Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad yesterday rejected a year-end deadline set by the Obama administration to agree to a U.N.-sponsored proposal for Iran to ship its low-grade uranium abroad for further processing.

On Fox News today, John Bolton — who has wanted nothing short of a military strike on Iran for years — dismissed any talk of sanctions and lamented that if Israel “take[s] a pass” on attacking Iran, then “Iran gets nuclear weapons.” When host Trace Gallagher wondered if attacking Iran might cause the opposition there to coalesce around the regime, Bolton said that wouldn’t be a problem because all that would be needed is an accompanying public diplomacy campaign:

BOLTON: I don’t agree with that, if handled properly. … I think a careful campaign of public diplomacy in the wake of a military strike could explain to the people of Iran who are knowledgeable and sophisticated, that the attack is not aimed against them, it’s aimed against this regime that they dislike so much.

Watch it:

Unfortunately, this kind of public diplomacy campaign didn’t work out so well coinciding with the U.S. war in Iraq. Indeed, just before the invasion, President Bush addressed the Iraqi people, saying the war “will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you. … We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free.”

And while Bolton has routinely ignored questions of how military action will “play out” in Iran and the region, the consequences are real and sobering.

The Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour — an actual Iran expert, not just some war-hawk flack like Bolton — has said that any use of force would all but kill the Iranian opposition movement. “Khamenei and Ahmadinejad would actually welcome a military strike,” he said, adding that “it may be their only hope to silence popular dissent and heal internal political rifts.”

Earlier this month, conservative gay rights group GOProud announced that it would be a co-sponsor of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). But the group’s inclusion as a co-sponsor has led to a backlash from the anti-gay right, some of whom are threatening to boycott CPAC if GOProud’s sponsorship isn’t removed. CPAC director Lisa De Pasquale told Hot Air last week that she was “satisfied” that GOProud “do not represent a ‘radical leftist agenda’ and thus “should not be rejected as a CPAC cosponsor.” But David Keene, the head of CPAC’s main organizing group, tried to calm the potential boycott by using a different tactic. In an e-mail to a right-wing radio host, Keene promised that GOProud would not have a speaking spot and that gay rights issues would not be “open to debate”:

In his e-mail response, Keene admitted GOProud “has signed on as a CPAC co-sponsor, but will have no speakers and we told them that, in fact, since opposition to gay marriage, etc are consensus positions (if not unanimous) among conservatives, these topics are not open to debate.” [...]

“I know that there are those who are as opposed to the sinner as the sin, but our view is that CPAC is inclusive and welcomes all of those who agree with us on most issues. I don’t know the GOProud people personally, but we find it difficult to exclude groups because of disagreements on one or two issues no matter how important many of us believe those issues to be … other examples: we have pro-life and pro-abortion co-sponsors, advocates of restrictive and more open immigration, supporters and opponents of the war in Afghanistan and supporters and opponents of some of the restrictions adopted in the war on terror since 9/11,” he continued.

“Some of these issues draw significant support on both sides of the question from the broad movement and these we often debate at CPAC … trade policy, immigration are example … while others like abortion are consensus positions and while we accept those who differ from the consensus, we see no reason for further debate. Gay issues fall within this category,” he said.

In recent weeks, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has faced ire from advocates for the public option, which he successfully forced the Senate to drop from its legislation by threatening to filibuster it. Now, a new CNN poll has found that Lieberman’s “favorable ratings have taken almost a 10-point drop in the past two weeks“:

Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) favorable ratings have taken almost a 10-point drop in the past two weeks, a new poll found.

31 percent of people told a CNN poll conducted Dec. 16-20 that they had a favorable opinion of Lieberman, a key Senate centrist who’d opposed healthcare reform only until recently. Opinion toward Lieberman, though, was down from a 40 percent favorable rating in the same CNN poll conducted December 2-3 of this year.

Poll respondents’ unfavorable opinion of Lieberman ticked upward over the same period. 34 percent of those polled said they now have an unfavorable opinion of Lieberman, compared to 28 percent who have an unfavorable opinion.

Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) decision to replace the so-called Botox-tax in the Senate health care bill with a 10 percent levy on indoor tanning salons has sparked quite the outrage. Republican lawmakers, appalled at the idea of using spray tans to maintain those artificial orange glows for the C-SPAN cameras, stumbled and stuttered their way through an incoherent critique of the tax, demanding that Democrats “explain” the new fee and joking that that the government could tax “anyone who goes to the beach” or doesn’t wear sunscreen that blocks “everything that the sun might produce.” Victor Zapanta compiled this video:

In part, Republicans are just playing dumb. Over the summer, the International Agency for Research on Cancer “raised their warning of tanning beds from ‘probably carcinogenic to humans’ to ‘carcinogenic to humans,’” concluding that “the ultraviolet light used in tanning beds (as with the sun’s rays) has been shown to raise the risk of skin cancer.” “The report cited the group’s own research analysis published in 2006, finding the use of tanning beds before age 30 to be associated with a 75% increase in melanoma risk.”

Taxing the cancer causing activity would dissuade Americans from sliding under the UV rays, lower national health expenditures and improve quality of life.