters, thereby forcing him to revert to the traditional major dailies for questions that don't include follow-ups.

Via Hot Air, the video of the day, in which MEP Daniel Hannan dresses down Gordon Brown:

The man has a blog.

Ramesh Ponnuru factchecks Obama's claim last night that greater federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research may help find a cure for Alzheimer's:

In 2004, Rick Weiss reported in the Washington Post that “the infrequently voiced reality, stem cell experts confess, is that, of all the diseases that may someday be cured by embryonic stem cell treatments, Alzheimer’s is among the least likely to benefit.” Weiss called the Alzheimer’s hype a “distortion” and quoted a researcher who explained the hype by saying that “people need a fairy tale.” Weiss, be it noted, is no conservative. After the Post he went to the liberal Center for American Progress, and he is reportedly up for an Obama administration job.

Ponnuru notes the many press reports that failed to point out Obama's distortion. The press failed to hold Obama accountable when he made the same dubious claim in January.

One has to wonder: Is Obama knowingly giving false hope to those suffering with Alzheimer's? Or does he not know enough about stem-cell research to understand that he's simply repeating a "fairy tale"?

For more fisking of Obama's stem-cell remarks last night, see Yuval Levin here.

The boss points out that Obama seemed to channel Calvin Coolidge last night when touting the "philosophy of persistence".

Washington's newest think-tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative, will be hosting an event next week titled "Afghanistan: Planning for Success." The timing couldn't be better as Obama plans to unveil his plan for Afghanistan this Friday. Speakers at the conference include Bob Kagan, John Nagl, Lt. Gen. Barno, Reps. McHugh and Harman, and Senator John McCain.

You can register for the event here.

President Obama is famous for building up straw men, then knocking them down. You know, on the one hand, some would have government do nothing at all to help the economy, on the other, there’s his plan. This is a transparent (and crude) rhetorical device, but that didn’t stop Obama from trotting out a whopper last night in his second prime time press conference at the White House.

Now the alternative is to stand pat and to simply say, “We are just going to not invest in health care. We’re not going to take on energy. We’ll wait until next time that gas gets to $4 a gallon. We will not improve our schools. And we’ll allow China or India or other countries to lap our young people in terms of their performance. We will settle on lower growth rates and we will continue to contract, both as an economy and our ability to provide a better life for our kids. That, I don’t think, is the better option.

The word “better” means of two options, that one and his. So it's either his option or the end of America as we know her. And that, from the great orator of our time.

Last night, President Barack Obama expressed confidence in the dollar and declared: "I don't believe that there's a need for a global currency."

Normally, that would settle the issue. But in the past 24 hours two of Obama's top economic advisers have signaled an openness to such a new global currency -- in one form or another. What's going on?

Politico's Ben Smith reports that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said this morning that he was open to a new global currency to replace the dollar, as proposed by a Chinese central banker. Geithner, according to Smith, said that the proposal -- which he has not yet read -- is less transformative that headlines have suggested. "We’re actually quite open to that suggestion – you should see it as rather evolutionary rather building on the current architecture rather than moving us to global monetary union," Geithner said.

Later, the moderator, per Smith "apparently sensing a gaffe," asked Geithner to clarify his remarks. Geithner walked back his earlier comments and said he does not see the dollar being sidelined by a new currency.

But Geithner wasn't the only top Obama adviser who refused to rule out a transition to a global currency. White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said much the same thing yesterday afternoon in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Although he characterized such a change as "unlikely," Goolsbee twice declined to rule out such a global currency despite being pressed by Blitzer. "I haven't seen the details of the proposal," Goolsbee said. The entire exchange follows:

BLITZER: The Chinese suggesting today, this dollar, U.S. dollar, should be replaced as international currency, because they are beginning to have concerns that you are printing, the U.S. government is simply printing too many of these dollars and will lose its value as an international currency.

What's your reaction?

GOOLSBEE: It strikes me as probably unlikely.

Different people have in the past argued for world currencies or new -- new currencies before. I believe the U.S. at this point is the safest place to invest in the world. And it's likely to remain that the dollar is a critical currency in the years ahead.

BLITZER: So, you -- you don't like some new international currency that some Chinese are proposing?

GOOLSBEE: Well, look...

BLITZER: I assume that's right, right?

GOOLSBEE: I haven't seen the details of what they are proposing.

I mean, the dollar is the dollar. If people don't want to buy it, they don't buy it. But I think you have seen sort of a flight to the dollar in -- in times of trouble.

I don't know enough about monetary policy and currency to analyze the potential benefits and drawbacks of such a change, though several people I've spoken to believe it's an idea that's as undesirable as it is unworkable. But as a matter of instilling confidence in the U.S. economy at a time when such confidence is critical, it seems that Obama's answer was much better than the mixed messages coming from his top economic advisers.

A lovely piece on the joys and sorrows of the kitchen garden, which, though it fails to mention the marauding rabbits, gophers, woodchucks, moles, and deer that may be the home-grown gardener’s greatest nightmare (get me a gun), gives a charming taste of the pleasure to be had among the pea-shoots--a pleasure the staff who will actually man the White House K-G is unlikely to share with the First Lady.

Mickey Kaus takes on the Ebony reporter's implausible assertion that "one in 50 American kids is homeless:"

1) The report apparently counts all people who are "homeless" even one night over the course of a year. That's very different from saying that one-in-50 are homeless at the same time--e.g., "now." 2) More significantly, the report counts as "homeless" families who've "doubled up"--e.g., moved in with relatives--apparently on the grounds that while these children in these families do have a home, they don't have "a home of their own."

This is a word cloud of Obama's press conference last night. I think my favorite part is how prominently the word "well" figures. In the Obama lexicon, "well" is more important than "families" or "deficit," or the entirety of his foreign policy. It's a good thing they don't transcribe "uhhs" and "umms."

The transcript of his last prime-time press conference was equally without hope, but "crisis" and "spending" were pretty popular.

Ben Smith reports:

Geithner, at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the U.S. is "open" to a headline-grabbing proposal by the governor of the China's central bank, which was widely reported as being a call for a new global currency to replace the dollar, but which Geithner described as more modest and "evolutionary."

"I haven’t read the governor’s proposal. He’s a very thoughtful, very careful distinguished central banker. I generally find him sensible on every issue," Geithner said, saying that however his interpretation of the proposal was to increase the use of International Monetary Fund's special drawing rights -- shares in the body held by its members -- not creating a new currency in the literal sense.

"We’re actually quite open to that suggestion – you should see it as rather evolutionary rather building on the current architecture rather than moving us to global monetary union," he said.

At last night's presser, Obama was asked about the Chinese proposal (maybe Geithner didn't watch?) and took the rather old fashioned view that the dollar should continue to serve as the world's currency because the United States is "the strongest economy in the world, with the most stable political system in the world." Sensing a potential firestorm, Smith reports that the moderator at Geithner's event went back to the Treasury Secretary to give him a second chance at answering the question. Geithner then gave the more conventional response that the U.S. government "will do what's necessary to say we're sustaining confidence in our financial markets."

Today, 14 U.S. Senators sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Gates raising concerns about cuts in the defense budget (see the full letter after the jump). Although Obama's baseline budget seems to reflect an increase from Bush's, the senators point out that with changes in supplemental funding taken into account, the fact is programs will be cut. In the March 9 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Tom Donnelly crunched the numbers:

In 2009, the Bush administration's baseline budget was $513 billion, and the plan was to spend $523 billion in 2010. The Obama administration announced this week that it would "boost" the 2010 figure to $533 billion. So the Obama budget is bigger than the Bush budget, right?

The reality, though, is something quite different. Here's where the question of wartime supplementals comes into the picture. The Bush administration's last supplemental requests were for $188 billion in 2008--at the height of the Iraq surge--and a $65 billion installment on the war costs of 2009. The Obama budget adds another $75 billion in war costs for 2009, for a yearly total of about $140 billion. What accounts for the whopping difference between the 2008 spending of $188 billion and the $140 billion to be spent in 2009? It's not, unfortunately, that the success of the Iraq surge or the drawdown now beginning in Iraq are saving much money. Indeed the immediate costs of a safe withdrawal are no different from those of staying on. And, with a second surge--really, a long-term ramping up--of forces in Afghanistan about to begin, the supplemental cost of those operations is going way up.

In 2011, Donnelly writes, Obama budgets for "wartime costs of just $50 billion. Based on the numbers, by 2011 Obama plans to be fighting the 'Long War' at less than one-third the cost of the effort of 2008."

To understand how irresponsible the Obama defense budget is, see the Washington Post's story today "GAO Calls Iraq Pullout A 'Massive,' Costly Effort":

The removal of about 140,000 U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011 will be a "massive and expensive effort" that is likely to increase rather than lower Iraq-related expenditures during the withdrawal and for several years after its completion, government investigators said in a report released yesterday.

So if costs will increase in Iraq during the withdrawal, which defense programs does Obama plan to cut? The senators write to Gates that Congress has not "been informed about which particular programs will be affected. This lack of information raises a number of important questions, with potentially troubling answers. ... It is unclear how the administration, if it intends to cut supplemental funding, expects to maintain our military forces in the field and enable them to conduct their missions safely and effectively."

What's more, the problem with the defense budget is that the Obama administration is, in effect, trying to undermine the ability of the Congress to do due diligence when it comes to the budget and defense by forcing a vote on the top line without knowing what’s below it. Therefore, the senators request that the administration specify which expenditures will be moved from the supplemental to the baseline budget. They've also requested risk assessments by combatant commanders.

Kudos to the 14 Republican senators for understanding and taking seriously the security implications of the Obama budget. "Now is not the time to attempt to cash in a 'peace dividend,' while thousands of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are serving in harm’s way, engaged in military operations in two major theaters of conflict overseas, with other very real threats on the horizon," they conclude.

It's hard to believe that more senators--especially in the Republican caucus--don't share those same concerns.

The full letter after the jump...

The boss notes that during tonight's press conference Obama seemed to have dropped the audacity that characterized his campaign rhetoric in favor of a new incrementalism and persistence on everything from the economy to energy to education. Obama also said he was only seeking "steady progress" in his dealings with Iran.

"When it comes to Iran, you know, we did a video sending a message to the Iranian people and the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And some people said, 'Well, they did not immediately say they were eliminating nuclear weapons and stop funding terrorism.’ Well, we didn’t expect that. We expect that we’re going to make steady progress on this front.”

Obama seems to have conceded here that Iran is working towards a nuclear weapon, just as it continues to fund terrorism. It's an odd locution from a president whose administration continues to stand by the conclusion of a 2007 NIE that found Iran no longer possessed an active bomb-making program. DNI Dennis Blair stood by that conclusion on the Hill just two weeks ago even as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen was telling reporters "that Iran is on a path to develop nuclear weapons.” Obama got dangerously close to conceding the obvious tonight. As Kristol says, "steady progress" is no standard for success against such a threat:

Is stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons really like improving health care or advancing the Middle East peace process? I would have thought not. The American (and European) position -- and the position of candidate Obama -- has been that this Iranian regime acquiring nuclear weapons is “unacceptable.” If that’s so, then there’s a deadline, so to speak, to all the incremental efforts. And since, by all accounts, that deadline is fast approaching, there would have to be a certain speed to the hoped-for “steady progress.” President Obama seems to evince no sense of urgency about Iran’s nuclear program. Did his relaxed statement about Iran tonight suggest he has quietly decided to accept the previously unacceptable?

Read the whole thing here.

Obama approval rating drops to 50 percent, Zogby reports.

The left tries to bankrupt Palin.

Scrappleface: "Scalia Urges Patience with Barney Frank’s Heterophobia"

Michael Barone on the Democrats' generic ballot woes.

WTO reports global trade will shrink 9 percent.

NRSC hits Obama:

J Street exists because its organizers believed it was "time for the broad, sensible mainstream of pro-Israel American Jews and their allies to challenge those on the extreme right who claim to speak for all American Jews in the national debate about Israel and the Middle East--and who, through the use of fear and intimidation, have cut off reasonable debate on the topic." Those Jews on the extreme right to which the group's founder, Jeremy Ben-Ami, was referring would be AIPAC, or as Chas Freeman likes to call it, the Avigdor Lieberman Lobby.

The people behind J Street genuinely believed that they -- and not AIPAC -- better represented the views of "the broad, sensible mainstream." In particular, J Street favors "diplomatic solutions over military ones, including in Iran; multilateral over unilateral approaches to conflict resolution; and dialogue over confrontation with a wide range of countries and actors when conflicts do arise." That is, J Street favors direct negotiation with Hamas, and Ben-Ami has been unequivocal on this point.

Yesterday J Street released a new survey of attitudes among American Jews but there is one question that is conspicuously absent: Should Israel negotiate with Hamas? It seems the group didn't have the nerve to ask for fear that the answer would show just how out of step they are with the "sensible, mainstream of pro-Israel American Jews." Though if you look close enough, the poll does bear out precisely that conclusion. J Street asked participants whether they agreed or disagreed with this statement: "The traditional Jewish organizations do a good job of representing my views on Israel." 47 percent of respondents agreed, while just 29 percent said traditional Jewish organizations (code for AIPAC) do a "poor" job of representing their views.

