Per Ambinder, Hillary Clinton says “If we had actionable intelligence that Osama bin Laden or other high-value targets were in Pakistan I would ensure that they were targeted and killed or captured” while Edwards says “My belief is that we have a responsibility to find bin Laden and al Qaeda wherever they operate. I think we need to maximize pressure on Musharraf and the Pakistani government. If they can’t do the job, then we have to do it.”

I hope this’ll be the last we hear of this issue, though fear that it may somehow become a staple of ever-more-fine-grained questions. The more you think about it, though, the more this just seems like a totally pointless hypothetical. If you had a situation where you had firm intelligence that a key al-Qaeda target could be taken out with a discrete special forces mission or a well-placed missile, the Pakistani government would no doubt give the okay. Conversely, posturing aside, nobody’s going to send a giant invasion force into the Pakistani mountains contrary to the will of the government. Bringing this scenario up in the first place was a pretty silly gambit on Obama’s part (what if Osama was on the Moon? in New Brunswick?), though it arguably worked. Anyways, for The Guardian what I found more important about Obama’s speech.

It’s well known that NBA stars don’t like to take on political topics lest it hurt them with their sponsors. The really clever ones, though, like Gilbert Arenas just slip their commentary under the radar screen through the use of analogy and metaphor. Here, for example, are Agent Zero’s thoughts on Iran:

There are these things called shark attacks, but there is no such thing as a shark attack. I have never seen a real shark attack.

I know you€™re making a weird face as you€™re reading this. OK people, a shark attack is not what we see on TV and what people portray it as.

We€™re humans. We live on land.

Sharks live in water.

So if you€™re swimming in the water and a shark bites you, that€™s called trespassing. That is called trespassing. That is not a shark attack.

A shark attack is if you€™re chilling at home, sitting on your couch, and a shark comes in and bites you; now that€™s a shark attack. Now, if you€™re chilling in the water, that is called invasion of space. So I have never heard of a shark attack.

Sharks, sure. He’s just talking about sharks.

Ron Brownstein seems really mad that Bush is blocking this S-CHIP expansion. I’ll even defend Bush a little. Brownstein writes that Bush is “portraying it as the first step on a slippery slope toward ‘government-run healthcare,’ as if senior senators in both parties were conspiring with Michael Moore to import Cuban doctors to inoculate and indoctrinate American children,” which seems to harsh.

Bush, more realistically, is just worried that expanding S-CHIP will make the country a much better place, and build political support for further expansions of S-CHIP and similar programs. He’s worried that people won’t think it’s just bad for kids under 18 to have no health insurance, but probably bad for young adults, middle aged people, and, indeed, everyone.

Politico‘s Ben Smith with a key observation on Barack Obama’s terrorism speech:

Also absent from the speech is any reference to “Islamic terrorism,” “Islamism,” or “Islamofacism” — the buzzwords of those who see a global conflict between the West and a specifically Muslim insurgency.

Right. Smith also notes (as does an aggrevied Katherine Jean-Lopez) that Obama didn’t use the phrase “war on terror.” Obviously, on this score it’s John Edwards who got the ball rolling and deserve credit for breaking the taboo, but it’s good to see further forward progress on this front, especially since Obama gave a speech that could hardly be accused of ignoring the reality of terrorism, as opposed to the right’s conceptual terrorism-related mirages.

And here’s what you need to know about the surge. The point of the surge was to create conditions on the ground that might help boost political reconciliation. Instead, Iraqis are less reconciled than ever. But don’t call it a failure of the surge, it’s not that a better surge would have worked. The issue is that it was the whole wrong diagnosis. Political problems were — and are — driving military problems and not the other way ’round.

Mark Kleiman, meanwhile, has a good suggestion based on Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s view that “We are buying time at a cost of the lives of our soldiers.” Just ask how many soldiers Bush really wants to see die in order to buy more time for Iraqi politicians.

Mark Thoma makes the basic case against Robert Samuelson. Brendan Nyhan adds in the point that Samuelson’s column is extremely long-lived, he’s been writing it for the past thirty years. I really wonder about this kind of thing. There are plenty of columnists I don’t like, but normally they’re at least good at generating buzz and discussion. But what’s Samuelson’s value to the Post? Are there people who, at the margin, are ready to drop their Washington Post subscriptions if they don’t get to read about how we should cut Social Security benefits for the nine millionth time?

Thanks to the miracle of pre-scheduled blog posts, this is being posted at 10:30 in the morning even though, with any luck, I’m actually on a plane to Chicago right now. And why am I going to Chicago? Ostensibly, because of the YearlyKos convention. The real truth, however, is more complicated and more delicious.

A little while back, you see, I was flying to DC from Albuquerque and had a layover in Midway Airport. Looking for something to eat, I came across a place selling what looked like a delicious pastrami sandwich like from the lost Jewish delis of my youth. I ordered one and . . . it was improbably great for airport food. Turned out to be an airport branch of a real Chicago delicatessen — Manny’s. Well, I thought to myself, if only I had a pretext to get work to send me to Chicago at some point. And then the solution emerged: YearlyKos. I do, however, take my work seriously and promise to provide top-notch coverage of non-sandwich aspects of the convention.

UPDATE: Oh, I — I screwed up and accidentally hit the “publish” button. I’m not leaving for Chicago until tomorrow morning. Bad day. Oy.

Photo by Flickr user Pemanently Scatterbrained used under a Creative Commons license