Today’s edition of quick hits.
* More discouraging economic news: “Sales of existing homes fell for the sixth straight month in January, dropping to the slowest sales pace on record. Median home prices were also down and many analysts predicted further price declines in the months ahead given high levels of unsold homes…. The median price of a home sold in January slid to $201,100, a drop of 4.6 percent from a year ago. Particularly alarming, analysts said, was the fact that the inventory of unsold homes jumped to a 10.3 months’ supply, meaning it would take that long to sell the 4.19 million homes on the market at the January sales pace.”
* Remember, the “surge” was called a “surge” because it was supposed to be a temporary bump in the size of the U.S deployment: “The Pentagon is projecting that when the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq is over in July there will be about 8,000 more troops on the ground than when the buildup began in January 2007, a senior general said Monday. Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, operations chief for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that by July the troop total is likely to be 140,000. That compares with 132,000 when President Bush approved orders to send an additional five Army brigades to Iraq to improve security and avert civil war.”
* Going to political war over surveillance powers: “Stepping up the pressure on House Democrats, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has launched a national ad campaign criticizing Democrats for not passing the Senate’s surveillance bill. According to the group’s press release, the ad ‘will be seen on cable and satellite stations throughout the country and is also seen locally in 17 media markets across the United States.’ It’s similar in tone to an ad the House Republicans put together last week — and similarly misleading. It claims that the lapse of the Protect America Act has meant that ‘new surveillance against terrorists is crippled.'” In other words, as is usually the case, they couldn’t make the argument on the merits, so they had to make stuff up. Typical.
* After declining to say either way whether it was responsible for pushing the pic of Obama in Somali garb, the Clinton campaign distanced itself from the effort this afternoon. Asked if the campaign had any role, Clinton spokesperson Howard Wolfson said, “No, not to my knowledge… I’ve never seen that picture before. I’m not aware that anyone else here has. I’m not aware that anyone here has circulated this e-mail.”
* On a related note, top Clinton aide Harold Ickes compared Obama to Jesse Jackson today. Probably want to be careful with that one.
* James Fallows, who used to work for Ralph Nader, has a good item about his former employer’s fourth presidential campaign: “That he stayed in the race in 2000 was tragedy. (See: Invasion of Iraq, 2003, and subsequent occupation.) That he came back in 2004 was unfortunate; his entry in 2008 is farce. Farce because it suggests detachment from political reality (the differences between the Republican and Democratic nominees are so faint that we can say, What the hell!) and, worse, narcissism. The fact that it won’t make any difference in the outcome actually is sad. I will always like and respect Ralph Nader and will always admire the wonderful things he has done. But I wish to God that he had not made this decision, or will reverse it soon. (And, I am sorry that saying this will make me an enemy in his eyes.) He is a better man than his recent decisions indicate.”
* Scholars at Southern Methodist are less than pleased that an upcoming Bush library will avoid objective academic research: “Benjamin Hufbauer, an associate professor of art history at the University of Louisville and author of Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory, said, ‘…Academics everywhere should be concerned about this. Clearly this goes against the idea of dispassionate inquiry, of looking at things on the basis of fact and merit. If it’s ideological, that’s opposed to the mission of a university,’ Hufbauer said.”
* It’s interesting how professionals seem to always reject the ticking-timebomb scenario out of hand: “Jack Cloonan, who spent 25 years as an FBI special agent and interrogated members of al Qaeda, recently told Foreign Policy that he has ‘been hard pressed to find a situation where anybody’ can say ‘that they’ve ever encountered the ticking bomb scenario’ when interrogating terrorists. He said it is a ‘red herring’ and ‘[i]n the real world it doesn’t happen.’ Cloonan added that the Israelis, ‘who have been doing this for a long time,’ have ‘never had a situation where it is quote ‘a ticking bomb.'”
* John McCain thinks the “war [in Iraq] will be over soon.” Feel better?
* And they wonder why we mock them for their secrecy: “Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting Dallas on Monday for undisclosed reasons. Cheney and is wife [sic], Lynne, arrived at Love Field airport at about 11:15 a.m. The smiling and waving couple exited Air Force One about 5 minutes [sic]. A limousine quickly escorted from them [sic] from the tarmac.”
* I appreciate those who take politics seriously, but this just isn’t healthy: “Jose Ortiz, 28 — a Hillary Clinton supporter — is behind bars after stabbing his Barack Obama-supporting brother-in-law, Sean Shurelds, following a political argument, according to KYW1060.com. ‘One is a supporter of Barack Obama, the other is a supporter of Hillary Clinton, and an argument of words turned bloody when one brother-in-law tried to choke the other and the victim then responded with a knife and stabbed his brother-in-law in the stomach,’ Montgomery County, Pa., District Attorney Risa Furman said, according to KYW. KYW reports that if Ortiz is convicted of the felony charge, he won’t be able to vote.” Ortiz, by the way, is a registered Republican.
Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.