AP reports:

Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane.

The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978. [...]

A U.N. panel on climate change has predicted that polar regions could be virtually free of ice by the summer of 2070 because of rising temperatures and sea ice decline, ESA noted.

(HT: Garance)

Yesterday in Iowa, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that Iraq will “go down in history as the greatest disaster in American foreign policy. That means that I am acknowledging it is worse than Vietnam.” She added, “I don’t think I have ever seen the world in such a mess.”

AMERICAblog notes that CNN is reporting that Michael Mukasey appears to be the administration’s top pick to replace Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. Mukasey is a former federal judge who “presided over many high-profile trials, including that of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 co-defendants, who were charged with plotting to destroy New York City landmarks.”

UPDATE: Mukasey also issued the first ruling in the Jose Padilla case after 9/11. While he ruled that “President Bush did have the authority to hold Mr. Padilla as an enemy combatant without charging him for a crime,” he also “ruled that the government must allow Mr. Padilla to see his attorneys.”

UPDATE II: Mukasey is an adviser to Rudy Guiliani’s presidential campaign.

UPDATE III: AP reports that some conservatives are already “drafting a strategy to oppose him.”

Earlier this week, Sgt. Omar Mora and Sgt. Yance Gray, who recently co-wrote a New York Times op-ed critical of the Iraq debate, were killed in a vehicle accident in Western Baghdad. The two fallen soldiers have since been hailed for serving their country and speaking out on Iraq. But one former conservative state Senator in Sgt. Gray’s home state of Montana, Dave Rye, has chosen to attack him for the op-ed, claiming he and his fellow soldiers weren’t intelligent enough to write it on their own:

Pardon my skepticism, and certainly no disrespect for the dead Montana soldier, but in my time in the Army I never heard such a word as “recalcitrant” escape the lips of any Staff Sergeant. I doubt if it’s spoken all that much in Ismay, either. The soldiers had the help and probably the encouragement of a writer with an agenda, from a newspaper which has always had one. Its continually declining circulation now mainly consists of those who want desperately to consider themselves sophisticated as well as compassionate, even if that means always branding the U.S. as the chief villain on the world stage—in fact, especially if it does.

Endorsements aside, of course the real strength of the Clinton primary campaign is this data pointed to by Todd Beeton:

For example, according to The National Journal’s composite senate rankings for 2006, Hillary Clinton is the least liberal of the Democratic senators running, getting a liberal score of 70.2 vs. Biden’s 77.5, Dodd’s 84 and Obama’s 86 (the 10th most liberal score.) But in a new Rasmussen Poll out today, more Democrats see Clinton as “liberal” (33%) than either Obama (31%) or Edwards (21%.) And while a solid 58% of Democrats identifies Clinton as moderate or conservative, a whopping 66% think John Edwards, the candidate running the most progressive campaign, is either moderate or conservative.

In part, you see here that identity trumps ideology even in people’s assessments of ideology. John Edwards has the accent of a moderate-to-conservative Democrat, so he must be one. But this is also the fruit of the fact that for a number of years our popular culture essentially defined Hillary Clinton as identical to liberalism, especially in the non-political media where most Americans get their political information.

But of course what’s an asset in a primary campaign in this regard is big trouble in a general election, and this has always been a wellspring of skepticism about her merits as a nominee to me. Why would you want your party’s standard-bearer to be seen as much more liberal than she really is?

In his new memoir to be released Monday, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan “levels unusually harsh criticism at President Bush…in his new book, arguing that Bush abandoned the central conservative principle of fiscal restraint.” President Clinton, on the other hand, he calls a “risk taker” who had shown a “preference for dealing in facts.”

UPDATE: Greenspan also writes, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”