On Fox News Sunday, the boss says that the more you look at Sotomayor's 2001 "wise Latina" speech the worse it is (read the full text of her speech here):

KRISTOL: ... It was a carefully prepared text, published in La Raza Law Journal.

WALLACE: This is her 2001 speech at Berkeley Law School.

KRISTOL: Right, at Berkeley Law School, at a symposium, speaking from a text, a total endorsement of, in my view, identity politics, counting by race, a Latina judge's voice.

She goes so far that the next day Judge Richard Paez of the Ninth Circuit, who is a liberal Clinton appointee, basically rebukes her and makes a big point of saying, "Look, I'm proud to be a Latino. I bring my experiences to the court. But I took an oath to judge, and I really believe we have to judge impartially and it can't just be an aspiration," and he didn't mention her name, but he basically is rebutting her speech the night before that somehow impartial judging is merely an aspiration.

So I think she has to account for this speech, not just for one sentence.

The Chicago-Tribune's Steve Chapman sounds a similar note:

Sotomayor, [her supporters] point out, also said judges "must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate."

Her allies have a point. Anyone who reads the whole speech will indeed find that her comment wasn't as bad as it sounds. It was worse.

What is clear from the full text is that her claim to superior insight was not a casual aside or an exercise in devil's advocacy. On the contrary, it fit neatly into her overall argument, which was that the law can only benefit from the experiences and biases that female and minority judges bring with them.

Also, see Scott Johnson's take here.

We don't have a very good understanding of Judge Sotomayor's reasoning in the Ricci v. DeStefano racial preferences case because she and her two colleagues issued a one-paragraph "per curiam opinion [that] adopted in toto the reasoning of the District Court, without further elaboration or substantive comment, and thereby converted a lengthy, unpublished district court opinion, grappling with significant constitutional and statutory claims of first impression, into the law of this Circuit," as the Second Circuit's Judge Cabranes, a Clinton appointee, wrote in his dissent from the court’s 7-6 denial of en banc rehearing in the case.

Thankfully, the Wall Street Journal has posted an audio recording of an hour-long hearing from the Ricci case that sheds a little more light on Sotomayor's grappling (or lack thereof) with the serious claims brought up in this case. The Journal reports that Sotomayor and "the presiding judge, Rosemary Pooler, fire questions at the firefighters’ lawyer, Karen Lee Torre." I think the following excerpt, in particular, is worth reading (though it's much more powerful listening Torre make her argument).

Judge Pooler asks (I assume Pooler is speaking because she is the only other judge identified by the Journal at the hearing) why the case of Hayden v. County of Nassau "isn't dispositive" in the Ricci case. Torre replies that in Hayden, "Nobody had lost anything. Nobody had taken the test yet. ... No one was hurt".

Judge Pooler interrupts and says that the district court judge said "no one was hurt here [in New Haven] either." Torre, flabbergasted, replies:

No one was hurt? For heaven's sakes, judge, if they didn't refuse to fill the vacancies, these men would be lieutenants and captains. How can you say they weren't hurt? They're out $1,000 a piece. Half of their marriages were strained by this. They spent 3 months of their lives holed up in a room like I was and you were when we took the bar exam.

So much for empathetic appeals.

Torre then argues that New Haven's decision to throw out an exam that tested vital knowledge for firefighters endangers lives, especially in a "post-9/11 era, no less":

I think a fundamental failure is the application of these concepts to this job as if these men were garbage collectors. This is a command position of a First Responder agency. The books you see piled on my desk are fire science books. These men face life threatening circumstances every time they go out. ... Please look at the examinations. ... You need to know: this is not an aptitude test. This is a high-level command position in a post-9/11 era no less. They are tested for their knowledge of fire, behavior, combustion principles, building collapse, truss roofs, building construction, confined space rescue, dirty bomb response, anthrax, metallurgy, and I opened my district court brief with a plea to the court to not treat these men in this profession as if it were unskilled labor. We don't do this to lawyers or doctors or nurses or captains or even real estate brokers. But somehow they treat firefighters as if it doesn't require any knowledge to do the job.

Oops. It looks like Torre just made an argument that was probably a little too classist for Judge Sotomayor's tastes. Nevertheless Torre continues to drive home the point that a mastery of the knowledge required to pass the test in New Haven could have saved lives:

Firefighters die every week in this country. ... [There was a case ] a few miles away where a young father and firefighter Eddie Ramos died after a truss roof collapsed in a warehouse fire because the person who commanded the scene decided to send men into an unoccupied house, with no people to save on Thanksgiving Day, with a truss roof known to collapse early in the fire because of the nature of the pins that hold the trusses together would have collapsed. And for 20 minutes he couldn't find any air and he he suffocated to death. And the fire chief had to go tell a 6 year-old that her father wasn't coming home. I'm not being histrionic. That happens all the time, and if you can't pass a competency exam and answer substantive job knowledge questions, I think that the only compelling governmental interest or Title 7 interest I see--

Then Judge Sotomayor interrupts:

JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: Counsel ... we're not suggesting that unqualified people be hired. The city's not suggesting that. All right? But there is a difference between where you score on the test and how many openings you have. And to the extent that there's an adverse impact on one group over the other, so that the first seven who are going to be hired only because of the vagrancies [sic] of the vacancies at that moment, not because you're unqualified--the pass rate is the pass rate--all right? But if your test is always going to put a certain group at the bottom of the pass rate so they're never ever going to be promoted, and there is a fair test that could be devised that measures knowledge in a more substantive way, then why shouldn't the city have an opportunity to try and look and see if it can develop that?

KAREN LEE TORRE: Because they already developed it, your honor.

JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: It assumes the answer. It assumes the answer which is that, um, the test is valid because we say it's valid.

KAREN LEE TORRE: The testing consultant said it was valid. He told them it was valid.... They had evidence that the test was job-related and valid for use under Title VII.

Sotomayor may have not wanted unqualified firefighters to be elevated to the position of captain and lieutenant--she simply wanted less qualified firefighters to be placed in charge of the lives of other men in the interests of racial diversity. I wonder what Eddie Ramos would say about that if he were alive today.

During her confirmation hearing, hopefully we will get to find out what evidence Sotomayor had to back up her claim that this test "is always going to put a certain group at the bottom". Did she actually examine the test to see if it was unfair to a particular group? And, how, precisely, does she think it's possible to create a test that "measures knowledge in a more substantive way"?

George Tiller, a doctor who performed third-trimester abortions in Kansas, was murdered today. Princeton's Robert George writes at NRO:

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him. We are a nation of laws. Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence. Rightly or wrongly, George Tilller was acquitted by a jury of his peers. "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord." For the sake of justice and right, the perpetrator of this evil deed must be prosecuted, convicted, and punished.

Read the rest here.

The average American may have an excuse for not being familiar with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), President Obama's unfamiliarity with NGA is troubling. The NGA is a key source (if not the only source) for information on many of the issues he is being briefed about on a daily basis. The North Korean nuclear test and missile launches, developments in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, even the Somali pirates, the intelligence community's analysis is likely based on raw intelligence produced by NGA. If the President has not yet had NGA analysts into the Oval for a briefing, it raises questions about how diligent he is about reading his intel. Perhaps instead of taking in a Broadway Show, he should have stayed home and spent Saturday night spending some more time with the PDB.

How soft are we getting on detainees? This soft: All 17 Uighurs are now allowed to order fast-food, and they're getting laptops so they can practice sending email. They can't email outsiders but this type of training is, no doubt, vital for their post Gitmo lives.

Of course, the last type of training they received was terrorist training -- from Abdul Haq, a member of al Qaeda's elite Shura Council.

The article also mentions the "stigma" of having been at Gitmo, as if the stigma of being a trained al Qaeda terrorist isn't going to trouble potential employers. The U.S. commander at the detention center says Obama's change is coming "a little slow" but when it comes it will be "dramatic." Another six months and Republicans may be fighting to keep open an all-inclusive resort operated at taxpayer expense.

There are a few missing from the list, like the Special Operations Command Intelligence Support Activity (ISA)--which may have another name by now. Officially, it doesn't exist, but its job is to gather intelligence in support of SOCOM operations, including the very black ones. It was formed after the abortive Iranian hostage rescue mission, because the military realized it could not count on the CIA for operational intelligence support. A popularized history of the unit can be found in The Killer Elite by Michael Smith (St. Martins Press), 2007.

It turns out the Obama administration isn't quite as keen as its supporters to let al Qaeda-trained Uighurs settle in the United States. NRO's Andy McCarthy reports on the latest developments:

The Obama Justice Department told the Supreme Court this evening that the Uighurs have no right to be released into the United States.

The Uighurs, Chinese Muslim detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, received terrorist training at al Qaeda affiliated camps (from an organization formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law) and were captured after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. They are the Left's combatant cause célèbre. The military took the incoherent position that they were trained al Qaeda terrorists but that their real beef was with China, not us. Thus, the federal courts have held that they are not enemy combatants. The government has been trying to relocate them for years but no country will take the remaining 17 — other than China, where our treaty obligations arguably forbid us from sending them because there is reason to believe they'd be persecuted.

Of course, it's one thing to say that they are not enemy combatants and should therefore be released. It is quite another thing, though, to say that they should be released into the United States (which, because of their terrorist affiliations, would violate federal immigration law).

Read the whole thing, but note that this has the potential to put a major kink in the Obama administration's Gitmo diplomacy. European nations are clamoring for the U.S. to accept some of the Uighur detainees in return for accepting some themselves. Now, the Obama administration has conceded that the Uighurs have no right to be released in the United States.

I know there are sixteen intelligence agencies, but I could only name eight before I had to turn to Google. Then again, I'm not the President of the United States. Ben Smith reports:

On his trip to get a burger with Brian Williams at Five Guys this afternoon, the President appears to have learned of the existence of a Defense Department intelligence arm, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, from an agency employee also at the burger restaurant.

"So explain to me exactly what this National Geospatial..." Obama said, after the worker mentioned his employer, according to a video of the event.

"We work with, uh, satellite imagery," the worker, Walter replied.

Obama: Sotomayor would have "restated" her wise Latina comment.

Robert George on Obama and his pro-life apologists.

Carl Levin alleges VP Cheney is lying about memos showing harsh interrogations worked.

How much do you have to pay to become Obama's ambassador to Japan? $600,000

Jennifer Rubin, Rich Lowry, Charles Krauthammer, and Andy McCarthy on Sotomayor.

“I think she’d say that her word choice in 2001 was poor,” said White House press spokesperson Robert Gibbs un-empathetically today. Wasn’t Gibbs’s comment on his boss’s Supreme Court nominee a bit harsh? Isn’t a poor choice of words kind of a problem for a judge?

But Gibbs had just begun his attack on Sonia Sotomayor: “I think if she had the speech to do all over again, I think she’d change that word.”

That word was “better,” from the following statement in her 2001 speech: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

What word would Gibbs have preferred? Apparently, something less judgmental than "better." “She was simply making the point that personal experiences are relevant to the process of judging, that your personal experiences have a tendency to make you more aware of certain facts in certain cases, that your experiences impact your understanding....”

So what Sotomayor meant to say, according to Gibbs, was simply that one set of experiences would lead you to a different conclusion as a judge than another--but not that one set is any “better” than another. Gibbs remained faithful to the core claim of identity politics--that judging can’t really be impartial or blind. He just gave up on the claim that one identity is any better than another. He turned Sotomayor’s statement from a silly expression of Latina pride into an assault on the possibility of impartial judging.

Good work.

Obama's uncle Charlie on why the president is heading to a concentration camp in Germany next week:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Payne, early in June your great-nephew, President Barack Obama, will visit the former concentration camp Buchenwald, which you helped liberate at the end of the war. Will he be travelling in your footsteps?

Charles Payne: I don't buy that. I was quite surprised when the whole thing came up and Barack talked about my war experiences in Nazi Germany. We had never talked about that before. This is a trip that he chose, not because of me I'm sure, but for political reasons.

From the boss's latest editorial posted here:

So Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs declared, "I think it is probably important for anybody involved in this debate to be exceedingly careful with the way in which they've decided to describe different aspects of this impending confirmation." Not just careful, but "exceedingly careful!" Senator Chuck Schumer warned that Republicans "oppose her at their peril." These are pretty heavy-handed attempts at intimidation. One wonders whether a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experience, might have found a better way to make that point than a hapless white male like Gibbs or Schumer.

The Washington Post reports that Europe has a message for Obama about accepting Gitmo detainees: You, first.

BERLIN, May 28 -- The Obama administration's push to resettle at least 50 Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Europe is meeting fresh resistance as European officials demand that the United States first give asylum to some inmates before they will do the same.

Rising opposition in the U.S. Congress to allowing Guantanamo prisoners on American soil has not gone over well in Europe. Officials from countries that previously indicated they were willing to accept inmates now say it may be politically impossible for them to do so if the United States does not reciprocate.

"If the U.S. refuses to take these people, why should we?" said Thomas Silberhorn, a member of the German Parliament from Bavaria, where the White House wants to relocate nine Chinese Uighur prisoners. "If all 50 states in America say, 'Sorry, we can't take them,' this is not very convincing."

Why is the Obama afraid of releasing here Uighur detainees who were trained by the leader of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party?

Would you really mind if this guy moved in across the street?

A new Quinnipiac poll shows that 54 percent of voters approve of Obama's pick of Sotomayor. The most interesting question, I think, in the poll is this:

Do you think making the Supreme Court look like the rest of the nation in terms of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender is more important than a justice's legal qualifications for the job, less important or about as important?

Fifty-four percent of Democrats say that race, religion, ethnicity, and gender is "about as important" or "more important" than legal qualifications; 76 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of independents say race, etc., is less important than legal qualifications.

Casablanca, Morocco
This is not your father’s (OK, this is not your grandfather’s) Casablanca. The bougainvillea, wisteria, roses, orange trees, eucalyptus, and date palms that adorn Marrakech—so plentiful are Marrakchi palm trees, in fact, and so revered, that some have been left to grow up through great fissures in the middle of paved streets—and add to its dreamy oasis-like quality, are not apparent in Casa, as Moroccans call it. This is everything a city should be: filthy, crowded, bustling, bristling with vitality. And of course it’s a Middle-Eastern city, so, as in Tel Aviv (and Cairo, but that’s another, worse, story)—which it very much resembles, with its industrial energy, its pollution-stained limestone high(ish)-rises, roll-down shutters closed against the afternoon sun, throngs making their way home after work—traffic rules are very, very flexible. Riding in Casa’s rush-hour traffic gives even a lead-foot like me the occasional heart palpitation.

Not that I’m not having them anyway: news of escalating efforts by the Obami to force the Israeli hand on natural growth in established settlements is horrifying and profoundly depressing. Do they want to take the Netanyahu government down? And if they succeed, do they think the Israelis will replace Bibi with someone more to their liking? Natural growth is a consensus issue in Israel, defended by members of every party.

If the Obami don’t know that, they should. But of course they do. Hillary Clinton is a good little homework-doer; George Mitchell has been told it; Rahm Emanuel knows it in his bones: no Israeli leader—not even Ehud Olmert, who offered the Palestinians the Moon and the stars (though not the Sun, as Mahmoud Abbas has dissemblingly suggested)—is going to tell a resident of Ma’aleh Adumim or Ariel that he can’t add an extension onto his house to accommodate another child or build a new house next door for his newly married daughter and son-in-law. Jettison your one true democratic ally in a region swimming in dictatorships at your peril, Mr. President. The Arab states may love you more for it, but that love won’t last.

As for Moroccans, every non-Jew I meet avows a deep friendship for Israel and attachment to Jews, whose history in this country stretches back to the Roman Empire, while every Jew claims to descend from an ancient Jewish-Berber intermarriage. If all of that is even only half-true, here’s a full truth: there is here none of the feeling of enmity-in-potential a Jew can often experience in an Arab country.

And if you ever need a dentist in Casablanca, I can recommend one.

Kimberly Strassel has an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal on Obama's nomination of Sotomayor:

President Barack Obama has laid down his ground rules for the debate over Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. The big question now is whether Republicans agree to play by rules that neither Mr. Obama nor his party have themselves followed.

Ground Rule No. 1, as decreed by the president, is that this is to be a discussion primarily about Judge Sotomayor's biography, not her qualifications. The media gurus complied, with inspiring stories of how she was born to Puerto Rican immigrants, how she was raised by a single mom in a Bronx housing project, how she went on to Princeton and then Yale. In the years that followed she presumably issued a judicial opinion here or there, but whatever.

The president, after all, had taken great pains to explain that this is more than an American success story. Rather, it is Judge Sotomayor's biography that uniquely qualifies her to sit on the nation's highest bench -- that gives her the "empathy" to rule wisely. Judge Sotomayor agrees: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn't lived that life," she said in 2001.

If so, perhaps we can expect her to join in opinions with the wise and richly experienced Clarence Thomas. That would be the same Justice Thomas who lost his father, and was raised by his mother in a rural Georgia town, in a shack without running water, until he was sent to his grandfather. The same Justice Thomas who had to work every day after school, though he was not allowed to study at the Savannah Public Library because he was black. The same Justice Thomas who became the first in his family to go to college and receive a law degree from Yale.

Read the whole thing.

In the wake of Tom Tancredo's outlandish statement that Sotomayor is a member of the "Latino KKK" (aka National Council of La Raza), the media will have an easy time dismissing concerns about Sotomayor's association with the group as right-wing moonbattery. But a TWS friend points out that the New York Times and Washington Post were very very concerned about John Roberts's and Samuel Alito's association with the nefarious Federalist Society:

You may recall that back in 2005, the press and the pundits obsessed over whether John Roberts had been a member of the Federalist Society. There was the Washington Post (here, here, and here) and the New York Times (here and here), of course. The Democratic Party eagerly pushed such inquiries. (And, of course, we went through the same thing with the Alito nomination.)

In short, the New York Times spoke for many when it asserted that a full airing of Roberts's views necessarily included "questions about Mr. Roberts's role with the Federalist Society, and the confusion about it, should lead to a broader discussion of who he is, and how he views the law."

In light of those inquiries, should we expect a full airing of Sonia Sotomayor's affiliation with the National Council of La Raza?

Given Sotomayor's widely-published remarks on the role of her Latina heritage in her judicial decisionmaking -- and of course, her infamous "wise Latina judge" comments were made at a La Raza event and were published in a La Raza law journal -- will the Sotomayor confirmation process involve "questions about" Judge Sotomayor's "role with" La Raza?

Won't such questions "lead to a broader discussion of who [she] is, and how [she] views the law"?

Any doubts I had that it was not just right in principle but also politically smart to challenge the Sonia Sotomayor pick disappeared this morning: The National Journal reports that its survey of “GOP Insiders” shows 64 percent advising that Republicans dodge a battle, with only a quarter recommending fighting. Safe rule of American politics: Two-thirds of “GOP Insiders” are never right.

Stuart Taylor digs up another example from Sotomayor's Princeton days:

In October 1974, Princeton allowed Sotomayor and two other students to initiate a seminar, for full credit and with the university's blessings, on the Puerto Rican experience and its relation to contemporary America.

I went to Princeton but somehow I never got to teach my own class, or grade my own work. One wonders how Sotomayor judged her work in that class, and whether the grade helped or hindered her efforts to graduate with honors.

Update: Matthew Franck of NRO's Bench Memos blog emails:

I thought the same thing about that bit of ethnicity-hustling that Sotomayor engaged in as a Princeton student—that she and her classmates got to run the whole show themselves when they got their seminar on “the Puerto Rican experience”—until I saw the press release from 1974 that the Daily Princetonian dug up. It seems they applied for a class of their own, and even got to set the readings and syllabus, under a loopy 1968 policy that handed this kind of curricular initiative over to students. But they did get an assistant professor of history to “teach” the class, after they designed it. (Some academic freedom he had!) Presumably he handed out the grades, but since he was (conveniently) an untenured assistant professor running a little class with some experienced Mau-Maus, you could almost predict the A’s all around from day one.

A Rasmussen poll shows that "Forty-nine percent (49%) of all voters have a favorable opinion of Sotomayor while 36% hold an unfavorable view." While Sotomayor's favorable rating is right about where Alito's was after Bush nominated him for the Supreme Court, Sotomayor's unfavorable rating is significantly higher than Alito's. Gallup reported on November 2, 2005:

More people feel positive rather than negative about Alito personally -- 44% to 19%, respectively -- with another third offering no rating. Again, Miers' rating was similar, but a majority, 54%, gave Roberts a favorable personal rating.

While negative opinion of Sotomayor is higher than it was for Bush's nominees, a Gallup poll shows that the percentage of voters who rate the selection of Sotomayor as "excellent" or "good" (47 percent) is slightly lower than it was for Roberts (51 percent) and slightly higher than it was for Alito (44 percent).

Given the fact that Obama has a much higher approval rating than Bush did, it's surprising that less than 50 percent of voters think that Obama made a good choice by picking Sotomayor.

Obama on national health care: "If we don’t get it done this year, we’re not going to get it done."

Dana Milbank: Latina Woman, Tongue-Tied Man

Quinnipiac: Specter leads Toomey by 9 points.

Obama's car czar's conflict of interest.

Jennifer Rubin: Roxana Saberi tells her story.

Frederick Kagan and Ahmad Majidyar on the Punjabi Taliban.

Bloomberg's Michael McKee reports:

The U.S. housing market is nowhere near recovery and signs of stabilization are premature, said David Sokol, a top aide to billionaire investor Warren Buffett who oversees the nation’s second-largest real estate brokerage.

Sokol was among money managers who told an investment conference in New York the economy is still deteriorating and they don’t have a lot of confidence in President Barack Obama’s economic policies.

“We’re not seeing the green shoots,” said Sokol, head of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., which owns HomeServices of America Inc. “We don’t see improvement.” [...]

Homes in the process of foreclosure are creating a “shadow backlog” of unsold properties that will continue to hang over the market, Sokol, 52, said in a speech yesterday at the Ira W. Sohn Investment Research Conference in New York.

While official statistics show a 10- to 12-month supply of unsold homes, “we believe the backlog of homes for sale is twice that.”

Read the whole thing.

The New York Times reports "Sotomayor’s Appellate Opinions Are Unpredictable, Lawyers and Scholars Say". The story isn't that surprising when one considers this 1996 Sotomayor quote that Ed Whelan dug up:

"The public expects the law to be static and predictable. The law, however, is uncertain and responds to changing circumstances. ... the public fails to appreciate the importance of indefiniteness in the law."

America's greatest non-fiction writer.

It's an honor just to be nominated, even if you're nominating yourself:

"Let me throw this out: I'm the best writer of nonfiction prose in America today. I may be the only writer of nonfiction who's even alive."-- Michael Wolff

This morning Steve Hayes noted reports that the Obama administration is planning on giving the FBI a greater role in its "global justice initiative" whose “premise [is] that virtually all suspects will end up in a U.S. or foreign court of law.” Gary Schmitt makes a few additional points about the proposed initiative:

The reality is Guantanamo, renditions, harsh interrogation techniques, and so on are the product of the fact that the vast majority of terrorists rounded up around the world are not going find themselves in a court of law. The evidence trail will either never be clean enough for courts here or abroad to use or much of it will be tied to intelligence that neither we nor other foreign intelligence services will be willing to expose in a normal court case.

Of course, it is impossible at this point to know whether “the global justice initiative” is the Obama team’s actual plan or just a Washington-style leak by folks (perhaps within the Justice Department) to see what the public reaction to such a plan would be. However, the idea that we should return to the “good ol’ days” when the core of our counterterrorism strategy was to arrest terrorists and put them on trial is an idea that should be thoroughly debated before we head back down that road. Lest anyone forget, the first World Trade Center bombing—which only by luck did not result in hundreds or possibly thousands dying—happened on the FBI’s watch and while DOJ and FBI officials were worried about building a court case against the plotters. And of course the ’90s saw al Qaeda and terrorists kill hundreds in attacks against Americans with the bombings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole. The question someone should ask is: how many died on 9/11 and before when the FBI was taking the lead in counterterrorism, and how many have died since?

