In a Foreign Affairs article, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee sharply criticizes the Bush administration’s foreign policy, calling it indicative of an “arrogant bunker mentality“:

American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out. The Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad. My administration will recognize that the United States’ main fight today does not pit us against the world but pits the world against the terrorists.

This criticism was too much for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who has been vociferously defending President Bush all weekend. Yesterday, he told an Iowa crowd that Huckabee sounded like a Democrat and instead suggested that “we ought to be saying thank you to the president for keeping us safe these last six years.”

Today on NBC’s Meet the Press, Romney went even further, saying that Huckabee “went over the line” and “owes the President an apology.” “That’s an insult to the President and Mike Huckabee should apologize to the President,” he said. Watch it:

In the face of Romney’s attacks, Huckabee backed down from his criticisms. On CNN’s Late Edition, he instead defended Bush and attempted to demonstrate his alliance with the President:

I didn’t say the President was arrogant. … I’ve said that the policies have been arrogant. … I’m the one who actually supported the President’s surge. I supported the Bush tax cuts, when Mr. Romney didn’t. I was with President Bush on gun control, when Mitt Romney wasn’t. I was with the President on the President’s pro-life position, when Mitt Romney wasn’t.

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HRC picks up the endorsement of The Des Moines Register. Their 2004 endorsement of John Edwards was thought to have given his campaign a substantial boost, helping to propel him from also-ran to second-place. Now they say:

Edwards was our pick for the 2004 nomination. But this is a different race, with different candidates. We too seldom saw the “positive, optimistic” campaign we found appealing in 2004. His harsh anti-corporate rhetoric would make it difficult to work with the business community to forge change.

This seems like a perfect set-up for an Edwards campaign line about how “If we don’t take the power away from these people, they’re not going to give it up.”

The New York Times reports:

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.

Carpetbagger writes, “Perhaps ‘Terrorist Surveillance Program‘ was a poor choice.” Atrios adds, “I guess we lost the cold war after all.”

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald: “More than anything else, what these revelations highlight — yet again — is that the U.S. has become precisely the kind of surveillance state that we were always told was the hallmark of tyrannical societies, with literally no limits on the government’s ability or willingness to spy on its own citizens and to maintain vast dossiers on those activities.”

Ross is right — those of us who predicted that Mike Huckabee’s rise in Iowa would ultimately redound to Rudy Giuliani’s benefit seem to have been pretty wrong and drastically underestimated the extent to which his rise in the polls could spill beyond Iowa’s borders. I think we can say only in our defense that this years Republican race has proven very unpredictable.

Earlier this week, former Halliburton/KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones revealed that in 2005 she had been “raped by multiple men at a KBR camp” in Baghdad. This past Friday on Houston’s CBS affiliate KHOU, former KBR employee Linda Lindsey said that, while she didn’t know Jones, the allegations of sexual harassment aren’t surprising:

“If you wanted to get a promotion you didn’t necessarily have to have the qualifications,” remembered Lindsey, a former KBR contractor. “You just needed to be sleeping with the person who was doing the hiring.” [...]

In a sworn affidavit for the Jones case, Lindsey said: “I saw rampant sexual harassment and discrimination.” [...]

Her affidavit also said: “When anyone would report an incident of abuse or harassment, they would be threatened with a transfer to a more dangerous location.”

Watch it:

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