More than that, a majority of respondents (53 percent) disagreed with this statement: "With Hamas launching rockets into southern Israel that killed many Israeli civilians and Israel launching air and ground strikes that killed many Palestinian civilians, neither side has a monopoly on who is right and who is wrong." This language -- neither side has a monopoly on who is right and who is wrong -- mirrors precisely the language of a statement put out by the group during the war. That statement spurred a devastating smack-down of the group by Eric Yoffe, one of the most prominent doves in the country.

American Jews approved of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in overwhelming numbers (75 percent to 25 percent), and despite J Street's insistence that American Jews share the group's war-what-is-it-good-for views, 41 percent said the war made Israel more secure to just 18 percent who said less secure.

There are some other interesting results in the poll, but the one clear result is that J Street does not speak for the "broad, sensible mainstream" of American Jews, and it knows it -- otherwise they would have at least asked about negotiations with Hamas. The closest they get is a question that hinges on a J Street fantasy of a "unified Palestinian government" that is willing to work with the United States on a peace agreement with Israel. When that happens, we'll all be J Streeters. Until then, J Street remains a fringe group at odds with mainstream Jewish opinion and the organizations that reflect it.

Mansion owners who for years have fought the installation of wind farms off Martha’s Vineyard (of course they’re all for renewable energy, as President Obama would wish them to be, but that equipment is just too unsightly) have some new allies in their battle to maintain their unobstructed water views--exploding bats.

It seems that air pressure from the giant windmills causes the bats’ lungs to explode when they get too close--this is known as “barotrauma,” according to the Washington Times, though I don’t see why they don’t just go ahead and call it “batotrauma” --and bats, the preferred insecticide of green-living people everywhere, are getting too close because the insects they feed on are attracted to the windmills at night when the turbines are operating and . . . well . . . splat!

It’s a microcosmic ecological dilemma wrapped in a climatic environmental paradox worthy of Toho Studios.

Ted Bromund writes at Contentions:

...a friend pointed out an interesting item in the February 26, 2009, New York Review of Books: a petition calling on the U.S. to withdraw immediately and totally from Afghanistan. One signatory, predictably, was Norman Finkelstein. Another, equally predictably, was Chas Freeman. That petition was published weeks before Freeman’s name was put forward as the arbiter of U.S. intelligence assessments.

I'm trying to track down a hard-copy of the petition, and will post as soon as I do, but there is no reason to doubt what Bromund says. The man who the Obama administration appointed to oversee the creation of national intelligence estimates was, just a few months ago, signing petitions for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. This is the man who James Fallows would praise for his "contrarianism," which included extremely contrarian views on Israel, China, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and now Afghanistan.

Was Dennis Blair aware that the man he was bringing on to head the NIC had been singing public petitions that would directly contradict the policies of the Obama administration? Imagine if Freeman hadn't withdrawn from consideration (or been tossed overboard depending on who you believe), the IG reports would still be in the offing, members of Congress would still be protesting the choice, and now we'd have the new head of Obama's National Intelligence Council explaining how his name got onto a petition calling for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan -- and how those views would never interfere with his assessment of the war there and the prospect for an American victory (which he would surely be working diligently to secure). Imagine that.

Update: I now have a copy of the petition, titled "Not This Time." It reads:

Dear President Obama,

We congratulate you and wish you the very best of fortune in your great undertainking. As writers, we admire your eloquence and your engagement with ideas. But we are worried because a new beginning will not be possible as long as we continue to spill the blood of the men, women, and children of Afghanistan. The Taliban is not a direct military threat to the United States nor are the people of Afghanistan. There is no victory for those who attempt to occupy Afghanistan, as the Soviets and the British discovered. There will be no progress at home while such an all-consuming war is ebing waged. If we stay, the situation will get worse, not better, and the toll in American lives and American prestige , as well as the damage to our standing in the Middle East and to the American budget will be staggering and tragic. We urge you to negotiate with the Taliban, withdraw all troops from Afghanistan, and begin the moral and physical rebuilding of Afghanistan, as well as that of the United States.

That is the full text. "The Taliban is not a direct military threat to the United States." That is the view of the man whom Dennis Blair would have installed as the head of the National Intelligence Council.

Arlen Specter's decision to oppose card check doesn't seem to have deterred likely primary challenger Pat Toomey. The former congressman said in a statement:

“The difference between Specter’s vote on the big government stimulus bill and Specter’s vote on card check: a threat in the Republican primary. It’s nice to see Sen. Specter reverse his position in a positive direction on card check, but I wish it didn’t take primary opposition to get him to do it.”

Philip Klein reports at the AmSpec blog:

Grover Norquist said today that he received a call from Arlen Specter's chief of staff informing him that the Pennsylvania Senator will vote against cloture on card check, dealing a serious blow to big labor's efforts to pass the legislation that would make it easier to form unions by denying workers a secret ballot on unionization.

Specter was the only Republican to vote for card check last time, which means Republicans can successfully filibuster the measure without any Democratic votes. It's pretty clear that Pat Toomey helped Specter discover his newfound appreciation for the secret ballot (that is, if Norquist's report is correct).

Update: The Hill's Michael O'Brien reports that Specter just confirmed in a speech on the Senate floor that he would oppose cloture on card check, but may change is mind later:

Acknowledging the decisive nature of his vote for the bill's prospects, Specter said he would reconsider his vote when the economy improves.

"Knowing that I will not support cloture on this bill, Senators may choose to move on" to change the controversial provisions in the bill, Specter said.

Update: Here's are the lines from Specter's speech in which he leaves open the possibility of voting for card check in the future:

If efforts are unsuccessful to give Labor sufficient bargaining power through amendments to the NLRA, then I would be willing to reconsider Employees’ Free Choice legislation when the economy returns to normalcy.

Apparently they still haven't shown up in Washington:

Pressed Monday on the button incident, [Clinton aide Philippe] Reines denied that he’d ever blamed McFaul, and sent over a joking statement taking responsibility for the gaffe.

“Ultimotely [sic], this was my soul [sic] risponsibility [sic], nobody else's in or out of the building. While the Russians laughed off the error and accepted the gift in the spirit of cooperation that it was meant, I've been sic [sic] about the mistake since, especially that I let down the Secretary and the fine professionals at the State Department,” he e-mailed. ...

Clinton and Lavrov publicly laughed off the gaffe, though Lavrov happily rubbed the American’s nose in it a bit when asked at the press conference after their meeting. It was also a source of great schadenfreude in the Russian press, and of concern to some American analysts.

“This is a pretty tough crew, and to come up with a naïve and childish way of talking about the relationship is probably the wrong signal to be sending to Moscow,” said Gary Schmitt, a Russia analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) also raised an eyebrow at the incident.

"If I gave him a reset button, I'd find someone in the State Department who understands Russian," he told the Financial Times.

Hillary's next stop is Mexico, where she has plans to unveil a brand new botón de reinicio.

I saw this last night, and I'm surprised there's not more of a stir about it. The war on terror is from this day forward to be referred to as an "Overseas Contingency Operation." It's an interesting choice of words. According to Wikipedia:

In philosophy and logic, contingency is the status of propositions that are not necessarily true or necessarily false.

It's an appropriate definition. Take the "alleged" terrorists now being detained at Guantanamo Bay. According to this administration, they are no longer enemy combatants. Does that mean they aren't terrorists? Well, they may be -- it's not necessarily true that they represent a threat to the United States, but it's not necessarily false either.

Is the security and stability of Iraq vital to U.S. interests in the Middle East? Well, it's not necessarily true that the Obama administration is withdrawing all U.S. forces from the country, but it's not necessarily false that all "combat forces" will leave by the end of next year.

Is the Obama administration committed to victory in Afghanistan? Well, it's not necessarily true that the goal is victory, per se, but a "hard-earned peace" that denies al Qaeda a sanctuary there. On the other hand, it's not necessarily false that the objective has changed, and while Obama recently sent 17,000 additional troops to the fight, no one is quite sure what their objective is.

One could go on. Rendition? Not necessarily true that they've ended the practice, not necessarily false that they consider it a violation of the due process rights of terrorists. Talking with Iran? Not necessarily true that they plan on talking to A'jad, not necessarily false that they will talk to the "leaders" of the regime. And the press has let them get away with this since the earlies days of the campaign. The strike force? Who would've thought that the Obama campaign would have been able to conjure up something like that and assume office without ever explaining what the hell it means.

Somebody once said, "words matter." I think it was Deval Patrick.

It's possible that the term "War on Terror" may be outmoded, but surely there were better options than this:

The end of the Global War on Terror -- or at least the use of that phrase -- has been codified at the Pentagon. Reports that the phrase was being retired have been circulating for some time amongst senior administration officials, and this morning speechwriters and other staff were notified via this e-mail to use "Overseas Contingency Operation" instead.'"

Strange times we live in, where naming a conflict can become more important than prosecuting the fight to a victorious conclusion. So the name for the pain is now politically incorrect. Fine. Though surely there exists a handle for the war that isn't completely lame? Take operation, for example. That doesn't even acknowledge that the GWOT is a war, but rather some sort of localized police action. An apt enough title in the slowly quieting Iraqi theater, but anyone who thinks Afghanistan is a "contingency operation" is off his chair.

As for "global?" Unpopular? Maybe. Accurate? Definitely. Overseas may sound definitively less imperial, but at least dubbing it the Global War on Terrorism acknowledged that the fight transcended the twin theaters in Iraq and Afghanistan, with enemies ripe in places like the Philippines, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and even South America -- where groups like the FARC support Islamic insurgencies with drug money to help keep the Pentagon occupied.

If "Overseas Contingency Operation" is an accurate projection of how the Obama administration views the Global War on Terrorism, then suspicions that the president is a poor custodian of the national defense may be well founded.

But is it fast enough so we can fly away?

As a political observer, there are so many reasons to love the red-faced walking comedy of errors that is Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. When he's not tripping up his own party by declaring his own constituents racist, he's throwing the left-wing blogosphere into paroxysms of rage by declaring Fox News fair and balanced.

And, if you think that's fun, wait 'til you catch him when he thinks no one's listening. Or, when he's so shamelessly demagogueing the economic suffering of his state for stimulus cash, that it's almost endearing:

My people are suffering. My people are hurting. They need that extra money. And right now that's paramount in my mind.

Then there was the time the governor's car was clocked doing 99 mph on a Pennsylvania highway. But no worries. Gov. Rendell assures us he wasn't driving that day, as he was no doubt involved in serious state business.

Nope, he was sportscasting that whole time, his spokesman said.

God love him.

Mickey Kaus and Jennifer Rubin have opined recently on what the retailer-proposed compromise on Card Check means. While Rubin argues that card-check is 'going nowhere, and that the compromise is a sign of defeat for Big Labor, Kaus says:

But the danger for union skeptics--including but not limited to business!--is that the Starbucks plan will become the starting point for a compromise that then moves in labor's direction, which explains the ferocity of the Chamber of Commerce's dismissal. And some business lobbyists are terrified of a seemingly mild compromise that, while it keeps secret-ballot elections, requires that they be held so quickly that management never gets to make its case.

I think this latter point is right, and I'll go a step further: this compromise could set the stage for passage of card-check in its current form.

Backers have to get card-check through the House and the Senate and get it signed by the president. Right now the only difficult hurdle is to get Senate approval in the face of a filibuster. House passage is all but assured, as is a presidential signature.

A compromise bill that passes the Senate with bipartisan support would set up a conference committee with the House. Conferees would have to draw up a compromise bill between the House and Senate versions. But as with the stimulus bill, the conference report would be drawn up by Democratic leaders, and would result in the most pro-labor bill they believed could pass the Senate. Reid and the unions could press wavering senators for support on one vote alone: to break a filibuster against the conference report. The conference report would be the most pro-labor bill that could garner 60 votes.

Further, senators are generally less willing to filibuster a conference report than other legislation. Harry Reid might have an easier time keeping moderate Democrats in line against the filibuster of a conference report than the original bill. If nothing else, he could assure them that they would only have to make one painful vote: rather than taking votes to break two filibusters (on initial passage and on the conference report), now there would only be one. And as many as seven or eight Democrats could vote against final passage. Enactment of card-check would by no means be a sure thing, but passage of a weak compromise would be a huge step forward for card-check backers.

Goldfarb, your work is done. Now, McCain's finally got Obama right where he wants him. Too bad he wasn't quite in game-shape back in November.

You have to hand it to the Pakistanis for their capacity for denial. In the wake of last year's terror assault on Mumbai--which was planned, launched, and directed from Pakistani soil--elements of the military and the government have gone out of their way to deflect blame and put the spotlight on India. Their latest attempt is nothing short of comical, or it would be if the situation inside Pakistan were not so dire.

According to the Paksitani newspaper Dawn, a report on last month's attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore indicates the Indians were behind the plot. The reason given, according to Dawn? "[N]o militant organizations Pakistan had the capacity to carry out the attack without the help of a state intelligence agency." The report cites the weapons and communications network used in the attack point to state sponsorship.

Keep in mind that this is a country that suffers from daily attacks from the Taliban, al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and a host of terror groups based on its soil, and where a vibrant and deadly insurgency in the Northwest Frontier Province has defeated the Paksitani military multiple times on the battlefield since 2004. Many of these groups use sophisticated weapons and communications network, ironically much of which is provided by elements with Pakistan's military and intelligence service.

Politico's Josh Gerstein looks at the Obama White House and transparency. He writes:

The Obama administration also seems to be in no hurry to release security-related records that might disrupt its own plans. One report on released Guantanamo detainees who allegedly returned to fight was expected to come out last month — but never surfaced, notes Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff.