The latest news from the Florida GOP primary race: Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush Jr. endorsed Marco Rubio yesterday, a nice gift to the former Florida state house speaker, who turns 38 today. Rubio had endorsed Huckabee back in December 2007, so it's not a surprise that Huckabee decided to scratch Rubio's back in return. While Jeb Bush's Jr.'s endorsement isn't the game-changer that his father could provide, it seems unlikely that Bush Jr. would have thrown his support behind Rubio without his father's approval.

Meanwhile, Charlie Crist raised cigarette taxes and fees for motorists yesterday. The St. Petersburg Times's Marc Caputo reports:

What's a governor to do when he signs a budget with $2.2 billion in new taxes and fees when he repeatedly promised to oppose new taxes? If you're Charlie Crist, change the emphasis of the discussion.

In signing the budget Wednesday, Crist repeatedly stressed that the budget has no "broad-based tax increases." Crist pointed out that only 2 million people smoke in Florida. So the new tax they pay isn't "broad based" because there are about 18.3 million Floridians.

"It's broad based, if it's a majority," Crist said. "Clearly."

Here's what's clear: The state has about 15.6 million driver licenses and about 18.8 million motor vehicles. All of them will have to pay more.

Crist's obfuscation seems a little ham-handed, but he's still clearly a very talented politician. The Orlando Sentinel's Mike Thomas explains how Crist played the legislature as dopes and made himself a hero to gun owners and state employees:

During this most recent session, Charlie's policy was to plunder trust funds to plug budget holes. Legislators went along with that, plundering 35 of them. One was a fund used to process concealed weapons permits. So what does Charlie do? He vetoes it, playing hero to the NRA, protecting the rights of gun owners from lawmakers.

And then he vetoes legislation to cut the salaries of state employees, again saving them from the evil legislators. It's not a bad idea to ingratiate yourself with thousands of state workers when gearing up for a Senate run.

Mark Hemingway reads Harry Reid's memoir The Good Fight, so you don't have to:

Released a year ago, the book got one glowing review: from his hometown paper. Every other major media outlet has been standoffish. Take this blurb from the Washington Post, proudly emblazoned on the back of the paperback edition: “Recounts fights with everyone from classmates to the man who would eventually become his father-in-law, preparing him for a senatorial life of battling the Bush White House and Republican filibusters.” Beware the value-neutral blurb: In fact, the Post never reviewed the book — the quote comes from a gossip column published a month before the book’s release. One of the most powerful men in Washington published a book, and the entire journalistic establishment’s reaction seems to have been, “If you can’t say something nice . . . ”

Of course, Reid doesn’t always have nice things to say himself. While no one expects Reid to praise George W. Bush, the degree to which he is judgmental and catty regarding the former president pretty much speaks for itself. Three pages in, after lamely trying to establish his bipartisan bona fides by talking up George H. W. Bush, Reid shares this charming anecdote about his early days in the Senate: “[Former Texas senator and vice-presidential candidate Lloyd] Bentsen went on and on effusively about what a quality man President-elect [H. W.] Bush was. Then he paused and said, ‘But watch out for his wife; she’s a bitch.’ I have never had anything against Mrs. Bush, but guided by Bentsen’s crude advice, I’ve always said that our forty-third president is more his mother than his dad.”

Read the rest of Hemgingway's review of Reid's "300-page patchwork of pointless political score-settling" here.

Three days after North Korea conducted its second nuclear test, public attention has already shifted to President Obama’s Supreme Court pick and there seems to be little consensus about how the United States and its allies should respond.

The Obama administration seems intent on continuing the Bush administration’s failed policy of diplomacy vice action. UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who on Tuesday said that North Korea will “pay a price” for its actions, remains closeted with her UN Security Council colleagues in meetings, at least for the few hours each day she is not doing TV hits, with little to show for her efforts thus far.

Despite the supposed paucity of good options, there are plenty of actions that the United States can and should take. Carolyn Leddy, Christian Whiton, and I outlined several of them earlier this month. Before attempting to pass a new meaningless resolution in the Security Council, the Obama administration should take a step the Bush administration never did--actually implement UNSCR 1718’s ban on North Korean exports of conventional weapons and sensitive dual-use goods and its ban on the transfer of similar items to North Korea. Despite South Korea’s agreement this week to join the Proliferation Security Initiative, none of this illicit trade to and from North Korea will be halted unless the U.S. Navy begins to stop and conduct inspections of North Korean ships on a regular basis, something that the United States has been unwilling to do until now. A sea blockade combined with increased pressure on China to monitor flights into and out of North Korea would send a serious message to Pyongyang and potentially make the costs of doing business with Pyongyang too high for some of its customers.

In addition, the U.S. should immediately designate additional North Korean entities and individuals involved in proliferation, including those who were behind the construction of the nuclear reactor in Syria that was destroyed by Israel in September 2007. For good measure, they might want to designate a few of the Syrians involved, something that has yet to be done given the State Department’s unwillingness at the time to let unpleasant truths about North Korea’s actions upset Chris Hill’s engagement strategy.

Finally, if the Obama administration is willing to do little more than twiddle its thumbs at the UN, Congress should seriously consider providing some backbone on this issue. One option might be a North Korean Liberation Act to provide adequate funding for dissidents and better coordination of U.S. efforts to overthrow peacefully the regime. Because if recent press accounts are correct, those chosen to take over once the Dear Leader departs this earth are not going to be better interlocutors for the next Chris Hill that the State Department bureaucracy produces.

The car czar's conflict of interest.

Blame the board!

Meet Caroline Miller, a 7th-generation West Point grad.

Dear Obama, gay groups are not protesting your appearances because they think you're totally awesome.

Crist breaks pledge, hikes taxes.

Consistency: NYT editorials on Sotomayor vs. Thomas

Is Sestak toast, or can he pull a Ned Lamont?

Another conveniently conclusive study shows...conservatives are stupid!

Robert Gibbs, without the benefit of the rich experiences of being a Latina woman, is unable to answer press briefing questions about Obama's richly experienced Latina nominee.

Marrakech, Morocco
In beautiful Marrakech, we admire the towering Atlas Mountains in the distance from our bougainvillea-laden terrace. Nork nukes and Sotomayor feel blessedly far away. Moroccans care not at all about our Supreme Court nominee, and only slightly more about the North Korean missile crisis. The Iranian threat worries them enormously, especially as they broke relations with the mullocracy two months ago. “We will not be dictated by Shiites on how to live our lives,” says a Moroccan friend. The upcoming municipal elections in this relatively open society will be a test of the power of competing national parties, some Islamist and some linked to the government. For the rest, the talk in Marrakech is of . . . nothing, really: French fashions, how to open the U.S. market to lovely Moroccan wines, which of the little Gardens of Eden that are Marrakech’s finest restaurants to eat at tonight. Life in this jewel of a city of 600,000 is easy. Life in this benign kingdom is altogether nice.

Our guide, J., takes us to the Jamma el-Fna, the main square just outside the gates of the Medina, the ancient walled city. Vendors of every variety of dried fruit, nuts, herbs, freshly-squeezed juices, grilled meats, call out to us; impromptu musical performances by fantastic Berber drummers allure us; beggars, fortune tellers, card readers, and snake charmers accost us: one proffers a snake. (J. calls it a “water snake,” but what can that mean? No water in evidence.) I touch it, feel its amazing snakish movement, demur when he makes to drape it around my neck. There are real live cobras, too—they’re small, or smaller than I thought cobras would be, anyway—who seem less charmed by the sounds of the charmers’ horns than poised to strike at them in annoyance. I would, too, if I were one. The noise is jarring and terrible. Lots of fifty-year-old tourists wandering here, looking like nothing if not ghosts of their former selves, now buying dried dates to aid in their digestion in place of the hashish they found here in their younger days.

The casbah is a happy surprise: none of the aggressive hostility of the Jerusalem shouk, where these days (if you even enter any more) you may be hounded to buy and likely to hear “F***ing Amriki Jew!” if you don’t, and none of the horror of Cairo’s bazaar, where shopkeepers beat their nine-year-old assistants in full view of their customers.

Inside the Medina, we visit the Bahia, a magnificent palace built in the late nineteenth century by the Grand Vizier Bou Ahmed to house himself, his four wives, twelve children, and twenty-four concubines. Punctuating the glorious tile-work walls and floors, painted ceilings, plaster carvings, carved wooden doors—all still essentially intact in spite of being mauled daily by tourists (us included)—are beautiful gardens, designed by Bou Ahmed himself. “He was growing lots and lots of Spanish Fly here, ha, ha, ha,” says J. “No Viagra in those days, ha, ha, ha!” Every afternoon at siesta time, apparently, the vizier would send for one of his concubines. Interestingly, the wives’ quarters are large and airy and as beautifully and intricately decorated as Bou Ahmed’s own, but the concubines lived together in tiny rooms, seeing the ceilings only during those afternoon assignations. It’s good to be the vizier.

On to Casablanca, the commercial capital—a city of six million—to see a mosque and a dentist.

On April 16, Barack Obama released memos detailing harsh interrogation techniques employed by CIA officers. A former top CIA official told me that the move had "devastated morale" at the Agency. Then, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brazenly accused CIA officials of lying to her and misleading Congress, the Obama White House did nothing to defend the CIA against her evidence-free claims.

Yesterday, the AP's Pamela Hess reported that Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, who is close to Obama, is seeking to replace CIA station chiefs at US embassies abroad with his own personnel.

The nation's two intelligence chiefs are locked in a turf battle over overseas posts, forcing National Security Adviser James L. Jones to mediate, according to current and former government officials.

The jockeying between CIA Director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair centers on Blair's effort to choose his own representatives at U.S. embassies instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs. Current and former U.S. officials described the dispute on the condition of anonymity, because of the sensitivity of intelligence issues.

Blair's office was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to better coordinate intelligence gathering and make sure critical information isn't overlooked. But former and current CIA officials warn that his plan could do just the opposite — creating competing chains of command inside U.S. embassies and potentially fouling up intelligence operations. They also worry it could complicate the delicate relationships between U.S. and foreign intelligence services, and leave ambassadors confused about where to turn for intelligence advice.

CIA station chiefs posted in American embassies have handled the national intelligence role abroad for the last four years, but Blair wants the option of designating other intelligence specialists for the job. That prompted strong objections from Panetta.

And this morning, the Los Angeles Times reports on the Obama administration's aggressive efforts to shift the U.S. counterterrorism operation from one focused on intelligence and the military to one in which law enforcement dominates.

The FBI and Justice Department plan to significantly expand their role in global counter-terrorism operations, part of a U.S. policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around transparent investigations and prosecutions.

Under the "global justice" initiative, which has been in the works for several months, FBI agents will have a central role in overseas counter-terrorism cases. They will expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option, officials familiar with the effort said.

Though the initiative is a work in progress, some senior counter-terrorism officials and administration policy-makers envision it as key to the national security strategy President Obama laid out last week -- one that presumes most accused terrorists have the right to contest the charges against them in a "legitimate" setting.

The approach effectively reverses a mainstay of the Bush administration's war on terrorism, in which global counter-terrorism was treated primarily as an intelligence and military problem, not a law enforcement one. That policy led to the establishment of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; harsh interrogations; and detentions without trials.

All of which raises an interesting question: Was Leon Panetta hired primarily to oversee the dismantling of the CIA?

The Huffington Post banner headline reads:

Dem Senators Open To Allowing Innocent Chinese Detainees To Live In U.S.

But read Ryan Grim's (very fair) piece and you'll see that these Dem Senators say nothing of the sort. Asked whether he'd be open to letting the Uighurs "live" in the U.S., Dick Durbin demurs: "I don't know. We may be in a position where that will be considered, but I leave that up to the administration. I just don't know." Likewise, the best Byron Dorgan can muster is saying no one has ever escaped from a Supermax -- the correct answer to a very different question. Ben Cardin tells Grim that there are other options beside settling them in the United States, though he goes further than any other senator in the story when he grudgingly concedes he "would not exclude the United States." And finally there's Harry Reid, who Grim notes has undergone a dramatic reversal on the issue after the president held a fundraiser for him this week. But Reid is hardly rolling out the welcome wagon. "We can't send them back to China. Should they go into a maximum-security prison? Probably not," Reid told the Las Vegas Sun.

Perhaps these senators are aware that the Uighurs, though innocent in the eyes of the law, are actually pretty dangerous in addition to being a pretty serious political liability. The Huffington Post glosses over that fact lest reality interfere with their faith-based detainee policy -- or their headlines.

Spiegel reports that the UN is sitting on evidence that proves Hezbollah assassinated former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri. UPDATE: This Michael Young piece, posted Wednesday, is the most sophisticated and perceptive response to Spiegel so far.

At least her husband wasn't a fan of the Alaskan Independence Party: Sotomayor's college yearbook page included a quote from Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas.

George Will says Sotomayor didn't save Major League Baseball--in fact, she harmed it.

Law professor Jonathan Turley says Sotomayor is not that smart.

A Gallup poll shows veterans are more Republican than the general public.

If yard signs win elections, Terry McAuliffe has the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nomination in the bag.

Rep. Joe Sestak is telling his supporters he will run for Senate in Pennsylvania in 2010 against freshly-minted Democratic incumbent Arlen Specter. The younger, more telegenic, more Democratic politician more beloved of the money-raising Netroots will soon be discussing his final decision with his immediate family, TPM reports.

Here is the text from a handwritten note to supporters:

"I am writing you as especially dear supporters to let you know I intend to run for the U.S. Senate...my candidacy's credibility will have much to do with my fundraising success by the 30 June FEC filing deadline at the end of this quarter. Would you help me bring the change for the future we Pennsylvanians need[?]"

Infantino confirms that the note is genuine and that "Joe Sestak has written a number of similar notes."

Daily Kos is already directing donors to Act Blue for the liberal former admiral. Sestak, who supports card check legislation for unions, has warned in th epast that unless Specter changes his tune on the Employee Free Choice Act, his labor support will be vulnerable.

Update: Pat Toomey on Sestak:

“While Joe Sestak and I disagree on a host of issues,” Mr. Toomey said, “I commend him for being a principled liberal who stands up for his beliefs and values. I have always believed that Pennsylvania voters—not party bosses in Washington—should have the final say over whom their nominees will be.”

Via Ben Smith, Joe Biden cracked the following joke after his telemprompter fell over while he was giving a speech in Colorado Springs:

"What I am going to tell the president when I tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?"

Remember, as Reason.tv says, It Can Always Get Worse

Pam Hess reports:

The nation's two intelligence chiefs are locked in a turf battle over overseas posts, forcing National Security Adviser James L. Jones to mediate, according to current and former government officials.

The jockeying between CIA Director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair centers on Blair's effort to choose his own representatives at U.S. embassies instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs. Current and former U.S. officials described the dispute on the condition of anonymity, because of the sensitivity of intelligence issues.

Prediction: An easy win for Panetta. Blair has proved himself to be completely tone deaf on political issues and sustained a "personal blow" with the withdrawal of Chas Freeman from consideration as NIC Chair. Panetta, on the other hand, just had his way with Nancy Pelosi, who would seem to be a far tougher opponent than Blair. I'm guessing a TKO for Panetta early in the second round.

Below is a video that purports to show the Academic Ensemble of Moscow Military District performing a musical mocking Europe and the Ukraine for their dependence on Russian natural gas. They joke that if Ukraine joins NATO, they'll just cut the gas. If Russia doesn't win Eurovision, they'll just cut the gas. And as a favor to their Belorussian friends, hey, they'll just cut the gas. Maybe we'll luck out and Ketchum will arrange some tour dates right here in the States.

USA Today: "Federal tax revenue plunged $138 billion, or 34%, in April vs. a year ago — the biggest April drop since 1981, a study released Tuesday by the American Institute for Economic Research says."

How exactly are we going to pay for national health care?

Playboy journalist Mike Guy got himself waterboarded last month but I missed the video -- probably because it doesn't confirm everything the left already knew to be true and thus has very little news value. On the assumption that many other folks didn't get the chance to see this, watch the video below. Guy takes it like a man, which isn't to say that he lasts longer than five seconds -- after all, the technique is designed to be extremely unpleasant. But the U.S. military trainer who applies the techniques makes clear that he doesn't believe it to be torture, and Guy himself isn't exactly convinced after having suffered through it. He seems to have gotten a buzz off of it. One wonders: if waterboarding really is torture, why are so many folks willing to give it a try? You don't see people lining up to have their fingernails pulled off.

Remember when Barack Obama pledged he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone who made under $250,000? Remember when the Tax Day Tea Parties were all a bunch of nonsense because Barack Obama had yet to raise anyone's taxes? Perhaps the protesters were more prescient than they're given credit for.

While their critics were indulging in the fantasy of a liberal president with a projected $9.3 trillion deficit over the next 10 years and a hankering to socialize the health care system who resorts to something other than tax hikes to pay for it all, the tea partiers were residing in the real world. In that world, a liberal president with a $9.3 trillion deficit, looming entitlement disasters, and dreams of creating a universally crappy but expensive health care system, floats a value-added tax. This is what "fundamental tax reform" might look like under a Democratic Congress and president:

Common around the world, including in Europe, such a tax -- called a value-added tax, or VAT -- has not been seriously considered in the United States. But advocates say few other options can generate the kind of money the nation will need to avert fiscal calamity.

At a White House conference earlier this year on the government's budget problems, a roomful of tax experts pleaded with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to consider a VAT. A recent flurry of books and papers on the subject is attracting genuine, if furtive, interest in Congress. And last month, after wrestling with the White House over the massive deficits projected under Obama's policies, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee declared that a VAT should be part of the debate.

"There is a growing awareness of the need for fundamental tax reform," Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said in an interview. "I think a VAT and a high-end income tax have got to be on the table."

The White House claims in the story that a VAT is "unlikely to be in the mix" for paying off Obama's health care costs, but if personnel is policy, we should be afraid:

Still, Orszag has hired a prominent VAT advocate to advise him on health care: Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and author of the 2008 book "Health Care, Guaranteed." Meanwhile, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, chairman of a task force Obama assigned to study the tax system, has expressed at least tentative support for a VAT.

Fed Chairman Paul Volcker has also endorsed Yale professor Michael Graetz's suggestion that a 10-14-percent VAT would exempt families making under $100,000 from the income tax and lower rates for others as "a sensible plan for reform."

When conservatives and libertarians have pushed for a national sales tax—the Fair Tax, as its called by proponent Neal Boortz— the tax is designed to take the place of an income tax, and some supporters even suggest repealing the 16th amendment to insure that Americans don't get stuck paying both the sales tax and an income tax.

Alas, that latter nightmare scenario is exactly what the VAT-touters are pitching, albeit with vague promises of what we'll get in return:

Emanuel argues in his book that a 10 percent VAT would pay for every American not entitled to Medicare or Medicaid to enroll in a health plan with no deductibles and minimal copayments...

And in a paper published last month in the Virginia Tax Review, Burman suggests that a 25 percent VAT could do it all: Pay for health-care reform, balance the federal budget and exempt millions of families from the income tax while slashing the top rate to 25 percent. A gallon of milk would jump from $3.69 to $4.61, and a $5,000 bathroom renovation would suddenly cost $6,250, but the nation's debt would stabilize and everybody could see a doctor.

Remain extremely skeptical, folks. No matter how much lovely alliteration Obama uses to describe this plan, it's just another pathway into your wallet for the federal government. It's just another source to tap for revenue when they're unwilling to make "tough choices." It will go up and up, and the relief the nation sees on the corporate income tax or the income tax as a trade-off will be precious little in the Congress we've got now.

It should also be noted that the VAT costs $3 billion just to collect in Canada, according to the National Post, on top of the added cost to every single item you buy, every day.

Luckily, because the VAT is a highly visible tax and disproportionately affects the poor, constituents and even their tax-happy Democrat representatives are likely to be wary about enacting one. Heck, even the floating of one might be enough to earn Republicans a few points on the generic ballot.

The Heritage Foundation suggests the White House take the drastic step of cutting expenses instead of figuring out how best to extract unending amounts of money from the American people:

So the problem is not declining revenues, but rather a spending spree unlike any in American history. If Washington insists on spending $32,000 per household, it will have to tax $32,000 per household – an unaffordable and unfair tax burden regardless what kind of tax collects it.

It's not a lot to ask. It's what the working families Obama professes to be working for have to do every day with their own, personal budgets.

The last quote in the VAT article is my favorite. As it becomes increasingly obvious that soaking the rich, taxing energy, sodas, cigarettes, and unhealthy foods will not pay for Democratic dreams, Democrats dream of other sources:

Most lawmakers are still looking for "a painless source of revenue" to overhaul the health-care system and dig the nation out of debt, Burman said. "Who knows?" he added. "Maybe the tooth fairy will bring that to them."

Perhaps Obama could appoint her to head of the Dept. of Squeezing Blood From Stones.

Update: Here's a savings idea. Our currency alone costs us $848 million a year. Go debit!

The Washington Post corrects the record (via CQ):

A May 22 editorial on Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial primary incorrectly stated that Terry R. McAuliffe had described himself as a "huckster." In his autobiography, Mr. McAuliffe described himself as a "hustler."

The number of people who are qualified to disagree with Joe Klein is dwindling. I have been drafted here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD Online to take issue with Time's political columnist, as I am not now, nor have I ever been Jewish, Roman Catholic, or physically disabled.

At such time as any of those three conditions changes, I will immediately desist criticism, as I could no longer possibly be an intellectually honest debater. But as of now, Klein can rest assured that the only divided loyalties I have are between Tide Mountain Fresh and Spring Fresh (they both smell so nice!).

Other commentators are not blessed with the same qualifications as I but inexplicably persist in criticism of Klein's arguments. People like Charles Krauthammer, for instance:

In a Politico story last week about conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer, Mr. Klein said "there's something tragic" about the quadriplegic writer's work, as it "would have had a lot more nuance if he were able to see the situations he's writing about."...

Rationalizing his disgraceful remark on Time's Web site, Mr. Klein wrote that Mr. Krauthammer's "unflinching support for American unilateralism ... caused the unnecessary loss of life." So not only is Mr. Krauthammer's writing hindered by his physical disability, he's also responsible for the deaths of countless American soldiers and Iraqi civilians because he ... writes newspaper columns that Mr. Klein doesn't like?

Jamie Kirchick, the author of the above passage, dares to call out Klein in the pages of the Washington Times, despite the fact that he is clearly disqualified from doing so by both his religion and foreign policy views:

Last summer, he attacked the "great many Jewish neoconservatives" who "plumped for [the Iraq] war" and whose hawkishness on Iran "raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel." (Notice the cowardly use of the passive voice. Who "raised the question" that Jews have divided loyalties, Joe, other than unapologetic anti-Semites and yourself?)

Mr. Klein derides these individuals as "Professional Jews," an epithet that applies to any of his co-religionists with whom he disagrees. (Full disclosure: Several weeks ago, Mr. Klein wrote, in response to a column I published in another newspaper, that I was "overwhelmingly limited," an insult I'm still trying to figure out. Given his propensity for adolescent name-calling and mockery of people for their innate traits, I should consider myself lucky he didn't call me a "Professional Queer.")

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the notion that Jews harbor "divided loyalties" has become a disturbing trope among some elements of the American left, and it's troubling to see this hoary slander find a home in the pages of Time.

