The Evin diet plan: “A close aide to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suggested that Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist critic of the president, appeared so gaunt during his televised confession this month because he himself had decided to take off some weight. ‘It’s natural that when someone has become fat, in prison he understands that his fatness harmed his body and spirit,’ said Ali Akbar Javanfekr. . . . ‘So maybe Mr. Abtahi took advantage of this opportunity to lose weight.’ The president’s advisor on media affairs spoke to the Iranian Labor News Agency. Observers were stunned when Abtahi . . . who served as a vice president for former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, publicly confessed to conspiring against Ahmadinejad. It wasn’t just that his words appeared to be copied verbatim from Iran’s hardline press. But the 51-year-old looked terrible.”
Sens. Lieberman and McConnell object to prosecuting CIA operatives. (Sens. Bond, Sessions, and Kyl do as well.) Rep. Pete Hoekstra isn’t pleased either.
This sums up where we are: “Appointing a prosecutor to harass CIA interrogators exposes this administration’s priorities: The global war on terror takes a back seat to terrorizing some of America’s most selfless warriors.”
Even the Washington Post editors are uneasy: “There is something unsettling about telling operatives that they are off the hook, only to have that stance change with a new administration. For another, the report underscores what little appetite the CIA had for getting back into the business of ugly interrogation (it had been so burned that it changed the term, at one point, to “human resource exploitation”); the agency was clamoring constantly for guidance.”
I know you are shocked that the White House deficit numbers might not be accurate: “Former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin says the Obama administration’s claim that Obama’s updated figures on the deficit that will be released Tuesday are ‘spin and nothing more.” ‘ Holtz-Eakin, who was a top advisor to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., sent a memo Monday to House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, accusing Obama of manipulating the numbers about future bailout costs in making the claim that the deficit will shrink by more than $260 billion from what was predicted three months ago. ‘Bottom line, the budget outlook is worse, and dangerous,’ Holtz-Eakin writes to Boehner.”
A peak at those documents that Vice President Dick Cheney says show the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques turns out to show the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques. The same techniques we will no longer employ.
And Cheney blasts the Obama administration.
Gov. David Paterson’s poll numbers remain grim.
Little wonder then that Rudy Giuliani is contemplating a run—although in all likelihood his opponent would be Andrew Cuomo. Talk about your heavyweight battles.
Bill McGurn thinks Obama needs to move to the right in order to save his presidency, like Bill Clinton did. Maybe he needs to lose the Democratic congressional majority too.
