McClatchy: “‘I still believe, at the end of the day, that he will bomb the Iranian (nuclear) facilities,’ said Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank with close ties to the Bush administration. Muravchik, who favors military action, sees Bush’s current focus on diplomacy as a prelude to attack.”

Rush Limbaugh: “If we launched attacks on Iran and Syria today and went heavy metal, pedal-to-the-wall, this country would be cheering. The Democrats and the media would be in panic, but the people in this country would be cheering.”

The Department of Education Inspector General has released another report criticizing the Bush administration’s Reading First program, part of the No Child Left Behind Act. The IG found the program “violated the prohibition against controlling individual school curricula by promoting specific reading materials and instructions to the financial benefit of companies — such as McGraw Hill and Voyager — headed by top Bush administration donors.”

“Determined to challenge President Bush, Senate Democrats are drafting legislation to limit the mission of U.S. troops in Iraq, effectively revoking the broad authority Congress granted in 2002,” the AP reports. A draft of the bill “would restrict American troops in Iraq to combating al-Qaida, training Iraqi army and police forces, maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity and otherwise proceeding with the withdrawal of combat forces. … The plan is to attempt to add the measure to anti-terrorism legislation that scheduled to be on the Senate floor next week and the week following.”

Yesterday in California, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said what has now become conventional wisdom: that the Bush administration’s inaction on global warming has had damaging consequences for our environment. “I would assess this administration’s record on global warming as terrible. And I have held hearings when I was chairman of the Commerce Committee for years and got no cooperation from the administration on this issue whatsoever,” McCain said.

For speaking such a casual truth, McCain has come under attack from the small contingent of global warming deniers on the right who refuse to accept the science. A few examples of the attacks:

Ankle Biting Pundits: McCain Sides With The Loony Left On Global Warming. … No Senator McCain, the President’s record on global warming is not terrible. Just because he doesn’t want to go along with the Euro’s and the lefties in voluntarily destroying our economy doesn’t make him wrong.

Jon Fleischman: McCain Embraces Environmental Extremism in California Appearance

National Review: He’s in CA doing “non-political” global warming events?? Gee, and they wonder why conservatives don’t trust him.

Tonight, Fox pundit Mort Kondracke said McCain’s comments were an example of him “popping off” and demonstrating he is “not entirely in control of his mouth.” Watch it:

Global warming is not a partisan issue. A recent poll taken among conservatives in South Carolina indicate 56 percent believe global warming is happening. Slowly, a consensus on the issue is building, leaving only the fringe right in its wake.

Newsweek: “The British are leaving, the Iraqis are failing and the Americans are staying — and we’re going to be there a lot longer than anyone in Washington is acknowledging right now. … [W]hat few people seem to have noticed is that Gen. David Petraeus’s new ‘surge’ plan is committing U.S. troops, day by day, to a much deeper and longer-term role in policing Iraq than since the earliest days of the U.S. occupation. How long must we stay under the Petraeus plan? Perhaps 10 years. At least five. … To a degree little understood by the U.S. public, Petraeus is engaged in a giant ‘do-over.’” (Via Atrios)

Roger Simon spins a fictional tale of 2008, resulting in John McCain’s ascension to the White House. It doesn’t, frankly, strike me as a particularly plausible story and that says something about McCain’s odds. I do, however, have to complain about this:

[McCain] had left Blair House early that morning to go to church, two churches in fact, Grace Reformed at 15th and O and then New York Avenue Presbyterian near 13th Street. The reporters doing live TV were still trying to figure it out—“I didn’t know McCain was particularly religious, Chris”—when a member of the new White House staff called and helped them out: One was the church of Teddy Roosevelt, and the other was the church of Abraham Lincoln. Two of McCain’s heroes. He had others: Thomas Moore, Lord Nelson, Joan of Arc, Julius Caesar, Colin Powell (his new secretary of State), Charles Darwin (how the creationists had howled about that one), Ted Williams, Mother Antonia, and Aung San Suu Kyi.

McCain and Powell are both Republicans with a strong interest in national security issues who are much-beloved by the national media, but they have different ideas about the subject. Why Powell would want to further ruin his reputation by serving again as Secretary of State for a president who has no intention of listening to him is a bit beyond me. On the other hand, Powell’s behavior in office was sufficiently inexplicable that I suppose there’s no telling what kind of crazy stuff he might do in the future.

From today’s pool report from Vice President Cheney’s trip to Japan: “This was largely a repeat of the speech delivered the day before in Tokyo. However, the vice president made something clear this day that had been unanswered the day before — when he had departed from a prepared text in Tokyo that had read Americans “do not” accept a policy of retreat and instead said that Americans “will not” accept a policy of retreat. Your pool’s queries about the meaning of this departure in tenses went unanswered last night in what started as a background briefing with an administration official and lapsed into something else that is, well, unreportable.”

on topics such as “military history,” according to Barry Gewen, an editor at the New York Times Book Review, explaining why there are so few female reviewers.