Even though Kirchick is handicapped by his ideology, I hope that I can recommend his piece to you from a place of unclouded, gentile judgment of which Klein would approve. On the other hand, some of my best friends are Jewish, neoconservative, and/or physically disabled, so you may not be able to believe a word I say. I'll have to get a clarification on that from Joe.

After four months of denials, dissembling and delays, the Obama administration has finally released a Pentagon report on recidivism among former Guantanamo Bay detainees. Yes, it's true that the report was only released after the New York Times reported extensively on its contents last week. And yes, it's true that the report was released just two hours after President Obama named his first Supreme Court nominee -- turning the heads of the Washington press corps from a national security debate he was losing to the inspiring story of Sonia Sotomayor. And it is also true that Obama's strong "presumption in favor of disclosure" did not apply to this politically sensitive study for the first four months of his presidency -- and for more than three months since THE WEEKLY STANDARD was told it would be released. And finally, it is true that Obama has tried to position the report in a way that would be politically advantageous -- using his speech last week to complain that most of the recidivists were let go by his predecessor.

He's right, of course. And it's an interesting approach. Who would have thought that four months into his term we'd be listening to Barack Obama criticize George W. Bush for being too lenient on detained terrorists. It's an argument that doesn't fit well with much of Obama's never-ending critique of Bush national security policy. And it risks boxing him further on Guantanamo.

The report shows that some 14 percent of detainees released from Guantanamo Bay are now engaged in jihad. And despite the efforts of some in the media to claim that the numbers are inflated -- guided helpfully as they have been by liberal interest groups and left-wing lawyers -- it's almost certainly the case that 14 percent is an understatement. The effort of the U.S. government and our supposed allies to track these terrorists is, shall we say, uneven.

The detainees the Bush administration released or repatriated were judged to have been those least likely to return to jihad. Most of those who remain at Gitmo -- some 240 terrorists -- are there because they were deemed especially dangerous -- "the worst of the worst" in the words of one counterterrorism expert. Does Obama think the detainees he releases or repatriates -- and there are likely to be a good percentage of them -- will be less likely to return to jihad? At one point, it was the position of his State Department that "a majority" of the nearly 100 Yemenis in Guantanamo should be repatriated so that they might "make a future for themselves" back in Yemen -- a country that has long been hospitable to al Qaeda and like-minded jihadists.

Still, we finally have the report. Good for the president.

Now he can affirm his commitment to transparency by releasing two additional batches of information that his administration has fought to keep from public view: 1) CIA reports requested by former Vice President Dick Cheney that detail the results of the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, and, 2) documents surrounding the briefings the CIA provided to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on those techniques.

Obama allies have claimed that the documents Cheney has requested do not show what he claims they show. Okay, release them. The White House -- the self-declared most transparent White House in history -- is hiding behind a silly technicality to keep the documents under seal. The CIA claims that the Cheney documents cannot be released because they are the subject of FOIA litigation and despite the president's authority to declassify and release them, he is deferring to the CIA. So he is using FOIA as a shield. Weak.

Congressional Republicans have also requested that the CIA declassify and release documents that will either support or contradict Pelosi's claim that she was misled by the CIA. The White House has thus far refused to defend the Agency from Pelosi's claim and the CIA has rejected an initial request to make supporting documents public. But they are relevant. If Pelosi's charges are true, those who lied to Congress could be prosecuted for their offense. If they are not, Pelosi is unfit to lead her party.

The CIA has more paperwork on the briefings. Did CIA briefers show lawmakers a slide show or PowerPoint presentation with details of the techniques used on detainees? Is there documentation of the contents of the briefings -- memos to the file, email traffic between the briefers and senior intelligence officials, a postmortem on the briefings prepared for CIA Director George Tenet?

Given that President Obama has already released the OLC memos detailing the techniques, what is the justification for continuing to block the release of documents detailing the briefings about those techniques?

"I will never hide the truth because it is uncomfortable," Obama said on Thursday.

Gallup shows support for gay marriage declining since 2007, when it stood at 46 percent. That number is now just 40 percent, with 57 percent opposed to legalizing gay marriage. More important politically is the fact that just over half of Democrats favor gay marriage (55 percent), and fewer than half of independents (45 percent) support such unions. Among Republicans the number is 20 percent in favor. All of which means that gay marriage remains a winning issue for Republicans, and one which will remain on front pages throughout the next election cycle.

Given the president's much praised powers of persuasion, one wonders whether the decline in support for gay marriage is a result of his oft-stated personal belief that marriage is between one man and one woman. Or maybe the left would prefer to credit Carrie Prejean for taking her case directly to the people.

TNR digs up another instance in which Sonia Sotomayor de Noonan appears to have received preferential treatment:

A large Washington law firm-Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge-has been forced to apologize to a Yale Law School senior after a student-faculty tribunal found one of its partners had asked her "discriminatory" questions focusing on her being a Puerto Rican.

The tribunal found the questions, asked during a recruiting dinner, violated Yale rules against discrimination. The questions, according to the tribunal, included: 'Do law firms do a disservice by hiring minority students who the firms know do not have the necessary credentials and will then fire in three to four years? Would I have been admitted to the law school if I were not a Puerto Rican? Was I culturally deprived?"

In a letter of apology this week, Shaw Pittman's senior parnter, Ramsay D. Potts, called the questions by Martin Krall "insensitive and regrettable", and acknowledged "they may have had a chilling effect on the firm's recruitment of minorities and other students.

Not only was Sotomayor offered the job, which she turned down in protest, but she received an apology from the law firm for questions she complained were inappropriate -- a complaint that led to the formation of "student-faculty tribunal."

Make sure to check out Ed Whelan's coverage of Sotomayor over at NRO's Bench Memos blog.

Also, see Jennifer Rubin's take here and Andy McCarthy's take here.

John Taylor: "The [national] debt was 41 per cent of GDP at the end of 1988, President Ronald Reagan’s last year in office, the same as at the end of 2008, President George W. Bush’s last year in office. If one thinks policies from Reagan to Bush were mistakes does it make any sense to double down on those mistakes, as with the 80 per cent debt-to-GDP level projected when Mr Obama leaves office?"

Sen. Roland Burris's hometown paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, felt obliged to identify the senator as a "Chicago Democrat" in its story on the latest development in the Burris-Blago 'pay-to-play' scandal, but the word "Democrat" is curiously missing from the New York Times's report:

Burris-Blagojevich Ties Come to Life in Transcript
By MONICA DAVEY and KAREN ANN CULLOTTA

CHICAGO — A transcript of a secretly recorded telephone call released on Tuesday revealed the degree to which Roland W. Burris aggressively and openly pursued an appointment to the United States Senate with those close to Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, who went on to appoint Mr. Burris last year before he was removed from the job.

Mr. Burris, who was appointed to succeed Barack Obama in the Senate, is now the subject of two investigations. In the call, he seemed almost in a crass negotiation with Mr. Blagojevich’s brother — also his chief fund-raiser — over how he could help the governor, win the appointment and not run into trouble over negative connotations that he might be trying to buy an appointment by fund-raising for him.

“If I do that, I guarantee you that that will get out, and people said, ‘Oh, Burris is doing a fund-raiser,’ and, and then Rod and I both going to catch hell,” Mr. Burris said in a phone call shortly after the presidential election that opened the Senate seat held by Mr. Obama. By the end of the call, Mr. Burris had promised to send a personal check within a month.

“God knows, No. 1, I want to help Rod,” he was recorded as saying. “No. 2, I also want to, you know, hope I get a consideration to get that appointment.”

At another point, Mr. Burris reminded the governor’s brother, “Tell Rod to keep me in mind for that seat, would you?”

But, of course, the Times always found room to point out that Larry Craig is a Republican of Idaho.

Update: The Washington Post is respectable:

CHICAGO. May 26 -- Sen. Roland W. Burris (D-Ill.) can be heard on an FBI audio recording promising to make a campaign contribution to then-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) at the same time he was pressing the governor for a Senate appointment.

This morning, John McCormack noted several outlets highlighting a New Republic piece by Jeffrey Rosen, with the headline: "The Case Against Sotomayor." McCormack ended his post writing:

"We eagerly anticipate Rosen's latest take, in which we will surely learn that in reality Sotomayor has a first-class temperament and intellect."

He hasn't gone that far, yet. But Rosen now says: "Sotomayor should be confirmed."

John Yoo says she's not a threat to the revolution:

Obama had some truly outstanding legal intellectuals and judges to choose from—Cass Sunstein, Elena Kagan, and Diane Wood come immediately to mind. The White House chose a judge distinguished from the other members of that list only by her race. Obama may say he wants to put someone on the Court with a rags-to-riches background, but locking in the political support of Hispanics must sit higher in his priorities.

Sotomayor’s record on the bench, at first glance, appears undistinguished. She will not bring to the table the firepower that many liberal academics are asking for. There are no opinions that suggest she would change the direction of constitutional law as have Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, or Robert Bork and Richard Posner on the appeals courts. Liberals have missed their chance to put on the Court an intellectual leader who will bring about a progressive revolution in the law.

But conservatives should not be pleased simply because Sotomayor is not a threat to the conservative revolution in constitutional law begun under the Reagan administration. Conservatives should defend the Supreme Court as a place where cases are decided by a faithful application of the Constitution, not personal politics, backgrounds, and feelings.

If there is an upside here for conservatives, Yoo has zeroed in on it: Sotomayor is not going to be a rallying point for the left, and she is not going to persuade anyone on the right. She will, presumably, be a reliable liberal vote -- nothing more, nothing less. Conservatives could have done much worse, but we're getting a liberal Harriet Miers instead of a liberal Alito. The real danger for conservatives is that Sotomayor becomes a Hispanic icon who's seen as being unfairly maligned by Republicans. That could further alienate Hispanics from the party and do lasting damage to the conservative revolution in ways that Sotomayor herself never could.

Liz Cheney, the Nora O'Donnell-slaying voice for Bush-era national security measures and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, isn't currently considering a run for office, but didn't rule one out, either:

"It's not something I'm focused on right now, I do have five little kids and I'm helping my dad to write his memoirs," Cheney said Tuesday in an interview on Fox News and posted on ThinkProgress.org.

"So I have a pretty full plate right now, but it's certainly something I could," she said before getting interrupted.

Ross Douthat: In postfeminist America, men are happier than women.

California Supreme Court upholds democratic government.

Norks reportedly fire another missile.

Ramesh Ponnuru: Sotomayor as Obama's Harriet Miers.

Is this what empathy for crooked New Jersey pols looks like?

The White House wants you to know that Sotomayor loves baseball and children.

Just as the Obama administration and its allies in Congress try to ram through cap and trade legislation, European countries are moving to exempt entire industries from the regulation lest they simply relocate their operations to more business-friendly nations. The Financial Times reports:

Berlin is preparing to help domestic industries overcome the economic crisis by cutting the electricity bills of the country's largest energy users.

Aluminium, copper and zinc producers are among energy-intensive industrial sectors that could benefit from the plans, which are set to be agreed ahead of elections in September....

The bulk of any relief is likely to be found by reimbursing companies for the cost of carbon dioxide emissions trading certificates that utilities currently price into their electricity bills.

Berlin successfully argued at an EU summit in December that energy-intensive industries should be not be forced to buy emission permits between 2013 and 2020 because companies would shift production overseas. It now wants to go further by compensating energy-intensive companies in the intervening years. Officials are also considering whether to reward big power consumers for their role in balancing the electricity network during peak-load periods.

So the largest energy users in Germany are to be exempted from any carbon tax system, but Democrats in Washington are devoting their full attention to imposing just such a system on struggling industries here in the United States -- and they're pointing to Europe as the model! No doubt any legislation the Democrats produce will likewise be full of holes for big business, leaving the little guy to carry most of the tax burden, but if Europe is the model, it is cause for some relief to see that even the Europeans are not prepared to commit economic suicide for the sake of reducing emissions. Whatever systems the Democrats put in place in this country, the moment people start losing jobs and bearing the heavy costs they were told would never come due, it won't be but one election cycle until the whole thing comes apart.

Jeffrey Goldberg embarrasses Fareed Zakaria here and smacks Roger Cohen here.

The New York Times did its best to carry water for the potential Bloomberg challenger, but after telling the paper that Mayor Mike was smearing him with push polling and negative stories and that the strategy was only pushing him towards running (“I don’t walk away from a fight,” he said) Anthony Weiner is ending his campaign before it even started:

Confirming suspicions that have circulated since he informed supporters in April that he would be suspending his campaign, Rep. Anthony Weiner is ending his mayoral aspirations for 2009, according to a source with knowledge of the decision. He will not seek the Democratic nomination for the fall.

Bloomberg has what is an effectively limitless supply of cash and he's assembled an all-star team of strategists and communicators. Whoever runs against Bloomberg will need to be fearless. Weiner, it turns out, was just a blowhard.

Anthony R. Dolan, former chief speechwriter to President Reagan and special advisor in the offices of Secretaries of State and Defense in the Bush administration, writes THE WEEKLY STANDARD in response to Paul Kengor's "Duped at Notre Dame" from the May 18 issue:

Gratitude is due Paul Kengor for his scholarly work on the Reagan years which was in evidence in last week’s Weekly Standard piece on the Reagan\Obama contrast at Notre Dame commencements.

And while personally grateful for the mention as the writer assigned to the speech, a sense of obligation to the Gipper and, I suppose, history forces me to put aside my normally self-congratulatory pose as a former Reagan associate and in a display of my prodigious though under-celebrated (mysteriously so) personal modesty, disclose that Reagan did the text, just about all of it. Indeed, shortly after I had heard the news “The president is writing his own draft” (devastating for a new speechwriter) Reagan called and -- anxious always that nothing he ever did hurt a single person’s feelings -- apologized for having the temerity to write his own commencement address, assuring me that what he kept calling “the many fine things in what you wrote” were in his draft. About that last part he was just being nice -- a story I will have to tell elsewhere but the point is that Reagan as the old and wise smoothie he was showed in the text what young speechwriters have lots of trouble learning, that the most important audience is the one directly in front of the speaker. Start with some relaxing notes, establish some common ground -- just take care of them and larger themes can be gracefully evolved and deftly executed.

Speaking to the students and their families about the legend of Notre Dame Reagan does just that and it’s worth a look -- on YouTube entitled ”Source of All Strength." The text also offers a chance to contemplate what many Reagan staffers knew directly in those days though we had trouble persuading a disbelieving capital class, that Reagan was a fine writer and not only had a fine mind but one lit by truths that he thought could trigger, if spoken aloud, powerfully beneficent if not fully understandable forces that could win the Cold War and even engage the attention of party-conscious graduating seniors.

I wonder why this was released the same day as Sotomayor was nominated:

The Pentagon says about 5 percent of terror suspects released from the U.S. navy prison at Guantanamo Bay so far have returned to the fight against the U.S. and its allies.

Data released Tuesday suggests that an additional 9 percent of freed Guantanamo detainees are suspected to have rejoined what the Pentagon defines as terrorist activity.

In all, 74 of approximately 540 detainees that have been released have either returned or are believed to have returned to the fight.

Don't worry though, it's not that there are actual terrorists being held at Gitmo (they're all innocent victims of the Bush administration's disdain for due process), it's that Gitmo turns innocent men into terrorists. Which, even if it were true, isn't much comfort to whatever U.S. community is going to serve as a half-way house for released detainees.

Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio says that "there is much in [Sotomayor's] legal background that is troubling", and he hopes that she doesn't get a free pass because of her ethnicity:

“I look forward to hearing more about Judge Sotomayor and her views about the proper role of the courts and judicial activism. The role the Supreme Court is to interpret the Constitution, not to make law. Given this, I am deeply concerned about Judge Sotomayor’s past comment that the courts are ‘where policy is made’ and look forward to hearing her explanation and defense of that view.

“Judge Sotomayor deserves a fair hearing and respectful treatment, but there is much in her legal background that is troubling and demands scrutiny and honest discussion. I hope that a serious examination of her record and beliefs will not be shelved or cast aside simply so Democrats can attempt to claim political credit for a ‘historic’ court nomination.”

Rubio's primary opponent Gov. Charlie Crist doesn't have much to say about Sotomayor. Crist alienated Florida conservatives in March by appointing a liberal judicial activist to the Florida Supreme Court.

After launching a public campaign to force Princeton University to hire faculty and administrators of "Puerto Rican or Chicano heritage," Sotomayor finally got her way. But she wasn't finished complaining. Despite being appointed to a student advisory board that would counsel the University on the hiring of a "minority dean," Sotomayor was ultimately unsatisfied by the appointment of Luis Garcia as Associate Dean of Student Affairs in September 1974. Sotomayor had a litany of complaints ranging from the manner in which the advisory board was selected to the manner in which the candidate was selected.

The Daily Princetonian bullet-pointed the complaints:

• candidates for the "minority" position seem to be subjected to closer scrutiny than those for comparable positions.

• some of the candidates seemed to receive preferential treatment during the selection process.

• no Asian or American Indian candidates were recruited or considered.

• the members of the advisory committee were chosen by [Dean] Simmons herself rather than by the minority organizations they seemed to represent.

The same day, Sotomayor wrote another op-ed in the student paper explaining her frustration:

In an effort to broaden and legitimize the decision making procedure, Dean Simmons asked us as members of the various ethnic and racial minorities to participate. We were given resumes of each of the major candidates considered; we interviewed them; and we were asked to summarize our feelings as to their qualifications. As this procedure continued we grew more and more disillusioned--not with regard to the caliber of the candidates, but with the process in general. Finally, when asked to make our recommendations, we issued instead a list of our grievances and asked that a decision be deferred until they were answered satisfactorily.

Ironically, the piece closes with this:

And finally, concerning the appointment process, the procedure established should insure uniform treatment of all candidates. A candidate's background or the position he or she seeks to fill should be no reason for preferential treatment on the part of the university.

Does anyone dispute that Sotomayor has been the recipient of preferential treatment for most of her life? She played a role in the hiring of a dean at Princeton -- how many alums got that kind of treatment while they were undergraduates? According to the president, Sotomayor's background is now the very reason why she has been nominated to the Supreme Court. And Sotomayor ruled against uniform treatment of all candidates in the Ricci case, which is sure to be a focus of her confirmation hearings. So now that Sotomayor is the candidate, does she want to be treated like everyone else, or does she want special treatment?

Update: Links to the original articles taken down at the request of the Princeton University Library.

Now that Obama has picked Sonia Sotomayor to take the seat of the retiring David Souter, the summer promises to be really interesting. By the last week of June the Supreme Court will have decided Ricci v. DeStefano. This is the case alleging racial discrimination in employment on the part of New Haven, Conn. Firefighters seeking promotion took a written and oral exam the results of which the city said would be dispositive in deciding which applicants would win a limited number of promotions. But the city decided to disregard the test results because they yielded too many qualified applicants of one race (white) and not enough of another (black). Whereupon the white firefighters, joined by one Hispanic firefighter who also did well on the test, sued the city. But their challenge was dismissed by a district judge. And then the dismissal was reviewed by the tribunal on which Sotomayor sits, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Sotomayor was on a three-judge panel that upheld the district court. The panel’s order scanting the serious legal issues in the case compelled other judges on the court to urge Supreme Court review. A while back the Court heard the case, and while oral argument is not a reliable predictor of decision, the smart betting is on a 5-4 decision that at least ensures the plaintiffs their day in court. If John Roberts wins a fifth vote, I’d say the Court, with Roberts writing, will hold that New Haven engaged in racial discrimination. A decision in any respect friendly to the plaintiffs will mean that Sotomayor during her (probably) July confirmation hearing will be subject to more than perfunctory questioning about her role in the case. And also about her apparent indulgence of identity politics and how it affects her approach to judging. As Stuart Taylor explains in his most recent column, Sotomayor has “seriously suggested that Latina women like her make better judges than white males.”

So far in his administration Obama has sought to play down matters of race and ethnicity. The choice of Sotomayor ensures that they will be widely discussed. As will be Obama’s fuzzy jurisprudence of empathy, which Sotomayor endorsed in her remarks today at the White House. The obvious questions for Obama and his Justice-to-be: what do they feel (since we have to put it this way) about Frank Ricci, the lead plaintiff in the New Haven case, who studied as many as 13 hours a day in preparing himself for the exam? Who spent more than $1000 on books the city designated as homework for the exam? And who, because he is dyslexic and learns better by listening, paid to have them read them onto audiotapes? Ricci got one of the highest scores and would have been promoted but for the city’s decision to throw them out because of their inconvenient results. What do Obama and Sotomayor feel about this very diligent, disadvantage-overcoming, working-class guy?

Of course, the better question is what the law says about what New Haven did to him and the other plaintiffs.

Clearly, he's feeling comfortable in his new home:

The New York Times' report on Sotomayor's 2001 speech to La Raza includes a couple of choice quotes from Obama's Supreme Court appointee:

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life". ...

"Our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

So much for equal justice under law. You can read the complete transcript of her speech here.

Obama, during his speech on national security last week:

"I ran for President promising transparency, and I meant what I said."

But on the easiest transparency pledge he made, the president has fallen consistently short. Here is yet another newspaper story on his failure to post bills on WhiteHouse.gov five days before he signs them:

Mr. Obama last week signed four bills, each just a day or two after Congress passed and sent it over to him.

The White House said it posted links from its Web site to Congress' legislative Web site about a week before Mr. Obama signed the measures, but transparency advocates say that doesn't match the president's pledge to give Americans time to comment on the final version he is about to sign.

"He didn't say, 'When there's a bill heading to my desk,' or 'When we're pretty sure a bill will soon be passed.' He said when a bill ends up on his desk - a strong implication that public review would follow the bill arriving at his desk," said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Here's what he actually said on the trail:

"When there's a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what's in it before I sign it, so that you know what your government's doing," Mr. Obama said in a major campaign speech laying out his goals for transparency.

Robert Gibbs has massaged the meaning of this statement (and by "massaged," I mean "made up a new promise out of whole cloth"), and now says the five-day clock starts ticking when the White House links to a bill in its final form from the White House web site.

"A conference report, as you know, is an unamendable piece of legislation that has to be approved by both houses, language has to be simultaneous, it gets sent down here, and we sign it," he told reporters Friday.

If one is a passionate advocate of transparency, enthusiastic about the public giving its take on legislation, as Obama claims to be, why is he relying on the public's knowledge of "conference reports," Thomas.loc.gov, and the contents thereof to jump-start active citizenship? It's enough to make you wonder whether he actually wants the public getting a look at these bills.

But even by the generous standard Gibbs has made up, the Obama White House didn't even come close:

In the case of a Defense Department weapons acquisition bill, the White House posted its link to the Library of Congress Web site, www.Thomas.gov, on May 14, even though the conference report wasn't done until May 20. Congress passed that bill on May 21 and Mr. Obama signed it the next day.

On the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights Act, the White House posted a link to Congress on May 14, but the Senate didn't finish its work until May 19; the House agreed to the Senate's version on May 20, and Mr. Obama signed it two days later.

H/t The Anchoress, for the headline.

Sotomayor was a tireless crusader for Latino affirmative action while at Princeton University. She was at war with the administration over what she told the student newspaper was a "lack of commitment" in hiring "Puerto Rican and Chicano administrators."

In 1974 Sotomayor wrote an ope-ed in the Daily Princetonian explaining why the Puerto Rican and Chicano students had filed a complaint with the University:

The lack of commitment on the part of the university to the Puerto Rican or Chicano heritage seems self-evident from these facts. Yet statistical evidence is not the total concern or complaint of the Puerto Rican or Chicano students--what is terrifying to us are the implications. The facts imply and reflect the total absence of regard, concern and respect for an entire people and their culture. In effect, they reflect an attempt--a successful attempt so far--to relegate an important cultural sector of the population to oblivion.