Publishing that report could complicate Obama’s attempt to close Guantanamo and farm out many of the detainees to other countries.

“It’s easy to release stuff that makes your predecessor look bad,” Isikoff said at the AU meeting. “The real test of openness of an administration is when you’re willing to release material that might not let you look good.”

Indeed. See here and here.

And Obama is thinking about releasing War-on-Terror documents that will make his predecessor look bad. Isikoff broke that story, too. He writes:

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against "high value" Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA. One senior Obama official, who like others interviewed for this story requested anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, said the memos were "ugly" and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a "truth commission" on torture.

Because of an executive order signed by President Obama on Jan. 22 banning such aggressive tactics, deputies to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. concluded there was no longer any reason to keep the interrogation memos classified. But current and former intel officials pushed back, arguing that any public release might still compromise "sources and methods." According to the administration official, ex-CIA director Michael Hayden was "furious" about the prospect of disclosure and tried to intervene directly with Obama officials. But the White House has sided with Holder. Faced with a court deadline in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit regarding the memos filed by the ACLU, Justice lawyers asked for a two-week extension "because the memoranda are being reviewed for possible release." (White House, Justice and CIA spokesmen all declined to comment.)

Got it? So, the Obama administration has buried a report on recidivist Guantanamo Bay detainees that would cause political problems but it is seeking to release "torture" memos that could prove politically beneficial. Those Bush-era memos, according to Newsweek, would be released "over objections from the U.S. intelligence community."

Surely we will read stories in the Washington Post and New York Times this week about the Obama administration "politicizing intelligence," no? Especially because Obama advisers have overruled "intelligence professionals" before, right?

As the old journalism axiom has it: Three is a trend.

It would be most interesting to see Obama explain the double-standard tonight.

The Obama administration is clearly turning up the heat on the Pakistani government in an effort to get them to tackle the Taliban leaders operating in the Quetta region. Last week, administration officials leaked that they are mulling airstrikes against the Taliban leadership in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, and particularly against the executive council in Quetta. This would be a significant expansion of the not-so-covert Predator campaign currently taking place in the tribal areas and the Northwest Frontier Province.

Since then, the International Security Assistance Force has begun to name Taliban leaders directing "insurgent activity from outside Afghanistan." In press releases that reported on the death of three Taliban commanders in Helmand province since March 16, ISAF has identified four Taliban commanders operating from outside of Afghanistan. Pakistan isn't directly named, but U.S. and NATO officers have been saying for years that the insurgency in southern Afghanistan is being directed by the Taliban shura in Quetta. And while the identification of Taliban commanders operating from outside of Afghanistan may seem insignificant, I've been following ISAF press releases for years and have yet to see this mentioned. The message to Pakistan is clear: We know who these Taliban leaders are and where they are operating from.

It will be interesting to see if the Obama administration will follow up on the not-so-veiled threats to strike in Baluchistan if the Pakistan military does not act against the Taliban leadership. The administration is pushing a policy of engagement and additional support for the Pakistani government, while some in Congress seek to lavish the country with a $20 billion, 15-year aid package. At some point it will be difficult to sell engagement and aid for Pakistan to the American people while we conduct strikes throughout half the country because the Pakistanis are unwilling to tackle the Taliban and al Qaeda problem.

The coming slowdown in potential growth. As usual, you can blame the Boomers.

One of these stained shirts was washed in Communism for 50 years. The other in Free-Market. Let's see the results!

Hey, Geithner should have been reading Mankiw's blog back in October.

Geithner's plan and incentives.

Immigration and Obama's aunt.

DCCC outraises the NRCC.

Bibi's still working on a coalition, all the live-long day.

When volunteerism is not so voluntary.

Three warm bodies now at Treasury to save the free world from credit crumble. Hurrah!

Smarting from treatment of the critical, conservative likes of the NYT, Obama tries to go around the filter.

A former Bush administration official emails:

Two things came to mind while reading your posts on the White House Situation Room:

First, during the Bush Administration, it was nearly impossible to reserve a conference room in the Situation Room because it was almost always fully booked with a whole range of interagency meetings and intel briefings. You would think with all of the reviews underway on Afghanistan, Iran, etc. there would be lots of demand for classified conference room space. Are these national security meetings now forced to take place next door in the limited classified meeting space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building?

Second, the Situation Room staff maintains a calendar for all of the conference rooms in the Situation Room that can be accessed on the desktops of all NSC staff (not sure if it is accessible on White House political staff’s desktops). Regardless, the press office should easily be able to determine what meetings were held in the Situation Room by calling the Situation Room staff.

If the White House thinks that the Situation Room is merely "a series of conference rooms that are used for a variety of meetings", then why does it refuse to confirm or deny whether or not top administration political operatives met with a congressional candidate to plot campaign strategy there?

In a remarkable interview that aired on "60 Minutes" Sunday night, Barack Obama criticized the Bush administration on Guantanamo Bay, suggesting that his predecessors had done a poor job determining which Gitmo prisoners were okay to release and which ones should have remained in detention.

"Well, there is no doubt that we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals that we've got to make sure are not a threat to us, who are folks that we just swept up," Obama told Steve Kroft of CBS News.

Of the approximately 250 detainees currently at Guantanamo, no more than a handful could be counted as "folks that we just swept up." And yet it is the policy of the Obama administration to release some 20 percent of them so that they might "make a future for themselves" back in their home countries. The vast majority of that 20 percent are individuals with known ties to al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist groups -- many of them having been recruited by al Qaeda, hosted in al Qaeda safehouses and trained in al Qaeda camps.

How is it that President Obama can criticize the Bush administration as too lenient and, at the same time, favor policies that would release known jihadists? The Obama administration is confused.

On January 24, more than two months ago, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reported on a new Pentagon report on former Guantanamo detainees who had returned to the jihad after their release. The report, he wrote, could be released in days.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD followed up. On the morning of February 2, Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gordon told us to check the Pentagon website -- www.defenselink.mil -- for the report. We did. It wasn't there.

It hasn't been released. And it now looks like the Pentagon is attempting to hide it further behind a bureaucratic blind. In an email two weeks ago, we were told that in order to see the report we would have to submit a Freedom of Information Act request -- a process that can take months, even years. Why did the the self-described "most transparent administration in history" suddenly reverse itself? Where is the report?

A growing chorus of individuals and organizations are now demanding that the buried Gitmo report be released.

Rick Blum, coordinator of the Sunshine in Government Initiative, says: "Whenever an official makes a statement and promises to release more detail, they better well release more detail. The public deserves to know what's going on with this report."

Independent Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman told THE WEEKLY STANDARD: "We know that a number of detainees who have been released have returned to the battle field to attack Americans and American interests abroad. The American people need to know what is in the report so that Congress can make an informed decision on what to do with the detainees currently held at Guantanamo and with combatants captured in the future in the war on terror."

Republican Senator Jim Inhofe says: "I encourage President Obama and his Administration to be forthcoming with the details of the Pentagon report on detainees who have been released from GITMO and returned to the battlefield. This Administration has ensured Americans it will be more transparent than its predecessors. I hope that they live up to those standards and release the details of this report, letting Americans know the potential implications of hastily closing GITMO as they currently plan. The truth is, many of the detainees held at GITMO are very dangerous, and several of the most dangerous, upon release, have returned to the battlefield as terrorists against America."

Obama budget panned by red-state Democratic Senator with magical metaphor.

Socialist Sweden won't save Saab.

"15 of top 20 bonuses returned by AIG employees."

Dodd's wife served as director of a company owned by AIG.

Hukt on fawniks dident werk for Obama.

Today, THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked White House to confirm the details of the Washington Post's report that Rahm Emanuel hosted a meeting with group of veterans' group leaders in the White House Situation Room. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor replied via email that he didn't know where Emanuel hosted the meeting but said "it wouldn’t be unusual" to hold it in the Situation Room, which Vietor described as "a series of conference rooms that are used for a variety of meetings."

Asked to confirm Democratic congressional candidate Scott Murphy's claim that he met with top White House political operatives in the Situation Room, Vietor replied, "I don’t know Mr. Murphy so I won’t be able to track down his schedule for you, but again, the situation room is a number of conference rooms, which are used for meetings."

So, does the White House keep a record of which outsiders meet in the Situation Room, and would it be acceptable to meet a congressional candidate to discuss his campaign in this venue? To these questions, Vietor replied: "I just don’t have anything else to add to this one."

While the Obama White House appears comfortable hosting political meetings in the Situation Room, a former Bush administration official told me this evening that such meetings would have been considered inappropriate during previous administrations. While the Bush White House occasionally used the Situation Room for internal senior staff meetings, the official said, it "never" hosted "outside people for non-national security purposes, that I’m aware of. It would have seemed very strange if someone had suggested doing that."

So what explains the Obama White House's decision to hold political meetings in an area traditionally reserved for matters of state? One possibility, the official said, is that Obama staffers are "just misusing the Situation Room" in “an effort to impress an outside party. ... That, to me, is just totally inappropriate, especially if it’s for political purposes."

The official also said that "a more charitable interpretation, though not necessarily one that excuses it, is that they're just packing people into the West Wing, and they just don’t have much office space and realize [the Situation Room] is an underutilized meeting space, which it is."

"That may be an explanation, but it’s not an excuse," the official said. "It suggests a lack of respect for the serious work that has historically taken place there."

Harold Hongju Koh, dean of the Yale Law School and a vocal critic of the Bush administration, has been nominated as legal adviser to the State Department. It's an odd pick by the administration, if only because of Koh's view that the war in Iraq was not only wrong, but a violation of international law. Of course, Secretary Clinton voted to authorize the invasion, and defended her vote for years afterward. Koh will now be advising someone who, if he has the courage of his convictions, he deems guilty of war crimes. That might lead to some conflict down the road.

It's also striking that while the foreign policy posts in this administration have, for the most part, gone to "realists" (Clinton would be the exception as a liberal hawk), the legal positions seem to be going to dyed-in-the-wool liberals (Dawn Johnsen, David Barron, Eric Holder, Marty Lederman, etc.). What this sets up is a foreign policy apparatus that is ideologically averse to military intervention and a legal establishment that would hog-tie Obama if he were to intervene in some new conflict. If, for example, you were a Democrat who hoped this administration would do something about Darfur (besides appoint the completely-out-of-his-depth Scott Gration as envoy), these kind of appointments should be worrisome.

According to Richard Holbrooke, Richard Holbrooke is essentially this country's top diplomat -- Hillary Clinton is merely his "pupil. This despite the fact that Holbrooke has hit the trifecta of shady business dealings over the last few years: a member of AIG's board with more than $800,000 in compensation, a managing director at Lehman Brothers, and the recipient of a "Friends of Angelo" loan from Countrywide (that alone was enough to get Jim Johnson thrown under the Obama campaign bus).

Now comes another revelation from the New York Times. Despite repeated denials, according to three sources, Holbrooke did offer former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic a promise of immunity from prosecution for war crimes in exchange for his withdrawing from politics in that country. Holbrooke again denied the story to the paper, but there seems little doubt that the rumor is true, and that Holbrooke is lying. (Didn't the New York Times think to ask Holbrooke's "personal archivist"?)

More than that, Christopher Hill, who was acting as Holbrooke's "principal assistant" in the negotiations, pleaded with Holbrooke, on Karadzic's behalf, to put the guarantee in writing. To Holbrooke's credit, he refused. It's hard to muster much outrage at Holbrooke's conniving to get Karadzic to step aside, but that he continues to lie about his role in the negotiations is far more troublesome.

Hill's role is less easily defended. The primary objection to his appointment as Ambassador to Iraq was his lies before a Senate Committee seeking assurance that human rights would remain at the fore of his negotiations with the North Koreans. Now we know that Hill was similarly sympathetic to Karadzic, who was responsible for some of the worst atrocities in the wars that tore apart Yugoslavia. He was willing to grant Karadzic immunity for those abuses in writing, even though as Holbrooke later conceded to one source, Karadzic never held up his end of the bargain.

This is precisely the complaint against Hill's work in North Korea -- a willingness to offer written guarantees in exchange for the easily broken pledges of men who, like Karadzic, ought to be charged with crimes against humanity. And his reward for this will be a post in Baghdad?

PS: Shouldn't someone (like a senator) ask what Holbrooke did for AIG in exchange for $800k? Hank Greenberg, the former chairman of AIG, went to great lengths to cozy up to China, providing lavish funding to the Council on Foreign Relations and other think tanks (and apparently Holbrooke) to promote a pro-China policy in the United States so as to curry favor with the ChiCom leadership. Is there anything we should know about Holbrooke's dealings with the Chinese in those years?

The Washington Post provided an interesting graph accompanying its story over the weekend on the CBO's budget projection:

The CBO estimates that the deficit over the next decade will be $2.3 trillion more than the White House calculated. The CBO also shows the deficit decreasing each year until 2012 and then ballooning each successive year thereafter.

Can't you already hear Obama on the 2012 campaign trail claiming that he "cut" the 2010 deficit in half? Thanks to the CBO we already know that this talking point is nonsense. Not only will the deficit explode following 2012, Obama's 2012 deficit will still be larger than Bush's biggest deficit.

(All references to apocalypse are tongue-in-cheek...I hope. Some of that gallows humor Obama loves so much.)

