I still don’t like Gail Collins, but this is pretty funny.

Meanwhile, to make up for the lost revenue, McCain says “all we need to do is cut out hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of pork-barrel projects.” These are presumably different pork-barrel projects from the ones McCain is going to cut in order to pay for $613 billion in permanent tax cuts.

Hillary Clinton, who jumped on the gas-tax holiday bandwagon posthaste, wants to pay for it with a windfall profits tax on oil companies. This makes her plan much more fiscally responsible. Not only does she balance the books, she turns a proposal that was unlikely to ever get passed into one that could not make it through the Senate if Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy both rose from the dead and hand-carried it there.

There are few things more satisfying than taking a strong stand in favor of something that is never going to happen. Free pander!

I assume everyone has read the report in the New York Times telling the story of how the Generals who gave independent assessments of the war in Iraq were fed their lines, monitored and punished with loss of access and contracts by the Pentagon?

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

If you haven’t, go read it now.

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

No doubt it was all very innocent.

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

You remember the Strategy for Victory? How about Stay the Course or When They Stand Up We’ll Stand Down ? What about Cheney’s light at the end of the tunnel or - my personal favourite - a few dead enders?

EJ Dionne has a nice article in TNR arguing that someone - 5 years later - needs to start defining what victory means .

Here is Petraeus’ memorable and candid account of where we stand: “We haven’t turned any corners, we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator.” Tell me again: What does success look like?

Supporters of the war say its opponents are locked in the past, stuck on whether or not the war was a good idea in the first place. Whether the war was right or wrong, they say, it’s time to move on and focus on the future.

This has it backward. It’s the war’s backers and architects, including the president, who are trapped in the past. They are so invested in the original decision to invade Iraq that they won’t even consider whether the United States would be better off winding down this commitment, relieving our military of the war’s enormous burdens, and redirecting our foreign policy.

Nancy Pelosi uses WordPress! I wonder if she has an opinion on the tags vs categories controversy?

Saint Frank’s column today notices how we are all turning our back on Iraq, even the most passionate among us. But it’s not sustainable.

General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker define victory as “sustainable security” in Iraq. But both Colin Powell and Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, said last week that current troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan are unsustainable and are damaging America’s readiness to meet other security threats. And that’s not all that’s unsustainable. An ailing economy can’t keep floating the war’s $3-billion-a-week cost. A Republican president intent on staying the Bush course will find his vetoes unsustainable after the Democrats increase their majorities in Congress in November. No war can be fought indefinitely if the public has irrevocably turned against it.

Get out of here atheists

Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago)

NYT has a nice piece about the absurdity of the campaign trail. People are asking the candidates about all kinds of shit like whether to get rid of the penny and the dollar bill and trying to make them eat crap like onion rings and chocolate cake - “Go on! Just have half a fish!” - and all the time the reporters are there with their mics making sure that the candidate doesn’t say anything interesting.

Obama had to deal with this

In Lancaster, Mr. Obama, talked to a woman in tears because disability had left her impoverished, then fielded a question from an impatient fellow convinced that the secret world government was about to impose the Amero, a joint American-Mexican-Canadian currency. Mr. Obama explained that he could not do anything about the Amero because, alas, it did not exist.

immediately followed by this

The pivot comes fast. One minute you are talking about an imaginary currency, and the next you hear life rubbed raw. In Lancaster, Linda Hassel rises, hesitant and pained. Her son is an Army lieutenant. What can you say to mothers and fathers who fear that their sons and daughters have died in vain?

Mr. Obama stood silent before answering. He said that he wore a yellow wristband given to him by a woman in Green Bay, Wis., whose son had died in Iraq. He spoke of crying with her and recognizing the futility of offering comfort. “I meet parents all the time who have lost sons and daughters, but their service to our country is never in vain,” he said. “They have performed magnificently. Our military has acquitted itself with all the honor you could expect. That’s never a waste.”

“Getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” he continued, “that is an accomplishment; trying to reduce and contain violence, that is an accomplishment.”

He stood perched on the edge of the riser. “The failure is on the part of the civilian leadership who did not think through this war and its consequences.”

We want to honor that service going forward, he said; we want to care for maimed veterans and those who remain haunted by war. We will end the countless tours of duty, he said.

“We revere your sacrifice,” he said to Mrs. Hassel. “I am going to make sure that we as a nation are as great as those who sacrifice for us.”

I know it was rehearsed, but still…that was pretty good.

Remember when Hillary won Texas and Ohio?

NBC News has allocated the remaining nine Texas caucus delegates, 7-2, in favor of Obama. That means the Illinois senator has won the most delegates, 99-94, as a result of both the Texas primary and caucuses.

MSNBC