Chicanos were the first natives of the Southwest. They were the largest population sector to become citizens when the Southwest was incorporated into the United States. Puerto Ricans constitute 12 percent of the population in New Jersey. Immediately surrounding Princeton--New Brunswick, Trenton, and Newark--they constitute 15 percent of the population. Yet we estimate that over 90 percent of the Princeton community knows nothing about either culture other than that we speak Spanish and that we are presently complaining about something. The members of the student body, for the same reason they study the French, Russians, English or Chinese, are the ones to benefit from the inclusion of our culture into the Princeton community and curriculum. Puerto Rican or Chicano students have no great need to study about their own culture--we live it. What good is it to know about what happens west of the Urals if you do not know what is happening a few miles around you.

It has been said that the universities of America are the vanguard of societal ideas and changes. Princeton University claims to foster the intellectual diversity, spirit and thoughts that are necessary components in order to achieve this ideal. Yet words are transitory, it is the practice of the ideas you espouse that affect society and are permanent. Thus it is only when Princeton fulfills the goal of being a truly representative community that it can attempt to instill in society a respect for all people--regardless of race, color, sex or national origin.

This is strikingly similar to the case President Obama made this morning in favor of Sotomayor's appointment to the Court. It was her experience, her background, her "extraordinary journey" that argued in her favor, and her appointment would be "another important step toward realizing the ideal that is etched about its entrance: Equal justice under the law." Sotomayor may have changed her views since her college days, though her record obviously indicates consistency, but perhaps what's most striking is that on the issue of diversity, Obama seems to have the views of a 21-year-old Hispanic girl -- that is, only by having a black president, an Hispanic justice, a female secretary of State, and Bozo the Clown as vice president will the United States become a true "vanguard of societal ideas and changes."

Update: Links to original documents removed at the request of the Princeton University Library.

During his remarks this morning, President Obama pointed out that Sotomayor was appointed as a district court judge in 1992 by Republican George H. W. Bush. But a friend on Capitol Hill notes this bipartisan talking-point is empty. The following 1992 New York Law Journal article explains that Sotomayor was nominated as part of a compromise in which Democratic Senator Moynihan was allowed to recommend judges for two of the seven vacancies:

The nominations of Andrew O'Rourke, Westchester County Executive, and Sonia Sotomayor, of Pavia & Harcourt, to the Southern District bench are awaiting hearings by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

The normal time period taken from the time a nomination reaches the committee for investigation, hearing and committee vote is two months, with action by the full Senate ordinarily following within a few days. Current nominations, however, have been held up since October by a dispute between the White House and the Senate Committee over the committee's right to access to FBI reports on candidates. A compromise reached last month should get the process moving again.

The seven Southern District vacancies have existed for periods of from 7 to 39 months. Senator Alfonse D'Amato, R-N.Y., has recommended persons to fill five of the vacancies, and, under an agreement between the Senators, Senator Daniel Moynihan, D-N.Y., two.

Senator D'Amato's recommendations are Mr. O'Rourke; Richard C. Casey, a corporate partner at Brown & Wood, who has been blind for five years; Colleen McMahon, a litigation partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Manuel Quintana, general counsel of the City Housing Authority; Loretta A. Preska, a litigation partner at Hertzog, Calamari & Gleason; Paul Shechtman, counsel to Manhattan District Attorney Robert A. Morgenthau; and Acting State Supreme Court Justice Patricia Williams.

Senator Moynihan has recommended Ms. Sotomayor and Deborah A. Batts, associate professor at the Fordham University School of Law.

According to Sotomayor's philosophy, Steele's opinion (what with the "richness of his experiences") is more valuable than noted white man Mitch McConnell's opinion, so I thought it was worth posting:

“Republicans look forward to learning more about federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor’s thoughts on the importance of the Supreme Court’s fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law. Supreme Court vacancies are rare, which makes Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination a perfect opportunity for America to have a thoughtful discussion about the role of the Supreme Court in our daily lives. Republicans will reserve judgment on Sonia Sotomayor until there has been a thorough and thoughtful examination of her legal views.”

Not exactly guns a-blazin' on this one.

Update: TOTUS for SCOTUS.

The Canadian Governor General doesn't just hunt animals in her spare time, and drape the spoils over the sofa in her office. No, Michaelle Jean guts harp seals with her bare hands and devours their hearts as part of a ceremony of political solidarity with seal hunters:

Jean knelt above a pair of carcasses and used a traditional blade to slice the meat off the skin.

After repeated, vigorous cuts through the flesh the Queen's representative turned to the woman beside her and asked enthusiastically: "Could I try the heart?"

Within seconds Jean was holding a crimson chuck of seal-ticker, she tucked it into her mouth, swallowed it, and turned to her daughter to say it tasted good.

Afterward Jean grabbed a tissue to wipe her blood-soaked fingers, and explained her gesture of solidarity with the region's Inuit hunters.

This is Michaelle Jean, at right:

The European Union recently voted to ban seal products at the urging of animal-rights groups, despite the fact that seal populations are thriving, not even the World Wildlife Fund opposes the Canadian seal hunt, and has in the past deemed the methods of hunting humane when performed correctly. The Economist pegged Europe's opposition to seal hunting as mostly emotional, and hypocritical given Europe's other animal industries:

Four years ago the WWF, an environmental organisation, commissioned an independent vet’s report which concluded that seal clubbing is not cruel if it is properly done by competent and trained professionals. The report judged that the Canadian hunt was professional and highly regulated. And the vets said that popular horror of the seal hunt seemed to be based largely on emotion and on images that are difficult even for experienced observers to interpret.

By the grim standards of Europe’s farrowing sheds, millions of seals enjoy a blissful life fishing and breeding on the Canadian ice...A few seals are killed to protect fish, others as a source of blubber or food. Most are indeed killed for their fur. That may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is hardly unEuropean. Europe’s fur farms produce over 30m mink and fox pelts a year. Every four or five days Europe kills more animals for their fur than the entire annual Canadian hunt does in a year. Seal hunting sounds unfair; but Europeans are reluctant to ban the hunting of similarly defenceless game birds, deer or wild boar.

The ban constitutes a loss of $5.5 million in exports to Europe.

This is the roll call vote from Sotomayor's nomination to the U.S. Circuit Court in 1998.

She was opposed by 29 Republicans, 11 of whom are still in the Senate today:

Brownback (R-KS)
Enzi (R-WY)
Grassley (R-IA)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Kyl (R-TX)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)

She was not opposed by any Democrats, and Cochran, Collins, Snowe, Specter, Hatch, Lugar, Bennett, and Gregg voted for her in '98.

Here's McConnell's take on Sotomayor today:

“Senate Republicans will treat Judge Sotomayor fairly. But we will thoroughly examine her record to ensure she understands that the role of a jurist in our democracy is to apply the law even-handedly, despite their own feelings or personal or political preferences.

“Our Democratic colleagues have often remarked that the Senate is not a ‘rubber stamp.’ Accordingly, we trust they will ensure there is adequate time to prepare for this nomination, and a full and fair opportunity to question the nominee and debate her qualifications.”

Drudge highlights Jeffrey Rosen's New Republic piece, in which a number of Second Circuit clerks and "eminent liberal scholars" expressed concerns about Sotomayor's temperament and intellect. Sotomayor is simply "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench," as one clerk said.

Rosen followed up with another report:

I was satisfied that my sources's concerns were widely shared when I read Sotomayor's entry in the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which includes the rating of judges based on the collective opinions of the lawyers who work with them. Usually lawyers provide fairly positive comments. That's what makes the discussion of Sotomayor's temperament so striking. Here it is:

Sotomayor can be tough on lawyers, according to those interviewed. "She is a terror on the bench." "She is very outspoken." "She can be difficult." "She is temperamental and excitable. She seems angry." "She is overly aggressive--not very judicial. She does not have a very good temperament." "She abuses lawyers." "She really lacks judicial temperament. She behaves in an out of control manner. She makes inappropriate outbursts." "She is nasty to lawyers. She doesn't understand their role in the system--as adversaries who have to argue one side or the other. She will attack lawyers for making an argument she does not like."

We eagerly anticipate Rosen's latest take, in which we will surely learn that in reality Sotomayor has a first-class temperament and intellect.

The boss, from his Blackberry:

"Where policy is made."

That's how, in 2005, reported Supreme Court pick Sonia Sotomayor characterized the Court of Appeals, where she now serves. It's undoubtedly even truer, in her eyes, about the Supreme Court. The debate over her confirmation could be an interesting "teaching moment"--a politically important teaching moment--for constitutionalists who would beg to differ from Sotomayor's vision of the appropriate role of the federal judiciary.

AP:

Officials tell The Associated Press that President Barack Obama intends to nominate federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor (SUHN'-ya soh-toh-my-YOR') as the first Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court.

Sotomayor, 54, would succeed retiring Justice David Souter if confirmed by the Senate. The officials spoke to AP on condition of anonymity because Obama has not yet announced his decision.

Sonia Sotomayor's path to the pinnacle of the legal profession began in the 1960s at a Bronx housing project just a couple blocks from Yankee Stadium, where she and her family dealt with one struggle after another.

She suffered juvenile diabetes that forced her to start insulin injections at age 8. Her father died the next year, leaving her to be raised by her mother — a nurse at a methadone clinic who always kept a pot of rice and beans on the stove. The parents had immigrated from Puerto Rico.

Sotomayor immersed herself in Nancy Drew books and spent hours watching Perry Mason on television, and knew she wanted to be a judge by the age of 10 after being inspired by a Perry Mason episode that ended with the camera settling on the robed sage.

"I realized that the judge was the most important player in that room," Sotomayor said in a 1998 interview with The Associated Press.

Now, Sotomayor is one of the most important players in the nation after being nominated for a Supreme Court seat by President Barack Obama. It is the crowning accomplishment in a career that included a long list of achievements: Yale Law School; a stint as a prosecutor and at a Manhattan law firm; a key ruling in 1995 that brought Major League Baseball back to the nation after a strike; and most recently a job as a federal appeals judge.

She also has that "empathy" Obama's looking for that allows her to impart her own preferences to the Constitution:

She has an extremely high rate of her decisions being reversed, indicating that she is far more of a liberal activist than even the current liberal activist Supreme Court.

Here's what the likely schedule will be for the nomination barring any uncovering of controversy:

The White House will announce a Supreme Court nominee at 10a.m. The Senate Judiciary Committee will likely hold hearings in the third week of July, permitting written committee questions the following week and a floor vote before Congress leaves for its summer recess on the weekend of August 8. Absent the discovery of an ethical transgression, the Democratic majority on the Senate guarantees confirmation, so the new Justice will take her seat when the Court opens its 2009 Term on October 5.

The case against Sotomayor, as made by TNR.

Today kicked off the second annual "Ride 2 Recovery" Memorial Challenge ride through Virginia. The riders -- many of them amputees or other wounded warriors -- started today with a ride from Washington, DC, to Manassas. Tomorrow, they ride from Manassas to Fredricksburg. And by week's end they'll be in Virginia Beach.

TWS covered their Texas ride here.

Follow their progress this week -- and learn more about the group -- here.

And then goes golfing:

His remarks in the Rose Garden today were inserted into his schedule and were an escalation of yesterday's statement, calling North Korea's reported nuclear and missile tests "a great threat to the peace and security of the world." (Yesterday, he said the region.)

Although the record of previous sanctions clearly have not had the desired effect, with North Korea repeatedly breaking any commitments achieved, the president called today for more unspecified "action." We have the full, brief text below.

When the president spoke, he was enroute to Arlington National Cemetery for a ceremony. We'll add his remarks there below the jump.

(UPDATE: After the Arlington event the president went golfing, despite the threats to world peace. And the rain.)

The Norks do whatever they want and in exchange the president gives them whatever they want, more fuel, more food, more aid, more talks, more time. It's like Bush's third term -- except Bush gave up the golf.

The boss asks who else will step forward, and what will happen if no one does:

Both Cheney and Gingrich have the background and stature to address credibly national security issues. Here’s an interesting question: Will any Republican whose career lies mostly ahead of him -- or her -- step up to confront Obama on the foreign policy and national security front? Is any of them enough of a risk-taker to defy the conventional wisdom that if you’re a mere senator or congressman or governor or aspirer to office, you should focus on domestic issues, that it’s hard (and it is) to take on a president on foreign policy? Will any of them seek to join Cheney and Gingrich in the foreign policy fray?

What if no younger political figure steps forward? If national security remains front and center over the next three years (a pretty safe bet), could the GOP nominee in 2012 be Gingrich...or even -- gasp! -- Cheney?

Read the whole thing here.

John Bolton predicted North Korea's latest nuclear test in the Wall Street Journal on May 20, despite the Obama administration's happy-go-lucky attitude toward Kim's regime:

The curtain is about to rise again on the long-running nuclear tragicomedy, "North Korea Outwits the United States." Despite Kim Jong Il's explicit threats of another nuclear test, U.S. Special Envoy Stephen Bosworth said last week that the Obama administration is "relatively relaxed" and that "there is not a sense of crisis." They're certainly smiling in Pyongyang.

In October 2006, North Korea witnessed the incredible diplomatic success it could reap from belligerence. Its first nuclear test brought resumption of the six-party talks, which gave Kim Jong Il cover to further advance his nuclear program.

Now, Kim is poised to succeed again by following precisely the same script. In April, Pyongyang launched a Taepodong-2 missile, and National Security Council official Gary Samore recently confirmed that a second nuclear test is likely on the way. The North is set to try two U.S. reporters for "hostile acts." The state-controlled newspaper calls America "a rogue and a gangster." Kim recently expelled international monitors from the Yongbyon nuclear complex. And Pyongyang threatens to "start" enriching uranium -- a capacity it procured long ago.

A second nuclear test is by no means simply a propaganda ploy. Most experts believe that the 2006 test was flawed, producing an explosive yield well below even what the North's scientists had predicted. The scientific and military imperatives for a second test have been strong for over two years, and the potential data, experience and other advantages of further testing would be tremendous.

Read the rest.

Jon Stewart likes the boss's confession of allegiance to Darth Vader on Special Report this week (see this video starting at the 1:15 mark):

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has always had a soft spot for Darth Vader. See Jonathan V. Last's May 2002 "The Case for the Empire":

The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.

It's a difficult leap to make--embracing Darth Vader and the Emperor over the plucky and attractive Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia--but a careful examination of the facts, sorted apart from Lucas's off-the-shelf moral cues, makes a quite convincing case.

In the not too distant future President Obama will outline his “peace plan” for the Middle East. Perhaps as early as next month, when he travels to Cairo to address the Muslim world, he’ll mention to Israel and the Arab states surrounding her how he thinks they can all work together to solve the intractable problem of Palestinian statehood. And, just as he sees himself as carrying the burden of fixing the Guantanamo “mess” left him by his predecessor, he clearly also believes--or so, at any rate, his secretary of state has indicated--that the failure of the previous administration to see to the creation of a Palestinian state is just another mess for him to clean up, and that a bit of pushing on the Israeli prime minister accompanied by some importuning of the Arab dictators and kings is a good start.

Perhaps so. Wouldn’t it be a miracle? I’m wondering, though, how he will approach the equally intractable problem of Arab Jew-hatred. Anyone looking at a map of the Middle East cannot miss the fact that Israel, at 10,000 square miles, is less than one third the size of her next largest neighbor, Jordan (34,495) one seventh the size of Syria (71,498), one thirty-ninth the size of Egypt (387,000), one seventy-sixth the size of Saudi Arabia (756,985). (Okay, it’s true that Lebanon--even including the part occupied by Syria--is less than half Israel’s size, but that’s for another day.)

It helps to have a visual:

And yet the Arab states surrounding her quake in rage and fear over her, and blame her for their own awful cruelty in forcing Palestinians in their midst to live as outsiders in horrific refugee camps, refusing to absorb them, pining for the day when they can boot them out altogether to live in their “own” state--or, as in the case of Hussein, the prior king of Jordan, solving the problem by exterminating them.

The Syrian dictator is allied with the Iranians; the Saudi “royals” rule in a compact with Wahhabi religious extremists; the dictator of Egypt lives in terror of the Muslim Brotherhood and clings to power with an ever-weakening grip, preparing his son Gamal to succeed him as if he were a king; the king of Jordan is dismissed by his neighbors as inconsequential. Are these the people--people who have spent generations teaching their own subjects to despise Jews and the Jewish state--Mr. Obama expects to engage in new diplomatic outreach to Israelis on his behalf? Are these the people he expects to take political risks on behalf of Palestinians whom they have treated with contempt for six decades? Are these the people in whose hands Mr. Obama expects Bibi Netanyahu to risk the safety and security of his own citizens?

Well, he's on a message. Just because it happens to be Dick Cheney's message is no reason to judge Joe harshly. Baby steps:

Speaking to reporters on the final day of his tour of the Balkans, Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged the administration still hasn’t figured out what to do with all the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay but predicted that it will still meet its deadline of closing the prison within a year. “I think so,” Biden said, when asked about the January 2010 deadline. “But, look, what the president said is that this is going to be hard. It’s like opening Pandora’s Box. We don’t know what’s inside the box.”

He added that it's probably best, since we won't know the extent of the spread of the released jihadis or the damage they might do, to stay off planes, trains, and completely out of the area known as "America" for the forseeable future, just to be safe. All right, I made that up, but isn't it great that we've moved past the "fear-mongering" of the Bush administration?

Presumably, Robert Gibbs will inform us of what the Vice President meant to say at his next briefing. The Weekly Standard humbly suggests that Joe Biden reach into Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's bag of tricks for future predicaments (and we all know they're coming!). From a September 1984 AP report:

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has agreed to campaign in his home state of New York for Walter F. Mondale, but Moynihan said Tuesday he doesn't think the Demcoratic presidential candidate has much chance to unseat President Reagan.

"I don't think so, do you?" he asked reporters at his semi-weekly news conference.

Moynihan immediately retrenched and said he meant to say that polls indicated Mondale trailed Reagan by a significant margin.

"I left that (polls) out," he said in response to a follow-up question. "I stand by what I meant to say."

Indeed.

David Frum has written a column in The Week magazine called "The pro-life delusion" in which he claims that a recent Gallup poll showing that 51 percent of Americans self-ascribe as pro-life

is wrong. Worse, it’s misleading—and threatens to send Republicans careening in precisely the worst possible direction in pursuit of votes they will not find.

Charles Franklin of Pollster.com explains the poll’s big technical error. Gallup oversampled Republicans. At a time when only 1 in 5 Americans identifies as Republican, 32 percent of the respondents in Gallup’s survey group identified themselves as Republican.

Frum argues that this poll will lead Republicans to try foolishly to win over "socially conservative, lower-income nonwhites [who] put their economic interests first and vote Democratic" rather than "economically conservative affluent whites [who] put their cultural votes first and also vote Democratic."

There are a few problems with Frum's argument.

It's not as though the overwhelming case that the pro-life issue helps the GOP started with this one Gallup poll. The issue netted votes for the GOP even when majorities self-identified as pro-choice, because pro-lifers have been more likely to vote on the issue. The case that the country has been turning more pro-life doesn't depend on one poll. There has been a clear and widely-recognized trend toward pro-lifers over the last fifteen years.

Moreover, the Gallup poll is not as unreliable as Frum makes it out to be.

Fox News independently found a number of self-identified pro-lifers within two percent (49%). Rasmussen and Pew have both recently shown a significant drop in support for abortion. (And Jay Cost points out that party ID bounces around quite a bit; the proportion of self-identified Republicans is probably closer to 32 percent than 1 in 5, as Frum claims.)

The Polling Company finds that the number of self-ascribed pro-lifers to be slightly lower (47 percent), but when you drill down on this poll it's clear that the anti-abortion position is quite strong: 82 percent of adults oppose third-trimester abortions, and 71 percent oppose taxpayer-funding of abortion.

Obama promised Planned Parenthood in 2007 that his public health-care plan would cover abortions. If the health-care bill unveiled this summer actually covers abortions, wouldn't it be a smart idea for Republicans to point out this fact--loudly and frequently?

The Atlantic's Chris Good writes: "A bus full of kindergarteners got turned away from the White House Thursday, 10 minutes late for a tour. (An event with the Pittsburgh Steelers prevented White House staff from letting them in.)"

Jim Treacher writes: "Sorry, kids! Obama doesn't change his schedule for anybody but Dick Cheney."

Yesterday Obama offered this critique of waterboarding:

"I know some have argued that brutal methods like water-boarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more. As Commander-in-Chief, I see the intelligence, I bear responsibility for keeping this country safe, and I reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation. What’s more, they undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured. In short, they did not advance our war and counter-terrorism efforts – they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all."

So, the waterboarding of KSM led to the recruitment of more terrorists? Where is the empirical evidence supporting that proposition? Or, does Obama mean that the propaganda efforts of our enemies and the obsessive compulsive myopia of our own media feeds anti-American sentiment which, in turn, helps terrorist recruitment efforts? What type of individual says: "Those evil Americans are waterboarding KSM, a mass murderer who says he personally beheaded Daniel Pearl - I'm joining al Qaeda!" Are there really such people who become terrorists to defend KSM's "rights"? Would they not become terrorists anyway?

If anything, one could make a stronger argument that it is Obama's preferred approach to interrogation, detention, and prosecution that has undermined our counter-terrorism efforts. One of Obama's favorite examples in favor of Article 3 trials for terrorists is Ramzi Yousef, the man convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and now held at a Federal supermax prison. Yousef was given the same legal protections and due process rights as guaranteed by the Constitution, but "the will of our enemies to fight us" was not sapped, instead Yousef's uncle Khalid Sheik Mohammed would orchestrate the 9/11 attacks.

Before 9/11 it was routine to treat terrorism as a law enforcement problem, and the FBI and the federal courts were therefore the government's primary tools in confronting the threat. Yet the attacks only increased -- the embassy bombings, the Cole, the Khobar towers -- culminating in the attacks on 9/11. All the while al Qaeda recruitment was booming. Obama can claim that the Bush administration's interrogation and detention methods undermined America's alliances and hurt America's standing in the world, but if there is any evidence that those methods served as a recruitment tool for terrorists or increased the will of our enemies to fight, he has yet to produce it. And no reasonable person could possibly believe that were it not for waterboarding, al Qaeda could be expected to treat a captured American soldier in a manner that complies with Geneva Convention standards.

Kim Strassel reports that Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty took on his Democratic legislature over spending and tax hikes. And amazingly, Pawlenty won. Strassel:

Upon receiving the last spending bill, [Pawlenty] announced that he would exercise the power of "unallotment," which has been on the books since 1939 and which has been used four times. Under it, the governor is allowed to "unallot" (take away) any state spending for which there is no money to pay. Panicked, the DFL passed tax legislation to cover its blowout spending bills, 10 minutes before the session's end. Too late. The governor said he'd veto the bill and would not be calling back the legislature to do any more mischief.

Mr. Pawlenty is now free to strip $2.7 billion from state spending to balance the budget. Tax hikes are dead. He tells me this will be one of the first times in modern Minnesota history that the state will reduce the size of government in real terms, not just slow its rate of growth. "The correlation in recent history has been between job growth and states that have reasonable government cost structures," he says. These cuts, he says, will position Minnesota to take advantage of the recovery when it comes.

The governor's "unallotment" power was central to Minnesota avoiding California's fate. But having a governor committed to low taxes and balanced budgets helped, too.

The press release:

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Senate unanimously passed an amendment last night introduced by U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) which establishes a procedure to block release of the detainee photos.

