On being selected an NBA All-Star starter after playing just 10 games — “I’m like President Bush. You may not like me, you may not respect me, but you voted me in.” (H/T: Eric Umansky)

Today on Fox New Sunday, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol said the Bush administration was doing a “decent job at threatening Iran,” but said he “would like a little more” rhetoric like Vice President Cheney’s recent claim that military strikes are still on the table.

Kristol added that while “you can’t just suddenly use force,” the question is, “can the President build a predicate if he feels he has to use force.” Kristol was confident: “I think if things have stabilized in Iraq, then you could easily build political support for being much tougher on Iran at the beginning of 2008.” Watch it:

In June 2006, Kristol predicted “we’ll have success through pressure and sanctions, or we’ll be forced to use military action.” In August 2006, Kristol said, “I think we could be in a military confrontation with Iran much sooner than people expect.”

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Like Scott Lemieux, I think the AP should be ashamed of itself for publishing this. Ed Kilgore, however, raises a much better question about the religious status of the GOP field: Is Rudy Giuliani a Catholic?

After all, the man has been married three times. His first marriage of fourteen years was annulled on grounds of a rather tardy discovery that he was married to his second cousin. I’m assuming this annullment was blessed by the Church. So his second marriage was technically his first. But what about his third? Did he somehow get a second annullment? Or was either his second or third (performed by none other than Mayor Bloomberg) marriage just a civil ceremony unblessed by the Church, which means Rudy was self-excommunicated by openly living in sin and/or pretending to be remarried?

Also: What ever happened to this communion business? All these Bishops went around condemning John Kerry for his pro-choice views, but shouldn’t Giuliani be in the same boat?

David Kirpatrick’s report on the recent meeting of the Council for National Policy (basically, a kind of conservative meta-organization dominated by Christian gorups) is interesting. Basically, as you’d expect, few are enthusiastic about John “Agents of Intolerance” McCain, Rudy Giuliani, or Multiple Choice Mitt. At the same time, they’re reluctant to throw their support behind a Mike Huckabee only to have their choice lose. People forget, but that kind of thing is always a huge factor in interest groups politics. When making a primary endorsement, it’s critical to try your best to pick a winner, lest your power wound up exposed as fairly illusory.

“[M]ost U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran,” diplomats tell the LA Times. “The officials said the CIA and other Western spy services had provided sensitive information to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency at least since 2002, when Iran’s long-secret nuclear program was exposed. But none of the tips about supposed secret weapons sites provided clear evidence that the Islamic Republic was developing illicit weapons.”

UPDATE: Kevin Drum has an eerily similar flashback from February 2003.