The markets are momentarily happy about the long-awaited, fleshed-out announcement of the Geithner plan to rescue failing banks. Increasingly frustrated since the Treasury Secretary's announcement of a plan Feb. 10 with precious little detail, this weekend's revelations were enough to make investors more hopeful:

"The (stock) market was looking for anything that was more definitive from Treasury than what we had," said Bud Haslett, chief executive of Miller Tabak Capital Management. "There are still are lot of unknowns, but it is more clear. The market is going to have a positive bias going forward."

Stocks have enjoyed a solid rally from 12-year lows hit this month. Investors are cautiously optimistic as they look ahead, although they will look to see that banks' balance sheets do show improvement. That goal has been elusive since the crisis began despite several previous aggressive steps by the government.

Geithner's op-ed on the plan is itself another indication of the administration's problematic priorities, wasting almost 500 words on touting stimulus bric-a-brac before even getting to the plan, but the New York Times offers a succinct explanation of the three-pronged, trillion-dollar gambit:

In one, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will set up special-purpose investment partnerships and lend about 85 percent of the money that those partnerships will need to buy up troubled assets that banks want to sell.

In the second, the Treasury will hire four or five investment management firms, matching the private money that each of the firms puts up on a dollar-for-dollar basis with government money.

In the third piece, the Treasury plans to expand lending through the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, a joint venture with the Federal Reserve.

Whether the plan will actually work, allowing banks' balance sheets to show improvement, is an open question among economists. The aim is to unstick seized-up markets by clearing out banks' toxic assets, thereby allowing them to start lending again. The administration hopes to entice private investors to buy those assets with a combination of fire-sale prices and shared risk with American taxpayers, who would foot much of the bill. The administration is hoping a group of private investors, such as hedge funds, will be able to create market prices for assets for which there simply is no market right now.

Christina Romer called it "using the expertise of the market by trying to set the price for these toxic assets." Administration officials have emphasized that, when toxic assets, which they assume are "undervalued," mature and the market recovers, taxpayers will reap the benefits of taking on these risks as money flows back into government coffers.

But liberal economist Paul Krugman became an unexpected thorn in the administration's side this week, as he argued that there's a reason such investments are risky— because there's a significant chance they won't go up. His first shot came on Saturday when he called the Geithner plan and its underlying assumptions an "awful mess" — a critique Romer called "unfair" on the Sunday shows. Today, he's been debating the new policy again, refuting the administration's line that its financing does not constitute a subsidy, and fretting that the Obama administration is solving a problem of "misunderstood" assets when it needs to be dealing with the fact that the assets are actually bad.

But Treasury is still clinging to the idea that this is just a panic attack, and that all it needs to do is calm the markets by buying up a bunch of troubled assets. Actually, that’s not quite it: the Obama administration has apparently made the judgment that there would be a public outcry if it announced a straightforward plan along these lines, so it has produced what Yves Smith calls “a lot of bells and whistles to finesse the fact that the government will wind up paying well above market for [I don't think I can finish this on a Times blog]”

Why am I so vehement about this? Because I’m afraid that this will be the administration’s only shot — that if the first bank plan is an abject failure, it won’t have the political capital for a second. So it’s just horrifying that Obama — and yes, the buck stops there — has decided to base his financial plan on the fantasy that a bit of financial hocus-pocus will turn the clock back to 2006.

I guess we can hope that Krugman's dim assessment ends up with others he's made in his self-proclaimed "not great" forecasting record, but the fact that he's arguing against partisan interest lends credence.

On the other side of the argument, Brad DeLong defends the plan with a useful Q&A:

Q: Where does the trillion dollars come from?

A: $150 billion comes from the TARP in the form of equity, $820 billion from the FDIC in the form of debt, and $30 billion from the hedge fund and pension fund managers who will be hired to make the investments and run the program's operations.

Q: Why is the government making hedge and pension fund managers kick in $30 billion?

A: So that they have skin in the game, and so do not take excessive risks with the taxpayers' money because their own money is on the line as well.

Q: Why then should hedge and pension fund managers agree to run this?

A: Because they stand to make a fortune when markets recover or when the acquired toxic assets are held to maturity: they make the full equity returns on their $30 billion invested--which is leveraged up to $1 trillion with government money.

But he also leaves open the possibility of a scenario I like to call "The Road:"

Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn't make back its money?

A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money--for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.

But regardless of whether one thinks the plan will work in the long term, it's hard to escape the fact that the Obama administration may run into trouble getting this off the ground. After all, the plan requires working closely with the very private investors Congress and Obama have been using as populist whipping boys.

Wall Street will wonder why it should get involved in business dealings with a government that feels free to gleefully abrogate private contracts and pass punitive tax policy when public sentiment requires it. Such feelings "dominated some discussions among representatives of the Managed Funds Association, the biggest hedge-fund lobbying group, during meetings in Washington this week." Main Street will wonder why its tax dollars are once again going to the pin-striped devils of lower Manhattan, whom Obama has suddenly decided aren't all bad after all.

And, the burning question remains: Why the heck didn't we do this first instead of a $787 billion package of long-term social program investments and two-lane bridge projects? If Obama had put this plan before his own policy aspirations, he wouldn't be facing this daunting mixture of bailout fatigue and tricky populism while trying to do the most important thing his administration will have to do.

After initially falling for the administration’s rhetoric that the $533 billion they were allocating for the Defense Department in the Fiscal Year 2010 budget represented an increase over the Bush administration’s final budget (an argument skillfully deconstructed by Tom Donnelly), the press now seems to have woken up to the fact that the administration has something different in mind. Recent press reports provide a rather disturbing preview of the administration’s plans for the defense budget and preparations to use Secretary Gates as a human shield of sorts to counter expected criticism from defense contractors and Republicans in Congress. It seems Gates’ role in the ongoing Pentagon review is so key that he has decided to skip the NATO summit in early April so he can devote himself to his “efforts to strategically rebalance the department’s budget.”

The administration’s plan to get us to European levels of defense spending by 2016 comes at the same time as reports that the Chinese government stated that its official defense budget will jump by 14.9 percent this year (who knows how high the actual amounts are) and an announcement by Russian President Medvedev that Russia will undertake a “large-scale rearming” by 2011 given that “there are a range of regions where there remains serious potential for conflicts.”

There are a multitude of reasons that cutting defense at this juncture is a bad idea. The systems reportedly on the chopping block include a new Navy destroyer, the Air Force’s F-22, Army ground-combat vehicles, and possibly aircraft carriers, all integral elements of our ability to project power and defend our allies. Missile defense, now out of favor because it is unpopular in Moscow, is expected to take a significant hit as well. One can debate the merits of each of these systems or programs, but these cuts will result in thousands of job losses -- an inconvenient fact that may wake up some Democratic members of Congress who seem willing to throw money at failing banks and insurance companies but not at the Pentagon.

But beyond the programs and systems, the administration’s budget offers insight into its mentality about national security. Listen to some Democratic budget experts and you hear phrases like a “return to normalcy” used to describe the administration’s plans for defense spending. In this “normal” world, there is no mention of 9/11, or of the fact that countries such as Russia and China still threaten our allies and our interests. Military commitments in the Middle East or South Asia 5-10 years from now, what military commitments?

The difficulty for Republicans who wish to oppose these cuts is that for the last four years, key figures in the Bush administration helped set the stage for the Obama defense budget we now have in front of us. It became a fad during the second Bush term to deliver speeches in front of the foreign policy establishment or delivery testimony and warn about the “militarization” of U.S. foreign policy. Secretaries Rice and Gates and eventually Chairman Mullen all participated in this group therapy session played out in public. Many on the left pounced on these comments and today use them to justify cuts to defense to help pay for an increase in funding for a supposedly struggling State Department.

It is true that in recent years the U.S. military has all too often been asked to conduct missions they have not been trained for and probably should not be doing, but that is not a reason to cut defense spending. Nor is it a reason to expand the Foreign Service at the cost of the F-22 or missile defense. Our allies in Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia want American boots on the ground as a sign of our commitment to their defense, not more diplomats in pinstripes and wingtips.

While Secretary Gates is meeting with the green eyeshade crowd at the Pentagon in early April instead of enjoying a glass of Riesling in Strasbourg-Kehl at the NATO Summit, he may want to think long and hard about whether he wants to become the chief advocate for a defense budget that will undermine, not strengthen our long term security.

As if the Obama administration needed any other potential P.R. obstacles this week, along comes self-absorbed Hollywood to perform special effects that look remarkably like terrorist attacks on the Potomac River, near the Key Bridge. The DDOT is distributing this message:

Please be advised CBS Paramount will be filming for a television pilot titled “Washington Field” in the District for one day on Wednesday, March 25, 2009. This is a new television series about the elite Washington field office of the FBI and a team of agents with exceptional and diverse skills who are called together for only the most critical cases.

The first shot they will be shooting in the District takes place on the Potomac River just north of the Key Bridge and Jack’s Boathouse (K / Water Street, NW under the Whitehurst Freeway). In the scene, there will be six (6) sculling boats on the Potomac River and one of them blows up. The special effect simulating the explosion will occur on Wednesday March 25th between 9:30am and 12:00pm (noon).

NOTE: It will NOT blow the boat into a million little pieces. Instead there will be a 20′ to 30′ high fire ball that will last approximately two (2) seconds. All material will be vaporized and there may be a small plume of smoke. The sound will be a low thud; not a loud bang.

A 20-30 ft. fireball. Surely there will be people in office buildings on either side of the Potomac who did not get the memo.

According to IMDB, "Washington Field" seems to be yet another TV show about an elite crime-fighting squad, likely featuring quirky personalities delivering overworked banter, and starring no one of note. Also, stuff explodes. Tune in!

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal yesterday expressed satisfaction with what he called President Obama’s “new lexicon.” "The challenge for everyone,” he told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, “is that (Obama's new language) is a prelude to a sincere change (of direction) in US and European foreign policy." As Meshaal sees it, it’s “only a matter of time” before U.S. officials are dealing directly with the terrorist organization he runs from his hiding-place in Damascus. And why not? If we can talk to the mullahs in Iran, surely we can talk to their “Palestinian” puppets. Even if their lexicons still contain the words “Death to America.”

A new Gallup poll released last week should send cold chills up the spines of those promoting global warming legislation. For the first time in Gallup’s 25-years of asking Americans about the trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth, a majority says the economy should be a the top priority, even at the expense of environmental protections.

Here’s the question: “With which one of these statements about the environment and the economy do you most agree: protection of the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth (or) economic growth should be given priority even if the environment suffers to some extent?”

Gallup reports it first started asking about the “economy versus environment tradeoff” in 1984, finding then that over 60 percent picked the environmental option. Before last week’s results, the percentage of Americans choosing the environment only slipped below 50 percent in 2003-2004. But even then, the percent choosing the environment was still higher.

The partisan pattern in these numbers is also revealing. Not surprisingly self-identified Republicans choose the economic growth option by a large margin (64 percent-31 percent), while independents pick the economy by a narrower margin (50 percent-42 percent). Democrats, on the other hand, side with protecting the environment 50 percent-44 percent -- a spread that implies Democrats face significant ideological cross pressure on this topic. “This finding suggests that the economic crisis may present a real philosophical dilemma to those who ordinarily are strongly supportive of environmental protection, but who may back off in the face of the perceived need to restore economic growth,” Gallup writes.

This can’t be good news for cap-and-trade fans, hoping for quick legislative action in this Congress. Democrats in states hard hit by the costs included in the president’s climate change proposal may find it difficult to support legislation that hits their constituents’ pocketbooks during an economic downturn.

Read the full Gallup report here.

Batter up: Geithner takes another whack at delivering bank plan.

Losing Krugman: "Or to put it another way, Treasury has decided that what we have is nothing but a confidence problem, which it proposes to cure by creating massive moral hazard."

Losing Frank Rich: "Another compelling question connects all of the above: why has there been so little transparency and so much evasiveness so far?"

Losing the NYT: "But it's perhaps unprecedented for him to get hit on the same day by columnists Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd—and in the paper's lead editorial."
Losing Kos: “Geithner is starting to look like Obama’s Rumsfeld.”

Losing his composure.

Losing his place.

Intel briefing not No. 1 on Obama's schedule.

Welcome to the post-racial world.

Green on green.

Obama's Katrina moment.

It's official: South Park can get away with anything.

In a speech on Saturday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responded directly to Barack Obama's video mash note from late last week. According to the Associated Press: "Khamenei, wearing a black turban and dark robes, said America was hated around the world for its arrogance, as the crowd chanted 'Death to America.'"

Hmmm, so much for Obama's commitment to a showing of "mutual respect" between his administration and the terror-sponsoring mullahs.

Khamenei: "Have you released Iranian assets? Have you lifted oppressive sanctions? Have you given up mudslinging and making accusations against the great Iranian nation and its officials? Have you given up your unconditional support for the Zionist regime? Even the language remains unchanged."

The story reports that Khamenei "enumerated a long list of Iranian grievances against the United States over the past 30 years and said the U.S. was still interfering in Iranian affairs."

Khamenei complains that Obama used his speech to accuse Iran of pursuing nuclear technology and supporting terrorism. But Obama's speech was notable precisely because it did not include any such direct accusation.

Obama strongest rhetoric noted only that Iran must understand that the path to its "rightful place in the community of nations...cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions."