Last week, after consulting with General Petraeus, General Odierno, and others, President Obama decided to fight the release of photographs that depict the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Those photographs are the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“This vote is an important statement of support for the protection of our troops who are on the front lines defending our country at a time of war,” said Lieberman. “This amendment provides the President with the ability to block the publication of the photos that would endanger the safety of our men and women in uniform.”

“Our military commanders have, to a person, stated that releasing these photographs will increase violence against out troops and civilians serving overseas,” said Graham. “I agree. Nothing will be gained by their release in terms of new information about detainee abuse. Americans will be killed because of their release and this amendment is designed to stop that from happening. I applaud the President’s decision to fight the release of these photographs. Our legislation will strengthen the Obama Administration’s legal standing in court and that is why the Senate has unanimously passed this important piece of legislation.”

Earlier this week California senator Dianne Feinstein said that Gitmo detainees could easily be held at Supermax federal prison in Colorado, but Colorado senator Michael Bennet opposed this proposal, saying, "Because the detainees are being tried by military tribunals, they should be held in military facilities. Military detainees should not be transported to and held at Supermax because it is not a military facility."

Now the Denver Post reports on some logistical problems with moving the detainees to Supermax:

Should Guantanamo detainees be transferred to Supermax in Florence? Moving any large number of terror detainees from Guantanamo Bay to Colorado's Supermax would require either shuffling current residents out of the Florence prison or expanding its capacity and resolving a long-running battle over adequate prison staffing.

As President Barack Obama and congressional leaders point toward the Colorado federal prison as a possible new home for some of the detainees, one big problem is the bed-space crunch.

Supermax's approximately 480 concrete cells already are jammed with the likes of Oklahoma City bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols, Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph and other notorious domestic criminals. There also are 33 international terrorists, including Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef and failed airline shoe bomber Richard Reid.

Only one bed was not filled Thursday at Supermax, U.S. Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Tracy Billingsley said.

So getting any more than a handful of detainees from Guantanamo to Florence would require considerable logistical maneuvers to clear room or an even longer-term solution through prison expansion.

Perhaps Senator Feinstein will propose fortifying Alcatraz? I hear it's quite empty these days.

Video via Hot Air:

Quoth Allahpundit: "the fact that government has now decayed to the point where congressmen feel safe openly admitting that they don’t know what they’re voting on suggests a civic breakdown in need of emergency repair."

How true.

In his speech today, President Obama surrounded himself with images of the law. In a hall housing the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the president clearly sought to portray himself as one who was protecting America’s legal heritage after almost eight years of “fear” and “hasty decisions.”

With respect to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo, President Obama said the legal challenges he faces are nothing new. In his prepared remarks, the president said:

Indeed, the legal challenges that have sparked so much debate in recent weeks in Washington would be taking place whether or not I decided to close Guantanamo. For example, the court order to release seventeen Uighur detainees took place last fall – when George Bush was President.

Later, the president discussed different categories of detainees. He explained that one category of detainees had already been exonerated by the law.

The third category of detainees includes those who we have been ordered released by the courts. Let me repeat what I said earlier: this has absolutely nothing to do with my decision to close Guantanamo. It has to do with the rule of law. The courts have found that there is no legitimate reason to hold twenty-one of the people currently held at Guantanamo. Twenty of these findings took place before I came into office. The United States is a nation of laws, and we must abide by these rulings.

The “court order to release seventeen Uighur detainees” that President Obama referred to is Judge Richard M. Urbina’s October 17, 2008, opinion in the D.C. District Court. Judge Urbina’s order built upon an earlier decision by the D.C. Court of Appeals in the matter of Parhat v. Gates. And of the “twenty-one” people Obama says “there is no legitimate reason to hold,” seventeen of them are the Uighurs referenced in these two decisions.

There are at least two problems with President Obama’s comments.

First, the two decisions cited above are riddled with errors and omissions. One omission is particularly noteworthy. Neither Judge Urbina’s decision, nor the Appellate Court’s decision mentions Abdul Haq, the master terrorist who trained many of the Uighur detainees.

Abdul Haq is a member of al Qaeda’s elite Shura Council and has plotted terrorist attacks against Chinese targets for years. We know this because Obama’s Treasury Department designated Abdul Haq a terrorist affiliated with al Qaeda and the Taliban just last month. And we know that he was the leader of the Uighurs detained at Gitmo because many of the Uighur detainees have admitted it.

Despite the fact that Haq is the leader of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIP), a UN and U.S. designated al Qaeda affiliate, and was the leader of the Uighur detainees’ group in Afghanistan, there is no mention of him in the court decisions cited above.

So, the very decisions that Obama says establish the “rule of law” are seriously flawed. It is true that the Treasury Department’s designation came out after the court decisions. But, it was no secret who Haq was or that his organization was affiliated with al Qaeda. Haq and his group have advertised their ties to al Qaeda in their propaganda videos.

This is why President Obama’s own Treasury Department says that Abdul Haq is a threat. It does not make sense, therefore, to suggest that Haq’s trainees are necessarily nothing to worry about.

Second, President Obama did not mention that another court shot down Judge Urbina’s decision earlier this year. While Obama mentioned that “the court order to release seventeen Uighur detainees took place last fall,” he failed to say that another court offered a sharp rebuke to Judge Urbina’s ruling in February of this year. A senior judge from that court wrote, “We are certain that no habeas corpus court since the time of Edward I ever ordered such an extraordinary remedy.” The courts, therefore, have not determined whether or not any of the Uighurs can be released into the U.S.

The Obama administration has reportedly been considering releasing some of the Uighur detainees into the U.S. soon. If it does, then perhaps the president’s conception of the “rule of law” is really just in the eye of the beholder.

First off, let me concede that having a clerk read parts of the cap-and-trade climate bill Micro-Machines style is pretty funny, and far beyond the levity quotient one expects from Rep. Henry Waxman. On the other hand, this is the United States Senate, sir. Could we not spring for the actual Micro Machines guy (John Moschitta)?

Via TPM, here's the video:

But there's a downside to the humor at this hearing. Brian Beutler of TPM characterizes this act of political theater as Democrats' "extraordinary measure to combat nefarious Republican stall tactics."

Faced with the possibility that the GOP minority might require the committee's clerks to read aloud the 900-page Waxman-Markey climate change bill, or many of its 400-plus proposed amendments, the committee's chairman, Henry Waxman (D-CA), hired a speed reader. An quick tongued, acting-clerk, if you will.

Heaven forfend! Who would want to make the committee, which is supposed to understand the bill, actually listen to the contents of all 900 pages of it?

Even if the reading of the bill is a partisan "stall tactic" on the part of the Republicans, intellectually honest folks who want government to function responsibly would have to admit it's a pretty benign one—beneficial, even. The brouhaha over reading the bill is an implicit, disturbing admission that—yes!— your Congress will enact a 900-page bill heavily regulating the fundamental engine of the American economy and your life in unprecedented ways without ever having read it. Feel good about that?

Beyond TPM's take, which is predictable from a left-leaning site, the laughter inside the hearing room from lawmakers themselves is illustrative of the darkly comic state of legislative affairs on the Hill. Just remember: This is only the attempted reading of one tiny amendment by a speed-reading clerk, no less, and the reaction in the chamber is, "Ho, ho, ho, imagine if we were actually serious about this! It's ludicrous! The language is mystifying, the prose impenetrable. It'd be absolutely excruciating to read all of those words together, in a row. Someone once told me that's what my monocle was for, but I absolutely refuse to believe it. Now, Alfred, collect my topcoat and cigars, and let's head to the club for a brandy before someone else tries to burden us with the stewardship of the taxpayers' money. Read the bill. Perish the thought!"

To counteract instances of malfeasance on at least some bills (although as abdications of duty go, this one was adorable), get on board with Republican leader John Boehner, who has suggested a 72-hour period mandatory period of public review for bills before they're voted on. His idea is part of the Obama administration's open dialogue on open government, and you can vote for it to send it up the food chain for possible consideration and enactment. Or, you can swing your pocketwatch blithely and meet the boys for croquet on the lawn. Either way. Vote here if you're so inclined.

Andy McCarthy writes:

President Obama’s speech is the September 10th mindset trying to come to grips with September 11th reality. It is excruciating to watch as the brute facts of life under a jihadist threat, which the president is now accountable for confronting, compel him forever to climb out of holes dug by his high-minded campaign rhetoric — the reversals on military detention, commission trials, prisoner-abuse photos, and the like.

The need to castigate his predecessor, even as he substantially adopts the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy, is especially unbecoming in a president who purports to transcend our ideological divisions.

Read the rest here.

Friends of Nan swept her off the grill today, voting 252-172 (Ron Paul, of course, and Walter Jones of North Carolina voted with the Dems) to block an effort to investigate her assertion that she never heard of waterboarding, but if she did, she didn’t know it was gonna be used, but if she did know it was gonna be used, she didn’t know what it was, and anyway the CIA lied, but if the CIA didn’t lie, the Bush administration lied. The measure, sponsored by Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, sought a bipartisan panel to look into the Speaker’s claims. Uh huh. And there was a unicorn in my back yard this morning.

Everyone heard Obama introduce us to "William" Gates this morning.

He was introduced at the Pentagon as "Ronald" Gates on Tuesday. That introduction was not by Obama, which the AP story linked above sort of suggests.

Here's the video. The Pentagon's video links are failing me, so go to the main page and look for "Pentagon Dedication Ceremony" for the flub in question.

Rough. He's gonna have to go all Dangerfield to get the respect he deserves around here.

Always coming through with a meme (that's right, I said it) that soars, Jim Treacher brings us Cheneykus on Twitter. A selection of his work:

Remember, lefties
I'm not running for office
Your polls make me laugh

Hello, Jon Stewart
You cried on September 12
But haven't since: Why?

I'm bald and morose
I don't look good in swim trunks
Eight years, no attacks

Every time I sneer
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed faints
Try that one, Barack

For long-form humor from Treacher, read here. For the art he's inspired, check this out.

In rereading his speech, it's in this sentence:

Today, I’m an even freer man. Your kind invitation brings me here as a private citizen – a career in politics behind me, no elections to win or lose, and no favor to seek.

Hmmm, the very thing that brings our hero (Obama) to his knees is what makes Cheney ever more powerful by the day. Mwahahahahaha. It's almost as if he were taking this super-villain thing seriously. Be afraid, Barack. Be very afraid.

In his speech at the National Archives today, President Obama touted his administration’s efforts to defend the United States, saying “We are investing in the 21st century military and intelligence capabilities that will allow us to stay one step ahead of a nimble enemy.” The events of recent days lead one to wonder what “nimble enemy” the President believes he is equipping our military to defeat.

Just as his April 5 Prague speech on nuclear disarmament was overshadowed by North Korea’s launch of a Taepodong-2 missile, the administration’s plan to slash spending on missile defense has in recent days run up against an unfortunate reality: Iran and other “nimble enemies” of the United States are rapidly making progress on the development of long-range ballistic missiles -- the very missiles that missile defense is intended to counter.

On Wednesday, Iran tested a Sejjil-2 missile capable of hitting Israel and parts of Europe. Gary Samore, the administration’s top counterproliferation and arms control official, told the New York Times that Iran’s move from liquid fueled missiles such as the Shahab-3 to solid fueled missiles such as the Sejjil-2 which are more mobile and can be launched on shorter notice, was “a significant technical development.”

The Iranian missile launch came on the same day that Secretary Gates was in front of a House subcommittee defending the administration’s 15 percent cut to the budget of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, including the cancellation or downsizing of key programs such as the Airborne Laser, Multiple Kill Vehicle and Kinetic Energy Interceptor, which are exactly the sort of “21st century military capabilities” the president touted today. Even more alarming is the fact that the administration has only allocated $51 million ($416 million less than Congress appropriated last year) for the planned missile defense sites in the Czech Republic and Poland. These are sites that would defend the U.S. homeland and our European allies from Iranian missiles. Instead of making construction of the sites a priority, the administration seems to be flirting with the possibility of giving up the sites in an effort to strike an arms control deal with Moscow.

The unfortunate timing of these cuts is such that even Rep. David Obey (D-WI), fresh from pandering to the Get out of Afghanistan caucus, expressed some concern, citing “continuing [Iranian] rhetoric about threats to our friends and allies in the region.” Congressional Democrats have a long history of slashing missile defense, so something is seriously wrong when people like David Obey begin to look like national security hawks in comparison to the Obama administration. Before the president delivers his next big speech or rolls out his next big national security initiative, he may want to “engage” Pyongyang and Tehran first to make sure they don’t make him look foolish in front of his own party as well as the American people.

Another TWS friend writes in about Obama's speech:

I thought this part was telling:

I stand here today as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents. My father came to our shores in search of the promise that they offered. My mother made me rise before dawn to learn of their truth when I lived as a child in a foreign land. My own American journey was paved by generations of citizens who gave meaning to those simple words – “to form a more perfect union.” I have studied the Constitution as a student; I have taught it as a teacher; I have been bound by it as a lawyer and legislator. I took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution as Commander-in-Chief, and as a citizen, I know that we must never – ever – turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake.

Yes, of course. God forbid this President give a speech without referencing himself. His claim to fame after all is (not one, but) two autobiographies written before he was 45. And the rationale for his self-referencing is always the same: as a foundation for subsequent moral preening. He may claim to believe in a fair debate - he just wants to make sure his podium is taller than yours.

He should be careful here. If he wants to play the "biography gives me special perspective" game, he has nothing on Vice-President Cheney, who during his tenure (in my opinion) largely kept his silence for the sake of national security while his critics libeled him and destroyed his reputation. I wonder if Obama would make a similar sacrifice.

Four random thoughts about Barack Obama’s speech today.

*Obama repeatedly complained about “fear-mongering” and a “climate of fear” and unnamed people making unspecified arguments designed to arouse the irrational fears of the American public. The White House doesn’t get it. Terrorism is scary. There is no need to create such a climate – it already exists, even if people don’t spend every day thinking about these threats. And this climate exists not because of anything Dick Cheney has said but because al Qaeda killed 3,000 people on 9/11 and its terrorists are committed to doing more.

*Obama’s speech seemed to blame the Bush administration and aggressive lawyering and Guantanamo and enhanced interrogation for, well, everything. "Because the terrorists can only succeed if they swell their ranks and alienate America from our allies, and they will never be able to do that if we stay true to who we are; if we forge tough and durable approaches to fighting terrorism that are anchored in our timeless ideals."

But terrorists swelled their ranks during the Clinton years, sending some 20,000 terrorists through al Qaeda training camps alone. This happened at a time when Obama presumably believes we were being true to who we are and before the dark days of the Bush administration alienated America from its allies. This is true of much of Obama's rhetoric on terrorism. It's as if he thinks anti-American terrorism started with the Bush administration and if we are only more mindful of "American values" these terrorists will leave us alone.

*Obama lamented the “return of the politicization of these issues that have characterized the last several years.” One might argue that Obama has politicized these issues as much as anyone in American public life over the past several years. He campaigned against Bush administration policies that, in several cases, he now embraces. And last month he declassified and released Bush-era memos on enhanced interrogation while refusing to declassify and release Bush-era CIA documents that include the results of those interrogations. That, it seems to me, is a classic example of politicizing intelligence or national security or "these issues."

*Obama courageously challenged those believe in the “anything goes” philosophy of fighting terrorists. Only he never actually named any of its adherents. He couldn’t of course, because no serious participant in these debates advocates such an approach.

This is Obama at his laziest and most intellectually dishonest – constructing and knocking down straw-man arguments so absurd that they don’t even serve the purpose of straw men in the first place. In this case, one of the most important revelations of the OLC memos was that the most aggressive, forward-leaning policymakers were unwilling to sanction an “anything goes” approach to interrogation. Even those who disagree with the legal reasoning in those memos or disagree with the use of waterboarding have to concede that an "anything goes" approach would include tactics and techniques that make US-style "enhanced interrogations" seem positively quaint.

I hope that President Obama is enjoying this debate, and one certainly hopes that he will continue to embrace it, because it is a debate that he has been asking for since he decided to run for president. From a series of reckless positions on national security while serving as a United States Senator -- including efforts to cut off funding for soldiers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, setting an arbitrary deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq, fighting to stop the surge, opposing the incarceration of terrorist suspects and enemy combatants without providing them with the full liberties and rights guaranteed to American citizens under our Constitution, opposing domestic intelligence gathering against terrorists through measures such as wiretapping, and failing to speak out in any manner in the face of scurrilous personal attacks on General David Patreaus, President Obama now has the opportunity to match his rhetoric with his responsibilities as President of the United States.

Much has been written in recent weeks about the loss of direction in the Republican party. Liberal commentators and White House spokesmen have smugly dismissed Vice President Cheney as yesterday's news, and his visibility as a further sign of Republican collapse. Well look who's squirming now. Once again, and now under a Democrat President, Democrats find themselves in a panic over being seen as weak on terrorism.

In the environment created by President Obama's hasty decisions, selective release of documents from his predecessor's administration, and constant droning on about the miserable legacy he inherited, Speaker Nancy Pelosi sought to cover up her own participation in the Congressional-Executive consultations on terrorist interrogation -- and then attempted to deflect evidence to the contrary by dismissing the US intelligence community as serial liars. Not a single, credible observer believes her account, she was rebuked by her own party's CIA Director, and her number two in the House leadership openly discussed the need for a independent review of her comments. Just yesterday, President Obama's hasty and ill considered deadline to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center and relocate hardened terrorists to U.S. soil was overwhelmingly rebuked by the United States Senate. One cannot imagine the Democrats are enjoying the argument their president started.

Each day the Democrat's angst seems to deepen, and each day the confusion of President Obama's policies becomes more evident. Despite all the rhetoric of his presidential run, he has now embraced the Bush administration policies on the commitment of troops to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He now supports the wiretapping he threatened to filibuster. He has denied the release of photos that the Bush administration likewise recognized as a propaganda gift for our enemies, and a danger to our troops serving in Iraq, and has revived the military tribunals he once scorned. And on those issues where his record has matched his rhetoric -- such as the commitment to close Guantanamo, he is not even supported by his own party.

One wonders what comes next. I bet he tries to change the subject -- and quickly.

I've read both speeches.

Obama's is the speech of a young senator who was once a part-time law professor--platitudinous and preachy, vague and pseudo-thoughtful in an abstract kind of way. This sentence was revealing: "On the other hand, I recently opposed the release of certain photographs that were taken of detainees by U.S. personnel between 2002 and 2004." "Opposed the release"? Doesn't he mean "decided not to permit the release"? He's president. He's not just a guy participating in a debate. But he's more comfortable as a debater, not as someone who takes responsibility for decisions.

Cheney's is the speech of a grownup, of a chief executive, of a statesman. He's sober, realistic and concrete, stands up for his country and its public officials, and has an acute awareness of the consequences of the choices one makes as a public official and a willingness to take responsibility for those choices.

A friend writes:

“I am listening to Obama's speech and I find it really unattractive (not to mention hypocritical) for Mr. Hope 'n Change to keep harping on the past. Boo hoo, you have to be a real leader now. Deal with it!”

Well said.

You can read Obama's remarks as prepared for delivery after the jump:

Via David Freddoso, an Obama gaffe that would have been noteworthy, I suppose, if he were Sarah Palin:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained an advance copy of VP Cheney's remarks as prepared for delivery later this morning at the American Enterprise Institute. I've read it quickly. I think fair-minded people will find it very well-argued and powerful.

Thank you all very much, and Arthur, thank you for that introduction. It’s good to be back at AEI, where we have many friends. Lynne is one of your longtime scholars, and I’m looking forward to spending more time here myself as a returning trustee. What happened was, they were looking for a new member of the board of trustees, and they asked me to head up the search committee.

I first came to AEI after serving at the Pentagon, and departed only after a very interesting job offer came along. I had no expectation of returning to public life, but my career worked out a little differently. Those eight years as vice president were quite a journey, and during a time of big events and great decisions, I don’t think I missed much.

Being the first vice president who had also served as secretary of defense, naturally my duties tended toward national security. I focused on those challenges day to day, mostly free from the usual political distractions. I had the advantage of being a vice president content with the responsibilities I had, and going about my work with no higher ambition. Today, I’m an even freer man. Your kind invitation brings me here as a private citizen – a career in politics behind me, no elections to win or lose, and no favor to seek.

Keep reading after the jump...

Politico's Mike Allen writes:

CHENEY, BUSH POPULARITY RISES (A TAD) -- CNN/OPINION RESEARCH CORPORATION POLL OUT AT 6 a.m.: “Most Americans still don't like Dick Cheney, but they like him a little more than they did just after he and George W. Bush left office. 55% of the public has an unfavorable view of Cheney; 37% hold a positive view of the former veep. That's an eight-point gain since mid-January. Is that uptick due to Cheney's visibility as one of the most outspoken critics of the Obama administration? Almost certainly not. Bush's favorable rating rose six points in that same time period, and Bush has not given a single speech since he left office.” Opinion of George W. Bush: Favorable, 41%; Unfavorable, 57%. Interviews with 1,010 adult Americans conducted by telephone on May 14-17, 2009. Sampling error: +/-3% pts

Get your "Cheney 2012" T-shirt today:

In an interview yesterday Hillary Clinton chillingly suggested it is now U.S. policy to demand not only that Israel dismantle “illegal outposts” and stop any further settlement expansion in the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, but also--and no distinction made here--to put a halt to “natural growth”: “We want to see a stop to settlement construction--additions, natural growth, any kind of settlement activity--that is what the president has called for.”

Really? Do the Occidental-Columbia-Harvard-Illinois-senator-President and the Wellesley-Yale-New-York-senator-U.S.-secretary-of-state know what “natural growth” means? Surely, though a devotee of the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger, Mrs. Clinton doesn’t advocate the forced sterilization of Israelis living beyond the green line in established settlements, or restrictions on the building of additional housing to accommodate family expansion, does she? Does Mr. Obama?

She must have misspoken. If so, though, how much better it would have been had it not been the anti-American, pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah al Jazeera at the receiving end of her ignorance. And if not? There’s freezing indeed ahead for the Jewish state, and not just in settlements.

The Times reports:

Iran test-fired a sophisticated missile on Wednesday that was capable of striking Israel and parts of Western Europe, adding to concerns that Iran’s weapons-development program is fast outpacing the American-led diplomacy that President Obama has said he will let play out through the end of the year.

Marc Ambinder gets a preview that includes, Step 1) Blame Bush:

Obama will caution that he does not have "the luxury of starting from scratch" -- cleaning up something that is "a mess that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that we are forced to deal with on a constant basis and that consume the time of government officials whose time would be better spent protecting the country."

It's worth remembering that the Bush administration didn't have the "luxury of starting from scratch," unless you mean the exciting opportunity to create a whole new building in the crater where the Trade Towers once stood. Bush, if you'll remember, was cleaning up "a mess" that left "in its wake" a "flood" of dead Americans and immediate threats to the rest of the country. It's a bit unseemly for Obama to whine about the "legal challenges" left by an administration that was successful in protecting the country from those threats for seven years.

Next up, Obama will promise to close Gitmo, and offer a three-part, vague plan for moving forward:

* when feasible, try those who have violated American criminal laws in federal courts.

* when necessary, try those who violate the rules of war through Military Commission

* when possible, transfer to third countries those detainees who can be safely transferred.

The good news is they were snitched on and caught. The bad news is they're all U.S.-born:

The FBI busted a homegrown terror cell late Wednesday night as the men sneaked around a Jewish temple in Riverdale planting what they thought were packages of C-4 explosives, sources told the Daily News.

The four men also allegedly had what they believed was a working Stinger missile in their car: officials said they wanted to shoot down a plane near Stewart Air National Guard Base.

Sources said the four men were arrested after a year long investigation that began when an informant connected to a mosque in Newburg said some militants wanted to buy explosives.

