The commander of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility Tuesday for a deadly assault on a Pakistani police academy and said the group was planning a terrorist attack on Washington that would “amaze” the world.

Baitullah Mehsud, who has a $5 million bounty on his head from the U.S., said Monday’s attack outside the eastern city of Lahore was in retaliation for U.S. missile strikes against militants along the Afghan border.

“Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world,” Mehsud told The Associated Press by phone. He provided no details.

“I want to apologize to you for what happened,” he said, looking earnest and speaking as if he felt pretty badly about it all. “But I can’t. Because I did nothing wrong.”

The last thing the Clinton campaign needs is for its vaunted competence to come into question on the heels of what may very well be Obama’s running the table between Super Tuesday and March 4. Having the competence assumption evaporate would be disastrous, particularly if the race comes down to keeping the confidence of the superdelegates in Denver.

And yet, and yet, the WaPo and other articles are contributing to my sense that the Clinton campaign competence is more illusion than anything. Look at the WaPo article again:

Several top Clinton strategists and fundraisers became alarmed after learning of the state’s unusual provisions during a closed-door strategy meeting this month, according to one person who attended.

The WaPo article is dated February 18. The Clinton campaign is just now figuring out how the Texas system works.

In conversation about difficult projects, I’ve occasionally been known to say “Americans planned D-Day, this isn’t that hard.” Currently, Clinton and company as campaign leaders look a lot less like General Dwight Eisenhower and a lot more like General William Westmoreland.

I seem to have read somewhere that the surge is working. That’s good! It’s important to take care of stuff in Iraq! But you know what? I really don’t give a shit what Obama and Clinton are or are not saying about the surge while they’re reaching out to primary voters. What, you expect them to suddenly change their messages in the middle of a campaign? You were once Quayle’s chief of staff — you should know how this stuff works.

I suppose there is the idea that it is somehow funny to use the Times’ op-ed pages to even out the playing field in American public debate about Iraq, but I can read this in so many other places that it just seems like a waste of space. You have a year to make your point — is this really what you want to leave as the record of your tenure?

I still happen to think the Times op-ed page is an important forum. You cheapen it by sounding like a syndicated writer. And quit using it as talking points for sparring with Juan Williams. If I wanted to watch Fox News Sunday, I’d wake up in time to do it.

I never thought I’d say this, but Paul Krugman was so much more interesting this morning.

Terrorists could hide a nuclear weapon inside a shipping container bound for New York at any time, U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler said yesterday, and large importers such as Wal-Mart are partly to blame for opposing greater scanning checks.

“Wal-Mart, America’s largest importer, has actively worked to oppose the scanning of all cargo containers coming into our ports,” Nadler said at a press conference on the Hudson River waterfront, where he was surrounded by anti-Wal-Mart banners and union representatives.

He then called on Wal-Mart to support new laws that would, in five years, require all containers to be scanned on entry.

“Currently, the government only inspects about 6 percent of the port containers coming into the country,” Nadler said. “The experts agree that our ports are vulnerable to nuclear attack and the Bush administration has failed to take that seriously.”

One in 25 of containers entering the United States in 2005 was bound for a Wal-Mart store, Nadler said, the equivalent of 695,000 20-foot containers a year — more than Target, Home Depot and Costco combined. He argued companies such as Wal-Mart have a duty to scan for nuclear and chemical materials — but that they are currently failing in that responsibility by lobbying against new security legislation.

“Wal-Mart executives are worried that anything that slows down their importation of foreign products, even if for a moment, it would cost them money,” said Stuart Applebaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store union. “The bottom line is that any one of the containers Wal-Mart is bringing into this country could prove to be 9/11 in a box.”

*Defined as “boiling down a complex issue to a simple — and simple to solve! — matter of corporate malfeasance.”

If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

I still don’t think he thinks we evolved from monkeys though.

*On any other day, in any other context, one can resist the gratuitous Onyx reference; today is not that day.

Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors.

One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its shares, Mr. Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease.

The most recent financial disclosure form for Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications business whose principal backers include four friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, said yesterday that the senator did not know that he had invested in either company until fall 2005, when he learned of it and decided to sell the stocks. He sold them at a net loss of $13,000.

The spokesman, Bill Burton, said Mr. Obama’s broker bought the stocks without consulting the senator, under the terms of a blind trust that was being set up for the senator at that time but was not finalized until several months after the investments were made.

“He went about this process to avoid an actual or apparent conflict of interest, and he had no knowledge of the stocks he owned,” Mr. Burton said. “And when he realized that he didn’t have the level of blindness that he expected, he moved to terminate the trust.”

Emph. added for your eye-popping amusement.

Fox News anchors, in particular love this one. So stupid.

Siegel’s an ad man, not a political consultant, and it shows. Read the article for some interesting dish about the mutual hatred between ad men and political consultants.

I’ve long wondered why Madison Avenue, which I assume is roughly 90-99 percent run by Democrats, doesn’t pitch in more in the messaging department. This Sun begins to explain why:

Less impressed are political consultants, who say Mr. Siegel is a political amateur who would be lost if the governor’s race became competitive. His ads simply “reinforce existing imagery,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant who created ads for Mr. Spitzer’s 1998 campaign. “They are competent. Am I overwhelmed by the production? The answer is no.”