As Bill Kristol points out:

So there's no reiteration of the demand--heretofore the position not just of the United States but of its European allies--that Iran stop its program for developing nuclear weapons in return for such constructive ties. After all, to demand a stop to the program is implicitly to threaten that there might be consequences if the program isn't stopped--and Obama doesn't believe in threats. He believes that we should speak nicely to our enemies, and carry no stick.

TNR's Michael Crowley has a different view, calling Obama's speech "shrewd."

In a post from yesterday morning, before Khamenei's speech, he wrote: "If and when the time comes when he finds himself seeking harsh new sanctions--and conceivably even support for military action--against Iran to halt its nuclear program, America will have far more leverage if Obama can say that he made good-faith efforts at dialogue and was rebuffed."

That may be true, but it's leverage the US will almost certainly never use. For all of Obama's talk about a nuclear Iran being unacceptable, he has shown little enthusiasm for doing much of anything (other than renewing already existing sanctions) to prevent it. It is virtually inconceivable that he would feel the need to rally support for a preemptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Crowley concludes: "Thus, every gesture like today's gives the U.S. more credibility around the world, and puts the Iranians on the defensive if they don't reciprocate. Which may be why Tehran is responding in such a muddled and uncertain fashion."

Khamenei's speech takes Tehran's response from "muddled and uncertain" to defiant and hostile. It suggests that Khamenei, far from being put on the defensive, sees the U.S. in a position of weakness. And why shouldn't he after Obama's ingratiatory message.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported last week that Democratic congressional candidate Scott Murphy claimed to have met with White House political operatives “in the situation room.” The White House has been non-responsive to inquiries as to whether the Situation Room--previously reserved for national security-related meetings--is now being used for political get togethers. Now we learn in today’s Washington Post that Rahm Emanuel called a group of veterans' group leaders together to discuss a budget controversy "in the Situation Room," with "Emmanuel seated in the President's chair." The article notes that the vets made a political pitch to Rahm--"We said 'look, don't give Republicans an opportunity to slam you.'"

So it seems that the Obama White House is using the Situation Room for meetings in a way no previous administration did. Such a meeting would have been held either in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, or maybe in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing (which is where the article says Obama himself met with the veterans 48 hours earlier)--but never in the Situation Room. Obama seems to be holding to this principle--but not the self-aggrandizing Rahm Emanuel.

Palin thinks Obama's tasteless Special Olympics joke is appalling.

Webster's dictionary redefines marriage to include same-sex unions.

Can't wait for the T-shirt: Unionize or Die.

U.S. fighters intercept Russian planes during fly-over incidents twice this week off the coast of South Korea.

Planned Parenthood's president working hard to make sure U.S. taxpayers fund abortion through ObamaCare.

Coleman lawyer predicts Franken win in first recount trial.

RNC outraises DNC in February.

Conyers calls for ACORN probe. Hell freezes. Pigs fly, etc. etc.

Krauthammer on the 'Bonfire of Trivialities'.

The financial crisis explained, as only the Brits can:

A first group of 122 Iraqi refugees arrived in Germany on Thursday this week. The government in Berlin -- which will accept a total of 2,500 Iraqi refugees in the coming weeks and months -- will provide all of them with long-term residency papers, language courses, housing, and work permits. The other 26 EU member states combined will accept another 7,500 Iraqi refugees under the terms of a deal arranged by Germany between the European Union and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Due to strong political lobbying by Germany’s ruling conservative CDU/CSU parties, the resettlement program is especially targeted at Iraq’s religious minorities, which are clearly among the most vulnerable refugees groups:

Many of the families are Christians for whom living in Iraq has become extremely dangerous. Churches have been bombed, bishops murdered and anyone wearing a cross can quickly become a target. The Christians are too small a minority in the Muslim country to protect themselves. Of the first refugees to arrive in Germany on Thursday, about 60 percent were Christian and 15 percent Muslim, as well as 15 percent Mandaean.

To be sure, this Iraqi refugee resettlement program is a major first step in the right direction. Ultimately, however, it is just a drop in the ocean as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees (many of them Christians) remain stranded in neighboring countries such as Syria and Jordan under terrible conditions.

A nation of hosers? Not so much. The Canadian government is refusing entry to British MP George Galloway who, in addition to being a Saddam-loving anti-war activist, is also a financial supporter of Hamas, “a banned terrorist organization in Canada,” and as such a national security threat to the country. The immigration ministry notified Galloway in advance of a scheduled visit to Toronto so he could “avoid the expense and embarrassment of being turned away from the Canadian border.” Too bad. That would have been fun to watch, eh?

In his own Nowruz greeting to the people of Iran, Peres “heaped praise on the Iranian people and expressed his belief that they would eventually topple the regime because ‘leaders who do not serve their constituents are eventually removed.’” Now that’s how a president should be speaking to the prisoners of the Mullahcracy.

Editor's note: Also check out Jamie Kirchick's Nowruz Greeting.

The cars that drove Detroit's customers away.

Geithner's Feb. 10 plan now set to be revealed in April.

White House vs. CBO on deficits.

Teleprompter of the United States meme taking off, as Noonan picks up the ball and runs with it.

Fund raising off Dodd's woes.

Burning questions: Hey, what's Howard Dean up to?

"Incompetence is the perpetual Geithner defense."

No, Joe the Plumber, no.

This is CNN: Verbally assaulting the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.

Eli Lake reports that Senator Sam Brownback is committed to "doing everything I can to hold up" Christopher Hill's appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. Yesterday the Pentagon put Petraeus and Odierno on the record in support of that appointment in a move that seemed orchestrated to avoid another Freeman-like collapse of a controversial appointee. And the support of Petraeus and Odierno certainly will bolster Hill's credibility with some, but obviously not Brownback.

I'm struck by how liberals seem to misunderstand the politics at play in this fight. Michael Crowley wrote a piece for TNR on Wednesday that didn't even mention the possibility that Brownback would put a hold on Hill's nomination. Today he's opining again that "this really doesn't look like a fight many Republicans will want to be part of." Maybe that's true, but it kind of misses the point. The story here is that Brownback doesn't care about the politics.

Crowley also tries to psychoanalyze McCain's opposition to the Hill appointment. Again, I think he's looking for complexity where there isn't any. McCain was a vocal critic of the Bush administration's North Korea policy. He made it pretty clear that he thought the Six Party talks were a farce, and that Hill and the administration had been played for fools. And if one were to psychoanalyze McCain's position: he spent four years held in prison by a bunch of commies in Southeast Asia. Is it really surprising that he would be hostile to a man who spent four years negotiating with a bunch of commies in Northeast Asia and has nothing to show for it?

The bottom line is this thing could go either way.

Update: Crowley also writes "During Hill's confirmation hearing next week, watch to see whether McCain seems to be demanding a concession from Hill on this point, perhaps in exchange for McCain's support, and whether Hill is willing to grant it." McCain isn't on the foreign relations committee -- he won't be questioning Hill.

This morning, Obama had to apologize to the head of the Special Olympics for his flop of a foray into stand-up, Bernard-Manning-style.

He expressed his disappointment and he apologized, in a way that was very moving,” Shriver said on ABC's “Good Morning America.” “It’s important to see that words hurt, and words do matter. And these words that in some respect can be seen as humiliating or a put-down of people with special needs do cause pain, and they do result in stereotypes."

Obama told Shriver he wants to have some Special Olympics competitors over to the White House for basketball or bowling.

It's times like this that I'm reminded of what a wise pundit once told us makes Obama more than just a singularly impressive intellectual— his "social perception."

And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he's a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, 'David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you're only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.' And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.

It is this extraordinary capacity that led him, no doubt, to make a joke at the expense of disabled children on national television. It must have been his social perception that led him to call the people of D.C. weather wimps as soon as he got here, or make a rude joke about a sweet, elderly First Lady of the United States at his first press conference, or insensitively parrot a headline about Jessica Simpson's weight on national television, or begin his bipartisan, "new politics" outreach with, "I won."

Jim Treacher has a few other hilarious examples of upcoming hits on the Obama Social Perception Tour, which I hear will also include some killer bits on beloved and recently deceased "Golden Girl" Estelle Getty and maybe Heath Ledger's drug problems, because those always go over well.

More Obama graceless greatest hits, here.

With any luck, the same person who translated the "reset button" for Hillary Clinton's Russian counterpart, translated the subtitles of Obama's message to our friends, the Iranian mullahs, like this:

I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw the Islamic Republic of Iran forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

My apologies to everyone offended by jokes about bombing our enemies. I'll have to stick to less offensive topics approved by Obama--like jokes about events for the mentally handicapped.

While President Obama laid an egg with his crack about the Special Olympics last night, it's worth watching this video that Governor Palin taped just a few weeks ago and which was shown during the 2009 Special Olympics in Boise. Right now President Palin is sounding pretty good, and it's not like she couldn't have figured out how to print money, drive the stock market down, or fill out an NCAA bracket. Also, Andrew Sullivan might want to do some shoe-leather reporting on this but the way Piper is doting on Trig, it seems awfully maternal.

HT: Jack Fowler

I didn’t hear you mention the name of Roxana Saberi, the American journalist who was arrested in Tehran on trumped-up charges in January and still languishes in Evin prison, in your appeal to Iran last night. Or did I just miss it among all the words of poetic conciliation?

A former high-ranking German military official says that Iran was behind the joint North Korean-Syrian nuclear facility inside Syria that was destroyed in September 2007. According to the AP story:

An Iranian defector told the West that Iran was financing North Korean moves to transform Syria into a nuclear weapons power, leading to the Israeli airstrike that destroyed a secret reactor, a report said Thursday.

The report, written by Hans Ruehle, former chief of the planning staff of the German Defense Ministry, details an Iranian connection and fills in gaps about Israel's Sept. 6, 2007, raid that knocked out Syria's nearly completed Al Kabir reactor.

Ali Reza Asghari, a retired general in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards and a former deputy defense minister, "changed sides" in February 2007 and provided considerable information to the West on Iran's own nuclear program, Ruehle said in his article in the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung.

"The biggest surprise, however, was his assertion that Iran was financing a secret nuclear project of Syria and North Korea," he said. "No one in the American intelligence scene had heard anything of it. And the Israelis who were immediately informed also were completely unaware."

Although no one would confirm this directly when the existence of the site was reported several months after the Israeli strike, several people I spoke to suggested Iranian involvement.

Looks like a clenched fist to me.

Barack Obama recorded a videotaped message in celebration of Nowruz. Obama spoke directly to the leaders of Iran.

So in this season of new beginnings I would like to speak clearly to Iran's leaders. We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.

You, too, have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right -- but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.

Haven't Iran's leaders made that choice? They are supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, and yes, al Qaeda.

According to the State Department's list of state sponsors of terror:

Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) were directly involved in the planning and support of terrorist acts and continued to exhort a variety of groups, especially Palestinian groups with leadership cadres in Syria and Lebanese Hizballah, to use terrorism in pursuit of their goals. In addition, the IRGC was increasingly involved in supplying lethal assistance to Iraqi militant groups, which destabilizes Iraq.

And, as former CIA Director Mike Hayden put it before he left: "It is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to the highest levels of that government, to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq."

It's become uncool to remind people of these inconvenient facts. But they are facts. And ignoring them is dangerous.

He was on the board of AIG from 2001 to 2008, leaving just two months before the company imploded but not before executives had set the bonuses that have sparked bipartisan outrage. He received more than $100,000 in compensation annually, but according to the White House, "Mr. Holbrooke had nothing to do with and knew nothing about the bonuses." Shouldn't he have known something about those bonuses, given his generous compensation package?

"The role of a board is to keep a company from going over a cliff," said Robert Litan, an expert on financial institutions at The Brookings Institution in Washington. "I wouldn't be surprised if, in a future lawsuit, a court were to find the (AIG) directors behaved negligently."

Obama seemed to agree this week when he said "Nobody here was responsible for supervising AIG and allowing themselves to put the economy at risk by some of the outrageous behavior that they were engaged in."

How can Obama reward that behavior by allowing Holbrooke to serve a the top of his administration's foreign policy apparatus? Or put another way, how can Richard Holbrooke possibly survive this story. The entire country is fuming over the train wreck that is AIG, and it turns out that RIchard Holbrooke was one of the guys who was asleep at the switch. Still -- he got his bonuses:

According to the SEC filings, AIG paid Holbrooke $267,943 in fees and stock awards in 2007; he was paid $232,865 in 2006. Compensation figures for the six months he was on the board in 2008 are not yet available. By prorating his 2007 compensation, he could have earned about $107,500 in directors fees and stock.

Between 2001 and 2005 the records indicate he earned $200,000 in director's fees. He also received 2,400 shares of AIG stock and options to purchase 10,000 more during that period.

As Obama would say, it's an outrage.

Earlier today, liberal bloggers at Crooks and Liars and Digby went after John McCain for not vociferously defending his daughter in an interview with George Stephanopoulos. Here's the exchange in question:

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain Lots of twitterers want to know: what do you think of Meghan's feud with Coulter and Ingraham?

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos I'm proud of my daughter and she has a right to her opinions.

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain Do you agree with them?

SenJohnMcCain@GStephanopoulos like any family we agree on some things and disagree on others.

GStephanopoulos@SenJohnMcCain Thanks for your time Senator.You're a good sport I know I'm not getting anymore on Coulter and Ingraham Happy St Pat's again

Why such a disjointed, terse conversation, one might ask? Because it was a "twitterview"—an interview conducted with the senator over Twitter, the social media tool, which only allows for 140 characters per entry.