After being tipped to the activity, FBI agents posing as militants sold the terrorists fake C-4 explosive material and the fake missile. NYPD reportedly boxed in a black SUV outside one of the temples while the terrorists were going about setting their fake bombs. Nice!

The perps:

Arrested was alleged ringleader James Cromitie of Newburgh, the son of an Afghan immigrant and his wife. Cromitie served a long stretch in prison in the past.

Alleged henchment David Williams, Onta Williams and Leguerre Payen were busted with him.

Sources said the three were jailhouse converts to Islam.

And, for an idea of why the New York Post sells newspapers, check out this lede:

Four home-grown Muslim terrorists hell bent on blowing up two Bronx synagogues and shooting down a military plane have been arrested following a massive, year-long investigation, sources told the Post.

"So, um, guys..Really, I meant to call before now."

I imagine this meeting felt like the first post-break-up coffee with an embittered ex. It's Obama's unpleasant duty to lie to them, let them yell, and validate their feelings. It's their place to yell, feel momentarily assured, and walk away knowing deep down inside that he doesn't really care about them anymore. Oh, the angst! The melodrama! The cold, neglected, half-drunk latte that symbolizes the lost passion.

Under heavy criticism for a series of decisions on national security that resembled, for some, those of the Bush years, President Barack Obama hosted a lengthy meeting on Wednesday with the leaders of several key human rights and civil liberties groups.

Now, what's he promising them? First, he complained about the Congress not funding the closing of Gitmo, which it did not do because, as even Robert Gibbs admits, the decision to close Gitmo was "hasty" and done without a plan.

According to an attendee, Obama expressed frustration with Congress' decision to remove funding for the closure of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. The president declared that his hands were tied in some ways regarding the use of reformed military tribunals, though he pledged to try as many detainees as possible in Article III federal courts.

He's apparently changing his mind on detainee photos once again:

...the president also left the door open for the future release of detainee abuse photos, saying that his administration's current opposition to the release was dictated by immediate concern over the complications it could cause to America's mission in Afghanistan.

By that logic, as soon as we manage to make some gains in Afghanistan, and the "immediate concern" dissipates, we can let those suckers out to sabotage the gains?

Platitudes, check:

"We talked a lot about the framework in which he is operating, and he talked about his strong desire to reestablish a system under which the executive is not exercising unfettered authority," said Elisa Massimino, CEO of Human Rights First and an attendee at the Wednesday affair. "One of the chief differences between him and his predecessor was that he didn't think he ought to be making these decisions in an ad-hoc, unaccountable way. And so he said that, in thinking through this, he was focused on how his successor might operate."

Please consider a bone thrown:

A terror suspect detained at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be transported to the United States for trial in a civilian court, two Obama administration officials said.

Ahmed Ghailani, suspected of taking part in al Qaeda plots to bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania among other crimes, would be the first former detainee at the detention center to face trial in the United States...

The announcement is expected to be made Thursday, the same day President Obama will give a public address on the detention center and other security issues.

This is not likely to help Democrats in Congress with mainstream public opinion, who've spent the week on their heels, declaring that no terrorists will end up on American soil in their districts, but it may give Obama's human-rights critics off his back for a while.

And, for those of you looking for detail tomorrow, think again:

What Obama will not do, however, is provide a detailed outline of which of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners will be released or transferred to other countries and under what conditions, and which will be tried in U.S. civil courts or in Bush-era military commissions, which the administration announced last week it will revamp and reconvene. The issue is being discussed by an administration task force that is due to report in July.

On February 2, a Department of Defense spokesman told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that a Pentagon report documenting the recidivism of some former Guantanamo detainees would be released imminently. The report was coming so soon that we were told to check defenselink.mil for it that afternoon.

Nothing.

Today, the New York Times, which has obtained a copy of the report, says that two administration officials claim it was squashed for political reasons.

Two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the report was being held up by Defense Department employees fearful of upsetting the White House, at a time when even Congressional Democrats have begun to show misgivings over Mr. Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo. (emphasis added)

What other reason could there be for the report’s delay? The Times cites a DOD spokesman as saying that it is still “under review.” It is now May 20. We were told that the report was coming soon on February 2. Other news organizations, including Newsweek and the Times, expected the report to be released in late January.

Has it really taken the Pentagon almost four months to review the contents of the report? Washington bureaucracies are notoriously slow, but that seems just a tad bit too slow, even by Washington’s standards.

Another anonymous official cited by the Times says that the DOD is damned if it does, and damned it if doesn’t. That is, if DOD releases the report, then it is seen as undermining the Obama administration and its attempts to close Gitmo. If the DOD does not release the report, then it is seen as “protecting the Obama administration.”

But the contents of the report deal with a hotly contested issue--one that is being debated throughout the media and is not going away any time soon. Therefore, the public has a right to know the facts and evidence accumulated by the DOD regardless of the implications for the Obama administration.

This is especially true because the Pentagon had previously released a similar report on June 13, 2008. The report we’ve been expecting since earlier this year, and which only the New York Times now has a copy, is merely an update of that June 2008 report, which is freely available online. There is no good reason the updated report, as well as further updates, cannot be released in a similar fashion.

Indeed, the differences between the June 2008 report and its successors are especially troubling. Perhaps those differences explain why an updated version of the June 2008 report would be especially problematic for the Obama administration as it attempts to close Gitmo.

The June 13, 2008, report noted that 37 former detainees were “confirmed or suspected” of returning to terrorism. On January 13, 2009, seven months later, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said that number had climbed to 61. Now, according to the Times, the DOD has found that same metric has risen further to 74--exactly double the Pentagon’s estimate just 11 months ago.

Jennifer Rubin on the Guantanamo two-step.

Andy McCarthy: Will Congress Save Obama on the "Prisoner Abuse" Photos?

Arlen Specter remembers he's a Democrat (unlike that other time) and defends Nancy Pelosi.

Gingrich says Pelosi must go; Hoekstra calls her "incompetent."

Mitch Daniels-mania continues to run wild.

New Hampshire state house rejects same-sex marriage bill with conscience clause in it.

Newsbusters: Matthews to Congressman Over Global Warming Skepticism: ‘Are You a Luddite, a Trogloadyte?’

Ace on the California ballot initiatives that went down in flames.

Fox News's Joseph Abrams: NIH Spends $178,000 to Study Why Prostitutes in Thailand Have High HIV Risk

Via Allahpundit, Reason.TV on Schwarzenegger's fall:

In answer to Barack Obama’s prayers for a “positive response to his outreach for opening a dialogue with Iran by the end of the year,” some withering disapproval from Leon Panetta, who calls Iran a “destabilizing force in the Middle East,” and a really scary warning from Hillary Clinton that the U.S. is going "to persuade the Iranian regime that they will actually be less secure if they proceed with their nuclear weapons program," Tehran today successfully launched a ballistic missile capable of reaching Israel. Like their friends the Norks, the Iranians just don’t seem all that moved by the admonishments of our government.

For Israel’s sake, here’s hoping that Benyamin Netanyahu is equally unimpressed.

If you’re a Republican you may want to stop reading right now – or at least don’t let the kids see this!

Gallup issued a new report yesterday tabulating changes in party identification across a host of subgroups between 2001 and 2009. The results? The political equivalent of a car wreck.

Republicans lost ground on party identification among nearly every demographic groups, including young voters, college educated, upper income, lower income, men and women. The only groups where the GOP did not lost ground were among frequent church goers and self-identified conservatives.

Political reporters and bloggers were quick to use the Gallup numbers as a chance to dance on GOP’s grave. Chris Cillizza, at Washington Post.com, wrote:

A new Gallup analysis shows that the precipitous decline in the number of people who identify themselves as Republicans is widespread across nearly every demographic group -- a development that suggests that there is no simple solution to solving the party's current problems.

Read the full Gallup report here. Republicans: Take two Valium and keep your head out of the oven.

Earlier today, California Senator Dianne Feinstein said that the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado, would be a good location to hold Gitmo detainees. In an emailed statement to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Colorado's newest senator, Democrat Michael Bennet, disagrees:

“I strongly support the Senate’s decision to withhold funding for the transfer of the detainees until the Administration comes up with a plan for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Because the detainees are being tried by military tribunals, they should be held in military facilities. Military detainees should not be transported to and held at Supermax because it is not a military facility.”

– Michael Bennet, U.S. Senator for Colorado

Delivered by Slate's John Dickerson:

Obama just called space shuttle astronauts who've repaired Hubble. Asked them to use its high power lens to find him a policy for Guantanamo

Politico reports on a very public clash among administration officials:

The Pentagon No. 3 official, Michele Flournoy, said the only way the United States can get European nations to accept some of the 240 detainees at the military prison is by agreeing to bring some of them to the United States as well.

But FBI Director Robert Mueller warned Congress that releasing some of the Gitmo prisoners in the United States would raise concerns that they might radicalize others, raise money for terrorist groups, or carry out attacks.

The FBI obviously has a better sense of the threat posed by transferring these detainees to American prisons -- or releasing them outright -- than the Department of Defense. After all, the Bureau is a federal law enforcement organization with a long history of dealing with such issues. Whatever Flournoy's expertise, we know for certain is not in prison management.

"Yes, children, hypocritical congressional investigations and foreign kangaroo courts are really our friends," Michael Gerson writes today in the Washington Post, describing the Democrats' "Mr. Rogers approach" to assuaging the intelligence community during their all-out assault on CIA morale:

"Don't be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we've made some mistakes," [Obama said.] "That's how we learn."... House intelligence committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes sent a sympathy note to Langley: "In recent days, as the public debate regarding CIA's interrogation practices has raged, you have been very much in my thoughts." There should be a section at Hallmark for intelligence operatives unfairly accused of war crimes.

Gerson also notes the speed with which prominent Democrats have changed their tune on the importance and admirability of the intelligence community depending on the political winds. This was Pelosi just days before she was saying the CIA systematically lied to her over a period of eight years:

Pelosi told reporters she had discussed intelligence sharing with Iraqi lawmakers after she arrived for a one-day visit. She was accompanied by Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who chairs a House committee that oversees U.S. intelligence operations.

"If we are going to have a diminished physical military presence, we have to have a strong intelligence presence," Pelosi said.

Pelosi said that on a trip to Iraq. Against the backdrop of the notorious "wrong war," on the sliding scale of Democratic political calculation, intelligence gathering was positively fuzzy-sounding when compared to the alternative of military action. Back at home, however, where liberal Democrats are finding it uncomfortable to be in charge of an escalation in Afghanistan, acting responsibly in Iraq, and keeping terrorists locked up while their base agitates for just the opposite, the intelligence community gets the brunt of their attacks.

In Democrat talking points parlance, the CIA is the Wall Street to the military's Main Street. It's easy to attack, accepted by most as necessary but maybe unsavory, and its successes are easily dismissed as it has not the ability (due to info being classified) or inclination to go on a p.r. blitz in its own defense, especially when attacks are coming from the president's party. Interrogators are corporate CEOs while the troops are unassailable small businessmen, so the CEOs must face the wrath of CYA-ing Dems. As Gerson notes, military commanders are thankfully getting better treatment:

Contrast this affront to Obama's treatment of the military. When Gen. Ray Odierno argued that the release of military abuse photos would put American troops at risk, Obama quickly backed down. By one account, Odierno told the president, "Thanks. That must have been a hard decision." Obama replied: "No, it wasn't at all." Obama has deferred to his military commanders on the timing and strategy of American withdrawals from Iraq. And he has proposed an escalating military commitment in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- leading 51 House Democrats last week to vote against a military funding bill.

The CIA is not without faults or mistakes, just as the military is not without faults or mistakes, but the enthusiasm with which Democrats dismiss (and endanger) the intelligence community's contributions to American security for political advantage is a shame.

And, as if on cue...

“The CIA has a very bad record when it comes ... to honesty. It goes back a long time,” Specter said in a speech before the American Law Institute at a Washington hotel.

The Republican-turned-Democrat listed a handful of examples in the past where the CIA has withheld key information from Congress.

“During my tenure as chairman of the Intelligence Committee during the 104th Congress, there were repeated instances where we didn’t get information that was there,” Specter said.

"It's a real problem as to how you get the information."

Nevermind that in this instance, Leon Panetta asserts that "Our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaida, describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed.'"

New York Times:

An unreleased Pentagon report provides new details concluding that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.

The conclusion could strengthen the arguments of critics who have warned against releasing any more prisoners as part of President Obama’s plan to shut down the prison by January 2010. Past Pentagon reports on Guantánamo recidivism, however, have been met with skepticism from civil liberties groups and criticized for their lack of detail.

The Pentagon promised in January that the latest report would be released soon, but Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said this week that the findings were still “under review.”

Two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the report was being held up by Defense Department employees fearful of upsetting the White House, at a time when even Congressional Democrats have begun to show misgivings over Mr. Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo.

Update: Steve Hayes and Tom Joscelyn wrote about the Obama administration's stonewalling on the report in March.

Greg Sargent reports that all three cables will carry Cheney's speech tomorrow morning live directly after the president makes his speech. The Democrats have developed a bad habit of elevating Cheney without engaging the substance of his attacks -- the hope being that his low public approval numbers alone are enough to undermine his argument. The strategy has backfired, but the DNC and other elements of the party keep plugging away.

Obama's speech tomorrow is essentially an attempt to bracket the former VP -- it's a campaign tactic, and it has the effect of putting Cheney on equal footing with the president just as it offers the president a chance to respond directly to the merits of Cheney's case against the administration. Maybe Obama will turn the tide tomorrow and regain the initiative in this debate, but given the signals we're getting from the White House, be dubious.

The White House now admits that the decision to close Gitmo in the days immediately after the inauguration was a "hasty" one. Marc Ambinder surmises that Obama "won't say where he expects detainees convicted by courts or military tribunals will end up." Instead,

The message tomorrow from Obama might well be: "trust me."

While Cheney makes the case for an unapologetic war on terrorism, Barack Obama will deliver his plea for trust in the wake of numerous reversals and in the context of an admission that the White House acted too soon. Without answers to any of the questions that Republicans and Democrats are asking, and with the public genuinely suspicious of the president's handling of the narrow issue of detainee policy, the president plans to respond quite literally with a speech about nothing -- just more of the same lofty rhetoric that got him where he is today.

Presumably, new credit-card regulations constitute "emergency" legislation given that Obama is once again breaking his pledge to post legislation online five days before signing, in order to sign it Friday.

President Obama will quickly sign the credit card legislation that just passed through Congress at a White House ceremony on Friday, according to White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

One problem: this means the President will again break his campaign pledge to post legislation online for five days for the public to comb it over in the interest of transparency before he signs it into law.

This is the easy stuff, people.

A new McLaughlin & Associates poll of 600 likely voters (PDF) shows:

Seven in ten voters (71%) say the United States will not be safe with a nuclear Iran. If Iran is able to produce a nuclear weapon, nearly eight in ten voters (79%) say it is likely that Iran will provide nuclear weapons to terrorists to attack an American city.

Think how easy it will be to track them in the snow:

Carl Levin , chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said that construction and staffing at a new maximum-security prison in Michigan could help his cash-starved state.

“If the governor and the local officials are open to it, that’s something that should be considered,” said Levin, making the point that each state should make its own determination.

Former Michigan Gov. John Engler, a Republican, suggested this month that creating a “Guantánamo North” in the Upper Peninsula could net the state upward of $1 billion per year, according to reports.

As Obama might say, better to fight the terrorists in Flint than Fallujah. Better to interrogate them in Detroit than Damascus. Better to release them in Kalamazoo than Karachi.

Normally careful wordsmith Joe Klein appears to be so rattled by the reaction to his comment about Charles Krauthammer that he’s making elementary errors of diction. “Malingerers” makes no sense in the first sentence of Klein’s post--unless he thinks malingerers means “maligners,” those who malign. But it doesn’t.

The view from AEI on the coincidence that Obama will be speaking on the same issue at the same time as Cheney:

The announcement of the former Veep’s address went out officially from AEI on May 12, though he had been asked to give a talk a couple of weeks before. (We asked him because this is one of the most important national security issues of the day, and AEI is committed to informing and prompting a public debate consisting of more than sound bites.) President Obama’s speech was announced today. What do we think? 1) The Obama White House runs the savviest information ops of any White House in modern history. This is all about rebutting an increasingly effective exponent of aggressive counterterrorism policies. 2) Why do it? The simple answer is that the public is listening to Cheney on the issues, and if the Democratic Congress’s decision this week to deny funding to close Gitmo is any indication, finger-in-the-wind politicians are listening, too.

There’s another message in the former vice president’s efforts to rally the nation behind a robust policy: Americans know we are at war. They don’t want Gitmo’s denizens in their backyards. They aren’t embarrassed by their country, by their soldiers in the field, or by their public servants striving to keep them safe. Mr. President, take note: It’s not just about the air time. Leadership matters. Especially in times of war.

A day after Harry Reid took a hardline against the relocation of terrorists now being held at Gitmo to prisons inside the United States, FBI director Robert Mueller goes up to the Hill and shares his concerns:

"The concerns we have about individuals who may support terrorism being in the United States run from concerns about providing financing, radicalizing others," Mueller said, as well as "the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States."

"All of those are relevant concerns," Mueller said.

The FBI chief said he would not discuss specific individuals. He said there were also potential risks to putting detainees in maximum security prisons.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., whose district includes the World Trade Center site, then prodded Mueller to agree that such individuals could be safely kept in maximum security prisons in the U.S.

Mueller balked at Nadler's suggestion, noting that in some instances imprisoned gang leaders have run their gangs from inside prisons.

"It depends on the circumstances," Mueller said.

Meanwhile, Dems are under tremendous pressure from the White House and the most extreme elements of their base to support the transfer of detainees to American prisons. Just today Reid refined his position slightly so as to allow for the possibility that at some undetermined point in the future he might support such a program. However, the point made by Mueller here has been underplayed in much of the coverage over this issue. Yes, the government may be able to physically secure terrorists held inside the United States, but the success of criminal gangs in using prisons as a base of operations should serve as a warning to those who believe that the U.S. criminal justice system can provide the same protections as Gitmo. Then again, supporters of bringing these terrorists into the United States tend to view them primarily as criminals -- not enemy combatants.

Expect a press release on how FBI director Bob Mueller is "disparaging" the corrections officers of America with his statement.

There appears to be a growing fissure between senior politicans on the Hill and the Pentagon when it comes to closing Gitmo.

Yesterday, Senate Majority Harry Reid said that he did not want detainees released or even imprisoned in the U.S. The Senate has decided not to fund the Obama administration's efforts to close Gitmo.

Today, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, said the following:

"When we are asking allies to do their fair share in dealing with this challenge, we need to do our fair share."

"This is a case where we need to ask members of Congress to take a more strategic view. Many of these members called for the closing of Guantanamo, and we need their partnership in making that possible."

The LA Times account, which is re-posted on the Baltimore Sun's web site adds:

Flournoy would not offer her own prediction of how many detainees the U.S. or its allies would eventually take. She said the administration was going through each case individually and there were no decisions on where detainees might be moved.

"I am optimistic that all of us will take more than we have agreed so far," she said. "This is a challenge that will require all of us to step up and make hard choices."

This is going to get interesting, to say the least. Reid was clear yesterday that he doesn't want any Gitmo detainees brought into the U.S. He was so clear that the press is already providing cover for him by lumping his Gitmo comments in with his missteps on other topics at the press conference. Did Reid simply flub his stance on Gitmo? Perhaps. But, he reiterated his point a few times. Reid, according to the Associated Press, said the following:

"We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States."

"Part of what we don't want is them be put in prisons in the United States."

"We don't want them around the United States."

And now the Pentagon is pushing back, saying we all need to make hard choices. Indeed, according to the Pentagon there is nothing to worry about. They are still on track to close Gitmo by January 2010.

If you want to understand the buzz about Marco Rubio, the underdog candidate challenging Gov. Charlie Crist in the Florida GOP Senate primary, watch this clip of Rubio's farewell address to the Florida House of Representatives, via Robert Stacy McCain at Hot Air:

Moe Lane writes (HT again to R.S. McCain):

I’ve been personally staying out of the entire Crist/Rubio NRSC endorsement brouhaha, mostly because we're going to have Senatorial candidates that are going to need the NRSC’s help — but I do have to ask: does Charlie have anything that can beat that?

Seriously. Does Crist play at that level?

See for yourself:

Just in case you think this isn't a fair example of Crist on the stump, see here, here and his performance on Meet the Press.

The White House announces:

Who: President Obama to Deliver Major Speech
When: Thursday, May 21, 2009...10:10 AM

Wonder why the president chose that time?

Senator Dianne Feinstein suggested during floor remarks earlier today that California prisons could handle detainees:

FEINSTEIN: Yes, we have maximum security prisons in California eminently capable of holding these people as well, and from which people — trust me — do not escape. So I believe that this has really been an exercise in fear-baiting. I hope it’s not going to be successful.

No word yet from Feinstein's office as to whether or not this is an official endorsement of bringing some Gitmo detainees to California if necessary. Her remarks actually touted the supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, as a prime location for the detainees. I'll post a transcript when it's available.

Ben Smith's profile today of Charles Krauthammer contains this quote from Joe Klein:

"There's something tragic about him too," Klein said, referring to Krauthammer's confinement to a wheelchair, the result of a diving accident during his first year of medical school. "His work would have a lot more nuance if he were able to see the situations he's writing about."

Klein's attacks on neoconservatives usually center on their religion, but in Krauthammer's case it seems his paralysis made for an easier target. John Podhoretz makes the key point in response: "Perhaps men and women in wheelchairs, or who are blind, or deaf, or have other infirmities that make their ability to get on a plane and go to Iraq should simply forbear any sort of opinion about such things. They should, instead, be left to Joe Klein."

Also see Jules Crittenden, who coins a new word to describe this vile line of attack.

Update: And check out Pete Wehner's take as well.

A victory for gun rights certainly helps wash down the sour taste of a credit card reform that shifts costs away from irresponsible borrowers and onto the backs of those who pay their debts on time and in full:

To the frustration and discouragement of many Democrats, House and Senate lawmakers and aides say it now appears likely that President Obama will this week sign into law a provision allowing visitors to national parks and refuges to carry loaded and concealed weapons....

“It is a shame,” said Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California. “But you have to come to a realization around here that at this point in time, the N.R.A. gets the votes,” she said referring to the National Rifle Association.

As the Times notes, the inability of leadership and the White House to strip out the measure bodes very well for a similar provision attached to (patently unconstitutional) legislation granting voting rights to the District. If Democrats move to give the District a vote, we will see the full repeal of the the district's gun laws. And after Obama disingenuously offered his support for the Supreme Court's decision striking down the DC handgun ban last summer, it would be a sweet irony if it was Obama's signature that finally restored Second Amendment rights to citizens of the District.

Jan Crawford Greenburg reports that a leading Supreme Court candidate, Judge Diane Wood, is in Washington today:

Sources tell me Obama has not decided whom he will choose. But of the three, Wood comes closest to meeting the criteria he has laid out in a justice. She could be his home run pick: She brings the intellectual heft and collegiality that would command respect on the Supreme Court, along with the life experiences that Obama has indicated he wants in his nominee. What’s more, Obama knows her. They both taught at the University of Chicago Law School.

Edward Whelan has begun to review Wood's record here, here, here, and here.

Liberals pray for card check passage.

Surprise: People hate newspapers more than airlines or cell phone providers.

Yipes! The fiscal future, in pictures.

Barack Obama bestows upon the nation most innovative, genius idea in car-manufacturing of the last 20 years. How nice of him!

What's your NPR name? I'm Marky Metula, which has a nice ring to it.

