Someone named Mike Henry is having a horrible day. I even wonder if he is still employed by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, having dared to do the unthinkable and break her perfect record for campaign discipline. Henry either leaked his memo about her skipping Iowa in the ’08 primaries or he let that memo float into the hands of a leaker. It is hard to believe he got sloppy; all Clinton employees know better.

The idea to ditch the caucuses, according to breathless and categorical statements from Howard Wolfson and other top campaign staff, was Henry’s and Henry’s alone and was soundly rejected by everyone in HillaryWorld, including Sen. Clinton herself. She denounced the idea and said she is “unalterably” committed to competing in Iowa, while spokesman Phil Singer said they are “unequivocally committed” to competing in Iowa. Sounds like they are going! Read more...

I spent half of Wednesday in Annapolis at the Naval Academy. It is graduation week for some of America's finest young men and women.

Among those I congratulated are some who, within weeks, will be serving in Iraq. Within the year, some of them, sadly, probably will be dead.

These young men and women of courage and valor are putting their lives in trust to the good judgment and good faith of the president and Democratic and Republican leaders in the Congress. Read more...

David Hill, director of Hill Research Consultants, a Texas-based firm that has polled for GOP candidates and causes since 1988, has a column posted on The Hill entitled "Overblown GOP apocalypse" in which he asserts the GOP isn't so bad off as the conservative bloggers and pundits would have you believe. Cases in point, he writes, are Florida and California.

"Consider Florida, where the newly elected Republican governor is already so popular that Floridians may forget about Jeb Bush. And the state legislature is dominated by the GOP. ... At the other end of the country, in California, you see a Republican Party that's bouncing back under the leadership of a suddenly stronger and more popular governor."

I've lived and worked in California (formerly as the communications director for the California Republican Party), and I can tell you things in the Golden State aren't all that rosy for the GOP. Consider that they lost Richard Pombo's congressional seat in a district where Republicans hold a registration advantage of 43%-37%. (In every other district, both congressional and legislative, in the state where Republicans hold at least 40% registration, they control the seat.)  Read more...

No blank check.

For months, that’s what congressional Democrats promised: On funding the war in Iraq, no blank check for George Bush. The only way they would continue funding the war, they insisted, was to include a timetable, even a non-binding timetable, for bringing our troops home.

No blank check. Yet here we are, approaching Memorial Day. And what have Democrats agreed to on Iraq? Giving Bush a blank check.

Why? One reason, of course — and I understand this — is that Democrats don’t have enough votes. If only they had a veto-proof majority, this would never have happened.
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Has Jack been taken to Nancy's woodshed yet? Have they had the talk about how many more times she can stand to see images from that ABSCAM video the National Republican Congressional Committee is now so fond of?

The new majority, the one that promised to "drain the swamp" and be the most ethical in history, voted yesterday to protect both one of its own and the earmark system politicians depend on but have to pretend to hate. Democrats voted en masse (although ethics committee members voted present) to stop the GOP from censuring Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.) for his threat to block the appropriations of a member who had tried to eliminate one of his earmarks, a violation of ethics rules.

There is, of course, a long tradition of lawmakers yelling at and threatening each other on the House floor. But two things are notable here: 1) Murtha is a very close friend of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the one she unsuccessfully stuck her neck out for in an attempt to topple the majority leader last November and 2) Democrats are trying to become the party of ethics reform, something easier promised than delivered, as Pelosi is quickly learning. Read more...

My former boss, Rep. Denny Hastert (R-Ill.), is a wise man and a good political leader. One of his sayings he had when he was House Speaker was “Don’t set up too many mousetraps around the house.” After all, if you aren’t careful, you might trap yourself.

That is exactly what the new Democratic majority did this week. It caught one of its own, Rep. John Murtha (Pa.), in a clear violation of one its own rules that it trumpeted so loudly at the beginning of the year. The earmark rule might be stupid, as Murtha and his colleagues clearly think. The Democratic ethics reform package might be complete “crap,” as Murtha put it last year.

But the Democrats can’t call themselves the most ethical majority in history, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) likes to put it, and then create rules only to ignore them with reckless abandon. It’s kind of like passing a seatbelt law and then refusing to wear the seatbelt. Read more...

If you read nothing else today (other than The Hill, of course), read the entire Pew Research poll about the views and beliefs of Muslim Americans. Don’t simply read the highlights on the first page. Dig deep. The information contained therein is disturbing and not likely to be reported widely by the major media outlets.

Here’s an example:

“Asked whether they believe groups of Arabs carried out the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, 40% of Muslim Americans say yes, while 28% say they do not believe this, and about a third (32%) say they do not know or decline to answer the question.” Read more...

The result of our most recent poll was a blow out. We asked whether you thought Paul Wolfowitz was a victim or an embodiment of corruption at the World Bank. By a 93-7 percent margin you decided he was the latter.

You didn't buy the idea that he was toppled for trying to clean up a corrupt organization. This presumably means you accept the bank directors' argument that the ethics panel hadn't approved the pay rise and promotion Wolfowitz arranged for his girlfriend, even though the panel's chairman had written, apparently referring to the matter, that it "had been previously considered by the committee [and] did not contain new information warranting any further review."

Immigration. Complicated isn’t the half of it; 380 pages and counting. Anyone can demagogue this baby.

I have to say, however, that I have great admiration for the senators from both sides of the aisle who have worked tirelessly, day in and day out, to craft a bill that goes to the heart of what the legislative process should be all about.

At the risk of pulling a “I remember the good old days” line, I have certain nostalgic feelings for my tenure as a young staff aide in the Senate in the ’70s and as a page in the mid-1960s. I remember the intense back-and-forth of civil rights bills, the compromises, the arm-twisting by Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey; I remember working on legislation growing out of Frank Church’s Intelligence Committee investigations on domestic surveillance; the Panama Canal Treaties; environmental legislation that changed the country. Read more...