Digby should have kept her righteous indignation to under 140 characters, because she's divining a bit too much about the senator's state of mind and his views on feminism and body type, from his Twittering. This is her take:

What kind of a man is this that he can't even defend his daughter against personal insults from the likes of Laura Ingraham? He doesn't even have a political motivation, as low and cynical as that might be. He won't be running for president again...

I think he believes that Megan deserves to be spoken to like that because he probably speaks to her that way himself. Although she's quite lovely, she's not physically a perfect Barbie like her mother or Sarah Palin --- or Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham ---which is what he thinks is important in a woman. So, he can't bring himself to defend her. She asked for it.

The man had 140 characters in which to clarify, parse, and parry Stephanopoulos' questions, while keeping it bland enough to avoid another round in a fight he didn't start. Stephanopoulos' "Do you agree with them," which he didn't even cite in his write-up of the interview, is very unclear about who "them" is— Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, as Digby thinks? Or, is "them" the "feuds" themselves or the substance of the disagreements? McCain doesn't bother to waste an answer on it, nor should he.

Meghan McCain is a bit of a squish who seems to delight in pushing her cure-all medicine of moderation in exactly the venues where she will find no actual Republicans to buy it— MSNBC, The Daily Beast, etc. If a Republican truly wants to change hearts and minds, "Hardball" and "Rachel Maddow" are not the soapboxes from which to start preaching, as the approach leaves the Right skeptical about her sincerity (and, there's substantive evidence to support this skepticism with Meghan). Laura Ingraham was impolite in referencing McCain's body type, and McCain was only slightly less impolite when she none-too-subtly took a shot at Ingraham's age instead of sticking to the high ground.

But no matter what you think of the fight, Meghan McCain is a grown woman who has shown herself perfectly capable of both starting a row and defending herself in one. I find it odd that those on the Left who endorse her empowering body-image talking points would simultaneously demand that her father defend his little girl from each and every volley. It would serve neither Meghan nor McCain himself for him to Twitter his outrage to Stephanopoulos, which would infantilize her and handicap his own message.

It's also odd that nary a liberal in sight (Karen Tumulty of Time, excepted) had a word to say about Obama's unnecessarily holding up Jessica Simpson's weight for ridicule during an interview with Matt Lauer, in which he parroted a rude US Weekly headline, to Lauer's delight.

You know, that was almost enough to make me think Obama thinks Jessica Simpson deserves to be talked about that way because she's not a statuesque specimen of a daily fitness regimen, like Obama and his wife, Michelle, which is what he thinks is important in a person. He couldn't bring himself to leave her well enough alone. She asked for it.

That's what I might have thought about Obama, but alas, I have not Digby's divination skills.

This is what we like to call epic protocol FAIL.

Recently Congress revoked a pilot program allowing a small fleet of Mexican trucks passage into the United States. This was a violation of NAFTA, and the Mexican government promised retaliation. That didn't stop Congress!

Unsurprisingly, Mexico has retaliated and placed duties on 89 U.S. products.

In a statement, John McCain points out that the whole matter began with an amendment inserted into the recent obmnibus spending bill. The amendment's sponsor, North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan, is an avowed protectionist.

The first thing Dorgan would like to see is America build up trade barriers to promote domestic industry, even if that means higher prices for consumers, loss of U.S. market share in the global economy, and harm to North Dakota oil seeds exports.

The global trading system hit a wall last year with the collapse of the Doha round. Now it is unraveling. And the American president? He isn't lifting a finger to stop it.

Demographics might not be destiny, but it does make for great dinner-party chatter. More babies were born in the United States in 2007 than in any previous year, the Census Bureau reports. The nation's fertility level is at 2.1 percent - the replacement rate. The population won't be shrinking anytime soon.

There are some disturbing trends in the census data, however. The rate of teen pregnancy has risen for the second straight year, and even though the rate of increase was small, it's a trend worth following.

Also, more than 40 percent of women who had children in 2007 were unmarried. This is the highest level recorded yet, and may spell trouble for the futures of some of those kids. The latest upward trend in unmarried births started in 2002 and doesn't show signs of abating.

In other demographic news, Americans stayed put from mid-2007 to mid-2008. Internal migration declined considerably. There was less moving around. And there were fewer immigrants.

Put it all together, and the picture we get is of a growing country, but also a relatively stable one. People seem to be hunkering down and waiting for the financial storm to pass. And the two-parent family of married mother and father continues its transformation into something ... else.

Omid Mir Sayafi, a blogger who was jailed in Tehran in February for “insulting” Ayatollah Kameini, died in prison yesterday under mysterious circumstances. The offense that saw him thrown into Iran’s infamous Evin prison? Asking "Mr. Khamenei, can you love me as much as you love Sheikh Nasrallah's son?" Them’s fightin’ words for the Supreme Leader, I guess.

As the (UK) Times Online reports, “Iran has launched a crackdown on bloggers and internet users deemed to be hostile to the authorities and their Islamic values.”

Yes, let us by all means have a “dialogue” with this open-minded regime.

Michael Barone reports that a poll shows surprising Republican strength in the race to succeed Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm. This, even though Granholm won a 14-point victory over reelection opponent Dick DeVos in 2006. Times change!

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that House Republicans will soon release a report on Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo and his "VIP" mortgage program. Among those alleged to have received those sweet mortgages: Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd, who is already embroiled in the AIG bonus scandal. No fun being Dodd right now.

Next up: governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey. For the GOP, it's a target-rich environment in 2009. How many more targets will there be a year from now?

Yesterday, Attorney General Holder said that some of the current Guantanamo detainees may be released in the United States. Press reports indicate that Holder and the Obama administration are considering releasing some or all of the Uighur detainees at Guantanamo onto U.S. soil. That would be a mistake.

There are currently 17 Uighurs held at Guantanamo. Five others were previously sent to Albania. All 22 of the Uighurs are openly opposed to the Chinese government, but claim that they have no animosity for America. Before the Obama administration dropped the “enemy combatant” label altogether, the government decided that the Uighurs did not satisfy the definition of an “enemy combatant.”

It is not entirely clear why. The Uighur detainees were initially classified as enemy combatants during hearings at Guantanamo and then, only later, the classification was dropped. It may be that the politics of Guantanamo (including pressure from various anti-Gitmo groups, and pro-Chinese opposition sentiment) played a role in that decision. It is also likely that the government thought it was not worth fighting in the courts after judges decided the Uighurs did not meet the enemy combatant standard. (In my view, the opinions that have been issued thus far ignore a wealth of publicly-available information.)

Let’s be clear on the Uighur detainees: None of them are first-order threats. None of them should be counted among the “worst of the worst” detained by American forces, either at Guantanamo or abroad. We are not talking about terrorists of the same caliber as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It is also clear that some detainees who posed a more serious threat to national security have already been released or transferred. The only reason the Uighurs are still at Guantanamo is because the Bush administration could not safely transfer them back to China. There were and are human rights concerns. The Uighur detainees probably would have received rough treatment, or possibly even been executed.

Given all that, however, it is mistake to say the Uighur detainees pose no threat whatsoever. In brief, here are four reasons why. (You can also read my previous reporting on this topic here and here.)

Laura Rozen has the Pentagon going on the record in support of Chris Hill's nomination, dealing a serious blow to the campaign against his appointment. Brownback can fight it, but now he's fighting Crocker, Petraeus and Odierno.

Too bad. A friend writes:

Chris Hill's gonna get rolled by Iran like a joint at a Phish concert.

The news outlets just can't seem to stop falling for the stories about high-level negotiations with the Taliban. Last fall's reports of talks in Saudi Arabia turned out to be false, just as reports of a split between the Taliban and al Qaeda. Another report last week also claimed Mullah Omar sanctioned high-level talks with the Afghan government, but this also turned out to be incorrect. All of these stories have a common thread: Former members of the Taliban who have been expelled by the group are pushing the idea of talks.

Today, we get another report of so-called high level talks. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Afghan government has reached out to the radical, al Qaeda allied Haqqani Network. The Haqqanis have a fanatical devotion to the Wahhabism espoused by Sheikh Issa al Masri in Pakistan's tribal areas. The Haqqanis have foreign fighters in its network and operate suicide training camps as well as carry out suicide attacks against Coalition forces and Afghans alike.

Like past "negotiations" one needs to look at the players involved. No member of the Haqqani network is identified as negotiating with the government, which automatically makes this report suspicious. The CSM tells us that Maulavi Arsala Rahmani, an Afghan senator "and a member of the mediating team" is involved. Rahmani is bullish on the talks and wants the United States to end raids against the Haqqani network in exchange for the Haqqanis' ending attacks on schools and reconstruction teams as a a confidence building measure.

But you don't need to look too far into the past to know that Maulavi Arsala Rahmani was involved in Taliban negotiations that weren't really Taliban negotiations. The Christian Science Monitor told us that last fall's negotiations in Saudi Arabia were a sham, and Rahmani was part of it:

None of the attendees currently belongs to the Taliban, according to one former Taliban official who attended the meetings. Some of the attendees – such as Maulavi Arsala Rahmani, a former deputy minister and currently senator – didn't wield much influence in the former Taliban government. Others, such as former Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, have since fallen out of favor with the leadership. On the Afghan side, attendees included parliamentarian Arif Noorzai and National Security Adviser Zalmay Rasul.

Rahmani and other Taliban washups and wannabes have been promoting talks without delivering anything tangible for years. Why should we believe them now? And why didn't the CSM catch Rahmani's involvement in prior failed talks, particularly when they reported it just six month ago?

Freethrow shooting: The stat that will not budge.

Will there be bonuses offered for Congressional preening? Because it's about to kick into overdrive.

TARP firms have been doing their taxes, Daschle-style, according to House Ways and Means investigations.

Krauthammer sticks up for Liddy.

Barack Obama's Teleprompter has a blog.

This oughtta be tough: Obama interviews with Ed Schultz today.

Surging in Afghanistan.

Obama has officially dropped worst idea of all time.

Osama (unverified) has a word for Somalia.

Coach K has a word for Obama on brackets (H/t, FamousDC):

As the Obama administration completes its strategic review, it’s no secret that some Democrats in Congress and the Administration are suddenly growing nervous about actually committing resources to, what not so long ago, they insisted was “the war we must win.” One of the favorite talking points of the minimalists is the famed hostility of Afghans to foreign occupiers. Afghanistan, you may have heard, is a “graveyard of empires,” full of fierce and proud people who will react violently to a “heavy footprint” of foreign forces.

It’s a great talking point. Alas, it’s also not true. In addition to the fact, as Max Boot, Fred Kagan, and Kim Kagan recently pointed out, that the insurgents do not enjoy the support of the Afghan population -- a BBC-ABC News poll last month showed only 4 percent desired Taliban rule – a raft of polling likewise reveals that the Afghans do support our military presence there, and want us, if anything, to be doing more. According to the latest poll conducted by a consortium of humanitarian agencies including Save the Children, Care International and ActionAid – hardly unabashed boosters of American militarism – “86% of those questioned around the country had a generally positive view of [foreign forces] - but a similarly large majority would like to see those same forces, and the Afghan army they support, doing more, with more frequent patrols.”

Yesterday's New York Times reported that the Obama administration is considering the expansion of its not-so-covert air campaign against the Taliban into Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan. Quetta, the provincial capital, is known to host the Taliban Shura Majlis, or executive council, which is led by Mullah Omar.

At a press conference yesterday, a reporter directly asked Secretary of Defense Robert Gates about the United States potentially striking in Baluchistan. His answers were quite revealing:

QUESTION: Yes, Mr. Secretary, on that review process, there was a story today that some consideration is being given to an extra emphasis on Baluchistan in Pakistan, because some al Qaeda figures may have fled from the northern regions down to that area; and could there be increased drone strikes there? Even if you can't talk about whether you're considering it as part of the policy or the review, what is your concern in that regard?

SEC. GATES: Well, I think -- I think we all have a concern about the Quetta shura and the activities of the Taliban in that area, but I think this is principally a problem and a challenge for the Pakistanis to take on. And as we have indicated, we are prepared to do anything we can to -- to help them do that.

Yes?

QUESTION: Well, along those lines, there's a sense that the Pakistanis are helping a lot with information on al Qaeda in Pakistan, and also Baitullah Meshud. They're not offering as much information on the Taliban in Pakistan. Is that your assessment?

SEC. GATES: I'm not going to get into that.

First, clearly the U.S. military and intelligence services are pushing the Pakistanis hard to take on the Taliban leadership and support networks in Baluchistan. While Secretary Gates said this is a Pakistani problem, he did not rule out he possibility of U.S. airstrikes in Baluchistan.

Second, the United States has no confidence in Pakistan's desire or ability to tackle the Taliban problem. Instead of providing a diplomatic response such as 'the Pakistani government and military have a difficult task ahead of it and is making strides to tackle the problem', Gates abruptly declined to answer.

The New York Times' report of the possibility of strikes in Quetta is a shot across Pakistan's bow. With the U.S. military surging in southern Afghanistan and the Taliban's efforts to pinch Kabul and gain more ground in the south and east, fighting is expected to intensify to its highest level since the Taliban was ousted from power in 2002.

