Today’s edition of quick hits.
* The news we were hoping for: “The fight goes on. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) cloture vote failed 48-45 just now, well short of the 60 votes necessary. In the end, four Dems crossed over to vote with the Republicans: Sens. Mark Pryor (D-AR), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA). Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) was the lone Republican to vote with the Dems. Now we’re on to the question of whether an extension will be passed. We’ll have more on that in a moment.”
* Bloodshed in Iraq: “Five U.S. soldiers were killed Monday when their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb and then came under small arms fire in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the U.S. military said. Iraqi army and police also reported fighting had broken out in the Haysuma neighborhood, a known al-Qaida stronghold in eastern Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, which is 240 miles north of Baghdad.”
* The incomparable Lee Stranahan’s latest clip offers the Giuliani campaign a new message: highlight all the disasters he’s been involved with, and tell voters it’s evidence of disaster-management abilities.
* Two interesting new political magazines launched today: The Root, created by the Washington Post to provide “thought-provoking commentary on today’s news from a variety of black perspectives”; and The Washington Independent, a “nonpartisan news and commentary site dedicated to covering topics of national importance. Launched in January 2008, the site aims to combine the best of the old and new media by combining the reporting, accuracy and fairness of traditional journalism with the speed, voice and community of the Web.”
* On a related note, Spencer Ackerman (recently of TPM Muckraker) has an interesting piece at the new Washington Independent about the CIA and the Bush administration’s torture policies: “[D]espite innumerable statements from the Bush administration about the value of the CIA’s interrogation program, U.S. interrogators are still mostly in the dark — in the dark not only about al-Qaeda, but about how to effectively elicit vital national-security information from the detainees in its custody.”
* There are 10,000 agents in the FBI. A grand total of 50 of them speak Arabic (that’s .005% 0.5%). As Matt Yglesias noted, “Suppose that instead of deciding to spread our scarce language assets thinner by invading Iraq, the Bush administration had done something much cheaper like a $15 billion per year effort to massively boost America’s base of people who speak Arabic, Turkic languages, Urdu, etc.? Wouldn’t that have been more helpful?” Actually, yes.
* Not a good sign: “Sales of new homes plunged by a record amount in 2007 while prices posted the weakest showing in 16 years, demonstrating the troubles builders are facing with a huge backlog of unsold homes. The Commerce Department reported Monday that sales of new homes dropped by 26.4 percent last year to 774,000. That marked the worst sales year on record, surpassing the old mark of a 23.1 percent plunge in 1980.”
* The NYT notes today, “Mr. Bush has spent years presiding over an economic climate of growth that would be the envy of most presidents. Yet much to the consternation of his political advisers, he has had trouble getting credit for it.” This is wrong for a variety of reasons. Most notably, Bush has presided over weaker growth than any president in five decades — hardly the stuff of “envy.”
* Here’s an odd twist: one of Bush’s SOTU guests is apparently ineligible to enter the country legally. One wonders if Tom Tancredo will send the Capitol Police after him, just on principle.
* “60 Minutes” had a really interesting report last night on George Piro, who was the front man for a team of FBI and CIA analysts who were responsible for interrogating Saddam Hussein while he was in U.S. custody. Among the insights: Piro didn’t need torture to acquire information, and Saddam Hussein had no interest in a relationship with Osama bin Laden.
* John Solomon, now the head of the far-right Washington Times, is still defending the bizarre brand of journalism he utilized at the Washington Post: “All the stories the liberal blogs have attacked have never been questioned by my own editors. They stood by them. The blogs point to no factual errors but complain that I highlighted something they didn’t care for or preferred that I would have focused on something else.” Predictably, this is false, too.
* Asked if the Bush administration has been good for his career, Keith Olbermann said, “Honestly? No. I’m an American citizen, I think this has been a disastrous presidential administration. I would have given what I have, in terms broadcasting success in the nature of this newscast, I would have easily said … if I were given the choice of this or some responsible presidency in the last four years or eight years? I would have taken a responsible presidency.”
* Clip and save for future use: “Sen. John McCain told a crowd of supporters on Sunday, ‘It’s a tough war we’re in. It’s not going to be over right away. There’s going to be other wars.’ Offering more of his increasingly bleak ‘straight talk,’ he repeated the claim: ‘I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars.’ McCain did not elaborate who the United States would be fighting.”
* And finally, Dick Cheney apparently likes souvenirs — he “has a piece of the house where [Abu Musab al Zarqawi] died on display at his residence.” That would be the same Zarqawi the Bush White House repeatedly declined to attack for political reasons, right? Just checking.
Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.