You know what caused the banking crisis? Testosterone! Where's my copy of "Are Men Necessary," or the blog from which it was copied?

Son of Waxman-Markey... Just when you thought it was safe to start an engine.

Lieberman and Graham to the rescue.

DNC releases web ad hating on Cheney.

Barack Obama's biggest critic. Say what, Joe Klein?

The Hill reports that “A massive amount of sensitive, national security-related information from the Clinton administration has gone missing from the national archives.”

The Inspector General of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) told congressional committee staffers Tuesday that a hard drive containing over a terabyte of information -- the equivalent of millions of books--went missing from the NARA facility in College Park, Md., sometime between October 2008 and March 2009.

The Department of Justice and the Secret Service are conducting an investigation, but it's so far unclear whether the drive was lost as the result of a crime or an accident.

Have they checked Sandy Berger’s pants?

The excuse some universities give for not permitting ROTC on campus is don't-ask-don't-tell. This is of course a policy the military follows pursuant to legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1993--but the universities choose to blame the military. Now it turns out that President Obama isn't rushing to overturn the legislation. As the AP's Lara Jakes reports, "the White House has not asked for the 1993 policy to be scrapped."

How then can colleges justify welcoming President Obama to their oh-so-can't-be-tainted-by-discrimination campuses? Isn't he far more responsible for the continuation of this allegedly heinous policy than the young ROTC students, or for that matter than the men and women serving in the armed forces?

Ross Douthat: Dan Brown’s America

Obama praises Pelosi for "cracking the whip and making Congress so productive over the last several days".

Mason-Dixon poll shows Crist beating Rubio by 35 points in the primary and his Democratic opponents by 30 points in the general election.

Allahpundit: Military confiscates, destroys Pashto-language Bibles on Afghan base

Another poll shows a more Americans identifying as "pro-life" than "pro-choice."

A press release:

Senators Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) today introduced the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act which would establish a procedure to block release of the detainee photos. The Senators plan to offer the legislation as an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations bill that is being deliberated on the Senate floor this week.

Last week, after consulting with General Petraeus, General Odierno, and others, President Obama decided to fight the release of photographs that depict the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Those photographs are the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

This legislation would authorize the Secretary of Defense, after consultation with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to certify to the President that the disclosure of photographs like the ones at issue in the ACLU lawsuit would endanger the lives of our citizens or members of the Armed Forces or civilian employees of the United States government deployed abroad.

Today, the Pentagon said the U.S. is on schedule to close Gitmo by January 2010. According to AFP, DOD spokesman Geoff Morrell said, “I see nothing to indicate that that date is at all in jeopardy.” Morrell added,

“As far as I can tell, everything remains on track for action to be taken with regard to the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility according to the timeline prescribed by the president in the executive order.”

I can think of a few things that may indicate the January 2010 date is in jeopardy.

The Obama administration does not yet have a plan for closing Gitmo. Congress has demanded that it come up with one. The bureaucracies in Washington are scrambling to oblige. As Morrell himself notes, Pentagon employees are in “near constant meetings with their counterparts” at Foggy Bottom and the Justice Department. They are discussing this “complicated” issue.

Attorney General Holder has said that closing Gitmo is the most daunting challenge he faces. That’s how complicated the situation is.

Leading Democrats (including Senator Harry Reid) and Republicans have said they don’t want Gitmo detainees transferred to detention facilities in the U.S., let alone released in the U.S. Originally, the Obama administration wanted to release at least several Uighur detainees onto U.S. soil. This was supposed to be part of a quid pro quo with European nations – a way to show that we were willing to spread the risk around.

The administration’s Gitmo diplomacy has gone nowhere. European nations are not keen on taking the detainees.

Congress has declined, thus far, to provide the funding the administration has requested for closing Gitmo.

There are about 100 citizens of Yemen at Gitmo - the most of any nationality. Most of the Yemenis are alleged to have significant terrorist ties. Their home country is a mess and infested with al Qaeda terrorists. The situation in Yemen is so tenuous that the Obama administration, which originally wanted to send the Yemeni detainees home, is attempting to find somewhere else to transfer them. Saudi Arabia, the supposedly next best option, does not really want the Yemenis and it is not clear that the Saudi rehabilitation program could even house them.

Other than that, closing Gitmo should be easy.

So, after a brief interruption during which George W. Bush reversed generations of American policy and put pressure on the Palestinians before making demands of the Israelis, it’s back to business as usual for U.S.-Israel relations. What happened at yesterday’s meeting between Bibi Netanyahu and Barack Obama was no more than a return to the U.S. policy of pressing Israel to endanger herself for the sake of whichever “strategic interest” happens to be paramount at the moment--today it is our diplomatic opening to Iran that may be imperiled by a lack of progress on the establishment of a Palestinian state--and, of course, that ever-desirable, always-elusive siren, “peace.” Put another way, you, Israel, can have peace as soon as you agree to diminish yourself to a helplessly undefended and vulnerable entity, whether by ceding land or conceding on a divided Jerusalem or acceding to the “right of return” of Arabs displaced after losing the war they launched against you in 1948--and we, America, can have good relations with sheikhs and mullahs who hate you only slightly more than they hate us.

Seventy-three percent of applicants for Massachusetts teaching licenses failed the math test. On second thought, not so shocking—not if you’ve had any experience with public school recently. Can’t wait to here how they done on the English egzam.

Hey, what's a little oral sex joke on the news? Surely no one thought Anderson Cooper was trying to "disparage" the protesters!

"I think it's an incorrect statement to say I was, in any way, trying to disparage legitimate protests," said Cooper. "I don't think it's my job to disparage, or encourage, which oddly other networks seemed to be doing. Protest is the great right of all Americans, and it's not my job in any way to make fun of people or disparage what they're doing."

Written out, it's actually far more conciliatory than it is on video. His tone was somewhat Jon Stewart-esque, conceding "sure, I was dumb," but noting the people he was covering were really dumb for using tea bags in the first place, which relieved him of his obligation to treat them with professional courtesy, you see. He also prefaces his non-apology with a couple minutes of pseudo stand-up about—what else?—"teabagging," much to the delight of the giggling attendees of the formerly serious Daniel Pearl Lecture Series. Not that he meant to disparage anyone...

Is it so much to ask that grown newscasters feel a bit of shame at repeatedly making a joke that would be deemed hackneyed even in a middle-school baseball locker room at this point? Further, is it so much to ask that Anderson Cooper feel the right amount of shame for making a dirty joke to David Gergen, no less, thereby treating his entire audience to a future of awkward shudders each time the veteran pundit appears?

It's unfortunate that the movement became so closely associated with a term with an alternate, sexual meaning, and it is important for organizers to recognize such pitfalls. Michael Steele's speech today, for instance, would have been well-served if someone had taken out the "teabag" line in favor of a "tea party" reference. On the other hand, we should be able to count on newscasters not to indulge in the lamest of word play while delivering their non-disparaging reports. You don't see me running around making obvious Code Pink jokes, do you?

David Attenborough and friends say they’ve found the Missing Link, and her name is Ida. She looks like a lizard to me, but maybe Bill Clinton would like to date her.

A statement after my own heart from Rummy aide Keith Urbahn:

The slides in the “World Intelligence Update” were prepared on a daily basis by military personnel serving on the Joint Staff, which reported to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not the Secretary of Defense. The report was briefed regularly to senior military officials in the Pentagon – only occasionally to the Secretary of Defense and not to the President of the United States.

Rumsfeld was fully aware that words and actions could be harmful and counterproductive to the war effort. It’s safe to say that some of these cover slides could be considered in that category. The suggestion that Rumsfeld would have composed, approved of, or personally shown the slides to President Bush is flat wrong. It did not happen.

Given that Draper used anonymous sources for this charge as well as for the rest of the innuendo in his piece, one would think he might have at least done a cursory review of the facts. He might then have avoided being taken by people with an axe grind. When Draper goes back and checks reality against his reporting, he might also check whether GQ is in need of a new gossip columnist.

You’ll find yourself in jail if you’ve the effrontery to fail to hold the escalator rail, says Toronto’s Globe and Mail.

Earlier today Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said at a news conference that he doesn't want any Gitmo detainees held in prisons in the United States. CQ has the transcript:

QUESTION: (inaudible)

REID: Change course on what?

QUESTION: On funding the closing of Guantanamo Bay.

REID: Well, the decision to close Guantanamo was a right one.

I agree with President Bush. I agree with John McCain. I agree with Barack Obama. Guantanamo makes us less save.

However, this is neither the time nor the bill to deal with this. Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president.

We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States. [...]

QUESTION: But Senator, Senator, it's not that you're not being clear when you say you don't want them released. But could you say -- would you be all right with them being transferred to an American prison?

REID: Not in the United States.

File this story under Things Nevadans Don't Like: nuclear waste, Gitmo detainees, and Harry Reid.

Joe Biden's commencement address at Wake Forest on Sunday was unfortunately overshadowed by Obama's stunning "We hold these truths to be arguably untrue" speech at Notre Dame. Thankfully, Mark Hemingway has pulled together a collection of Biden's most unintentionally hilarious remarks at Wake Forest:

"I believe so strongly, as you may recall when I was here in October, not in you particularly but your generation, that I don’t have a single doubt in my mind we’re on the cusp not only of a new century but a new day for this country and the world."

"Folks, we’re either going to fundamentally change the course of history, or fail the generations that come after us, because change will occur. Non-action is action, unlike most generations."

"There’s not a single issue on this President’s plate that will not yield a change — just merely by ignoring it, it will change."

"Just imagine. Imagine a country brought together by powerful ideas, not torn apart by petty ideologies. Imagine a country built on innovation and efficiency, not on credit default swaps and complex securities."

"This has been the history of the journey of America — never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, never have the American people let their country down at rare moments, similar moments in our history. And it’s a journey we’re all going to take together."

"When I graduated, all had not changed utterly yet. Today, it has."

Her next column comes tomorrow and inquiring minds are eager to hear how, precisely, the Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times columnist managed to "inadvertently lift" an entire passage from a blog post and insert it into her Sunday column. Slate's Jack Shafer credits Dowd for her quick response to inquiries about the plagiarism, for the quick correction to the column, and for "taking her lumps and not whining about it." But, as Shafer writes,

As long as she's in the business, somebody will be taunting her about it. The best and perhaps only way for Dowd to set things right will be to proceed directly to Step 7 and tell her readers in detail how she came to commit this transgression.

Maybe we will finally get a column that isn't laced with catty name-calling and too-cute-by-half phrases. Or, perhaps, a friend will offer Maureen a plausible explanation for how a whole paragraph could be transferred from a conversation to a column, and then Dowd can just cut, paste, and file.

Yesterday Art Laffer and Stephen Moore wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

Lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Oregon want to raise income tax rates on the top 1% or 2% or 5% of their citizens. New Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn wants a 50% increase in the income tax rate on the wealthy because this is the "fair" way to close his state's gaping deficit...

Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states...

Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

Did the greater prosperity in low-tax states happen by chance? Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No.

Prescient, no, given this report on New York Florida billionaire B. Thomas Golisano?

Golisano said this year's state budget — which increased income taxes on upper wage earners from 6.85 percent to 8.97 percent — was the final straw. His moving to Florida will save him $5 million in state income taxes. The billionaire founder of Paychex, a payroll processing company, has already registered to vote and gotten his driver's license in Florida, and signed the homestead exemption paperwork that will cap his annual property tax increases to 3 percent a year there.

"I'm sorry Mr. Golisano feels that he has to change his residence at this time," Gov. David Paterson said today. "I understand the people moving out of this state is one of the reasons we don't want to raise personal income taxes as we did."

Paterson warned legislative leaders that raising the income tax would drive people out, but he bowed to pressure from Democratic leaders in the two houses to implement the tax, which will raise $4 billion a year.

Golisano, who for now will keep his Buffalo Sabres hockey team, isn't buying Paterson's promise:

"I'm sorry, that kind of statement doesn't render much confidence in me that it's going to change. They get used to a level of spending and they just can't back off from it," Golisano said of the governor and lawmakers.

Counterinsurgency gurus David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum wrote an op-ed over the weekend on the U.S. Predator campaign against al Qaeda, the Taliban, and allied terror groups based in the region. Essentially Kilcullen and Exum argue that the campaign is misguided because it hampers the Pakistani government's ability to wage a counterinsurgency campaign.

The Predator campaign is one of the least bad options in a series of really bad options that exist in Pakistan. The fact that we have to launch airstrikes in our own "ally's" territory is in itself an indication of the very real problems that exist inside Pakistan. This campaign is undesirable, but absent a better plan, what alternative exists to cull the spread of al Qaeda and curb its external operations?

Absent the Pakistani military taking on the Taliban and al Qaeda and practicing counterinsurgency techniques to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in the tribal areas and the NWFP, there really are no viable options. The Taliban wiped out the most promising of the much-touted "Pakistani Awakening" movement, and the military is even complicit in their destruction by failing to aid them. Clearly a U.S. invasion/counterinsurgency operation in Pakistan is a non-starter. And here is what General Kiyani thinks about COIN:

Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani on Saturday said that Pakistan Army has developed a full range of counter insurgency training facilities tailored to train troops for such operations. “Therefore, except for very specialized weapons and equipment, high technology, no generalized foreign training is required,” the COAS said in a press statement issued here.

Owing to its vast experience, Pakistan Army remains the best suited force to operate in its own area, the COAS said. So, the comments from various quarters coming on the level of Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) training of Pakistani troops and about their shifting from eastern borders is unsuited. Uncalled for aspersions through various quarters on our training methods/orientation are apparently due to lack of knowledge and understanding of our training system in vogue, he said.

In other words, Kiyani is saying 'we won't train for COIN because we don't need to, please send us money and weapons and we'll do whatever we want to do with them.'

There is a real national security & political dimension to this whole mess. The CIA isn't merely headhunting, although high value targets are on the list. The Predator campaign is designed to keep al Qaeda's external network from striking in the West again. If the strikes are stopped and there is an attack on the U.S. homeland, there will be hell to pay.

Wishing for the Pakistani military to practice COIN or even counterterrorism operations in the northwest isn't a plan -- recent history tell us it is a pipe dream -- nor is allowing al Qaeda to operate unhindered. I've yet to hear an alternative to the strikes in Pakistan. Until Pakistan gets serious and send the Army into Waziristan, Mohmand, Kurram, Arakzai, Khyber, Bajaur, and ... and parks it there to practice COIN [good luck with that, please don't hold you breath] the Predator campaign is the only option on the table.

It's amazing what a little accountability will do for you:

President Barack Obama's allies in the Senate will not provide funds to close the Guantanamo Bay prison next January, a top Democratic official said Tuesday.

With debate looming on Obama's spending request to cover military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the official says Democrats will deny the Pentagon and Justice Department $80 million to relocate Guantanamo's 240 detainees....

It appears to be a tactical retreat. Once the administration develops a plan to close the facility, congressional Democrats are likely to revisit the topic, provided they are satisfied there are adequate safeguards.

If Dick Cheney is losing the argument over detention policy, I'd love to see what winning looks like. At this point the administration is set to preserve the same basic structure of the Bush administration's detention scheme -- military commissions for some and indefinite detention for others -- while a Democratic Congress moves to preserve the actual structure at Gitmo. Yes, the Democrats may provide the funds if the administration ever presents a plan for where these terrorists will be kept inside the United States, but that will be a major fight and it's anything but a done deal. And even if the administration prevails, it's hard to see how Gitmo is closed by January of 2010.

It's amazing what Google turns up these days. Here is Haass on the Charlie Rose show in September 2003, two months after he left the administration to become president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Presumably free to speak his mind, and at a time when the war in Iraq was already going badly, Haass somehow does not take the opportunity to explain how he had opposed the war. On the contrary, he explains why he was for it.

CHARLIE ROSE: What’s the idea that drove us into war with Iraq?

RICHARD HAASS: I think more than anything it was the concern about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, what they might do with them weather directly use them or indirectly hand them off to terrorists. I think also for some people there were additional reasons....I think you had a menu of arguments, the key one for me and the key one for the state department and indeed the U.S. Government was the weapons of mass destruction concern.

And a few months earlier with with Jim Lehrer:

JIM LEHRER: But you, Richard Haass, based on what you looked at before the war, were you personally convinced there were weapons of mass destruction on the ground that could in some ways jeopardize the security not only of the area, but our interests as well?

RICHARD HAASS: Yes, sir. I had no doubt about the chemical and biological. And I think the key factor in my own thinking was, were we prepared to live with the uncertainty over what Iraq might do with it? Did we want to live in a world where Iraq could use it or where Iraq could hand it off to terrorists? And for me that was the strongest set of arguments on the side of the ledger that argued for going to war.

But ask him now and he'll tell you he "believed in diplomacy, I believe in multilateralism, I believe in institutions...I did not believe in the Iraq war." It's amazing what six years and a shift in elite opinion can do to a man's memory.

CIA officials tell the Washington Post that the administration is making us less safe:

The Obama administration's decisions to close the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, make public Justice Department memos sanctioning harsh interrogation, and ban techniques authorized by the Bush administration are affecting the agency's operations.

Agency officials said they will carry out any future debriefings or interrogations under provisions of the 2006 version of the Army Field Manual....

For example, the "attention grasp," described as "grasping the individual with both hands, one hand on either side of the collar," is one of the 13 techniques employed in the past by the CIA and is listed in the Justice Department's May 10, 2005, memo. It is barred under the Field Manual. Unlike harsher techniques on the list, such as nudity, dietary control, sleep deprivation and waterboarding, CIA officials say they want the authority to use the attention grasp without going back to Washington for approval....

Another intelligence official, who also asked not to be identified, said waterboarding and other harsh techniques "were meant to get hardened terrorists to a point where they were willing to answer questions." That capability, the official said, "is now gone."

Forget the ticking time-bomb scenario, the Obama administration's new rules wouldn't even allow the CIA to grab Osama bin Laden by the shirt collar if they caught him. By this standard Bobby Knight would be a war criminal. The president may be "absolutely convinced" that he was right to end the use of harsh interrogation techniques, but those on the left who insist that coercion is ineffective and counterproductive might be confused by the CIA's frustration. Why would the CIA even want to use techniques that, according to so many on the left, produce only false confessions at best?

Just as alarming is the effect this witch-hunt is having on the already risk-averse culture inside the CIA. According to the Post, "the agency's defensiveness in part reflects a conviction that it is being forced to take the blame for actions approved by elected officials that have since fallen into disfavor." If Obama one day is confronted by a situation that requires more than a hard look from a Justice Department lawyer, will a CIA agent follow a lawful order to aggressively interrogate an al Qaeda prisoner?

And for those still clinging to the hope that Nancy Pelosi and the administration are outmaneuvering their critics -- that "it's all strategic," as Michael Steele would say -- perhaps the timing of this story will prompt a rethink. If not, there should be plenty more leaks from the CIA over the next few weeks to help bring them around.

Lawrence Wilkerson is having trouble keeping his story straight. And on Rachel Maddow's show last night, his story fell completely apart.

You will recall that Wilkerson recently came forward with a tale about how Vice President Cheney ordered enhanced interrogation techniques be used on a top al Qaeda operative in order to gin up phony intelligence connecting Iraq and al Qaeda. This, Wilkerson claimed, happened months before the techniques were approved by the Bush administration's lawyers.

But it is obvious that the basic timeline of Wilkerson's story does not work, drawing into question Wilkerson's veracity. Wilkerson says that Cheney ordered the techniques used on an al Qaeda terrorist in "April and May 2002" and it didn't stop until Ibn Shaykh al Libi, who Wilkerson says was waterboarded by a foreign intelligence service, revealed such links. The problem is that al Libi discussed links between Iraq and al Qaeda in February 2002--two months before Wilkerson claims that VP Cheney supposedly ordered the enhanced techniques used. Therefore, it could not have been al Libi's admission that stopped the "torture" of another al Qaeda terrorist two months later.

Wilkerson's story simply does not add up.

So, Wilkerson went on MSNBC last night in an attempt to salvage his tale. He didn't. Instead, his appearance (in a highly favorable setting where a fawning Maddow did not challenge him at all) raises even more questions. For example, Wilkerson had this to say:

" The pushback against me from even my own interlocutors in the last 24 to 48 hours has been: 'Well, Tenet gave those instructions, not the Vice President.' And my reaction has been: 'Any time Tenet gave instructions like that he had cover from the Vice President, otherwise George Tenet would never give instructions like that.' "

Wilkerson's own "interlocutors"--whoever they are, assuming they even exist and actually have a scintilla of real knowledge about these affairs--say that VP Cheney did not issue the waterboarding order, Tenet did.

This is a big problem for Wilkerson. His whole story revolves around "Sith Lord" (Wilkerson's words) Cheney's alleged order. What is the basis for Wilkerson's claim that Cheney ordered the putative waterboarding, and not Tenet? In a rambling summary of his own personal crusade against the Bush administration, Wilkerson claims he has strung together "multiple sources" for his stories--in general. But when it comes to VP Cheney's specific role in Wilkerson's tale, Wilkerson said this:

"My assumption that it came from the Vice President's office I think is based on pretty firm ground."

So, Wilkerson's central allegation regarding VP Cheney is now admittedly based on his own "assumption," but Wilkerson's own "interlocutors" disagree.

Strike one.

And what of Ibn Shaykh al Libi--the al Qaeda operative who Wilkerson claims was waterboarded into confessing a phony link to the Iraqi regime? Wilkerson told Maddow that his story actually involves two al Qaeda operatives--al Libi and another unnamed al Qaeda terrorist who Wilkerson claims was also roughed up in order to find an Iraqi link. (Wilkerson's original story was so poorly written it was difficult to tell if he was talking about one or two different al Qaeda operatives.)

Wilkerson did not name this second al Qaeda operative. But with respect to al Libi he said this, "I'm a little confused about al Libi, I admit that." He added, "I still have to put that piece together."

But al Libi was the only named al Qaeda terrorist in Wilkerson's original account, and it was al Libi's testimony that Wilkerson claimed stopped the enhanced interrogation of another. Now, Wilkerson says that he has to put al Libi's story "together"--whatever that means (invent new details and sources?).

Wilkerson has, therefore, conceded that he does not actually know anything about al Libi.

Strike two.

Happiness is...being old, male, and Republican.

Just when you thought the "peace" movement might have lost some of its hateful self-righteousness...

Robert Byrd in hospital with infection.

Obama's personal investments show a shocking lack of money in "weatherizing," "electronic medical records," and failing car companies. Those are for you to invest in!

Cap-and-trade = Carbon tax + Corporate welfare.

Huckabee's Pelosi poem: Bad, but better than Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration poem? Definitely.

Welcome to the future of car production! "It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more."

Democrats concerned that Republicans will call "Washington takeover of health care" a "Washington takeover of health care."

"Are the elderly cost-effective?"

Is Leon Panetta indulging in the dreaded "false choice?"

It's fun watching Richard Haass preen about his vociferous "dissent" before the Iraq war:

Haass says it's painful to hear the list of all the policies that he was against -- including the Iraq war and U.S. policy on Afghanistan. "I believed in diplomacy, I believe in multilateralism, I believe in institutions," he says. "I did not believe in the Iraq war....I found myself on a very different page from my colleagues."

But here is Haass, in January 2003, not only setting forth the justification for the war, but doing so publicly [in remarks to the School of Foreign Service and the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University in Washington]:

When certain regimes with a history of aggression and support for terrorism pursue weapons of mass destruction, thereby endangering the international community, they jeopardize their sovereign immunity from intervention including anticipatory action to destroy this developing capability.