For Mr. Sheinkopf and other consultants, Mr. Siegel is the latest attempt by a cocky advertising executive to move into their turf. “They look down on us, and we don’t pay attention to them,” Mr. Sheinkopf said.

For my money, anything that changes the current tone of political ads is welcome.

PS: in other ad-related news, Chevy’s new Silverado ad freaked me out when I saw it last night. Fortunately, Seth Stevenson tells me that I’m not alone. Watch the ad. It’s creepy.

First, I saw Spitzer’s gubernatorial ad (click here and watch “To Do”), which was striking in that it basically moved past the campaign and outlined a strategy for his first 100 days in office.

Second, now that Spitzer’s election seems assured, it’s time to make the race for his coattails. Running to replace him are Republican Jeanine Pirro and Democrat Andrew Cuomo. Pirro’s ad (click here and go to “Videos”) argues that she’s more qualified to replace the Democrat Spitzer. It’s, of course, an attempt to get some cross-party cred in blue New York. But doesn’t have nearly the bipartisan cred that comes with an actual cross-party move, like when Giuliani endorsed Cuomo Sr. in ’94.

Cuomo, being a Democrat, is able to out-do Pirro on this score. He actually goes so far as to have Sptizer sit down next to him during the entire ad (click here and watch “most qualified.” BTW… why do none of these sites have permalinks for their ads?!).

It’s no surprise Spitzer has such coattails, of course. He’s ridiculously popular. Given that his fame comes from an aggressive series of Wall Street investigations, is it possible that a politician can take on corporations and not come off sounding like David Sirota? I sure hope so.

There is not much choice. There is not, because we have screwed up. Not a little but a lot. No country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have. It can be explained. We have obviously lied throughout the past 18 to 24 months. It was perfectly clear that what we were saying was not true.

We are beyond the country’s possibilities to such an extent that we could not conceive earlier that a joint government of the Socialists and the liberals would ever do. And in the meantime we did not actually do anything for four years. Nothing.

You cannot mention any significant government measures that we can be proud of, apart from the fact that in the end we managed to get governance out of the shit. Nothing. If we have to give an account to the country of what we have done in four years, what are we going to say?

*The Prime Minister in question is Ferenc Gyurcsány (pronounced FAIR-entz JOR-chahn-ee); he overtakes Wes Clark in this category** — as in “Oh, man, he totally Gyurcsanied!”

**It’s also possible this was “intentional”*** on Gyurcsany’s part, in which case we reserve the right to adjust the definition at a later date.

***I find this difficult to believe — but if it’s true, the meaning will have to be further adjusted to something along the lines of “a bad miscalculation based on one’s ill-timed and ill-conceived free-swinging manner.”

Statistically it is now nearly as dangerous to serve as an American soldier in Afghanistan as it is in Iraq.

Which means that a) Afghanistan is getting more and more dangerous, b) Iraq is less dangerous than previously believed, c) Americans are not spending enough attention to what is going on in Afghanistan these days or d) all of the above. Take your pick.

Then there’s Nick Kristof today about the Bush legacy vis a vis national parks and the environment:

In 100 years, Mr. Bush’s mistakes in Iraq may not matter anymore, but our wilderness heritage lost on his watch can never be restored.

Which means that a) Bush’s environmental record is devastating — so much so that it makes Iraq look like a ping pong match, b) Iraq is less of a disaster than previously believed, c) Bush’s “mistakes” in Iraq are not irreparable or d) Kristof is committing to the record a Paul Krugman-esque bit of hyperbole*.

I would have dug up a third Portrait of Iraqian Gray quote from the front section, but I couldn’t find one. Besides, this way it’s not a trend piece.

*Krugman predicted in 2002 that “in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.”

I was a Republican–until they lost their minds.”

Need we say more?

(via (TNR)

Perhaps even more than her stance on the war in Iraq, it is Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s position on flag desecration that has drawn the scorn of the liberal Democratic base.

When Mrs. Clinton took a stand on the matter last year — co-sponsoring legislation that would have criminalized the desecration of the American flag even as she opposed a constitutional amendment that sought to achieve the same end — she was pilloried from the left. Editorial boards criticized her for political maneuvering, the political commentator Arianna Huffington attacked her for “stars, stripes and triangulation” and even some of her supporters quietly wondered why she had gone out on a limb on such a controversial issue.

On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton played a leading role in the flag-burning debate once again, co-sponsoring a measure similar to her previous one as an alternative to the constitutional amendment that was about to come up for a vote in the Senate.

“Fortunately, we have an opportunity to protect our flag in a bipartisan and constitutional way,” Mrs. Clinton said in her floor speech.

The measure, brought to the floor by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, failed, 64 to 36, minutes before the proposed amendment fell short of the 67 votes it needed.

. . .

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and a former presidential nominee, voted for the measure, which closely resembled past efforts to pre-empt an amendment to the Constitution. Democrats who voted for the measure in effect bought themselves the right to claim that they had voted against flag desecration, potentially inoculating themselves against possible charges of lacking patriotism in a general election campaign. The broader measure to amend the Constitution failed by a single vote, 66 to 34.

*In other words, a “While I’m against a constitutional amendment, I’m also opposed to gay marriage” kind of triangulation.