The United States has already expanded the air campaign in the northwest beyond the tribal areas. If the decision is made to hit the Taliban in Baluchistan, don't expect the first strike to hit in Quetta--the likely targets will be the multitude of Taliban camps in the outlying districts such as Zhob.

Like every other office in America, THE WEEKLY STANDARD is busy putting the final touches on the brackets for our NCAA pool. This year, however, we've added a new wrinkle: An entry into the pool for President Obama, reflecting his picks.

The only question is: What do we do with the pot if President Obama wins? A few possibilities suggest themselves:

* The Booby Prize: If Obama wins, all players are refunded their entry donation.

* The Socialist Option: If Obama wins, give the money to the lowest paid staffer.

* The Communist Option: The entire pot is given to the player who finishes last.

* The Save the World Option: Use the money to install energy efficient lightbulbs in the office.

* The Save America Option: Hold the money in escrow to be donated to the President's 2012 challenger.

Reader suggestions are welcome...

From reader JA:

Actually, the Communist Option should be that the managers in the office split the winnings among themselves and claim they did so on behalf of the people.

From reader CE:

How about the “Obama Appointee” option, and the person running the pool can keep the money for themselves and then when the winner comes looking for their winnings, they can plead ignorance that they didn’t know that’s what happens at the end of the contest. (even though it’s the same person who has ran it for the last five years and would like to start weekly Lotto drawing for the office)

From reader JB:

The Nancy Pelosi option: Spend the winnings to hire more civilian federal employees, and double the pot by taking an equal amount from the Defense budget.

At his bizarre town hall last night, President Barack Obama joked that "Washington is in a tizzy" over AIG and the $165 million in bonuses to be paid to its executives. The New York Times yesterday quoted White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel complaining that the whole affair was a "distraction." At Tuesday's press briefing, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs could not even provide a rough timeline of the administration's handling of the AIG affair.

Yes, it's true that the bonuses represent less than one percent of the total bailout money that has gone to AIG. And yes, there are legitimate points to be made about retention bonuses in general and (though less persuasive) retention bonuses for these AIG employees. But it has been clear for a while that something -- an event, a comment, a cable news tirade, a speech -- was going to focus the growing public anger over bailouts and government giveaways.

This is it.

And if the White House doesn't understand that, Congressional Democrats certainly do. “I think in general the administration is underestimating the rage and frustration that people are feeling about the shenanigans on Wall Street,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told Politico. “I think they need to be more aggressive in standing up to Wall Street and representing the taxpayers.”

Other Democrats are taking shots, too.

Here's President Obama, Wednesday night at his town hall meeting in California:

The same is true with AIG.... It was the right thing to do to step in. Here’s the problem. It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.

This comparison is inappropriate on so many levels, one hardly knows where to begin.

First, given the world we live in and our own recent history, shouldn't the president of the United States avoid flip and juvenile comparisons to suicide bombers? Second, should the president really be comparing employees of financial institutions to murderers--especially when his administration has been defending giving those employees their (supposedly) contractually obligated bonuses?

Third, is the president's view really that the way to deal with suicide bombers is to try to "ease them off" the trigger rather than to shoot them if possible before they act?

Maybe President Obama should stop talking for a while, and actually try to govern?

Via CNN, Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski has some advice for Obama:

Somebody said that we're not in President Obama's Final Four, and as much as I respect what he's doing, really, the economy is something that he should focus on, probably more than the brackets...

I never bought the argument of the Left, indulged in frequently during the Bush years, that if he was in Crawford, he couldn't possibly be doing his job. If he was exercising frequently, he couldn't possibly be doing his job. Most of them believed he couldn't possibly be doing his job, no matter where he was; Camp David, Crawford, and his bike rides were just excuses to make a point they'd make no matter what.

So, I'm careful about implying that the president must not have a life outside of his job in order to do his job. Barack Obama has two beautiful daughters, the actual weight of the world on his shoulders, and any human's need to chill every now and then. I do not begrudge him some time at the gym or some Super Bowl fun every now and then.

But he's just short of two months into his presidency—a job he asked for somewhat enthusiastically— during an economic downturn he himself compares to the Great Depression, and his requirement for respite is disconcertingly high.

On February 3, the day Tom Daschle had to withdraw his nomination as HHS head, Obama left the White House to read to students at a local charter school. The look of the scene, as even Maureen Dowd noted, echoed the actions of President Bush, much maligned by the Left for reading "The Pet Goat" to students for several minutes after getting word of the 9/11 attacks. The "My Pet Goat" moment became a symbol for Bush's adversaries of his alleged wilting under pressure, though the administration maintained it held off on an official statement until facts were gathered, and to avoid panic among students.

The Obamas, however, were explicit that escaping the relatively minor crisis of Daschle's botched nomination was exactly what they'd intended to do:

"We were just tired of being in the White House," the president candidly told the gleeful second-graders at Capital City Public Charter School.

"We got out! They let us out!" Mrs. Obama said as the kids and their teachers laughed.

The President also took a week-long trip to Hawaii in December and a three-day Valentine's Day trip to Chicago, but those are reasonable. What is worrisome is the President's favorite retreat is a place that no longer exists— the campaign trail.

When public opinion began to waver on his giant stimulus bill, he took to Elkhart, Ind. and Ft. Myers, Fla. where the crowds and the approbation were plentiful. That was the beginning of February, back when the economic crisis was a catastrophe from which we might never emerge. Today, states are rarin' to spend the money, spurred by threats written into the bill and from the administration that they'll lose their money if they don't spend it on deadline.

The problem is the rules for doing so responsibly, and even lawfully, are largely unclear because the massive bill was pushed through Congress and signed by the president with precious little debate or thought, at the urging of the president himself. Perhaps that's something he could have been working on while he was accepting hosannas on the trail.

The administration's frequent miscues, particularly the lack of a viable plan for failing banks, make it easy to wonder exactly why Obama feels there's an urgent need to take a "time out" at his "time-out dinners."

Dana Milbank noted Obama's tendency to retreat to another trail tactic in December— evasion combined with sports talk. When possible contacts between White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and indicted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, were the talk of the day, Obama was having none of it, prompting this zinger from Milbank:

A month from now, the nation will say farewell to its sports-obsessed president who doesn't like tough questions. And it will replace him with, well, another sports-obsessed president who doesn't like tough questions.

Today, as the AIG mess blows up in his face and Geithner faces serious questions, the president is on an all-out campaign swing, addressing everything but the issue at hand. This morning, he filled out a bracket for the NCAA Tournament, raising eyebrows even on apolitical sports blogs, about the president's priorities. To top off the day, he'll travel to California to pitch his budget plan to crowds of the adoring and appear on Jay Leno's show, to joke around a bit. Perhaps on the way back, he can do a diner tour of West Virginia.

None of these incidents would be problematic on its own, but Obama's natural tendency to deal in campaign solutions when faced with presidential problems bespeaks the frightening rightness of the Right's talking points during the campaign. For many, even those who did vote for him, there's a creeping feeling that Obama might be as unprepared as McCain supporters warned he would be, even though they'd rather he weren't. His refuge is the campaign environment where he knows he excels (although even the Teleprompter betrays him these days).

Too bad we need a president.

On Tuesday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs declared that Barack Obama would be bringing Guantanamo detainees to "swift and certain justice," unlike his predecessor in the White House.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder says that some current Gitmo detainees could be released in the United States.

Attorney General Eric Holder said some detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may end up being released in the U.S. as the Obama administration works with foreign allies to resettle some of the prisoners...For "people who can be released there are a variety of options that we have and among them is the possibility is that we would release them into this country," Mr. Holder said. "That process is ongoing and we've not made any determinations or made any requests of anybody at this point."

I wonder if Holder would welcome them in his neighborhood? Or perhaps the lawyers who defended them so vigorously would be up for a new roommate or two? Blair House?

Noemie Emery skewers the Palinphobes.

Napolitano calls terrorist attacks "'man-caused' disasters." Just like car crashes and obesity?

Matthew Continetti on Bloggingheads.

David Smick on the export addiction.

Good news: bonuses for Fannie Mae!

British study shows that Girls do better at single-sex schools.

Obama disarms pilots.

According to Trendhunter magazine, on the heels of Germany’s Obama fried chicken fingers, Russia has its own unseemly ad for Duet Ice Cream: “This ice cream ad reads, ‘The Flavor of the Week! Black in White! Chocolate in Vanilla’ and features a chocolate and almond coated vanilla ice cream bar with a cartoon Obama standing in front of the White House with four vibrant rainbows and sun beams bursting cheerfully in the background.” I’m reminded of a popular Viennese confection called the Mohr im Hemd—a sort of chocolate-hazelnut pudding surrounded by a vanilla sauce. (It translates to “Moor in Shirt,” or a nightshirt, which is presumably white.) I’ve never had Russian ice cream, Obama-flavored or otherwise, but for my money, I’ll stick with Eva Longoria and her love for Magnums.

Is President Obama’s pet union trying to pull a fast one on some of its constituents? SEIU, which the Washington Post calls “the most influential union in the nation,” has announced it’s going to can 75 members of the union that represents union members in labor disputes.

I am the very model of a union representative / I keep my job and yours as well by being argumentative / I’m not averse to using tricks that some may find agitative / And in the end I always win because I am affricative (with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan).

But the Union of Union Representatives has plans of its own, filing “unfair labor practices charges against SEIU with the National Labor Relations Board. The staff union's leaders say that SEIU is engaging in the same kind of practices that some businesses use -- laying off workers without proper notice, contracting out work to temp firms, banning union activities and reclassifying workers to reduce union numbers.” Calling Norma Rae!

A statement from Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee:

"Before Wall Street executive Scott Murphy gets carried away with ‘top-secret’ meetings in the White House situation room, he must first answer to the voters of upstate New York. For now, those middle-class taxpayers have only one question for Murphy – why did he so blindly endorse a loophole that gave millions in taxpayer-funded bonuses to AIG executives?”

In the NY-20 special election, the economy is the sole issue. Jennifer Rubin notes that the seat could be the first casualty of the AIG bonus scandal. Murphy says he would have voted for the stimulus--which included protections for AIG's bonuses--while Tedisco has come out hard against the stimulus in the last few days.

You can't stop her, you can only hope to contain her:

Images of wolves being hunted from the air were one of the more macabre entries in the presidential campaign, and now Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is at odds with the federal government over wolf hunting.

The National Parks Service has complained that a new program under which state workers will shoot wolves from helicopters in the Upper Yukon/Tanana region.

"We’re concerned that it would be difficult and potentially not possible for us to follow our mandates based on the state’s action in the control area," Greg Dudgeon, the superintendent of hte Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, told me just now....

The group Defenders of Wildlife has also filed suit against Palin.

"While the media obsesses over Governor Palin's private family life, she is getting away with illegally slaughtering large numbers of wolves from the air," commented Defenders Action Fund president, Rodger Schlickeisen. "The governor is even encouraging the killing of wolves that reside and den mostly on federal land, which belongs to all of us, not just Alaskans...."

I don't care what anybody says, "slaughtering large numbers of wolves from the air" is political gold.

The Washington Post:

Russia Signaling Interest in Deal on Iran, Analysts Say

And the Associated Press:

Reports: Russia confirms Iran missile contract

The deal the Washington Post refers to in the headline, in case you're wondering, was a deal with the United States on managing Iran -- not a deal to provide missiles to Iran.

Absolutely nothing, says union boss James Hoffa: "Since when is the secret ballot a basic tenet of democracy?"

Answer: since the early nineteenth century. But who's counting?

Hoffa criticizes the secret ballot because he supports card-check, which would unionize workplaces once a majority of workers sign a card in support of a union. President Obama supports card-check. Last week legislation was introduced into Congress that would make it the law of the land.

But it's nowhere near a done deal. Two Blue Dog congressmen, Dan Boren and Travis Childers, both announced recently that they oppose the legislation.

On the Senate side, The Hill reports that the fight may come down to four senators up for reelection in 2010: Arlen Specter (PA), Blanche Lincoln (AK), Michael Bennet (CO), and Harry Reid (NV).

Keep an eye on this quartet. Their votes will have far-reaching consequences for the American economy and workplace democracy.

Florida Republican congressman Connie Mack has called on Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner to resign. Politico blogger Glen Thrush writes that Mack is the "first member (we think) to call for Tim Geithner's head." Give Mack some pioneer points, then, because something tells me he won't be the last person to say Geithner should go.

Geithner's nomination was almost derailed when he admitted to not paying payroll taxes as a banker at the International Monetary Fund. This, even though Geithner, as Treasury secretary, would be in charge of the IRS! Regardless, the Senate confirmed Geithner, though with 34 senators opposed.

Geithner was confirmed because he had a sterling reputation. At that point, his association with the previous administration was considered a plus. And Geithner was also thought to be a better spokesman than Lawrence Summers for the Obama administration's economic policies. He caught a break.

So what happened? Geithner's bank plan was a bust. He came under criticism during a recent Senate Budget Committee hearing. He rarely speaks in public, leaving Summers to appear on the talk shows and deliver speeches.

Geithner knew about the AIG bonuses last Tuesday, but did not get out ahead of them. Nor did he, it seems, organize a public relations strategy to deal with the fallout. As of Sunday, after all, Larry Summers was saying that, while he didn't like the bonuses, AIG was "contractually obligated" to pay them out. A misstep!

Next up for Geithner: announcing the details to his bank rescue plan, which could cost another $750 billion dollars. How will "Doogie Howser, Treasury Secretary," be able to convince Congress to give him the money?