The right to self-defense including the right to take "pre-emptive" action against a clear and imminent threat has long been recognized in international law and practice. The challenge today is to adapt the principle of self-defense to the unique dangers posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Traditionally, international lawyers have distinguished between pre-emption against an imminent threat, which they consider legitimate, and "preventive action" taken against a developing capability, which they regard as problematic. This conventional distinction has begun to break down, however. The deception practiced by rogue regimes has made it harder to discern either the capability or imminence of attack. It is also often difficult to interpret the intentions of certain states, forcing us to judge them against a backdrop of past aggressive behavior. Most fundamentally, the rise of catastrophic weapons means that the cost of underestimating these dangers is potentially enormous. In the face of such new threats and uncertainties, we must be more prepared than previously to contemplate what, a century and a half ago, Secretary of State Daniel Webster labeled "anticipatory self-defense."

From yesterday's press briefing:

Q Somebody suggested that Speaker Pelosi should come forward with the evidence of her allegation that the CIA misled her. Does the President agree that she should have some evidence --

MR. GIBBS: You know, I appreciated the opportunity to get involved in this on Friday and I declined, and I haven't changed my mind on Monday.

Q Does the President have confidence in Speaker Pelosi?

MR. GIBBS: He does. [...]

Q If I could go back to the CIA and Pelosi and just try this one different way. But Panetta has issued his statement. Does the President agree with Panetta that the CIA is not in the business of misleading members of Congress?

MR. GIBBS: I appreciate the opportunity. I would point you to my remarks from Friday.

Q So we can kind of be in limbo on whether or not the President agrees with the CIA director?

MR. GIBBS: I appreciate the hypothetical. Yes, sir.

The fact that Gibbs clearly has such definitive orders not to say anything at all about Pelosi-gate shows just how bad of an issue this is for Democrats and how the White House desperately hopes it will go away.

Also, the Washington Examiner reports that Pelosi knew about the letter before it was sent out:

The Central Intelligence Agency gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., advanced warning before CIA Chief Leon Panetta sent a memo to employees at the spy agency that countered Pelosi's claim that the agency lied to Congress about waterboarding.

A CIA official, but not Panetta, made the call to Pelosi.

"His office gave a heads up," a Democratic aide said Monday.

The aide said Pelosi protested Panetta's memo on the call to no avail. [...]

[O]ne top Republican aide said it would be unusual for Panetta to act without the White House "being aware of it first," particularly because the memo referred to the speaker.

As Bill Kristol wrote on Sunday, it seems highly unlikely that the White House didn't know about the letter before it was sent out, and there's a good chance that Rahm Emanuel and President Obama encouraged Panetta to throw Pelosi under the bus.

Via the FPI Overnight Brief, Yonhap reports:

North Korea executed its pointman on South Korea last year, holding him responsible for wrong predictions about Seoul's new conservative government that has ditched a decade of engagement policy toward Pyongyang, sources said Monday.

Choe Sung-chol, who as vice chairman of the North's Asia-Pacific Peace Committee had pushed for bold reconciliation with Seoul's previous liberal governments, disappeared from public sight early last year amid reports that he was fired.

Rumors spread in January that he was forced to work at a chicken farm, but a number of sources privy to North Korean internal affairs told Yonhap News Agency that Choe was executed last year to shoulder the blame for inter-Korean relations, which changed drastically with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak's inauguration.

In his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today, President Obama said the following:

“If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way, to the extent that we can make peace… between the Palestinians and the Israelis then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with the potential Iranian threat.”

Netanyahu, naturally, stressed the primacy and immediacy of the Iranian threat, especially the mullahs’ march towards nuclear arms. Obama, however, sees the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” as a chip that can potentially be used to force Tehran to make concessions.

But, here’s the problem. Hamas, the only entity that has the power at this point to make concessions on the Palestinians’ behalf, is not only a terrorist organization that does not believe in Israel’s right to exist, but also an Iranian proxy (despite being a Sunni terrorist group).

So, in order for President Obama’s vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace to come to fruition, the following would have to be accomplished:

- Hamas would have to accept Israel’s right to exist - unless you are Jimmy Carter and believe that Hamas already does, or you believe that a real peace can be reached without Hamas accepting Israel’s basic existential rights. And, just for the record, Hamas just recently rejected Israel’s right to exist yet again.

- Hamas would have to renounce anti-Israeli terrorism, its chief reason for existence.

- Hamas would have to stop taking substantial aid from Iran – unless you think that the Iranians would allow Hamas to reach a peace deal that could be used, as President Obama has suggested, to put pressure on the mullahs while at the same time Hamas accepted the mullahs’ arms, training, and cash. Also, Hezbollah, Iran’s chief terrorist proxy, would have to stop giving Hamas “every type of support.” Hamas would have to renounce this support from the Iranians and Hezbollah even though it is vital for its survival, in both the fight against the Israelis and in the intra-Palestinian rivalry for power.

- In addition to those three steps, the Israelis and Hamas would have to sit down and come to terms that were acceptable to both parties – without any additional interference from Iran, which has no incentive to see peace achieved and has historically sponsored any party that opposes it.

President Obama, like so many others in Washington, doesn’t seem to realize that the Iranians have already gamed this all out and are using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to achieve its own ends in the region and beyond.

Bibi, on the other hand, led with his concerns about stopping a nuclear-armed Iran from becoming a reality - for good reasons.

Kevin Hassett provides the factoid of the day: "Extrapolating out the 2007 CBO forecast, our government plans to spend about $5.6 trillion more between 2009 and 2018 than was projected to be spent when the Democrats took over control of Congress."

Samuelson and Continetti are on the same page.

Allahpundit: Hope and change: GOP even with Dems in party affiliation for first time since 2005

Rasmussen: 43% Say CIA May Have Misled Pelosi, 41% Disagree

The liberal Catholic magazine America is unimpressed with Obama's Notre Dame speech.

Said President Obama:

We should have a fairly good sense by the end of the year as to whether they are moving in the right direction and whether the parties involved are making progress and that there's a good-faith effort to resolve differences.

Leave aside how silly it is that the President seems comfortable with the notion that he might spend the next six months, in addition to the last five, engaging the Iranians with absolutely no sense of whether or not things are "moving in the right direction." Which "parties" is Obama referring to here? Direct negotiations by definition involve only two parties. Is Obama wondering aloud whether his Secretary of State is going to make a good-faith effort to resolve American differences with Iran? Is he wondering whether Dennis Ross is making progress -- and will he wait until the end of the year to find out?

And why not:

Arrested Somali pirates who are now in the Netherlands on trial for their deeds say they would like to stay in the Netherlands. "It's a good life here."

Suspected pirate Sayid will stand trial on Monday with four of his countrymen in the first Dutch pirate trial. "I want an education during my imprisonment, and I appeal to the government not to send me back to Somalia. The people who live here respect human rights. I want to live here," he told Volkskrant.

What kind of Somali pirate wouldn't want to live in a welfare state with legal khat and indoor plumbing.

After reading Obama's speech at Notre Dame on abortion as well as the media coverage of it, a couple things stand out.

First, almost every outlet--from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times to the Washington Post and the New York Times--reports that Obama "directly" confronted the abortion issue "head-on", which is true enough, if you mean he confronted the issue by trying to skirt around it and diminish it by calling for pro-lifers and pro-choicers to reach "common ground" in order to reduce the number of abortions.

If you want to see what it actually looks like when a president confronts the abortion debate "head-on", read Ronald Reagan's 1983 essay Abortion and the Conscience of The Nation.

Second, none of the reports (the aforementioned as well as those by Politico, USA Today, LA Times) actually notes Obama's very unpopular stances on abortion--that it should be legal throughout all 9 months of pregnancy for effectively any reason and that it should be covered by private and public health insurance. These positions also contradict his call to reduce the number of abortions. How exactly are readers supposed to support Obama's effort to reach "common ground" on this issue if they don't know where he stands?

From the Onion:

BREAKING: Pelosi Alleges CIA Failed To Tell Her Democratic Party Would Be Opposed To Waterboarding

The only thing that surprises me about this photo is that Helene Cooper isn't sitting there taking notes for her next story on Israel. She must have been just outside the shot with Chas Freeman, Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abunimah.

Andrew Breitbart writes a fantastic column today owning up to a misguided but well meaning attempt to confront some anti-war protesters. They were, as Breitbart had suspected, anti-war protesters -- they just weren't protesting the Iraq war, or the Afghanistan war, or the war on terror, or the war on drugs. Instead they were protesting the war being fought by the Lords Resistance Army, the vicious guerrilla group fighting a war against the Ugandan government with child soldiers. Mistakes were made, and Breitbart ended up getting photographed flipping the bird to a bunch of kids who were marching against actual tyranny and oppression. The column is very funny, and Breitbart uses his mistake to do some good -- directing people to the group's website at invisiblechildren.com.

Meanwhile, Vanity Fair's James Wolcott, confronted by a contrite and self-deprecating conservative, strings together a series of self-righteous and ad hominem attacks culminating in an imaginary scene that has Breitbart getting into a "contretemps" with participants in an AIDS walk. And this in the course of asserting a disconnect between the conservative caricature of liberals and reality.

On ABC's This Week (video here. ) Sen. Jim Webb said no Gitmo detainees, including the Uighurs, should be brought to the United States:

SENATOR JIM WEBB

The situation with the Chinese Uighurs that you're talking about, on the one hand it can be argued that they were simply conducting dissident activities against the government of China. On the other, they accepted training from al Qaeda, and as a result, they have taken part in terrorism. I don't believe they should come to the United States.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS

(Off-camera) Not to the United States and not Virginia.

SENATOR JIM WEBB

No, I don't believe so.

Webb also said it's unreasonable to close Gitmo by January 1:

SENATOR JIM WEBB

We spent hundreds of millions of dollars building an appropriate facility with all security precautions in Guantanamo to try these cases. There are cases against international law. These aren't people who were in the United States committing a crime in the United States. These are people who were brought to Guantanamo for international terrorism. I do not believe they should be tried in the United States.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS

(Off-camera) Yet back in, back in January you supported the President's decision to close Guantanamo.

SENATOR JIM WEBB

I think Guantanamo has become the great Rorschach test of how we feel about international terrorism. We should at the right time close Guantanamo, but I don't think that it should be closed in terms of transferring people here.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS

(Off-camera) Well, but I just want to press this one more time because actually in January, on January 23rd you said the President has given a reasonable time line in sorting this out. You no longer believe it's reasonable?

SENATOR JIM WEBB

Well, no, I don't actually. You know, having sat down with my staff and gone through the numbers in detail and, and looking at, you know, the facilities that have been built there and coming to the point where I have to, you know, personally weigh in on this in a detailed way, I think what we're doing is the right way.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS

(Off-camera) So you will not support funding for closing down Guantanamo?

SENATOR JIM WEBB

We should close down Guantanamo at the right time. What - I think what's happened is Guantanamo has become the issue rather than how we process these people who are detained there. Let's process them with the right rules of law, the right due process within the constraints of how we have to handle these cases with military intelligence and that sort of thing, but the facility is there at Guantanamo and then close it down.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS

(Off-camera) So the January deadline should be relaxed. The President should not meet that January deadline. You don't believe Guantanamo should be closed...

SENATOR JIM WEBB

I think we should, you know I think we should defer to the judgment of the administration who is looking at this. I think we all are moving toward the right direction but we shouldn't be creating artificial time lines.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS

(Off-camera) But the administration has said January.

SENATOR JIM WEBB

They said a lot of things and taken a look and said some other things, so let's have - let's process these people in a very careful way and then take care of it.

Also, after the jump, see the Senate Republicans' compilation of Democrats opposed to releasing detainees in the United States:

It was that kind of day—and it has been that kind of presidency: Barack Obama, moving as he wishes to move, and the world bending itself to him.

That from Jon Meacham's "exclusive" interview with President Obama. What's most disturbing is that Meacham likely believes this, despite all evidence to the contrary. Meacham had a cover piece on the inevitability of gay marriage, but though Obama supports gay marriage he refuses to move off his personal view that marriage should be between one man and one woman. Likewise on DADT, where Obama is showing caution at the insistence of Jim Jones, or so Jones claims. In Iraq, Obama has yielded to his generals who urged him to slow the pace of withdrawal and keep U.S. force levels stable through the end of the year, at least.

Obama reversed himself on the release of the photos, was rebuked by a Democratic Congress on funding for closing Gitmo, he has revived the military commissions he attacked relentlessly during the campaign, and his administration is openly talking of indefinite detention of terrorist suspects. The world is not bending to Obama, Obama is bending to the world. And the world is praising him for it. The left, however, is either furious or, as in Meacham's case, willfully blind.

Calderone gets another statement from the Times:

Maureen had us correct the column online as soon as the error was brought to her attention, adding in the sourcing to Marshall's blog. We ran a correction in today's paper, referring readers to the correct version online.

There is no need to do anything further since there is no allegation, hint or anything else from Marshall that this was anything but an error. It was corrected. Journalists often use feeds from other staff journalists, free-lancers, stringers, a whole range of people. And from friends. Anyone with even the most passing acquaintance with Maureen's work knows that she is happy and eager to give people credit.

Why would further action be dependent on an "allegation, hint or anything else from Marshall"? It is plagiarism, whether Marshall is bothered by it or not is irrelevant. Plagiarism does not become a victimless crime if the writer whose words were stolen does not publicly prosecute his case as a result of an ideological affinity with the perpetrator or any other reason. The victims are the readers, however many remain, who can now wonder just how much of Dowd's drivel is her own and how much is cribbed from her friends, who apparently pass along entire paragraphs that may be sprinkled into a column without attribution and at Dowd's discretion.

If the Times sees no need for further action, perhaps someone should ask Carlos Slim whether he thinks the Times is making good use of his investment by retaining Maureen Dowd when they could probably get Josh Marshall for half the price, if that. Marshall is looking to move on.

New Jersey voters could witness a real slugfest this November in the state’s gubernatorial election. Incumbent Democratic Governor John Corzine is facing stiff competition from Republican Chris Christie, according to a new Rasmussen poll released last week. Looking behind the numbers suggests the incumbent governor has some reason for fear – and hope.

Christie currently leads his main competitor in the June 2 GOP primary, Steve Lonegan, by just under 10 points. In a low-turnout primary, the outcome is not guaranteed. Yet right now, Christie looks like the favorite.

Assuming he wins, Ramussen’s poll suggests he would do well in the general election too. He leads Corzine right now by nine points – 47 percent-38 percent.

A few details in the crosstabs suggest Corzine is in a deep hole among certain key electoral constituencies. In addition to his nine-point overall deficit, the incumbent governor trails among women by 12 points, independents by 33 points, and moderates by 21 points. For his part, Christie also performs well among the Republican base, leading Corzine 76 percent - 12 percent among self-identified conservatives.

So where can the incumbent find some sunshine in these gloomy numbers? New Jersey is still a strong Democratic state. Despite Corzine’s high unfavorable rating (Rasmussen pegs it at around 53 percent), New Jersey voters say they “prefer a Democratic governor” compared to a Republican by 48 percent-34 percent.

Political observers know New Jersey usually ends up disappointing Republicans at the end of the day. Rasmussen agrees:

New Jersey polls often shows Republican candidates polling well in the spring and then shows Democrat gaining ground in the fall. A Republican has not won a statewide election in the Garden State since 1997. On a generic basis, 48 percent of New Jersey voters would like to see a Democrat as Governor while just 34 percent would prefer a Republican. That political gravity is almost certain to help the incumbent as Election Day draws near.

Corzine may also get a boost from President Obama—64 percent of New Jersey voters approve of the way the President is handling his job. That figure includes 47 percent who Strongly Approve. Just 25 percent Strongly Disapprove.

But GOP operatives hope Governor Corzine’s budget troubles and unpopularity – along with a strong candidate in Christie – mean 2009 becomes the exception to years of dashed hopes. Read the full Rasmussen poll here.

Over the weekend, President Obama selected Utah governor Jon Huntsman, a Republican (duh! It's Utah!), to be his ambassador to China. Huntsman is fluent in Mandarin, whip-smart, and a guy who holds respectable, establishmentarian opinions on a host of issues, namely, the need for the GOP to "moderate." By selecting Huntsman, Obama reasserts his bipartisan credentials, and makes a pick based on expertise (those language skills, experience in the region) rather than political connections. A good move.

Another story-line is emerging from the Huntsman pick, however, and it's not persuasive. Huntsman was widely known to have been considering a run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. Yes, Obama's first year in office isn't half-done yet. But that hasn't stopped the Beltway's permanent presidential parlor game. Indeed, one of Huntsman's presidential campaign advisers, John Weaver, tells Byron York today that the GOP is headed "for a blowout" in 2012 unless it nominates a Huntsman-like moderate. The party, Weaver says, cannot be defined by Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh. Other analysts agree, arguing that Obama is brilliantly absorbing the Republican center and thus dooming the party to near-term irrelevancy.

This is exactly the line of argument coming from the administration itself. Earlier this week, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told a Salt Lake City television station that Huntsman made him "queasy." "I think he's really out there speaking a lot of truth about the direction of the party," Plouffe said. Of course Plouffe thinks so. He's a liberal, and Huntsman has been saying that the GOP needs to move in a more liberal direction. (And, incidentally, isn't it possible that when Plouffe made that comment, he already knew that Obama was going to select Huntsman for the Beijing post?)

The administration would like the voting public to believe that the GOP is outside the mainstream. Co-opting centrist Republicans like Huntsman reinforces that notion. But the problem with this argument is that what is "mainstream" changes over time. As unpopular as the Republican party is at the moment, it is actually winning a lot of the debates in Washington. Cap-and-trade has little chance of passing, health care is just as dicey, Americans are concerned about Obama's reckless accumulation of national debt, Nancy Pelosi is playing defense for the first time in her speakership, and the president has reversed himself on military commissions, abuse photos, and preventive detention. Victory or near-victory in these policy battles hasn't redounded to the GOP's benefit because the public still associates the Republican party with George W. Bush's failed second term, specifically the years 2005-2006 and the recession that began in December 2007.

It takes a while for the public to catch up. When they do - and it may not happen until 2016 - they'll go looking for someone who, in all likelihood, opposed the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and ObamaCare. He (or she!) won't be a moderate, and won't be named Huntsman. Why? Because an Obama-friendly moderate stands absolutely no chance of winning a Republican presidential nomination anytime soon. The coalition that would nominate such a man (or woman!) exists, sure. In the Democratic party. Not the GOP.

The Huntsman pick is good for the country and good for the president. But it has absolutely no impact on the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Maureen Dowd plagiarized (or in the parlance of the Huffington Post, "inadvertently lifted") the work of a partisan left-wing blogger, reproducing it word for word, and then offering this bizarre explanation:

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.

Of course this could have happened to anyone who doesn't read Josh Marshall, but given how much it looks like straight plagiarism, and that it’s unclear how she could have repeated Marshall verbatim based on a conversation, we assume she’ll provide some corroboration for her story -- or surely the Times will have to remove or suspend her for having committed the most serious of journalistic crimes. As for the apology, having failed to attribute "a paragraph" to the proper source, and having taken credit for that work herself, Dowd can't even be bothered to use proper punctuation in the note acknowledging this "inadvertent lifting"? Is being caught for plagiarism really an occasion for a more casual style of writing?

One of the main reasons large swaths of Pakistan has fallen under Taliban control is that the military has nearly no capacity to fight a counterinsurgency operation. The Pakistani Army is built to battle the Indians on the eastern plains, not the Taliban in the mountainous northwest. The Pakistani Army's idea of fighting a counterinsurgency is to move the artillery up or call in air or helicopter strikes, and level entire villages. This of course makes the Army hated: why would a country's own Army indiscriminately kill their own people and destroy their property?

Just as the U.S. and Britain have been given the green light to send additional special forces trainers to help teach the Pakistani Army counterinsurgency techniques, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, Chief of Army Staff, tells us not to bother. Everything is fine, says Kiyani, all we need are your shiny new weapons:

Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani on Saturday said that Pakistan Army has developed a full range of counter insurgency training facilities tailored to train troops for such operations. “Therefore, except for very specialized weapons and equipment, high technology, no generalized foreign training is required,” the COAS said in a press statement issued here.

Owing to its vast experience, Pakistan Army remains the best suited force to operate in its own area, the COAS said. So, the comments from various quarters coming on the level of Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) training of Pakistani troops and about their shifting from eastern borders is unsuited. Uncalled for aspersions through various quarters on our training methods/orientation are apparently due to lack of knowledge and understanding of our training system in vogue, he said.

Perhaps someone should tell the more than 1.1 million internally displaced persons who are leaving the northwest due to the heavy handed tactics of the Pakistani military that they were wrong to leave as the soldiers are well trained in taking the needs of civilians into consideration.

Many Pakistan watchers are hard on the Pakistani Army and the government--with good reason. Statements like Kiyani's demonstrate a lack of seriousness in addressing the spread of the Taliban, and make the government appear to be panhandling for international aid and advanced weapons.

Tacitly conceding this weekend that Fred Armisen's Barack Obama is just heinous, and even if it weren't they probably wouldn't have the guts to actually go after Obama, SNL went back to making fun of George W. Bush.

In this skit, Will Ferrell reprises his impression of W. by admonishing Darrell Hammond's Dick Cheney for his public defense of the administration's position on enhanced interrogation techniques. Acting as the popular font of liberal conventional wisdom, SNL thinks the Republican MVP is damaging the Republican Party and Bush's legacy.

What the Cheney-haters overlook is that he's winning the argument, and the American people agree with him, even if they don't love him:

Cheney is making arguments that the Bush administration largely avoided throughout the second term. Aside from an occasional, defensive speech about its war on terror policies, the Bush White House allowed its opponents to level harsh attacks with little or no response...

Democrats have made the assumption that because Cheney is personally unpopular, the policies he has advocated are, too. Obama did not become president because voters supported his positions on national security and the war on terror. They don't.

In a widely overlooked Pew poll on "torture" released late last month, respondents were asked: "Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?" (Cheney would no doubt object to the wording of the question, insisting that the policies used by the Bush administration were not "torture.")...

A stunning 71 percent of those surveyed said that the use of torture could be justified--with 15 percent saying it is "often" justified, 34 percent saying it is "sometimes" justified, and 22 percent saying it is "rarely" justified. Independents fall decisively in what most journalists might characterize as the "pro-torture" camp. More than three-quarters of independents--77 percent--said that torture could be justified: with 19 percent saying it is "often" justified, 35 percent saying it is "sometimes" justified, and 23 percent saying it is "rarely" justified. The phrasing of the question also likely resulted in underreporting the support for what Cheney calls "enhanced interrogation," since some of the respondents might be hesitant to admit to a random telephone caller that they favor "torture."

It's too bad SNL apparently didn't couple this skit with one spoofing Nancy Pelosi's horrendous press conference (or, not that I can tell online; correct me if I'm wrong), which demonstrably damaged public opinion of the Democratic Party and Obama's message on enhanced interrogation techniques. Kristin Wiig's Pelosi is far better than Armisen's Obama, and Nancy's a more comfortable target. I guess when you've still got Cheney and W. to kick around, it's irresistible.

Good thing Darth Vader is impervious to comedy.

Obama presumably to give Bibi a Zune loaded with "The Bible" as read by Charlton Heston. "New Testament optional, Beebs!"

“You’re a hypocrite!” one man yelled. “I’m a winner, pal,” Graham shot back.

Coleman v. Franken to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Dear California, Seriously? Seriously. Focus on the budget; not curing homophobia in kids who can't write yet.

Abortion still above Obama's paygrade.

Just how much government debt does a president have to endorse before he's labeled "irresponsible"?

Huntsman, like Seacrest, out!

Globally, this means the administration is willing, as their top defense experts like to say, to “balance risks” when it comes to the nation’s future peace and security. Translated into plain English, this means “taking risks” with the nation’s peace and security