It would be extremely unusual for Obama to switch Treasury secretaries before the end of his first year in office. But these are unusual times. And Geithner is setting himself up perfectly to be the fall guy.

Luckily, Geithner will be able to count on Obama, who stands by his associates in good times and bad and is not the sort who throws folks under the bus as soon as they become political inconveniences. ...

Oh, wait.

The Mexican government announced several days ago that it would impose higher tariffs on 90 different products imported from the United States. Today the list was released. The National Association of Manufacturers provides an unofficial translation here.

Mexico imports a range of agricultural and industrial products from the United States. In the case of agricultural products, those imports include corn, rice, wheat, beef, and a whole range of other items. Looking at this list, it seems that one common characteristic among the targeted ag products is that they are generally produced in California. The new tariffs are imposed on wines, onions, lettuce, almonds, strawberries, cherries, peas, grapes and other products grown in California.

According to a Mexican government official following the debate, California wines are likely to be displaced in Mexico by Chilean and European wines. (Mexico has signed Free Trade Agreements with those countries, and they have not violated the agreements in the way the Obama administration has.) It's my understanding that almost every product on this list faced a tariff of between zero and ten percent on sales in Mexico before this action; now those rates will rise to 15 or 20 percent in most cases. Grapes shipped to Mexico will face a tariff rate of 45 percent.

The most powerful Californian in Congress is, of course, Speaker Pelosi. If the Mexican government wanted to make a U.S. politician bear the political cost of violating NAFTA, they could hardly do better than to target Pelosi. This list guarantees that she will hear about this every time she returns to her state -- especially when she travels to wine country.

California will not be the only entity hit by these increased tariffs. The list includes many industrial products as well. It's interesting to note that it includes toilet paper, antiperspirant, plasticware, shaving cream, dental products and shampoo.
There's an Ohio company that makes many of those products, and Ohio happens to be represented in the Senate by one of America's most ardently protectionist Senators -- Sherrod Brown.

It could just be coincidence that Mexico is imposing penalties that seem to disproportionately impact the constituents of leading protectionists in Congress. If it is though, it's an interesting coincidence.

Overrunning the asylum, European Union thought police have issued a pamphlet to members of parliament containing guidelines for the gender-neutral-speak that will from now on be the required language of that august body. Members will no longer be permitted to use such repulsively sexist appellations as Miss or Mrs., Frau, or Fraulein, Madame or Mademoiselle--you get the picture. Nor will the EU secretary general countenance “man-made,” “headmistress,” “statesman,” or “policewoman,” among other abhorrences. Sputtered one outraged Scottish Tory: “We will soon be told that the use of the words ‘man’ or ‘woman’ has been banned in case it causes offence to those who consider 'gender neutrality' an essential part of life.” Can he--oops, I mean, it--be very far off the mark?

The CQ piece on opposition to Chris Hill (linked by Michael Goldfarb below) has a hilarious and horrifying kicker:

Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., also defended the Hill nomination and downplayed the importance of having an ambassador who knows a lot about Iraq. “We have ambassadors that go all over the world that don’t have any experience in the areas that they run,” Levin said.

Because, y'know, the ambassador to Iraq is just about as important as the ambassador to the Maldives.

After 9/11, few would have predicted that the American homeland would not be struck again in short order. Indeed, the more we learn about al Qaeda’s designs the more we understand that was the terrorist organization’s intent. Al Qaeda operatives had already been dispatched to U.S. soil for follow-on attacks, while al Qaeda’s commanders stationed overseas continued to plot new terrorist attacks against America.

How many al Qaeda terrorists were being positioned for this second round of attacks? We will probably never know. But one of the most interesting findings to come out of the intelligence collected at Guantanamo involves the number of detainees who had at least some of the requisite skills for such attacks. Paul Rester, who is the director of the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantanamo, has investigated this aspect of al Qaeda’s operations. In Inside Gitmo, Gordon Cucullu explains:

Rester was thinking about some of the interrogation reports one day and had an idea. He told his staff that they were going to construct “fantasy hijack teams.” First they assembled the profiles of all known 9/11 hijackers, including Muhammad al Qahtani, Zacarias Moussaoui, and the 19 who [committed suicide] with the aircraft. Then they applied these derived standards to detainees in Guantanamo. To their surprise they were able to come up with four additional hijack teams: trained pilots, aircraft engineers, committed muscle, and presence in the United States on 9/11. It is highly likely that these men – some, if not all – were among other hijack teams aloft on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Teams of five al Qaeda terrorists hijacked three planes on 9/11. The fourth plane was hijacked by a team of four, but Qahtani and/or Moussaoui were most likely intending to be the fifth. Thus, we know that when Rester found that there were “four additional hijack teams” at Guantanamo, we know that he and his staff probably identified 19 or 20 detainees who could have taken part in another hijacking operation.

From our vantage point as outsiders, we know who some of the detainees identified by Rester are. For example, one of them is Ghassan Abdullah al Sharbi, whom I discussed in my piece today. Cucullu says that al Sharbi was identified as one of the “primary fantasy hijackers.” Al Sharbi had taken flight lessons with at least one 9/11 hijacker in Arizona and worked for the upper echelon of al Qaeda’s hierarchy in plotting attacks against Americans.

As the Obama administration decides what to do with the remaining detainees, it would be prudent for the president’s advisers to ask: Who are the other detainees Rester and his team identified as potential hijackers?

Keep in mind that these detainees are not likely to be among the most senior al Qaeda terrorists who are considered to be “high value.” Notorious, high-level detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah could plan from afar, but there was little to no chance they would or could be part of a “hijack team.” Their presence would surely have set off alarm bells, and they would not sacrifice their skill set for a single operation. This means that in addition to the 16 high-value detainees currently held at Guantanamo, all whom are directly tied to large-scale terrorist plotting, there are likely another 20 or so detainees who intelligence officials believe could have been slated to take part in a future round of hijackings.

The Obama administration would be wise to find out who they are, and how the Bush administration neutralized them.

Remember everyone's favorite Energy secretary, Steven Chu? Last month he told the Los Angeles Times that, if the Obama administration's climate change policies aren't enacted, "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California." What a party-pooper.

Well, yesterday Chu said he was open to imposing duties on foreign carbon as a "weapon" to fight climate change. "If other countries don't impose a cost on carbon, then we will be at a disadvantage...[and] we would look at considering perhaps duties that would offset that cost," Chu said, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Unsurprisingly, America's trading partners do not like the idea, and Chinese government officials are already on record saying a carbon tariff would be (1) illegal under the WTO and (2) invite retaliation. Which no one really needs right now.

Also, Chu's comments arrive just as the Obama administration has to deal with Mexican anger at Congress's decision to revoke rules allowing Mexican trucks on U.S. highways. So far the Obama administration is doing an excellent job at treating our friends (and competitors) shabbily.

Connecticut Democratic senator Chris Dodd is up for reelection in 2010. Republicans are chomping at the bit to take on the career senator, who is alleged to have received sweet mortgage deals from infamous Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo.

Recently the former GOP congressman Rob Simmons announced he will run to challenge Dodd. Another name that's occasionally mentioned: CNBC host and committed supply sider Larry Kudlow.

Whoever the GOP nominee is, things are looking good. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows Simmons already tied with Dodd. Now, the campaign hasn't even begun, a lot will happen between now and November 2010, yadda yadda yadda. At this point the GOP ought to take what it can get.

And look what it got! Dodd apparently entered language into the stimulus bill guaranteeing "contractually obligated" bonuses "agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009.” Bonuses just like AIG's, in other words.

It further turns out that Dodd has taken more than a quarter million dollars in campaign donations from AIG and its employees over the last two decades.

So: Dodd is not only friends with mortgage lender bad guy number one, he is also friends with evil insurance giant number one. That has to hurt his chances, no?

Josh Rogin gauges the opposition to Chris Hill's nomination to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and gets some choice quotes from Senator Sam Brownback, who is leading the charge against the appointment:

Brownback, who spearheaded the letter, said in an interview that he is considering placing a hold on the nomination. Such a move could stall action indefinitely.

In addition to his criticisms of Hill’s experience and qualifications, Brownback also questioned the nominee’s credibility with Congress, referring to promises Hill made to him regarding North Korea last year.

At a July hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hill, as the chief negotiator for the six-party talks, promised Brownback he would elevate the human rights issue in bilateral discussions and invite Jay Lefkowitz, the State Department’s special envoy for North Korean human rights, to all future negotiations with the North Koreans.

In exchange, Brownback lifted his hold on the nomination of Kathleen Stephens to become ambassador to South Korea. Neither promise was kept, Brownback said. “I had a direct statement made to me in open hearing and nothing happened,” he said.

Support from Senator Lugar, ranking members of the Foreign Affairs Committee, assures that Hill's nomination will get out of committee and will make it difficult for Republicans to filibuster his confirmation, but Brownback isn't seeking reelection and has little to lose from putting a hold on Hill. After the mess with General Zinni, it's not clear that President Obama is paying much attention to all this, but surely someone in the administration is eager to make sure they have their own guy in place at the Baghdad embassy. The White House is doing all it can to move Hill's nomination along, but iIf Brownback holds this up for any substantial length of time, presumably the White House will find someone else to fill the post.

The idea of federal yard sales. Literally.

Obama finds unfamiliar foreboding in AP analysis: "Gone are the days when they could merely bludgeon the Bush administration and promise to seek bipartisan solutions to the nation's economic problems."

Obama's bracket backlash: "I think it’s the first time a sitting president has ever wasted his time in such a public fashion."

The creepy fallout of bailouts: “Give the bonuses back, or we’ll find a way to take them back.”

Turns out the enforcement of existing laws is pretty darn popular.

Chris Dodd works on cleaning up the phenomenal political mess he made himself.

Governors entreated to spend stimulus money really, really fast, and totally responsibly and transparency, but mostly really, really fast.

Bloomberg opening borough election HQs.

N.C. State student identifies new and innovattive way to deal with "hate speech:" putty and paint.

The growing Geithner problem.

Obama: Geithner's doing a heckuva job.

Massachusetts's universal health care plan faces a ginormous budget shortfall, reports the Times:

Thanks to new taxes and fees imposed last year, the health plan’s jittery finances have stabilized for the moment. But government and industry officials agree that the plan will not be sustainable over the next 5 to 10 years if they do not take significant steps to arrest the growth of health spending.

Governor Deval Patrick wants to cut costs by instituting "a new payment method that rewards prevention and the effective control of chronic disease, instead of the current system, which pays according to the quantity of care provided." Good luck with that.

Price is determined by supply and demand. If you have great demand for health care but a limited supply, like we do now, the price will be high. Preventive medicine could reduce demand by making people healthier in the long run, but it will take a long time for those cost savings to be realized. In the meantime, demand for medical services will keep prices high, and government subsidies will make costs go higher, because if you subsidize something (in this case, health insurance and thus demand for health services) you get more of it.

How do you reduce demand? Well, you could institute rationing and limit the medical services available to the consumer. Or you could make the consumer more responsible for his health care decisions. But our political system isn't ready for either option. The upshot: demand continues to increase as government shoulders more of the burden. And the cost of government health care swells.

So, when the Washington Post reports that the Obama health care plan could cost $1.5 trillion over 10 years rather than the $635 billion set aside in the FY2010 budget, we should take that information with a grain of salt. It's likely that the real number will be much higher than that.

The U.S. health insurance system produces a tremendous amount of social and economic distortions. It ought to be reformed. But, if you advocate a reform that insures more people at the government's expense, you ought to realize that the only way to pay for such a proposal is through much, much higher taxes. And not just taxes on the top 2 percent.

AIG's bonus bucks continue to stir outrage. Up next: AIG executive Edward Liddy testifies before Congress today. Cue the sanctimony!

Secretary Geithner said yesterday that the Treasury will deduct the amount of the bonuses from the most recent AIG bailout. (Total spent propping up AIG so far: $200 billion.) But Geithner's policy isn't stopping congressional Democrats from plotting to tax the bonus money at absurdly high marginal rates.

Krauthammer:

When you get politicians ahead of the mob running companies, you get madness and idiocy here. The contracts are legal contracts, and it wasn't as if these bonuses were unknown or sprung at the last minute. They were written into these agreements over a year ago, long before AIG was even nationalized or partially nationalized.

And the problem here is that by the Congress now trying to break the contracts by a ruse, essentially a 100 percent taxation or confiscation, they're going against a few hundred years of common law where you don't do retroactive confiscation or bills of attainder, which are laws aimed at particular individuals. It's just not done.

And to sacrifice all of those principles of democracy and business and contract over, as Rich indicated, a tenth of one percent of the bailout, is absurd, particularly in a Congress which just a week ago signed a bill with enough pork to fund these bailouts for about 20 years.

John Fund wrote something similar in yesterday's "Political Diary" (subscription only):

The government, in a desperate attempt to avoid political pain caused by its own foolish economic mistakes and lax oversight, has poured billions into bankrupt companies. Then when those companies pass out bonuses they claim are necessary to retain qualified workers, the political firestorm leads government officials to propose tax rates that would make even British socialists of a half century ago blush. We are slipping into debates that have nothing to do with a free economy and everything to do with the government calibrating how to balance the favors it hands out with the inevitable moral outrage those favors engender.

Ugh. Someone stop this ride. It's no fun anym